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Jackie's March message continued . . . Apart from the tomatoes I've been deep in genetically engineered werewolves, human wombat crosses and a trio of watersprites with unusual but quite decided tastes- the sequel to In the Blood, which will come out in a week or two - I'm never quite sure exactly when books 'come out', no one ever tells me anything, as whathisname Forsythe used to complain, and authors are usually the last in the chain to know things like release date, cost and how many copies printed about books. What else this month? The Canberra Word Festival (a panel debating why teenages don't read teenage fiction on the 17th) and the Milestones of Federation dinner speech that evening at Dromkene, and that's quite enough jaunting for March, as I want to get Blood Moon finished. Leaving it dangling is like reading only half of a book- even though I know what's going to happen, it isn't real enough till the words are down, and anyway characters always surpise you; you never really know what the next sentence will be till it's on the page. Which is why this is such a brief March piece....I've left the heroine on a virtual reality beach, and want to get back to her; or go out (once it gets a bit cooler) and pick even more ripe tomatoes before they lure the fruit flies into the apples (if you think a ripe tomato smells good, imagine what it must be like for a fruit fly), plus the chillies, which can get stung by fruit fly too, and the beans, which will turn woody if i don't do a bit more gathering, plus the...well, you probably don't want to know. So back to the beach, and the strange desires of watersprites... March Recipes All the best, Jackie Top of the Page