NEWS FLASH!

Knitting Bones, the eleventh entry in the Betsy Devonshire needlework mystery series, will be out in hardcover in December. I had thought it would come out late this summer, but my editor now says December. The paperback will come out in the summer of 2008 – perhaps I misunderstood. But that means the book tour I was starting to plan for late summer is mostly OFF. Well, I will still go to speak to the EGA group of Skyllkill, New York (why do I have to look up the spelling of that name every time?), because that's been set up a long time. My sister Dolores wants to show me the graves of our father's many-times-great-grandparents in upper New York state, and the little town they founded – Pulver's Corners, I think is its name – and if we do that, then perhaps we can combine that trip with a talk to Skyllkill (is that a crazy spelling or what?) EGA won't be a stretch. But it all feels a bit looser now, because I won't have a new book to promote.
I'm so glad I have a friend in Thailand! I'm setting off on Thai Die now; I'm up to Chapter Three, and finding that a month in Bangkok wasn't enough. I want to do more tie-ins with Thai silk. They weave some marvelous fabrics in silk over there; the hand-woven pieces are magnificent! But I need to find out about the possibility of getting some Thai silk floss. I had contacted some sources directly, via e-mail, but they don't seem to understand what I want. Now I have an American businessman, Ron Zommick, who speaks Thai and has a manufacturing plant over there (not silk), who is trying to find a source for me. Thai silk factories don't make silk thread for export, and the threads used to weave cloth aren't the same thickness as floss. I'm also connected, by a third party, with two Buddhist nuns in Nepal because I need to know what material the Buddha's robe might have been made of, and a piece of silk or cotton 2600 years old might look like.