I am incredibly lucky. I know it. I have a great family, who are wonderfully supportive, but make fun of me when I deserve it (and sometimes when I don’t, Andy). I have a job I love, awesome friends, a taste for oranges, am easily amused, live in the greatest city in the world, and have really pretty hair. (what? I DO.) But I consider myself truly lucky, because I have been going to Michigan every summer of my life.

To explain: my grandfather bought a tract of land on a small lake in the great state of Michigan over 50 years ago. He built a one-room cottage on that land, that over the years has grown through additions and the introduction of indoor plumbing into a summer house that my family goes to every year. The days are soft in summer, we swim in the mornings, sail in the afternoon. I can sit on the porch, eating cherries and reading (lots of romance novels), play volleyball with my neighbors, who I’ve known my entire life, or just lay on the dock, and watch the day drift by. It is the most special of places, and with my family and friends scattered to the four winds, it’s the place I know we will always come back to.

The reason I mention this special place, is that I’m making it the setting of the next book I’m working on. Not Michigan itself, unfortunately (as I write Regency-era historicals), but a lake, a summer house, where your neighbors watched you grown up, as you watched them, where people are lazy and unhurried and more themselves than anywhere else – because when faced with people who knew you when you were five, how can you not be? And a place where the problems over everyday fall away to allow you to realize what is truly important. What about you? Does anyone else out there have a special retreat?

In other, non-writing news, I’ve just learned I’m going to have to move apartments. *Groan*. I’ve lived in this apartment for 4 years… and I swear, my books have been breeding. I dread just thinking about packing them up!

Happy reading –

Kate Noble