Back from the great beyond...though perhaps temporarily...

I submitted the manuscript for Plunder late Wednesday night. Yay!

I've either been working on that book or thinking about working on that book or feeling guilty about working on that book since...well, I'm not sure how long. Stress and terror tend to make one lose one's sense of time, so I can't tell you exactly. I signed the contract over a year ago...I think...and kablooie. Daily crises erupted for the entirety of 2010, and all of a sudden it was June 2011 and I was looking at a deadline that was pushed back twice. I'm obsessive about deadlines and asking for extensions made me absolutely nuts.

Compounding the problem was that I signed another contract more than a year ago, to co-write a book on math literacy. We turned in the manuscript in April but, you guessed it, that deadline had already been shoved back when we did so. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to know that I have two completed manuscripts, and that they're both on their editors' desks. And not mine.

They'll both be coming back for final edits. And again, for me to review the copyedits. Still it's easier to fix something than to create it from scratch. For good or ill, those books are written. Until they come back, my time is my own.

So what did I do to celebrate? Well, I spent all of Thursday cleaning off my desk and filing the paperwork that had accumulated in a towering mound on top of it. The fact that this felt fantastic, kinda like scratching an itch, is a symptom of my mental state for the past year.

What? You were expecting drunkenness and debauchery. Clearly, you're reading the wrong blog. But if you can do without drunkenness and debauchery, I'll keep you posted on what I'm doing to enjoy my brief window of freedom.

In that spirit, would you take a look at this desk???