Welcome to the new and improved LoriRaderDay.com.

I can’t tell you how excited I am about my new site. The trees. Oh, the trees. And the lines from my book? Can you stand it?

Tremendous thanks to Karen Barry of Austin, Texas, the genius behind my new design. Let me tell you a little story about this design to give you the full picture. When Karen and I first started talking about what I wanted from my new site, I was clear about one thing. Mystery pages often rely on black and red as their source colors, and while I love black and red—another crime writer and I decided to call them DARKNESS AND BLOOD, our signature colors—I wanted something different. Ominous and dark, OF COURSE, but not black and red and not, especially, a black background with white text.

If you have a black background with white text, that’s your deal with the devil, but I find it hard to read and sometimes have to click off pages I really want to read because I am going blind. You take whatever you want—or not—from that.

Later, when Karen had an early draft of the site to show me, she warned me that, if I didn’t like the colors she’d used, we could certainly play around with other options. But I loved the colors, the same ones you see today.

Here’s the part that I think you might find interesting. After I said I loved the color scheme, Karen told me that the colors had actually come from zooming deep, deep, deep into my author photo and pulling samples out of the flecks of color in my eyes. THE FLECKS IN MY EYES. How’s that for charming-slash-creepy? I knew we were destined to work well together, and apparently my eyes have some violet in them, a la Elizabeth Taylor. Va voom.

Now that the site is up, I hope to blog here more regularly. Truthfully, I have a lot more to tell you these days. For one thing, I’m sitting next to a short stack of Black Hour advanced reader copies right this very minute. And somewhere in Philadelphia this very minute, there’s a stack of 100 or so of them, getting pressed on librarians from across the nation at the American Library Association’s Midwinter event. There’s a copy sitting at the Random House (Seventh Street Books’s distributor) booth with a “staff pick” placard from an RH library marketing staffer named Kelly, who just launched herself into my top five people of all time.

***Edited to add: Sign up for updates from me by midnight Eastern Standard Time Wednesday, January 29, and be entered to win a BLACK HOUR prize pack, including an advanced reader copy of the book! Sign up is on the homepage at loriraderday.com. Make sure to look for and follow-through with the confirmation email you’ll get so I can include you in the drawing!

Lots more happening in the next five months. Five. Months. That’s all, until I can finally share The Black Hour with all of you. Thank you to Karen for the beautiful site, to Scott Blackwood for introducing us, and to all of you for coming along with me.