In a surreal bit of perfect coincidence, the week after the ARCs (advance readers copies) of Imaginary Girls were released into the wild I had the opportunity to go into hiding.

It helps with the nerves, hiding here. It helps me from being tempted to look at Goodreads—which I am trying to avoid this time around.

So it’s a wonderful and lucky thing that I am far, far away from my real life right now, with spotty internet access, Google Alerts gone dark, and no real sense of what people’s reactions to my book have been—if there have even been any reactions at all—though I admit I’ve seen a few things on Twitter that got me excited!

So I landed at the artists colony on Friday and here I am, nestled in the woods, in the most perfect writing studio I could imagine for myself, looking out the window into the snow, wondering if I have the skill and courage to build myself a fire in the fireplace (probably not, I’m afraid of fire), and I have one very, very important thing to do this first weekend here:

Finish reviewing the final-final-final pages of Imaginary Girls.

After this, the next time I see it, it will be a BOOK. I’m a writer and I can’t even think of a word to encompass how exciting this moment is!

I also have a whole new book to write. I’m typing up this post offline (no internet access in the studios, for the good of artistic creation) so I can’t look back at my blog archives to check, but did I tell you that book #2 got approved?

Book #2 on my contract got approved! (It was a two-book deal—the second book is not a sequel—so I had to submit pages and a synopsis and hope my editor said yes.) She said yes!

!!!

So, after I finish my last-ever read-through of IG, that’s what I’ll be working on here: continuing the first draft of my NEW BOOK!

Not pictured: the bed in my studio. I am not going to nap on it today, I am not! This is what needs my focus:

Anyone else first-drafting this winter? I think it’s harder than revising… all those intimidating blank pages.