Ooftah!

I'm back from my cruise to Alaska, which also means that I've finished the latest manuscript and turned it into my editor. Why do these seemingly unrelated things coincide in my world? Because unlike people who plan ahead, I ended up spending the first 2-1/2 days of my long-planned vacation locked in my stateroom working furiously to finish the book. Now, personally I think that sounds a lot worse than it was, since working on board the ship meant that I had access to 24-hr room service, all of my meals were prepared and served for me, and someone came in and cleaned my room twice per day. Frankly, it beat trying to finish up at home!

But now that the book is done and vacation is over, the world seems to be coming at me at approximately 397 miles per hour. Today I faced one of my longest and most intense phobias and dragged myself to the dentist (it's been embarrassingly long since my last visit) only to find out that one of the bridges installed when I was a teenager (it turned out I had no adult teeth under three of my baby molars) needs to be replaced. And I need a filling. And 2 of the wisdom teeth that my orthodontist told me I wouldn't ever get because I lacked the buds to make them grow, did indeed grow and now need to be removed. So I'm looking at about 2 months worth of steady dental work--in other words, my worst nightmare. But at least this dentist is willing to drug me into insensibility in order to keep me from screaming and running at the sight of anything made from surgical steel.

That, however, is not all that I've got going on. Oh, no. There's more. In addition to the dental torture, I'm jumping right into a proposal for a new series of books that I'm quite excited about. They'll be a complete departure from what I've been doing until now and I can't wait to branch out a bit. That needs to be finished in the next 4-6 weeks. At which point, I will begin rewriting the next of the e-books originally written for the Fantasy Fix series and finishing that just after the new year.

You might say I have a thing or two on my plate. I say, ooftah!