With apologies to Madonna… *grin*
So, yes, in case you hadn’t heard, I’m back from what some might call the “trip of a lifetime.” I think it was the trip of a lifetime because I’m not sure we’ll ever do it again. It was fabulous, wonderful, exciting…um…long…but overall a great trip that gave me oodles of inspiration and research!
So, now I’m back, the kids are back in school and the man I live with is back to work. One might imagine I would be pounding away on my keyboard, typing typing typing.
Alas, this is not the case.
First off, the laundry we brought back after two weeks (and I even did a couple loads at one of the campsites!) was, literally as high as my waist. It was bigger than a first grader, lemme tell you. Then there was the school shopping we didn’t get finished before leaving for the trip. Oh, and a trip to IKEA to pick up some bookcases for Superman’s office and a chair for mine…so he’d have a place to put all his stuff I told him to get out of my office when I redecorated/organized and I’d have a place to sit…to write.
Yeah.
So the slipcover for the chair is missing a piece (the one you sit on!), the phone service we just switched to before the trip is wonky, one kid had to have a tooth pulled yesterday and the other one fell off his scooter over the weekend which meant a trip for x-rays and now one to get a cast put on his wrist.
Did I mention I had the bright idea of putting together a photo book for the nearly 2,000 pictures we took on this trip? Since they’re digital I wanted to have something to hold and look at and show around, and uploading them all to make prints was too much effort. But um, yeah, 2,000 pictures take a long time to organize when you consider I wanted to add text and commentary — and yeah, it had to be done soon, before I forget where we were and what we were doing!
Nonetheless I managed to get started on my next Spice Brief, tentatively called Everything Changes. It’s a short story told from Alex Kennedy’s point of view, about his feelings about what happened in Tempted. I started three times because I couldn’t get a feeling for the style — first person present was what came out first, but I thought first person past tense might be better, and then I chucked it all and made it third person past tense. I got 10 pages done, but heck, with all three versions is should count as thirty, right?
RIGHT.
So I’m back but not quite on track, and I’ve decided that’s just the way it goes when juggling motherhood, wifedom, household goddess status AND writerly pursuits. Never enough hours in the day to get it all done. And I guess I won’t complain too much because heck, I’m still doing what I love and getting paid for it, and I’m not the one who fell off a scooter and broke my wrist!
Have a great day, everyone!
M

The Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park