It is just after 2 a.m. on Sunday. It’s the last day I get to stay up like this. Twenty-four hours from now I’ll be sound asleep, just over three hours away from the first attempt of the alarm clock waking me up. Then it’s back to school, where I’ll face AP kids upset that I’m making them do a timed writing the first day back, and regular seniors upset that I didn’t cut them any slack on their final essays. (My God, what a load of crap most of those were!)

It has been a very, very productive break for me. My partner and I finished the first draft of our super secret project at the start of the break. Since then I have been plowing ahead in The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date and am now on page 125, breaking through the 30,000 word barrier. I fully intend to reach page 150 by the end of tomorrow. I mean, today.

I would have made that goal today (yesterday), but … I had this really weird dream last night. Some of you may think I dream of werewolves all the time, but that isn’t the case. In this dream, however, I did. The details are not important and have nothing to do with any book. The important thing is that, in the dream, I got to experience the transformation, and it was pretty bizarre. So, what did I do today? I wrote about it, of course! Well, sort of. The transformation I wrote about was actually the reverse of what I dreamed.

Some months back I’d written about 1,200 words of the next book in The Werewolf Saga. Today I doubled that. It isn’t much, but it’s something. It got me right back into the story. And yeah, I’ve missed it. The new book is called Nadia’s Children. I don’t know how much time I’ll spend working on it right now, but it was nice to move from the YA Girls to the adult language and completely different tone of the Saga.

I told you the other day part of the reason I’ve put off working on The Werewolf Saga. Here is some more of the reason. My experience isn’t exactly the same as Lon’s, but it’s close enough. And it takes some of the fun out of working with my favorite characters.

The business side of writing really blows. I keep hoping I’ll find a reputable agent who will take away the submission and contract issues, but so far that hasn’t happened. The two agent relationships I’ve had were disasters. Looking at LitMatch.net I see that I still have six unanswered agent queries. The newest of those is 133 days old. The oldest, for a children’s picture book, is 209 days old.

I believe it was Stephen King who offered this advice to new writers: If you can stop writing, do it. I have to agree with that. The business side will make you insane.

This is so not where this post was going when I started it.

Final thought going into Sunday: GO VIKINGS!!!!