Hello, bookcasers.

Happy Thursday to you.

It is Thursday.

It is getting warm outside to mothers and fathers out there.

I know you're living with a mix of real extreme happiness because you can take the kids outside and extreme angst because

school is about to let out, which is means you're about to have them all day, every day,

unless you have admitted them into camp ad nauseum. So welcome. And happy beginning of summer, sort of.

Yeah, it's, first of all, it's warm where you are because you're up in Minnesota where it's been cold. But, you know, people south of the Mason Dixon Lines, it's been warm for a while. It has been warm for a while. And so, but, you know, so you're already warm and you're still living with the dread of having your kids home all day every day unless you put them in camps to a fairly well. So I include you, too. It's not dread. It's not dread. You've got summer with the kids. That's all was wonderful. Although as a friend of ours said, I love my kids eight hours a day. Yes. And now you've got them for more. And now you've got them for more. Yep. Yep. And they expect food and shelter all the time. Yep, yeah.

Especially shelter and, yeah, and food too.

Yeah.

Anyway, we're back with Jay Ryan Strattel, our writer in residence.

It has been such a pleasure to do this with him.

We started with him a couple years ago now, Kate.

I would talk to him every few months.

As he, we started when he began his fourth novel,

he now has it submitted and accepted by a publisher.

And it's not coming out until 2007.

Now, that seemed like a long period of time to me,

sort of almost two years of lying fallow after it was picked by

the publisher and an agreement to put it out. But it turns out there's an enormous amount

still going on. Yeah, yeah. He's got lots of editing to do, spell checking to do, big notes,

small notes, picturing of fonts, picturing of covers.

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