Last August, I made an important mental note and filed it away in the dark recesses of my brain. It went something like this: Every year, you forget how busy the back-to-school season is. You overcommit and over-extend yourself, and you make your family a little crazy, what with all the emotional breakdowns and carryout pizza. Don't do it again this year. Simplify, simplify. Clear your schedule. Whatever you do, do NOT--I repeat--DO NOT take on any additional projects in August and September.
Unfortunately, also lurking in the dark recesses of my brain are a bunch of empty Diet Coke cans, reruns of Diff'rent Strokes, and badly-conjugated French verbs. Very important mental notes can get lost in there, as evidenced by my curious decision to write a 350-ish page book in 14 weeks spanning across (yep) August and September.
(It's going really well, by the way. Melanie and I are managing to carve out big chunks of time at the library, and we're chugging along. We'll chug better once the kids are in school, but still, we're making good headway.)
Our writing schedule, as you might imagine, is pretty rigorous; coupled with the demands of the busy back-to-school month, it's a lot to manage. I'm going to slip away and take a bit of a blog break, because something really has to give. If something doesn't give, my kids may very well look back on August 2009 as the The Month That Mom Went Crazy.
I'm stepping away until Labor Day, so I can work on the book, enjoy the last 18 minutes of summer with my favorite people, and elbow my way through the school-supply aisle with the rest of the free world (I am not afraid to FIGHT for twenty-cent bottles of Elmer's glue). I'll run a few things from the archives, in the meantime.
Hope to see you back here in September, my friends.
