August has pretty much flown right by. Sheesh! I guess there’s an upside to being insanely busy—the hottest part of the year goes by with barely a notice.

So here’s what my average weekday has looked like for most of this month.
Wake up 4:45 am. Either go for a run or do 40 minutes on the stationary bike. (I’ve been trying to run MWF, and do the bike T, TH.)

Get home/finish, do breakfast, shower, get dressed, clean the kitchen (I am SO sick of having a house on the market), then get the kid up at 6:15-6:30. Sit and cuddle with her in the recliner while she drinks her milk and watches “Little Einsteins.”

7 am or so, do last minute sweep/clean of house, make sure the kid goes potty (in the potty!), get her dressed, teeth and hair brushed, and then kick husband and kid out the door by 7:30.

Go to work. Try and write on my lunch hour.

Get off work 4:30ish, and either head to gym or coffeehouse to write more. (I go to a coffeehouse to write after work because if I went home it would waste over half an hour for me. Instead I go to a place near the day care, and then can usually get another hour of writing in before I have to pick her up.) If I go to the gym (which I really try to do at least 3 times a week) I squeeze out a quicky 20 minute weight workout, then force myself to do 40 minutes on the elliptical trainer.

Pick up the kid, head home. Do something that resembles dinner that doesn’t involve messing the kitchen up too much. Spend a couple of hours doing something vaguely resembling Family Quality Time (which usually involves all of us being in the same room while we do our own thing.) Give the kid a bath around 8ish. Give kid to husband to put to bed.

Try and write some more. Go to bed 10ish.

On the weekends we sleep as late as possible. I also rarely do any working out on the weekends. And at some point during the weekend the husband almost always takes the kid off for several hours to give me alone/writing time.

The funny thing is that I’ve really never been an organized person. But I think there comes a moment when a person realizes that if they want to do all the things that they want to do, then they either need to give some of the crap up, or they need to schedule the ever living crap out of their life. Thank god for weekends!

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My agent warned me that August was an insanely slow month in the publishing world, so between that knowledge and being busy as all crap, I’ve actually managed to not stress too much about the submission status of my novel. Give me another couple of months—then I’ll probably start freaking out! But I’m trying to be good; I’m working hard on the next book. I’ve finished the [incredibly rough and shoddy] first draft, and am now going through and putting in and taking out all sorts of stuff that will basically render the final product completely unrecognizable from the rough outline that I started with. (Yes, right now I’m the stage of novel-writing where I’m utterly convinced that this thing is horrible and will never ever be right. Thankfully, I know through reading other author blogs that I am not the only person who goes through this and that this feeling will—hopefully—pass.)

And, speaking of blogs, I’ve come to something of a decision about this one. I’m keeping it—mostly. I’ve received a wide swath of advice ranging from “don’t change a thing” to “no blog no how no way Real Writers don’t blog.” I can see why the “don’t change a thing” part could be risky for a writer, and I also disagree with the “no blog” view, especially since there are SCADS of very successful writers who blog, and blog about far more than just their writing. I got to thinking about how I find new books and what I do when I find an author I like, and one of the first things I do is I look for their website, and when I find their website the first thing I do is look and see if they have a blog. Then I see if they link to any other authors, and will often look harder at those names when I go to the bookstore.

So I’m basically going to strip out most of the super-personal stuff (after backing the whole thing up first, of course!) and then maintain a professional, but still fairly personal and personable site—hopefully maintaining a happy medium. I don’t get a zillion daily hits at this point, but I’m fairly sure that the hits I do get are from people who want to read about me and my life and my writing, and I don’t want to lose any of them.

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In other news, we did get an offer on our house, the caveat being that it’s a predicated offer, i.e. it only goes through if they sell their house. And it’s an open predication, so if we get a better offer, or even one that we prefer over this one (i.e. ready to buy right now), we can take it—hence the reason our house is still on the market.

Yes, we now have a silly little chain of predications. We have a predicated offer on the house we want to buy as well, so as long as the people we’re hoping to buy the house from don’t make a predicated offer on the house of the people trying to buy our house—resulting in an eternal loop of predications—we might maybe someday get through all of this and actually get into a new house. Sheesh!