So Close...

Whenever I'm writing a story, I get so wrapped up in it! Of course, while I'm writing, life goes on, meaning I'm still responsible for a lot of things at my house...dishes, laundry, cooking, making sure a teenage boy with "senioritis" and a tween girl with...well, drama, get to school on time. I also spend my days hanging out with the cutest little great-nephew in the history of great-nephews. But when I start getting close to the end of a book, I find that I really want those things -- well, not the kids, but the dishes and laundry -- to just go away.

Each interruption makes me sigh and roll my eyes like a junior high cheerleader who's just been told her skirt is too short. I want to pile the dishes and laundry in the driveway, douse them with gasoline and light 'em up! Oh, sure, I'd like to do that most of the time anyway (who wouldn't). But when I can see the end of the story, when I can taste the sheer elation I feel when I click that "Upload" button, those dishes, those dirty socks, the "cat detritus" on the carpet, they all make me just a tiny bit crazy. Crazier.

I have a lot of readers who are also my friends on Facebook. On a fairly regular basis, they'll ask me when the next book is coming out. None of them have made the correlation between the need to clean house and the delay of publishing my next book. When they do, I'm hoping several of them will show up at my door, mops, buckets and laundry supplies in hand, saying, "We're here! You go write! We'll take care of everything else!" I mean, isn't that what good fans would do?

Ah, well, back to my writing...I mean laundry. Yeah.