April Madness

April is going to be a busy month for me. To put it very mildly.

Miss Fraser turns seven next week, and we're having her birthday party Saturday at Chuck E Cheese. After two hours of the noise and crowds there, I'm going to want to come home and sit alone in a quiet room for the rest of the day. But it's what she wanted and she only gets one birthday a year, after all. I ordered her cake today–chocolate, with Littlest Pet Shop decorations.

As regular readers of this blog know, my next book, A Marriage of Inconvenience, releases April 11. So I'm busy with all the things an e-book author does to promote a new release–preparing guest blog posts, making sure my online ads are ready, obsessively monitoring review sites, etc. And on the days those guest blog posts are live, I'll be busy commenting and interacting with readers.

And then there's Easter. I sing in a choir, and this is the busiest time of our year. We have two Palm Sunday services, Maundy Thursday, plus 3 services on Easter starting at 7 AM. Somehow Mr. Fraser and I have to squeeze in the family aspects of Easter, too–getting Miss Fraser's Easter basket ready, planning a festive meal, and so on.

To add to the fun, Mr. Fraser is teaching a college class this quarter on top of his full-time job. Some weeks at least one of us has an evening commitment four workdays out of five. He did this for the first time last year, only then it was even crazier because I'd just sold The Sergeant's Lady and was in the middle of edits, AND we found the house we wanted and were scrambling to buy it before the first-time buyer tax credit went away. But even without that added layer of insanity, we are going to be seeing less of each other, and I'll need to do more of the day-to-day housework and childcare than normal, until mid-June.

Some people might use my April schedule as an excuse to take a break from writing. And if I hadn't spent the last five months battling carpal tunnel syndrome, I might do just that. But I'm just now starting to write regularly again, now that my hands are feeling better and I've got a copy of DragonDictate for when they start to feel sore. (I'm using DragonDictate right now, so if there are any really insane typos or my sentence structure seems a bit less polished, that's why. I'm still learning to speak like I type.)

I've missed writing. I'm behind schedule on my manuscripts compared to where I wanted to be at this point in the year. So I'm going to write in April. I've made a resolution to write every day. I'm not setting myself a word count or page count quota. That's my one concession to how busy my schedule is. But I have to write every day. Even my daughter's birthday. Even Easter. Even on the days Mr. Fraser has class. Some of those days it will probably only be a paragraph or two. But I will write every day.

I won't make this blog boring by posting daily progress updates. But I think I will include a weekly report, maybe on Saturday, maybe it's part of my Six Sentence Sunday posts, just to keep myself honest.