I'm late to February. (Also, I still have to think every single time I spell February, and type real slow....)

I'm doing something moderately insane and taking an anatomy and physiology class with the slightly more insane intention of going back-back to school when my kids fly the coop.

So now I can tell you lots about bones!

But it's sent a few things to the back burner and my normal February newsletter was one of them.

But don't despair. It's still February. At least I think it is (things have been a whir).

The most exciting news is that From the Sky is now available. And you should definitely run out and buy it (even though I also missed the opportunity to promote it on Valentine's Day... le sigh. Though I can also tell you about joints...).

You can find it HERE.

When there's an accident at Andy Putman's ATV park, he doesn't expect someone so beautiful to fall from the sky--in the form of flight medic, Madigan Jones.

Unfortunately, Madigan is less than impressed with Andy, his business, and his happy-go-lucky way of life. After all, she's seen the way tragedy that can follow an accident--sometimes painfully close to home.

Now she keeps her life is measured and careful.

But how much can you live if you're afraid to die?

And speaking of women's fiction...

I am creating a Kickstarter for my new covers for the Unlikely Heroes series. They are soooo pretty. And the spines are cohesive. It will launch early March. If you're interested, you can find it HERE, then click "Notify Me On Launch" and Kickstarter will let you know when it's live (I will too).

And speaking more of women's fiction, my amazing friend Bridget (B.E. Baker) has two new books out. Bridget is a fantastic writer and someone I'm lucky enough to call a friend. One of her books is a women's fiction and one a nonfiction about the Donner party. Yup, the Donner party. She said when she dove into the research for that one, she was struck by the untold plights of the women and children.

Read more about her books below...

The Crumbly Old Castle

Three best friends. Two crumbling estates. And one trip that changes everything.

When three barn besties escape for a girls’ trip to Ireland, they expect a lot of fun. They don’t expect to want to stay… forever.

Natalie was always the responsible one, the organized one, the together one. But when she inadvertently leaves one day early for their vacation and comes home pink-cheeked with embarrassment, the last thing she expects to find is her husband. . .in their bed with another woman. Luckily, they don’t notice her, and she takes the trip as a time-out to figure out what to do.

Samantha’s marriage has never been full of fireworks and trips to Cabo, but they were making it work. At least, she thought they were. When an unreasonable ultimatum sends her into a tailspin just before the trip, she takes the time to reevaluate what matters and what she wants out of life and love.

Vanessa’s husband passed a few years before, and she’s been soldiering on. Moments away from her job and responsibilities as a mother of three have been rare, but she has no plans of uprooting their life in Colorado. At least, not until someone she trusts betrays her in a big way. That wound makes her question everything about her own value and her family’s future.

Can these three friends help each other find firm ground in a world that seems to be unsafe, unsteady, and unhappy? And can found family really be what they all need when the going gets tough?

Hungry

This one is only available on Bridget's own store for purchase, though it's up for presale everywhere else.

A mesmerizing work, literarily impressive and historically exacting. -Kirkus

In 1847, the Donner party resorted to eating human flesh to survive entrapment at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains. They became infamous almost instantly, with hundreds of books, stories, and interviews exploring their misery. None of them tell the extraordinary story from the first-person point of view of the female survivors.

Until now.

Three women yearned to make better lives in California:

Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Graves set out west with her family in search of a home that would be free of disease like the ague that had afflicted her mother and sisters for years. If she met a handsome guy along the way, well, she wouldn’t complain. As the belle of the Donner party, she certainly had plenty of interest.

Peggy Breen had just given birth to her seventh child, but she wasn’t afraid of the two-thousand-mile journey toward prosperity. She’d take care of her children and honor her husband along the trail, because that’s what women of faith did. But when supplies became limited, her giving heart and her mother’s instinct were at odds.

Virginia Blackstone Reed, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the group’s leader, set out in search of adventure, riding her sassy palomino pony alongside the largest double-decker wagon anyone had ever seen. As the adopted daughter of the most influential and prosperous man in the wagon train, she had no idea at the start that her polarizing father with his ostentatious wealth would pave the way for their future devastation.

By the time these women and the rest of the party reached the Sierra Nevada mountains after taking an unproven “shortcut,” they were already two months late. They had lost people, oxen, mules, and livestock they couldn’t survive without. Then the snow began to fall.

And it didn’t stop.

Hungry follows the tenacious protagonists and their miraculous rescue as they fight the elements and one another, highlighting the strength that kept them going when most of us would have been defeated.

And speaking of Hungry...

(Okay, that segue was downright tasteless. My apologies--especially since I just ACCIDENTALLY made another food pun with the 'tasteless' thing, and I'm not even erasing it. But seriously, kind of low brow of me. And yet...)

Speaking of hunger...

Here's this month's recipe. Because it's February, I thought you deserved a chocolate cake (even though, like I said, I missed Valentine's Day!). But you deserve it anyway.

Chocolate Volcano Cake

One of the beauties of bundt cake is that you throw it all in one pan, and tada, you look really fancy (especially if you have a fancy bundt pan like I do). But it's fairly simple.

Cake:

2 C sugar

1 C butter, somewhat softened

1 1/2 tsp vanilla

3 eggs

2 1/2 C flour

1 C cocoa

2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 C instant chocolate pudding mix

2 1/4 C buttermilk

1 C semi-sweet chocolate chips

Chocolate Icing:

1/2 C water

1/2 C (1 stick) butter

1 tsp vanilla

1 C cocoa

3 1/2 C powdered sugar

To make the cake: 

Grease that bundt pan, baby. Grease it, or you will regret it.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Beat sugar, butter, and vanilla. Add eggs

Add flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt, instant chocolate pudding mix. Of course you're supposed to sift this, and if you're a person with grit, I suppose you will. I always just dump it in the bowl and then sort of fluff it around with a fork or, heck, the beaters. Because I'm lazy. My cakes turn out anyway.

Now add the buttermilk.

Then the chocolate chips.

Pour it into the bundt pan (or a tube pan).

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Then, without opening the oven, turn the temperature down to 325 and bake for another 30-ish minutes (mine was about 35 minutes). Insert a knife or other long cake testing device. It should come out with moist crumbs, but not batter.

Let it cool for 10 minutes. Then turn it out onto a cake platter. Here I must issue another warning. Don't leave this thing in the pan for an hour or few and then expect it to come out. The longer cakes sit in pans, they less they want to leave them. So give it just a brief cooling period and then turn it out.

When it is completely cool, you'll add the frosting.

For the frosting:

Heat water and butter. Melt butter. Then remove from heat and whisk in cocoa and vanilla. Add the powdered sugar and beat (I always have to move it to a bowl for this step because my pan isn't big enough and is non stick and I like to beat icings so the ingredients incorporate fully).

When the cake is cool, pour this into the center. It will overflow down the sides. I should tell you that I also like to spoon it up onto all the sides so that it is on all sides. In fact, I do this a few times (every couple hours or so) to get a chocolate glaze coating on the cake. Because I like it like that, okay.

Note: Sometimes this frosting comes out runny, but other times it thickens more so you have to get it on quick and maybe even add more milk to get it to drizzle. I don't know why this is. It is chemistry and I haven't gotten that far in my science journey yet.

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