Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic reared its head we live in a new world, a new time. It feels like we need a computer reboot.

That’s the metaphor fellow writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch coined for our current pandemic stasis, and I love it. So relatable.

Everyone’s computer has hung up at one time or another. That little circle just whirls and whirls and whirls. It’s easy to make the comparison to this pandemic stupor.

Our days whirl and merge. We wait and wait and wait for normal to return, for our lives to reboot.

There’s relief, when the circle on the computer screen stops whirling, and the computer starts up again … but there’s also worry. Will it happen again and need to be unplugged and rebooted? We can’t predict.

The pandemic quarantine is loosening in some places. That reboot causes worry. Could we end up back in total quarantine again? We don’t know.

Is a return to a pre-COVID19 is even possible? We don’t know that either.

We hope and pray for the best. While stuck in our new world, in our pandemic stasis, we get up each day, put one foot in front of the other, and do the next thing.

We take care of whatever task is next, whether it’s mindbogglingly mundane or breathtakingly scary. And then, after that, we do the next thing, and the next.

My next thing was releasing a new book, my first romantic suspense.

She’s a forty-seven year old widow who views life with rose-colored glasses while raising her grandson after her only child and his wife die in a suspicious car accident.

He’s thirty-four, a divorced, overly cautious ex-cop, who manages her shipping company. A cartel’s bomb killed his twin sons. He trusts no one.

Mysterious threats about Evie’s grandson begin to fill her email inbox at the same time drugs show up in a company shipment. When the nanny she hired against his advice disappears with the toddler, they uncover a web of lies, murder, and drug smuggling in her company.

Searching for the toddler tests their trust, even as it binds their hearts.

Pre-order Seeing Clearly here for Kindle and here for Nook.

What’s your next thing? Mine is be writing the next book.