It’s Friday and I’m sitting here, trying to wake up a bit. (It’s not working out too well, seeing as how I misspelled about four of the words in that sentence. And then I forgot the second “s” in “misspell.”) One child is watching Moana while another seems to be staring into some great, dark void and a third is probably eating something he shouldn’t and the fourth is still upstairs sleeping. (Lucky child. She’ll be doing chores later to pay for her gift of sleeping in.) And here I am, already misplacing the point of this paragraph.
It’s been that kind of week.
Basically, I hit a wall. Not a writer’s block kind of wall or anything like that, just a moment where everything I was doing became too much and my brain began to squelch in my head like so much useless squelchy stuff and things like clipping coupons became rather taxing.
I had Reasons, you know. The Firstborn came out in May. The Bride Price came out on Tuesday. I’m polishing up another book set to come out in October. There are two anthologies set for this fall that I’m slated to be a part of. And then there are children in this house, spilling out of every crevice (crevasse?), constantly needing more food and clean underpants and wanting to go places like swimming pools and the library and dance lessons. And then my husband picked up some bug/illness/plague which involved him having a terrible fever off and on for a week and a cough that sounded like his lungs wanted to break free from the paltry confines of his ribcage and then my brain went NOPE and here we are.
It’s Friday, and I’m still trying to wake up.
I gave myself a couple of weeks to breathe. I mean, The Bride Price still had to have its debut. But I didn’t write anything new, not really. All the other characters, sitting in their lovely little worlds (okay, some of them have not-so-lovely worlds where people kill one another with hammers and then they miss afternoon tea) had to be pushed back for a bit, while I tried to remember basic things like daily ablutions and consuming food that wasn’t a cookie or cake or… I don’t know. The names of other types of food are escaping me right now.
But the moral of this story (Yes, there’s a moral, watch me meander my way towards it) is that you need to find a way to give your brain a break from time to time. Even if it’s only a five-minute mini-break while you hunker in the bathroom and cry over the Oreos you hid from the kids (… what?), your brain needs a moment to step back and regroup.
Over the next three-ish months, I’m starting my oldest in third grade work, my second daughter in first grade work, my oldest boy in pre-k, and all while trying to keep my toddler from sledding down the stairs or eating the drywall. I’ll have two – possibly three – writing-related releases. The girls will start up their dance lessons for the fall and there will be library things and homeschool things and LAUNDRY DEAR LORD WHY DO YOU KEEP WEARING CLOTHES AND THEN CHANGING INTO OTHER CLOTHES AND WHY DO I HAVE MORE UNMATCHED SOCKS IN THIS HOUSE THAN MATCHED???
*deep breath* Moral, Quenby. Don’t forget the moral.
So. To sum up!
The Bride Price is out now and it has a shiny new cover! 
See? So shiny…
I managed to somehow (hides sacrificial goat remains) make it the shortlist of a flash fiction contest headed up by fantasy author Mark Lawrence.
One of the little dudes inhabiting this household turned four AND got a haircut.
And that’s my week! Now… back to work.
After Oreos, of course.