My Month of Leisure

Just wait til you see my Valentine's Day version of the Save the Date cover. I'm still working on getting it back to its PG rating…

I'm very grateful to Deena of A Peek at My Bookshelf for providing the first review of Save the Date. Deena does an awesome job of promoting Christian fiction and is such a sweet, encouraging lady.

Oh, weekend, thank goodness you are here. We are winding down our semester at school, and things always, always get crazy. I'm so ready to be done with finals. Today was one of those days where I was questioning teaching, life, existence, the chemical composition of Silly Putty, and then one of my students brought me this:

Isn't that the coolest? It's even got my initial on it. She's so getting an A. (Actually she had one already. And I've already checked into cloning her.)

I'm hosting Christmas Eve for the Jones side of the family for the first time ever, and my family knows I never decorate, but now I kinda have to. And now I can say. . .I have decorated. I even put the ornament in my special display place along with my Tybee Island mementos.

If you get real close to the bell jar you can hear the ornament saying, “Please. Let me out. Can't breathe.”

So during my blog fast, I was finishing up a book. Except the Curse of National Write a Novel Month struck YET AGAIN, and I had to toss it all away. And I mean all of it. I was two weeks away from finishing, and I just got this sneaking suspicion that something might be wrong. Clues that the book wasn't going well:

I started avoiding my office and looking for different places to write. Like my favorite lawn chair. In the house. In front of a window.

I'm closing my eyes and pretending to be at the beach. I'm closing my eyes and pretending to be at the beach…

Or the car.

Ignore that dirt in the floor. It's always never usually there. And I wrote a heck of a chapter in that seat.

I sat on the bathroom floor, my bedroom floor, my office floor, the library.

I even started avoided writing and doing other things instead. Valuable, valuable things. Like …

Buying a coffee table to refinish and hauling it out in the front yard with my power sander and setting off every neighborhood dog.

I observed nature.

That was an enjoyable five minutes.

I ordered parts and tried to fix my ice maker myself. This will be easy!

Ice maker is now in pieces. In my garage.

I made lists.

and…

and…

I played the staring game with a friend.

I knew things were getting bad when I started cleaning. And I knew they were catastrophic when I started ORGANIZING.

I rearranged my closet and sorted clothes by color. (And apparently half my closet is black and gray.) (To the  far left is the Polar Fleece Section. The most important.)

I rearranged some cabinets and sorted my light bulb collection.

I then came to terms with the fact that I even have a light bulb collection.

I organized my laundry cabinet, something I've barely looked at in the last decade. (Found wood glue, plug-ins, random nails, vacuum cleaner bags to vacs I don't even own, and enough chemicals to start my own Chernobyl.)

Until, finally, I heard the voice of God. And He said, “Jennifer, drop the flippin' Clorox bottle, turn off the Weird Al Yankovic Pandora, and hear me when I say you've got to trash that story.” And I was like, “Nooooooo. I love ‘Amish Paradise'!”  And I was totally bummed because I was almost done. And for the first time in EVER I was going to get all of December off to, I dunno, participate in holiday junk, and I was DYING for a break. But in the end, I hit the delete button and started over. So now I'm writing There You'll Find Me (the story you guys named!), and though it's still about Finley, a sister to my Hero Stud Alex from Save the Date, it's not the story I intended to write. Not the story I originally wanted to write. But it's the story I'm supposed to write, and I'm excited about it. And since I began it just a few weeks ago, I haven't cleaned a single closet. So I must be on the right track.

Happy Weekend!
P.S. Did you see that Taylor Swift picked NeedtoBreathe as her opening act for her next tour? Class. Act. I think one day that girl is going to be the next Clive Davis. Say what you want about her vocal ability, but that girl's got an eye and ear for music and talent.