So Long Til Next Year

Thanks everyone for your prayers and commiserations. The old house has become a much bigger sucker-upper of my time than I would have imagined. They haven't finished gutting all of the downstairs yet. We're still trying to get the upstairs floors dry with dehumidifiers and these huge fans that are like giant hair dryers on steriods. There's like ten in each room. You can barely get around them. And yet the floor's still wet.

Considering my plate was already fuller than I like it, the Great Flood of '06 just sent it crashing to the floor. So when I read that one blogger agent was taking the rest of the year off--from agenting and blogging--I liked that idea a lot. While I love blogging as a way of keeping in touch will all my cyberspace friend, I just don't have the brain cells to think of anything to blog about, other than whining about the sorry state of both my houses. I don't even enjoy that so I'm sure you all wouldn't either.

So I'm taking a Christmas break from blogging: my gift to myself. I'll see you all back here in the new year. And it's kind of a gift to you too: one less blog to check each day. :)

Merry Christmas everyone. Hope yours is wonderful.

If your smoke detector catches on fire . . .

. . . it’s a good thing the water leaking through the ceiling puts it out.

Sunday we drove up to our old house, the one that’s for sale, to find water running out the garage door. I thought, “Oh, crap. The water heater broke.” But nothing was in the garage that could be too damaged by water. It would be a pain to clean up and replace, but doable.

Until we lifted the garage door.

And water was pouring off it.

And off the garage ceiling.

A burst pipe?

We run inside to find this.

It’s raining inside our house. But not outside.


What I want to know is, if it’s raining, where’s the rainbow?

A river runs through it.

Can’t wait to see our water bill this month.

Apparently (and I’m going to use passive voice here since the perpetrator is unknown) the master bathtub was stopped up and the faucet turned on full blast sometime twelve or eighteen hours previously.

Okay, I’ve said before my life is fodder for my blog. And then the other day I was saying I had nothing to blog about. But really, God, I could have done with something far less dramatic. Or something that was good news . . . like a book contract.


Can’t wait to see what our water bill is this month.

Oh, and I guess the house is off the market.

Someone Else's Adventure

Go check out my dear friend and crit partner, Jenny Cary's blog. I think hanging out with me is rubbing off on her. And maybe not for the better. Her adventure sounds eerily like something that would happen to me.

The Sound of Silence

What’s that? Can you hear it? Nope? That’s because there’s nothing to hear. Unless it’s the slight crackle as the fizzle goes out of my Nano efforts. Sigh. Didn’t come close to finishing 50,000 words. I got just over halfway there.

It’s a hard time of year to do Nano with the holidays. Plus, we’re coming off a big move. I still don’t have a desk or an office or a routine, which makes it very hard for me to write. And then the kids got sick. As usual, life interrupts writing.

However, I’m not too bummed. I’m 25,000 words farther in my story than I was a month ago. I didn’t expect to hit 50,000 words, I just wanted to get myself back into the groove of writing. And it did help to some extent. I can now see the end of my book, though I’m not sure I’ll type those magic words, The End, before this year does. But I’m thinking about my characters and where they’re going. I have some ideas of things I want to layer in on the next round of revisions. So over all it was a great experience. I still might even get some chocolate out of it . . .