1. There are a lot of good things about being married to a carpenter/contractor, as I am. You can get things fixed without bringing someone in, for example. Also nice is that I rarely have to hammer a nail for anything, although that’s mostly because it makes him VERY NERVOUS when I look like I’m about to do so. The flip side—it’s not a downside, just a truth—is that when you are married to a contractor, they are used to job sites. And they have no trouble living WITHIN one, if it means they can, say, remodel and redecorate the entire downstairs, re-do the floors in several rooms AND tear out the laundry room. I, however, am having trouble adjusting to all this disruption. As I write this, there is someone adding texture to our living room walls. What is texture, you ask? I did too! It’s basically like another layer of wood/plaster, that makes the room feel more…oh, I’m not even sure. Ask me when it’s done. Also, our kitchen floor is torn up from where the fridge leaked and my washer/dryer are both out in the garage. If I SAY anything about this, though, my husband just rolls his eyes: to him, it is as normal as me being crazy during revisions. (Which I am right now, but that’s another issue altogether.) I know all this disruption, people coming and going and general chaos will be worth it in the end. But I miss having a floor. I’m not complaining! Just saying….

2. Regular readers of this blog know my daughter gets up early. Like, 5:30-6am, every single day. She’s been like this since she was a baby, and we’ve tried all kinds of things to change it: later bedtime, earlier bedtime, no sugar before bedtime….you name it. No change. This week, though, after she started hollering for me one morning at 5:25, I was at the end of my rope. So, following someone’s suggestion on Twitter, I purchased The Good Nite Light. It’s a plug in nightlight with both a sun and moon on it, and you can set it so it shows the moon when you want your kid in bed, and the sun when it’s okay to get up. We were all excited about this possibly working, and I think it MIGHT be, although it’s too soon to really tell. Which is to say, now she knows why I am not showing up to get her up when she is screaming for me to do so. But does that mean she STOPS screaming for me? Well….no. In fact, it’s more like, “Mama! The sun is taking TOO LONG TO COME ON!” Back to the drawing board, I guess.

3. Because my kid gets up so early, I tend to try and be in bed by 10, because otherwise I’m like a zombie all day. This week, however, two of my favorite musicians were playing at a bar up the street from me, at an early hour of 9:15. This is also notable because I live out in the country and NOTHING is near me, except for this little bar that has music sometimes. Still, I was hesitant. It was already a crazy week and I knew I’d be tired if I did it. But my husband insisted, so I went. And I am SO GLAD I did, because I got to see Sara Romweber play the drums, which was freaking awesome. I have heard of her and her music before but I’d never seen her live and WOW. I took this video, even though it’s not great quality. You can see her on the left, with her brother, Dexter Romweber (whose name inspired MY Dexter in THIS LULLABY) playing guitar. My friend Carrie was on the right, but you can’t really see her. Anyway, watch Sara wail on the drums. It’s pretty epic: check it out here.

4. It’s so freaking hot here right now. I know, I know. It’s summer in North Carolina, this is not exactly breaking news. But honestly I don’t remember the last time we had these long stretches of three digit temperatures, day after day, with heat indexes that make me want to swoon. 110 degrees? REALLY? We are fortunate in that everything here is air conditioned, for the most part, so it really becomes a two-pronged approach to avoid constant sweating: do things as early in the morning as you can, and perfect your hopscotching from one cool place like the car or grocery store to another. That said, I was loading groceries into my car for about five minutes today at 11:20 or so and was quickly drenched by my own pores. YUCK. I will always be a summer girl, but man. Hoping for a big storm to blow out all this humidity and cool things down, even if only for a little while…

5. Finally, I’m approaching a milestone moment here in my office. When I first moved up here, I had two big bookshelves to fill up however I chose. In one, I put all the books I really love and that are important to me, like my worn paperback of Lee Smith’s FAIR AND TENDER LADIES and the copy of BLEAK HOUSE my father gave me that I have tried to read about a million times and probably will a million more. (It’s his favorite novel, so I MUST finish it at some point. I always get to about page 300 and bail. Sad but true.) On the other one, I put one copy of every one of my books, starting with hardcovers, then paperbacks, then foreign editions. I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of my books published in other countries in the last couple of years, and suddenly I find that shelf is FULL. Whoa! These four are the last that will fit:

From top left, going clockwise, they are Swedish, Spanish, Hungarian and Portugese. I think. I have to say, seeing these and all the others just blows my mind. I mean, I am not someone who has traveled a lot. Too anxious, for one reason. But to know that my BOOKS have been all around the world…wow. I feel really, really fortunate. I mean, Hungarian? Who KNEW? For once, having too much of something is a good thing. Even if it means springing for another bookshelf….

Have a good weekend, everyone!

1. I’m starting this entry at 7:34 am, while my kid watches Toot and Puddle in the playroom. On the TV behind ME, in the living room, GMA is covering the movie theatre shootings in Colorado. This kind of news is just so horrific: I have no words. I can’t even imagine how the families of the victims are coping, the town, and all the chaos and sadness. We live in scary times, and we know that. But once in awhile something happens like this that brings it right up close. Too close. Heartbreaking.

2. Last night, I did a chat over on the Facebook page for Girl’s Life magazine. Now, these things always make me kind of nervous: you have to keep up, type fast, refresh the page often AND answer concisely but also with wit and heart. WHEW! It was an hour long and by the end I felt like I’d run a 5K. I was literally out of breath. I THINK it went well, especially since just as it started we got hit by a summer thunderstorm that I was terrified would knock out the power altogether. But I am seriously out of shape when it comes to promotional stuff. It’s like a muscle you have to keep primed, and when you let it go, you feel it the next day. My brain is sore today, if that makes any sense. Clearly I need to up my reps before next summer, when the new book comes out.

3. SPEAKING of the new book, there’s been another title change. I KNOW. Believe me, I know. For those of you who are counting, this is title number three, but—-to further confuse things—it’s actually title number one, the original one I had in mind the entire time I was writing. Let me explain. Titles are complex things: sometimes they present themselves VERY early in a book (like This Lullaby, which came to me in the first sentence) and other times they evade me until almost the end (Just Listen, for example). Other times, I have a title in firmly in mind but nobody else likes it, so I have to change it during editing (just about all my other books fall into this category). For the new book, I was about a third of the way through when I decided to call it THE MOON AND MORE. But by the end, I got worried it would sound too much like a sequel to KEEPING THE MOON, so I changed it to THE BEST AFTER EVER. Which was cute, but everyone called it THE BEST EVER AFTER from, like, the minute I announced it, so we decided it was too confusing. Back to the drawing board. About a week’s worth of nail-biting later, I came up with SOMEONE ELSE’S SUMMER. Good, right? Well, my publisher wasn’t totally crazy about it, and neither was I, to be honest. It was kind of a Hail Mary, but I was prepared to run with it until they asked if I could PLEASE come up with another option. All I could think of—all that really EVER worked well—was THE MOON AND MORE. So I decided we’d go back to that, and just hope the similarity to KEEPING THE MOON would be okay. Which I think it will be. There’s some lesson in all this angst and worry and stress expended to end up EXACTLY where you started, not that I want to learn it right this second. I am just glad to have a title and a book I’m happy with. It will be out in Summer 2013. STAY TUNED!

4. My chickens continue to provide me with SO much happiness. Who knew poultry could be so great? They’re cute and funny and give me moments of Zen almost daily. I’m totally not kidding, by the way. Lately my favorite thing is watching our little furry footed d’Uccles practice their crowing. It sounds like someone trying to hold back a sneeze, but you can just TELL they think they are very fierce and scary. At least until Foghorn, our big rooster, chimes in and shows them how it’s done. This video isn’t great, but it makes me SO happy. I am such a nerd. Want more proof? I have a chicken stapler:

Whatever you are thinking, I have already thought it. Rest assured.

5. Okay, as I’m wrapping this up it’s now 4:23pm. I’ve stayed off Twitter and most social media today, feeling like I can’t just do my regular stupid updates when there are so many people grieving in Colorado. Instead, I got quiet, as I tend to do when I’m sad, and just spent the day with my kid. We went to our local indie bookstore, then to her swim lesson, where I sat and watched her as she paddled, sometimes frantically, as her teacher coaxed her forward through the water. For some reason, watching her swim has always kind of gotten me (wasn’t she JUST a baby in my arms?) but today it was especially poignant. When something happens like this movie theatre shooting, you just feel so scared and unsafe. It makes me want to bar the door and keep my entire family inside and in my sight, close, forever. But you can’t live like that. But how CAN you live in a world where senseless things happen like this? I have no answers to these questions. I guess that we are all figuring it out together, especially on a day like today. And so today, the best I can do is tell the ones I love how important they are to me, be grateful we are all accounted for, and hope for a better tomorrow. Yeah. I think I’ll do that.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

1. I am only JUST now getting caught up on sleep, mail and everything else I fell behind on during the last week when I was with my extended family on Cape Cod. But it was TOTALLY worth it. Gorgeous weather, cousins everywhere, and lots of laughing and swimming and general silliness. It’s always a long day going and coming back for us—airport, 2 hr flight, rental car, drive to Cape—but once we pulled up at my aunt’s house, which we were renting, I forgot about all that. It was just so, so lovely and reminds me of all the summers I spent there as a kid, running through the woods with my cousins, swimming to the raft during the day and playing night games once it was dark. (“Beckon” was a favorite, a game nobody here in NC had ever heard of. Must be a Massachusetts thing?) I’m a Southern girl at heart, and NC is my home. But a piece of me will always be in this place, looking out at this view.

2. Every summer on this trip there are Big Moments. If you’re lucky, they are GOOD Big Moments (like when my cousin Miranda was married!) and not the not-so-good ones (when I fainted the only time I was catching the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard). This time, the good, for me, was watching my kid swim out to the raft. She had on her puddlejumper, with my husband and I on either side of her, but even so it was EPIC. I cried. (Luckily, I was in the water, and nobody could tell. I hope.) It was just such a Cape rite of passage, not to mention a big kid thing. I still can’t get over it, even though she did it a bunch more times after that. I guess part of it that, up there, part of me thinks I’M still a kid, and seeing her grow up is blowing my mind a bit. In the best possible way, but still: it IS happening. The NOT so good Big Moment came when the tree in front of aunt and uncle’s house, the one that generations of us have climbed on, under which my grandmother, my cousin Kate AND Miranda were all married, suddenly shed its huge, ancient front branch. CRACK! I know, it’s just a tree. But to us…it’s like part of the family. And just like that, the view was literally different. All week people kept stopping by just to stare. It’s so crazy to me to think of this tree that has been there a hundred and fifty or so years, growing and growing, and then one day, suddenly, the branch just goes. There is some metaphor there, but I’m too much of a coward (and getting too close to 50) to try and figure out what it is. So I’ll just say: Wow.

3. One downside to being gone was that I missed the premiere of Good Afternoon America, which is now airing at 2pm on ABC. Regular readers KNOW how much I love Good Morning America, so of course this would be a natural fit for me, even if it wasn’t hosted by Josh Elliott and Lara Spencer, who also host on that show. There is ONE wrinkle, though: 2pm M-F is squarely during my writing time. Like, smack in there. Which is a problem considering I am already challenged enough in the discipline department. I’m thinking I have to DVR it to watch at 5, when I’ve put in my words and time. Which will TOTALLY not be the same, I know. But books don’t write themselves. Or, if they do, I haven’t figured out how to make that happen. Anyone?

4. Speaking of books, I’ve now had TWO experiences of seeing my new paperback covers out in the wild (and by wild, I mean, at bookstores. Not in the jungle or woods. Although wouldn’t THAT be something?). Market Street Books in Mashpee had one of the new ALONG FOR THE RIDE, and I also saw some of them at Target here at home. It’s a crazy thing to ever see my books when I’m not really expecting it—sometimes I think this whole thing is just an awesome dream, and I’m going to wake up back at the Flying Burrito spooning salsa into ramekins—but the new look takes that to a whole other level. I love seeing them in a fresh new way, especially DREAMLAND, which I am especially proud of and always worried didn’t get picked up as much because it had a darker cover. (It is, however, a darker book, so it was truth in advertising, I guess.) Anyway, thanks to everyone who has posted pics over on Twitter of the books in THEIR local stores. It makes me happy. So nice when the internet does that, isn’t it?

5. And now, with the Cape behind us, we’re back at home to the usual chaos. The painters are gone, but we’re about to rip up the carpet in the bedroom. (My husband, as a contractor, sees projects EVERYWHERE, kind of like I see places to could curl up for a nap. It’s all how you look at the world, I guess.) While we were gone, our refrigerator leaked all over the kitchen floor, warping the boards, so now they’re already pulled up, which makes it much more interesting (and perilous) whenever you try to get anything out of the fridge. Our middle chickens are producing eggs, and our tiny d’uccles are getting bigger, with a couple of them attempting crowing. It’s so cute! Although I know that fierce is what they are going for. All this, and it’s only mid-July, with so much summer left. I tried to keep this in mind when I got my first BACK TO SCHOOL flier in the mail today. Don’t rush me! It’s my favorite season, even with the heat and bugs. I want it to last. I’ll be breaking branches soon enough, I am sure. So let me just have this, now. If that’s okay and all.

Have a good weekend, everyone!