The new cover artwork is SO fresh and fun—and amazingly, the talented artist, Filipa Namorado, lives here in Portugal, just a couple of hours from where I live.

You can’t make this up. Right here in Portugal? Seriously?

But wait, there’s more…

Included in the final book in the series, Mother-Daughter Book Camp, will be an all-new epilogue, which I just finished writing! For some time now, eager readers have been writing to me, asking to know what happens to all of the girls. What careers do they choose? Where do they live? Do they marry and have children? Please please please could I give them a glimpse of their futures?

Wish granted!

No spoilers here, but I will tell you that the epilogue, which includes five full chapters (one each for Emma, Jess, Cassidy, Megan, and Becca), is set in Concord (of course), and finds the book club and their friends and families celebrating a baby shower. Whose? I’m not telling! You’ll have to read it to find out….

The first two books in the series, The Mother-Daughter Book Club and Much Ado About Anne, will be released in December 2025. The second two, Dear Pen Pal and Pies & Prejudice, will be released in May 2026. And the final three, Wish You Were Eyre, Home for the Holidays, and Mother-Daughter Book Camp, will be released in August 2026.

I can’t wait!

We boarded a flight for Portugal and moved overseas.

With my husband’s retirement, we’d found ourselves at a crossroads. We could continue to live more or less in the manner and in the place we’d always lived, or we could seek out a new adventure. Writers can write anywhere, so after giving it some thought and exploring a number of options, we voted for a new place and a new adventure.

And here we are in Portugal.

My husband jokes that he’s finally experiencing the study abroad program he was never able to afford in college.

If I were Empress of the World (a position to which I aspire), I would bestow upon all of my subjects the gift of a study abroad program, or some other opportunity to experience life in a different country. I’ve done this a number of times in the past, and in each case it was transformative. Growing up, I spent considerable time in Canada, thanks to my Canadian mother; my family and I moved to England for a while when I was 11, thanks to a grant my father received to study its then-cutting-edge “open classroom” educational system; I participated in a semester-long study abroad program in college as an undergrad; and I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s as a post-grad, thanks to a grant of my own.  

As much fun as it can be to travel as a tourist, actually living somewhere offers a completely different perspective. Traveling abroad opens your eyes—living abroad opens your heart. It gives you the time and leisure not just to sample but to steep in another country’s culture and rich traditions, to learn its language (if you’ve chosen a spot where English isn’t the native tongue, as we have), to decode its politics and navigate its bureaucracy and connect on a deeper level with its people. As a result, perspectives widen. Prejudices fade. Preconceived notions shift. The world becomes a smaller place.

So, here we are, two years in on this grand adventure, happily settled in an apartment in a lovely town in the north of Portugal.

We’re learning the language, slowly. We’re adjusting to the rhythms of local life, slowly, from the church bells that mark the passage of our days, to the rooster next door who serves as our alarm clock, to the night owl DNA apparently baked into the Portuguese (I will never adjust to dinner at 9 pm!). We’re enjoying the many festivals and their attendant fireworks (I have never seen so many fabulous firework displays in my life), and the incredibly fresh produce available at our town’s weekly open-air market, the largest in the country. And don’t get me started on the abundance of cheeses and seafood!

We’re having a grand time exploring the country’s many highways and byways, from the stunning nearby national park of Peneda-Gerês, where wild horses and cows roam the stony hills…

… to such beautiful cities as Lisbon and Porto, Guimarães and Coimbra, Aveiro and Cascais and Viana do Castelo and more. And of course there’s the glorious coastline on our doorstep. 

If you haven’t looked at a map recently, Portugal hugs the western edge of the Iberian peninsula, big spoon to much-larger Spain’s little spoon, and the coastline stretches from north to south much the way it does in California. For a country that’s roughly the size of Maine, Portugal punches far above its weight. There’s so much to see! Its terrain is highly diverse, with an arid, Mediterranean climate in the south, a mountainous middle, and cool, rainy winters here in the north that nourish a lush green landscape reminiscent of our decades living in the Pacific Northwest.

Friends and family ask us how long we plan to stay. I have no idea, I reply. Are you just a visitor, or an expat, or an immigrant? Do I have to have a label? If I must choose one, I suppose it would be “sojourner” – defined as a traveler who dwells in a place for a time. (The key word here is “dwell,” with its echoes of “linger” and “abide” and “home.”)

Portugal is home, for now.

And we’re loving it here. We miss family and friends, of course, but there are these wonderful inventions called airplanes that connect us frequently. One of our sons moved to Barcelona shortly after we landed here in Portugal – a huge blessing as he’s now just a short flight away. I have to laugh when I remember that post-grad year in Germany many moons ago, when international phone calls were so expensive I was only able to talk to my then-boyfriend, now-husband twice the entire time I was there. Imagine being forced to rely on actual, handwritten letters to communicate! How positively medieval! (Although I’m convinced humanity has lost something as we’ve moved away from physical correspondence—but that’s a topic for another conversation.) These days, the world is literally in my hand, and I can pick up my cell phone any time I want not only to call and talk to family and friends, but also to see them, thanks to FaceTime and WhatsApp and Zoom and GrandPad and all those other handy apps.

And it turns out that living abroad is catnip to everyone in our address book. We’ve never had so many visitors in our life! Which is fine with us, because there’s nothing we like better than showing off this magnificent country.

St. Augustine once noted, “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

I agree wholeheartedly, although I would add that those who do not experience living abroad read only one chapter. Whether you’re just a traveler or you’re a sojourner like me doesn’t matter. What matters is that you open the book and dive in! A few pages, a chapter or two, the entire volume—the world awaits, and the experience will change your life.

It’s changing mine.

…AND you can get the whole series in a nifty boxed set!

Find them both at your favorite bookstore! Happy summer, everyone!

I’ll be giving us all a brief pep talk, and then we will have dedicated time to work on our individual projects. 

Although I was a latecomer to the Betsy Tacy books, as many of you know, they’re dear to my heart. In fact, in Home for the Holidays, I had my fictional book club dive into the series—something I like to do myself from time to time for inspiration. Maud Hart Lovelace is a wonderful writer, and her books deserve to be cherished by a wide audience. If you aren’t familiar with them, treat yourself and add them to your bookshelf!

You can find more information about Sunday’s event and pre-register here.

Hope to see you there!

Thanks to the tropical storm/hurricane headed for Cape Cod, my book signing at the Brewster Book Store in Brewster, Massachusetts, has been postponed 24 hours. Hope to see you there Sunday morning at 10!

Hope to see you on Saturday at the Brewster Book Store
in Brewster, Massachusetts —
my only appearance in the U.S. this fall!

Altogether now, “Happy book birthday to me!”

Book birthdays are a big deal to an author. After months and sometimes years of writing, and then months and months of waiting, publication day is the day the finished product finally hits bookstores and libraries, and from there, the hands of readers. And if we’ve done our job well, those readers will be happy with what we’ve created.

Truly, Madly, Sheeply is dear to my heart. It’s the fourth and likely final in my Pumpkin Falls mystery series, and it features some of my favorite things: sheep and knitting and October in New England. Plus, it was an absolute joy to write from start to finish. Why, you ask? Well, for one thing, I switched up my process. (Process is what writers call the way in which they choose to write.) Time was, I could devote every day to writing stories–and I did. For a while now, however, I’ve had a full-time “day job” (that’s what writers call any paid work besides writing) at Longyear Museum in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. I absolutely love it, and will share more on that in a future post. Meanwhile, however, those work responsibilities meant I needed to change my usual process when it came to writing stories. And so I did. Truly, Madly, Sheeply was written over the course of a year, on Saturday mornings. Yes, only on Saturday mornings! That’s all the time I had to devote to it. Well, plus a week-long push at the end when I was knitting all the chapters together and polishing it up. You know what? I had FUN. Somehow, corralling my writing into once-a-week sessions and not worrying about the consequences (because there was no point in worrying–it was simply what I had to do) uncorked a sense of joy that I didn’t even know I was missing. I didn’t worry about meeting a deadline–I knew that would happen. I didn’t worry about making everything perfect–I knew it eventually would be. I just wrote for the sheer joy of it for those few hours, every week. 

So it turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks! I just assumed that once a writer had an established process–writing every day–they stuck with it–or were stuck with it–forever. Nope. It’s nice to know that I’m the captain of my writing ship, and can change course as needed.

Back to Truly, Madly, Sheeply and this picture. The sharp-eyed among you will notice what’s behind me. That’s my knitting cabinet. Just looking at it makes me happy! It’s full of wool and sheep and dreams of beautiful hand-knitted things to wear and to give to friends and family. Whether I’m knitting or writing, I’m always thinking of the person or reader who will enjoy the end product.

I hope you all enjoy Truly, Madly Sheeply!

Many changes aboard the good ship Frederick this past while—I’ve been busy! We moved (twice), acquired grandchildren (twice), retired (one of us, not me), wrote a new book (one of us, me), knit up a storm (see: grandchildren), and now we’re happily settling into our newest adventure (which you’ll hear more about in a future post).

Today, however, I want to talk about woolgathering.

Isn’t that a wonderful word? Recently I learned a bit more about its origin. The term has been around since the 16^th century, when it meant literally gathering wool—plucking up tufts of fiber that had snagged in bushes and on fences and the like by a passing sheep. Presumably, you’d gather until you had enough to spin into yarn and knit into sweaters and socks and such. You can read more about the etymology of the expression here.

For a writer, the term as we have come to know and use it today is a metaphor for what we do: woolgathering is daydreaming, plucking bits and pieces from the nooks and crannies of our everyday lives (along with our imaginations) and weaving it all into a story.

One of my favorite parts of this job of mine as a writer is research. Research has taken me to some amazing places: Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (Spy Mice: For Your Paws Only), Jane Austen’s home in England (Pies & Prejudice); a New Hampshire “sugar shack” to watch the maple syrup manufacturing process (Yours Truly); and Nantucket island (The Voyage of Patience Goodspeed), to name just a few. This time around, for my forthcoming Pumpkin Falls mystery Truly Madly Sheeply, research took me to the New England countryside, where I indulged in some metaphorical and literal woolgathering as I visited a sheep farm, made some memorable four-legged friends (and two-legged as well!), and got to see an old-school sheep shearer at work.

My travels began at Liberty Hall Farm in Durham, New Hampshire, home of Great Bay Wool Works.

Theresa Walker and her family run this fabulous farm, raising mostly Romney sheep for their fiber, which they spin into lovely undyed and botanically dyed yarn for knitters like me.

My knitting friend Jonatha recommended it—she’d met Theresa at a sheep and wool festival in New England. (And by the way, it was Jonatha who came up with the title Truly Madly Sheeply—isn’t it scrumptious?) So off we went on a crisp autumn day, eager to learn more about all things sheep. When we pulled into the driveway, Theresa came out to meet us.

That’s Theresa on the left. Don’t you love her smile? She welcomed us warmly and made us feel right at home. I’m the one on the right with one of Great Bay Wool Works’ fabulous knitting project bags. And check out Theresa’s license plate….

I want one!

Theresa is a peach. I couldn’t have asked for a better resource when it comes to all things sheep. She crammed so much information into our visit, my pen could barely keep up.

First up was a tour of the barn, and then a meet and greet with the flock.

See that sign over the barn door that says Liberty Hall Farm? Remember it—it has a cameo in the new book.

Inside, on the main level, you look up and see … hay! Lots of it. This is basically the pantry for sheep food.

The sheep pens are downstairs. (The barn is built into a sloping hillside.) A clever sign showed us the way….

At the bottom of the stairs, the first thing you see is this:

Don’t you love their names? After we oohed and ached over them (I mean, come on, Cute Face?!), you turn around and—there they are! 

They were bigger than I’d expected. Romneys are built kind of square, like giant footstools with legs. Their fleeces (wool coats) are THICK, too! Theresa had me stick my hands in and give one of them a good back scratch, and my hands disappeared up to my wrists. 

The flock at Liberty Hall Farm is friendly.

This endearing new friend is Little Lamb—as in “Mary had a.” The friendliest of all the sheep, though, was Edie. 

Is she adorable or what? I swear she’s smiling! Theresa calls her the concierge. Edie is big on meeting and greeting, and apparently she’s very popular on the festival and fiber show circuit. 

In addition to being friendly, she’s also ridiculously photogenic.

I mean, seriously. She knows that camera is there! Edie was the model for the knitting project bag I showed you at the beginning of this post, by the way.

My friend Jonatha was smitten.

No, Jonatha, you can’t take Edie home with you.

“Sheep are the best dogs you’ll ever have,” Theresa told us, and after meeting Edie and her woolly friends, this dog lover is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

We watched the sheep for a while as Theresa shared her sheep-y wisdom with me (HUGELY helpful). I scribbled notes furiously. They’d come in handy later while I was writing Truly Madly Sheeply. In fact, Liberty Hall Farm makes a cameo in the book, and so do Theresa and Edie. Theresa appears as “Theresa Wallace, the sheep whisperer,” and some of the information she shared with me is also shared by a character called Bert Harrison. (Theresa is larger than life! I needed two characters to contain all that sheep wisdom!). Edie I rechristened Beatrice in the book, for reasons which will become apparent when you read it. (Hint: it may have something to do with Shakespeare.)

After we said goodbye to the sheep, we left the barn and went across the yard to Theresa’s house, where I happily shopped for a ridiculous amount of yarn because that’s what knitters do. Back home, I turned some of that yarn into hats. I made this one for my husband (the pattern is called “Jason’s Cashmere Hat” and you can find it here).

And this one was a present for my grandson for Christmas. He’s obsessed with dinosaurs. The pattern is by Celia Hancock and it’s called “Dinosaur Toque.” You can find it on the Ravelry website. The cream-colored accent yarn is from Great Bay Wool Works—and maybe even from Edie! The green is from Portugal. More about that yarn in my next blog post.

I absolutely love knitting with the yarn from Great Bay Wool Works. It’s dreamy. By the way, you can follow Theresa and her woolly friends on Instagram—@greatbaywoolworks—for more great (no pun intended, haha) photos of the flock and their adventures!

My next research outing was to Clark Farm in Carlisle, Massachusetts, where my husband and my friend Jonatha and I got to watch a sheep shearer at work.

It was a blustery autumn day, perfect for holing up in a barn. There was a school group in attendance at the shearing as well—what a fabulous place to bring kids on a field trip! I could tell that they absolutely loved it.

By the way, I want to address something right up front here. Shearing does not hurt the sheep. (When done properly, of course.) In fact, if sheep are NOT sheared, it can be very dangerous to their well-being. Even fatal. Sheep do not naturally shed their wool. It will continue to grow and grow, obscuring their vision, their mobility, and even their ability to reach a food source. There are cautionary tales of sheep who have been found wandering around with massively overgrown wool coats before they were rescued. My favorite is Baarack—a dapper (once you could actually see him) Australian merino desperately in need of a haircut. His fleece weighed 35 kg (77 pounds)! That was estimated to be enough to knit 61 sweaters, or 490 pairs of socks! No fun walking around with THAT on your back, right?

(If you’re interested in learning more about the importance of shearing, here’s a video from the Livestock Conservancy you can watch.)

By the way, while I’m preaching—wool is an amazing fiber! It’s a natural, eco-friendly, renewable resource. It’s biodegradable and sustainable. Wool keeps you warm in the winter, and it’s odor resistant and keeps you cool in the summer. Seriously! It’s SO much better for us, and for the planet, than that stuff made from chemicals. Go, wool!

OK, off my soapbox. Back to Clark Farm. 

This is Kevin Ford.

Kevin is a special breed of sheep shearer, one who uses only hand tools (most shearing is done with electric clippers). He first learned the trade from a relative in Galway, Ireland, and later, after perfecting his craft, received a blade shearer certification from the New Zealand Wool board. Kevin is a national sheep shearing champion with over 40 years of experience under his belt. Each year, he travels to farms up and down the East Coast to shear some 4,000 sheep and educate people about sheep and the shearing process. Wow! Talk about watching a master at work!

Kevin starts by placing the sheep on its back, leaning against his legs. The sheep looked surprised to find itself sitting on the floor! But it quickly relaxed and stayed calm throughout the process. I think it knew it was in the hands of a pro. 

Next, he begins shearing the belly. Check out the size of those clippers! And that cute border collie in the background, supervising the proceedings. 

As he trimmed, Kevin tossed pieces of fleece to those of us waiting to bag it. Later, the fleeces would be shipped off to a woolen mill to be cleaned and spun into fiber. My friend Jonatha brought along a blanket that she knit from one of last year’s fleeces as show-and-tell for the kids. She even knows the sheep it came from!

After Kevin finished trimming the sheep’s tummy, he moved on to the legs.

And from there it was the back and side.

It’s kind of like peeling a banana. A very woolly banana. 

In the picture above, you can see the special shoes Kevin wears—they’re called sheep shearing moccasins and they’re made in New Zealand. They allow the shearer to place his or her feet closer to the sheep, and give them just the right traction needed to shift position easily.

After he finished with one side, Kevin moved on to the other.

The school kids were fascinated. We all were fascinated! Kevin has a calm presence and he worked quietly, but he looked up now and then and explained exactly what he was doing. I learned a lot.

You can see here he’s almost done. There’s a newly shorn sheep emerging!

Look at that gorgeous fleece! And that, my friends, is how sweaters and socks begin….

If you’d like to watch a video of Kevin at work, there’s a great documentary called The Shearing Day from Meet My Neighbor Productions that you can watch on YouTube here. Kevin is truly amazing and it was a privilege to see him at work. I honored him (I hope), with a cameo in my forthcoming book Truly Madly Sheeply. You’ll recognize him in Chapter 32.

Kevin has also written a book, Shearing Day: Sheep Handling, Wool Science, and Shearing with Blades. It’s out of print, alas, but you might be able to find it at your local library, or from a used bookstore.

So there you have it. A huge part of the woolgathering process for Truly Madly Sheeply. I think it may be my favorite in the Pumpkin Falls mystery series. It certainly was the most fun to research and write. The book will be published at the end of August, but it’s available for pre-order now. I hope you like it!

That’s all from me for this month. See you next time!

What I’m knitting

Little Moments by Fifty Four Ten Studio. I love her blanket patterns—the repetitive geometrical motifs are so calming. I’m knitting this one in a gorgeous multi-hued blue bulky merino wool called Nônô from Tricots Brancal in Portugal (more on that in my next post).

What I’m reading

For adults:  Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein. Hilariously irreverent, informative, and thoughtful—it’s a terrific memoir. I am not only being entertained but also educated on all things sheep.

For young readers: The Midnight Children by Dan Gemeinhart. The writing is wonderful, the kind I like to slow-read to enjoy every morsel. Loved it hugely.

What I’m watching

The Shearing Day, of course! Also The Reluctant Traveler with Eugene Levy (I’ll watch him in anything). 

What I’m baking

 My Nova Scotia grandmother’s brown bread. Family favorite.

 What I’m writing

Absolutely truly nothing at the moment. I’m woolgathering!

It’s Maple Month.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, Maple Month happens every March here in New England, and it is a Very Big Deal indeed. I’m sure it’s celebrated in other places as well, wherever maple producers do their thing. Here where I live, as soon as the conditions are right (cold nights, warmer days), which usually happens come March, maple producers take to the woods to tap their trees, open their sugarhouses, fire up their evaporators – and let the magic happen. Sap flows, sap is collected and boiled down, and voila! Maple magic. Maple syrup, maple sugar, maple cream, maple – well, you get the picture. In a word, maple everything! Yum!

Maybe it’s my Canadian roots (is the Canadian maple leaf flag not a thing of beauty?), but I’m pretty sure that maple syrup runs through my veins.

Give me a choice of anything in the world to put on pancakes or waffles, and it’s always going to be maple syrup. REAL maple syrup, that is – none of that fake stuff. Give me a choice between fudge and maple sugar candy and it’s going to be maple sugar candy any day of the week. Ice cream? Maple walnut, of course.

Readers often ask me where I get my story ideas. When it comes to my Pumpkin Falls mysteries, you don’t have to look any farther than my own lifelong love of maple for the maple-inspired theme at the heart of Yours Truly.

And when I say “lifelong” I’m not exaggerating. Take a look at this picture:

That’s my mom and me, a long time ago, on a wintry day in New Hampshire. Isn’t she glamorous, with her sunglasses and scarf? (She’s the Canadian one, by the way.) I’m a little over a year old in this picture, and I swear I can remember the sweet smell of steam wafting from that sugarhouse behind us. Mmmm mmmm.

Last weekend, my husband and I had hoped to drive up to visit Parker’s Maple Barn, our favorite sugarhouse in southern New Hampshire, but the cross-border pandemic travel restrictions kept us closer to home. So instead of pancakes and waffles drenched in made-on-the-spot maple syrup, we went off to find the next best thing: maple walnut ice cream.

It’s never too cold for ice cream here in New England!

It’s always a sad day when I’m unable to respond to someone’s nice note. (And yes, I have a backlog of snail mail and email I’m working my way through — be patient with me!)