It’s January 2. How did it get to be Thursday already without my having written the blog? I know. There was a holiday in the middle of the week. That means today is the day.

People often ask me, “Do you work on more than one book at a time?” The answer to that question turns out to be both “Yes,” and “No.”

I awakened to an e-mail from my editor in New York. She read the new Joanna Brady manuscript over the holidays, and she loves Remains of Innocence. I always end up holding my breath between the time I submit a manuscript and when I hear from the editor. So I’m breathing again. That book is with Harper.

The next e-mail after hers was someone from Simon and Schuster wanting to set up a video shoot for the upcoming Ali Reynolds book, Moving Target. Now we need to get the Christmas decorations taken down and put away in time for the video crew to show up here at the house.

On New Year’s Eve, I tried to send the first part of Ali Reynolds # 10, still unnamed at this point, to Bill for some preliminary editing. Before I sent it, I tried to do a spell check. The spell check did the first couple of words and then may trusty MacBook Air crashed! Several times! I finally ran up the flag to Bill which turned into the “What were you doing when that happened?” routine.

He spent several hours untangling the mess, including uninstalling and reinstalling the new and improved version of Pages. I haven’t yet tried it. He says that the reinstallation process fixed the problem on his computer. I’ll give it a go on my computer. If it doesn’t work, I’ll go back to the “old” Pages, thankyouverymuch.

That means, in case you haven’t been counting, I’m working on three separate books at the same time–creating one, promoting one, and editing the third. (Not to mention periodic Christmas vacation Grandma duty.) As you can see, I’m not actually writing more than one book at a time. No doubt that would drive me nuts!

So does this sound like I’m keeping a bunch of balls in the air? Yes! And, with any kind of luck, I shall continue to do so for a very long time.

So Happy New Year, folks. Now, get to work!

PS. I just discovered that the feature about our garden which was shot last summer is now scheduled to run in this week’s issue of Pacific Northwest Magazine at the Seattle Times.  You can read it now online, or for those of you who receive a dead tree copy of the paper, it’ll will be in the print version. Seattle Times Pacific Magazine.