I am getting back into this book seriously again, and my hope is to start soliciting agents in the fall. It’s been a long time since I was this motivated to work on it, but I am glad that I have had the time away so that I could look at it with some perspective that I did not have at the time I started it ten years ago. It’s not the same book it was back then, and I think it’s better as a result. It seems to me that not getting the other one finished so that it had the potential to be published was a blessing. My daughters will all be in elementary school next fall, and I am grateful that they are all healthy and that I’ve been here to watch them grow and do things that make me laugh and cry (mostly from joy.) I’m sure it won’t be smooth sailing, but to have a more regular schedule and to have more than 10-18 hours a week to work during daylight hours is really feeling like a gift right now. The summer is upon us, of course. And I am looking forward to a lot of pool time and games and hiking. I am also looking forward to finishing this thing up enough so that I can start knocking on some doors. I wish I could knock on doors instead of emailing, but that’s not how it works.

I’ll still be painting like a madman to try and get a show of these trees and some more stuff related to the war baby series that I am taking a break from, and I’ll still be trying to get into more galleries and so on. But if I don’t finish this book, I will feel like I let myself down, and, as I have said for as long as I can remember, a novel is a problem that we give ourselves; no one is going to write it for me, and no one is going to have a chance to love it or to hate it if it never exists.