Eli's here.

Among my excuses for not finishing up Rivers Run is that I've been car shopping. Last weekend, I bit the bullet and bought a new car.

Eli's on the left, Fitzy's on the right.

My old car was a bright blue 2008 Honda Fit (a Jazz, for you Europeans). He was named FitzPetey, which means "son of Petey," and yes, therein lies a tale. My all-time favorite car ever was my mother's 1967 Mustang, but for a long time my favorite car I ever owned was the beige Chevy Chevette I bought used when I lived in Huntington, WV. I've always been in the habit of naming my rides -- the car I owned prior to Fitzy was a 1974 Plymouth Fury I dubbed Sherman the Tank -- and when contemplating the Chevette, the name Petey came into my head and stayed. So Petey it was.

I loved that car because it was all the things Sherman was not: It was small and cute and fun to drive; it got pretty good gas mileage for the '80s; and it could carry a four-drawer dresser when I dropped the back seat down. It was, in sum, a perfect car for twentysomething me.

Petey was succeeded by a series of sedate sedans of the Toyota Corolla variety. By 2008, the year my mother died, the kids had gone away to college and I wanted something less sedate. So I scoured the Consumer Reports car issue and discovered they loved the Honda Fit. It was small and cute and fun to drive, especially in a 5-speed; it got terrific gas mileage for not being a hybrid; and thanks to the back seat style, I could move a kid to college without renting an SUV. And I could get one in bright blue. So I test-drove one. It was the most fun I'd had behind the wheel since driving the Chevette. So I bought it and dubbed it FitzPetey.

Eleven years later, Fitzy was still rolling along. And he was still fun to drive. But he was getting to the point where I was pretty sure I would have to sink some money into him. And too, I wasn't crazy about the prospect of driving a ten-plus-year-old car when I retired. So I started thinking about what I'd want to drive as I got older, and researching my options. The first thing I learned was that Consumer Reports was no longer so crazy about the Honda Fit -- which was okay, as I was thinking of going a little bigger anyway. But not too big. I flirted with the idea of buying something with enough towing capacity for a small trailer (not a tiny house!), but they seemed like a huge step up from my little Fit.

Then I started looking at crossover SUVs, which weren't a lot bigger than Fitzy -- but it appeared the manufacturers were all trying to out-muscle each other in body style. (I sat in a Hyundai Kona, which most of the car ratings sites love, and felt like I could be warming up for a stock-car race. I'm sure there's a market for them, but it's not me.)

And then I started looking at hybrids, and that's when I found the Kia Niro. It's bigger than Fitzy, but not by that much. It's got more cargo space than Fitzy, and better gas mileage than Fitzy ever had. Kia is marketing it as a crossover SUV, but it's a lot friendlier-looking than the tough-guy vehicles the other guys are selling. Here, take a look. This one is a 2017, but the front of my car looks the same.

Mr.choppers | Wikimedia Commons | CC 3.0

So I bought it and named it Eli, which only makes sense if you know anything about 1960s singer-songwriters. See, the car model is a Niro, which is pretty close to Laura Nyro, who wrote a bunch of hits in the '60s and '70s before dying of ovarian cancer in 1997. Among the songs she wrote is Eli's Comin', which was a hit for Three Dog Night in 1969. (She also recorded her own version, but this is the one I remember.)

The one thing I may regret about buying this car is that my kids can drive it. Neither can drive a stick shift, so Fitzy was mine, all mine. I believe I'm about to learn the joys of sharing a car again, as Kat drove it last night and appears to be hooked. But I've already made it clear that I have dibs on putting the first scratch on Eli -- and that it won't happen for a long, long time.

****
I admit, the wait for Rivers Run is getting ridiculous. So I'm committing now to a release date of  Thursday, March 21st -- just a week and a half from now.

That will clear the decks for me to finish writing Book 2 during CampNaNo in April, with publication probably around the solstice in June -- let's call it Thursday, June 20th.

The final two books aren't much more than a glimmer in my eye at this point, but surely I can get the third one out by the fall equinox -- say, Thursday, September 19th, although I may have to push that forward a week. Then the fourth and final book would drop sometime around Yule.

Wish me luck.

***
These moments of vehicular blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.