Back to my real life

Today is the day I told myself I would be getting back to my “real” life. Whether I finished going through all those photos or not, today was the day I was going to start back to work on my sequel to Do You Know the Monkey Man. (BTW, I did finish the photos — I uploaded a total of 6055 of them to my online album, which means I looked at at least three times that many images. Do you think I take too many pictures???) But I won’t be working on my Monkey Man sequel today or this week (and probably not even next week, either) because I got The Truth About Truman School back from my editor for final revisions. I haven’t actually read her comments yet because I want to reread the manuscript first (and today, when I have the house to myself, is the perfect time to read it from start to finish, with no interruptions) and see what jumps out at ME before I see what she wants me to rework.

I think my family has been a little shaken up by the fact I haven’t been writing lately (and my lack of concern that I haven’t been writing). My kids have grown up understanding that yes, Mom is at home, but Mom is WORKING and unless there is blood or death (and the death of a spider does not count), she is not to be disturbed when the door is closed. But during the last three weeks, the door has not been closed. Ever. And everyone in my family has asked me, “Uh, are you…writing anything right now? REALLY??? NOT AT ALL????” I’m not sure this has ever happened in my children’s lives. But I’ll be back at it today!

I had been hoping to use this past week to update my website and get my author packets in order, but that didn’t happen. The photos took longer than I expected, and then…you know that water we had in the basement a week ago? The water that I said “at least it didn’t extend over to my wall of floor to ceiling books.” Well, guess what? It DID extend that far…it just took a week to get there! A week after we thought we’d finished the clean-up. And I had my picture book collection running along the floor of those bookshelves. So it’s been a pretty depressing weekend. I spent the majority of it sorting through wet, moldy books, figuring out how many are salvageable and how many are definitely destroyed (it was amazing how there could be a completely dry book just two books down from one that was completely soaked). At first I thought there were about 350-400 picture books destroyed. But last night it looked like maybe about half of those might still be salvageable.

It’s going to feel very good to get back to the writing today.