Oh, man.

In just the past week or so I’ve missed so much.

I missed the Teen Author Festival including tons of amazing events and readings! I missed your beautiful blog posts! I missed elephants (well, I will tonight)! I’m sure I missed a lot of other stuff I don’t even know about because I was over here missing it!

But here’s my excuse—and this excuse goes for all the emails I owe (!) and the manuscripts emailed to me that I haven’t commented on, and some other things I meant to do and haven’t been able to do yet and may not get to before I leave…

My excuse is this: The novel got me.

It happened last week. Slowly I felt it crawling up my legs, wrapping itself around my waist, clasping me tighter. But there was a day—was it Thursday? it’s all still a blur—where it stuck its fangs in and I went numb to it and let it do with me what it wanted. It’s had me all day today and I’ll let it keep it up tomorrow while I tweak some pages and take a look around, see what I’ve got.

I want to finish a good chunk of this book before I leave April 5.

Back to the novel. It hasn’t let go just yet.