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Author copies of my new novel Promises to Keep arrived yesterday. It's a pretty little green and blue book, with a story about my GCI protagonist Louise and Viola, the town bookseller, becoming involved with a poetry club and a track team from the local high school.

In PTK, the club analyzes my favorite verses by Dickinson, Keats and Shakespeare while they wrestle with the ethics of funding for the arts versus sports programs. I slipped in a poem I wrote in high school. I was the art editor for my school lit mag from '77-'79, years in which ten of us killed ourselves raising money to publish our little mag while the principal handed over all the available funding to the football team.

I wasn't nice like the kids in my book, though. They used to refer to me as the girl "most likely to be denied parole."

This book is a landmark for me in a bunch of ways. I'm now officially over the midway point toward fifty published novels. I've never published any of my own poetry before this. And I got literary -- my kind of literary, anyway -- and honored the poets like John Keats who kept me dreaming and writing instead of giving up and accepting my life lot. I made a promise, way back then, that I would do that someday.

Took twenty-five books and years, but I kept that promise.