I’m back home after my quick weekend trip to the Louisiana Book Festival. It was a really nice event. I think my panel went pretty well, and I had a steady flow of people at the signing. A couple were already fans who brought books to be signed, but the rest seemed to be just discovering me, which was nice.

Unfortunately, I got sick while I was there, either being hit with a massive allergy attack or coming down with a cold, so I didn’t get to enjoy the festival fully. It was a bit colder than they forecast. I’d packed for the forecast, but it was really cold, and that didn’t help matters. I was fine during my events in the morning, just with a slightly sore throat, but it got worse as the day went by. After I checked out of my hotel, I just spent the afternoon in the author hospitality room before I headed for the airport, and I fell into bed as soon as I got home.

I’m feeling better now, but I’m giving myself today as a “light duty” day since I’m sick, it’s a national holiday, and the weather is good for a sick day, all cold and gloomy. I’m working on brainstorming a story idea, but I may also let myself watch a movie that kind of counts as “research.”

Tomorrow if I keep feeling better, I can go back to “normal.”

This weekend, I’ll be a speaker at the Louisiana Book Festival, my last big book event of the year. I think they’re stretching the definition of “Louisiana author” a little bit, but they invited me. I don’t even know if they know of my Louisiana connections (my family is from Louisiana, and I lived there briefly when I was a baby). It’s ironic that this is my first big state book festival invitation. So far, Texas hasn’t been interested in me for the state book festival, state teen book festival, or even regional teen book festival. Texas needs to up its game! I also haven’t heard anything from Oklahoma (my actual native state).

I’m on one of the panels for teens, but I’m not sure what kind of audience we’ll have for the first panel in the morning. The up side of that is that I have the rest of the day free to go to the panels I find interesting. And there’s the south Louisiana food. I’m hoping to get a little gumbo and maybe a beignet while I’m there.

It’s just a one-night trip, but I’m doing my usual overpreparation, as though I’ll be gone for a week. My wardrobe planning keeps changing as the weather forecast keeps changing. I was going to buy a new dress for cooler weather, but now it’s going to be chilly enough (and I’ll have to be outdoors enough) that I think I’ll just go with slacks and a sweater, and I have plenty of sweaters I seldom get to wear. There’s a party the night before, and it will probably be too chilly to wear my little black dress unless I also wear a coat, so I think I’ll do a skirt and sweater for that. That means I won’t have to go shopping. I really need to purge my wardrobe before I add more to it.

So, if you’re in Louisiana and coming to the book festival, I hope to see you!

I’m down to about three thousand words until the end of this book — at least, of the target word count. I think the rest of the story may fit into that. I just have to write the finale. This may be the most I’ve ever written in one week. Which means that writing before I do anything else is a good strategy, as much as I hate to admit it.

The other good strategy is turning off the wi-fi on the computer and resisting the urge for most research or “I just want to check my e-mail” breaks. Sometimes, I do need to do research for the book as I write it. The main character is a librarian, so her response to everything is to do research, and sometimes I need to look up what she’s looking up because the results will affect the plot. But I’m also really bad about having a thought pop into my head and suddenly wanting to look up things related to it. I’ll think of what I want to have for dinner and start looking up recipes. This morning, the knob broke on the portable radiator I use to warm up the bathroom, and I desperately wanted to research what other heaters might be best for that purpose so that I don’t have to heat up the entire house when I take a shower. But I resisted that urge. I can look that up after I’m done writing.

This isn’t new. It’s just a lot easier with the Internet. In college, my dorm was across the street from the main campus library, and I would often dash across the street to look something up that I’d suddenly become curious about. Now I can do that without leaving my house. I think a lot of it is a stalling measure when writing starts to feel hard. It feels like a reflex — I don’t know what needs to happen next, so I’ll just go look something up. If I power through, I can move on and get past the tiny blocks. It’s just a difficult habit to break.

The next trick will be to see how the time change affects me. I’ve been waking up more or less on my own at an early hour, but if I keep waking up at that time after the change, I’ll be super early. If I go back to sleep, I’ll end up going through a whole additional sleep cycle and be super late. I may just go with early. We’ll see.

And then we’ll see if I can keep up this level of productivity.

I managed to avoid having to drive in much rain, as the rain didn’t start until I was on my way home from the dentist. It was funny having an appointment on Halloween because the staff dressed in costume—everyone dressed up as the head dentist. It was hilarious. Then they played spooky haunted house music on the sound system.

I didn’t get a candy overload since I wasn’t at home on Halloween night and didn’t have to buy any candy just in case I had trick-or-treaters (which I never do, but it’s best to be prepared). However, the chocolate is on sale now, so I may not be able to resist loading up. I helped out at the church “block party” for trick-or-treaters, but the rain had only just stopped and kids were only just starting to come out when I had to leave for choir. The weather was bad enough that I don’t know how many kids went out. I noticed a lot of pizza delivery cars out and about, so I suspect a lot of families decided to stay in, have pizza, and watch spooky movies, which sounds pretty good to me. That might have been what I did if I hadn’t been singing Christmas music.

Now I have two days until my self-imposed deadline to finish the book, so I have work to do. I’ve got the rest of it outlined, and I know there will be a lot of revision because I came up with some fun ideas toward the end that I want to move earlier in the book. There’s a character who really added energy to things who needs to show up earlier, and that will require some rearranging.

And then I will give myself a weekend to collapse.

Happy Halloween! I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I scheduled a dentist appointment this morning. Actually, I know what I was thinking — it’s a Wednesday, and the odds were pretty good that I’d be around on a Wednesday since I have choir.

The “what was I thinking?” isn’t to do with this day being associated with candy. Most of the candy eating will come after I see the dentist. It’s more to do with the fact that it always seems to rain on Halloween, which means I have to go out in the rain. Every other day this week is supposed to be nice, but the weekday I have to leave the house, it’s raining.

Then again, Halloween or not, the same thing probably would have ended up happening. I can make bad weather appear by having a dental checkup. Before I managed to adjust the schedule for my regular appointments, I used to have a checkup in February or March, and we tended to get sleet on that day. Rain is relatively easy.

However, I also have good things happen when I’m at the dentist. That’s usually when my agent gets in touch with me with good news. In fact, I was at the dentist when my agent first called to say she wanted to represent Enchanted, Inc.

So, will I get caught in the deluge today? Will I get good news while I’m having the tea stains scraped off my teeth? We shall see!

The other issue with today is that I’d just started establishing different morning habits and this will throw off my routine before it becomes habit, but I still started the day with writing and have done a thousand words, so maybe it won’t derail me entirely.

I made it through another busy weekend, with a book festival all day Saturday and singing in two services Sunday, so it’s taking me a while to gear up for today. While the brain was still only semi-functional, I did an errand run, hitting both Target and the grocery store. Now maybe I can settle down and focus on writing.

Next Saturday is unscheduled. There’s a party that night, but I don’t really plan on going because I also have a Friday-night party, and that’s enough socializing for one weekend. I already have grand plans to spend next Saturday morning catching up on housework, then Saturday afternoon catching up on writing, and then Saturday night on the sofa in my pajamas, having a movie night.

In the meantime, I’m way behind on the book I’m working on, so it’s head down and forging ahead for the rest of the week. I don’t have to cook because I have leftovers and stocked up on frozen entrees. I have a couple more errands this week, but they’re of the sort I can walk to, so they double up as exercise. Otherwise, I’ll be writing. I hope.

I had a rather challenging children’s choir session yesterday, as the preschool director was sick, so we combined the two groups — and then just about everyone showed up. I didn’t get a good head count, but based on the rosters, we had at least 14 kids. And they’ve been stuck indoors for ages because of all the rain, so they were really hyper. Combining the groups also meant we had some siblings together, and that can get even crazier because they act they way they act at home with each other — or the way they would act at home with each other if they could get away with it.

So, 14 kids in a relatively small room, with lots of pent-up energy. None of the things that usually work worked. We tried getting them to burn off some energy with activity, but that made them more hyper. We tried doing a more quiet activity, but they were so hyper it took forever to do it because they wouldn’t listen enough to hear what was going on.

Fortunately, the adult helping with preschool plays the piano for Sunday school, so we hauled the piano to the room (it’s on wheels) and did a singalong of our favorite Sunday school songs, and that seemed to engage them a bit, though there was still some running around and screaming.

I was still twitching when I got home last night, and the quiet at home was glorious.

It stopped raining today long enough for me to get a real walk outdoors, and I think that will help my energy levels today. I like rainy days, but we’d passed the point of what even I enjoy.

Today I also need to work on my presentation for the book festival where I’m speaking this weekend. So I guess I’d better get busy.

I can already tell that this is going to be one of those days when focusing is a challenge. I got my kitchen cleaned and organized last week and earlier this week, which inspired me to tackle the dining room. That room mostly tends to hold the spillover from the kitchen and from the patio, as the dining table is by the door to the patio, and so a lot of the stuff I use on the patio that isn’t stored outside ends up sitting on the dining table. When I was out shopping yesterday I found a little cart that’s perfect for storing my patio stuff. It sits in the corner near the door, and now my table is clear. I also got a little plastic bin that fits in my cabinet shelf to hold all my tea, so I can just pull it out and see all the varieties, and it’s sad how thrilling I find that.

But then having those two rooms cleaned and organized has inspired me to tackle the living room, and now when I sit down to try to think about work, I find myself instead looking up things like racks to hold CDs or cute baskets for holding my knitting. I want to organize All The Things. Some people do spring cleaning, but I turn domestic in the fall.

All this is great, and it needs to be done, but I’m supposed to be writing a book. I’ll start thinking about the next scene that needs to be written, and next thing I know, I’m off on a mental rabbit trail, contemplating ways to organize things and what I need to buy to make that happen.

I think what I may need to do is establish a starting-to-write ritual for this book, something that’s guaranteed to get me into the right mindset to write and focus on that world. That usually involves a piece of music that serves as a theme for the book, maybe a few images to look at. I normally write in silence, but if I find a piece of music (usually a movie score) that works, I can play that to shut out all the other voices vying for attention. Scent can even work — a candle or essential oil that takes me to the right place.

Of course, the effort to pick all this stuff can serve as its own kind of procrastination/distraction. I’m probably better off just giving myself a stern mental lecture.

After taking yesterday as a rest/catch-up day and after running all the errands this morning, I’m about to dive into a final proofreading pass, and then next week I’ll be ready to start something new that I need to refresh myself on (news about the new thing to come soon).

Meanwhile, I totally forgot to mention that my publisher put the e-book version of Don’t Hex with Texas on sale for $1.99, probably through the rest of this week. I’m sure most people who might be reading this already have all the books, but in case you need the e-book version, here’s your chance to get it as a bargain.

I succumbed to two fall things at the grocery store this morning: the first Honeycrisp apples are out (my favorite harbinger of fall), and Pioneer has a pumpkin spice pancake mix (it’s the spices with no pumpkin). I don’t get excited about pumpkin spice lattes because I don’t like coffee, but I like spiced baked goods. I think I’m going to make a spiced peach compote to top the pancakes for this weekend, hopefully to celebrate being done with the book (other than dealing with copyedits, a final proofing pass, and then dealing with all the publishing stuff, getting cover art done, etc.).

And now lunch, then work!

I’m treating this as a semi-weekend day to recover from essentially working all weekend. I got mostly better from last week’s cold, but then the weather got in the way. We got record amounts of rain, more than 7 inches in one night, and it was more than the hotel conference center roof could handle. A few leaks let water pool in the ceiling tiles until the ceiling tiles couldn’t handle it, and you can imagine the fun stuff that exploded into the air along with bits of ceiling tile and all that water that had been pooling in there. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I’m fairly sure the entire place was contaminated the rest of the weekend. I’d be okay at home, then couldn’t stop coughing while I was at the convention. I managed to get through my panels then beat a hasty retreat for home.

I’d thought that the panel on evil overlords would be about writing villains, but instead it was more of an improv exercise in which we were essentially creating evil overlords on the spot, answering questions about our lairs, wardrobe, minions, etc. It was a ton of fun. I’ve never been a villain-centric writer, so it was an interesting exercise in putting myself in that viewpoint, but since the idea was to be funny with this, I got to create a villain who was a spoof of the Maleficent type. My chosen lair was a castle with a moat. I went with formal wear in basic black for public appearances (unless I was pretending to be a captive princess to lure heroes to my lair), but for casual wear just hanging around the castle, I preferred yoga pants and sweatshirts. I may get a couple of fun stories out of that exercise because I kind of liked the character I created. To some extent, I suspect she just put on the evil overlord front to keep the villagers away from the castle so she could get some peace and quiet.

I’m also tempted to create the costume for this character and wear it next year.

Meanwhile, I went to a couple of Marian Call’s concerts and bought some more CDs. She’s an Alaska-based singer/songwriter who does geeky stuff along with more mainstream topics. I saw her in concert a few years ago and she was the music guest of honor this weekend. And from a conversation after her Saturday concert we both came away with writing prompts for something that needs to be addressed.

Now I need to catch up on life and all the stuff that didn’t get done while I was sick or busy with the convention. My kitchen is a disaster, I have to do laundry, and there’s a lot of admin work I need to tackle. Then tomorrow I start the proofreading pass on my book.