They're really pretty. I can see why you would put them in.

Thanks for the linky, Steph. Pretty flower. (I learn something new every day on this board!) I can see why that image fits in the poem well.

Teppy, it's lovely. As lazy as the season itself, not to mention the susan itself.

I like the -ing suffix, but then, I always like indirect better than direct.

WHOA.

(my current Amazon author sales rank:

Amazon.com Sales Rank: 3,415

Yesterday it was 1,246,000. (Lower is better; I'm pretty damned sure Ms. Rowling or Senator Clinton is 1 right now).

Either someone's been busy ordering, or else everyone else stopped selling....

Black-eyed susan is the prototype summer flower for me, too, so a good choice. The only other high summer flower that comes to mind immediately is Queen Anne's lace, but that's... white. The exemplar of all midsummer flowers ought to be yellow.

Wow, deb. Very cool.

Liz, I figure someone stole all the stock of OotP, and that's why I climbed.

In any case, it rocks my world and makes a long irritating day more fun...

I'm going to toss a question out, because I have the fourth book of the new series percolating in my head, and I'd love some opinions.

If you have a haunted house, and the house is torn down, what do you suppose happens to the ghosts?

It would be the thread in the fourth book.

I think they die. Dissipate. Whatever.

HOWEVER... what if you had one of those crazy Americans who bought the stones and reassembled the house somewhere else? I bet he gets the ghost. The same for a crazy Brit who buys the bricks and paves his courtyard.

Betsy, here's the premise.

It would be based on the song "The Boughs of London", in which a nobleman's older daughter becomes engaged to a man her younger sister wants. She lures the older sister for a walk along the Thames and knowing she can't swim, pushes her in and watches her drown. Younger sister then goes home and steals older sister's fiance, who sounds like a total prat, but I didn't write the song, it's 15th century or thereabouts.

Anyway. a wandering musician wanders by and finds all these beautiful bones washed up on the south bank. He makes a harp out of them and strings it and takes it to the house (he's a wandering minstrel or some junk) and plays for the family, but the harp plays its own tune, which is an accusation of murder against the younger sister.

So this one has all the basics for my series: a crime, a haunting, a bckstory I get to rewrite, and I could actually focus on Ringan's house restoration side career.

My thinking is, the house once covered this huge tract of land, and was subdivided in the nineteenth century, and he's being hired privately (as opposed to the National Trust) because someone's bought the empty lot that was once part of the house, and wants to expand his Victorian cottage back onto the property next door. Which is where the ghosts from the song have been lying dormant for five hundred years.

Just beginning to puzzle this one out...

Any chance that he's expanding on to the flagstones/cobblestones of an old courtyard? That would work for me. Stone remembers.