Apologies to my readers for not posting in a week. Please stop nailing chicken hearts to my door. I promise to be better.

How’ve you been? The reason for my delay is that I’m doing Fancy Author Stuff, by which I mean revisions and trying to manage my stress level.*

Bunny Mold

I expected to have a few months to button up my novel before it heads to galleys. Contractually speaking, I still have until May 30 to present the finished manuscript, but the publisher wants to take it along to the London Book Fair in mid-April, where there’s a chance of selling it to publishers overseas. They don’t need a perfectly edited book to try to sell it, but I do need to finish this round of (rather significant) revisions. So I have about four weeks to do a whole mess of work, and we’re going to Philadelphia for a three-day weekend that was planned over a month ago, and I’m doing my best to stay on schedule but damned if I haven’t neglected my humble blog.

I’m not complaining here. I always imagined it’d be thrilling to buckle down and work like gangbusters on a publishing deadline, and while “thrilling” is no longer the word that I would choose, it is satisfying to know I’ll have a much better book in less than a month, right around the time that spring kicks in and I can look around and appreciate the season. So: lots of work, daily personal deadlines to say on track, excellent progress so far, basket of candy rabbits at the end.

(The whole revision coincides perfectly with Lent, incidentally.)

* I almost wrote “levels”, which seems to be the common way to say it. I try to avoid subdividing my stress, as that would only result in multitasking, which is, itself, an infamous cause of the very thing I’m trying to manage.