Welcome Back

Instead of trying to fill you in on all that's happened since my last post, I'm just going to go forward from here. Not only do I have no desire to drudge up all of the drama, but I am perpetually short on time.

I have only moments right now, as the four boys are running around the office and Ron is about to bring home two massive shelving systems for two of the walls in there. So much to do, so many kids screwing it up.

We're out of the farm house (thank God), and everyone seems to have made it through relatively unscathed. We're in a four year old, five bedroom brick home with a huge yard now and it's absolutely wonderful.

Ron is working again (thank God), and we're STILL battling the VA over his disability rating. What a joke. He's lost a weight, put on a lot of muscle and has a dark tan. Don't worry, we've taken permanent measures to prevent our family of seven from becoming a family of eight.

I (grudgingly) picked up the Twilight books in May of this year, and joined the masses of obsessed fans. When it was over, I wandered around, hopelessly lost for days before I figured out a way to pull myself out of it; if I so desperately needed a love story to follow, why not create my own? I spent the next twenty weeks burning the midnight oil at my laptop in the kitchen of the old farmhouse, listening to mice in the walls and crickets behind the furniture (I already thanked God that we're out of there, didn't I?), writing about a lonely girl, a beautiful boy and a farm with a dark history. 600 pages later, I ended the first installment of the series on a cliffhanger and began the horrible process of finding an agent. When I find the idiot that said 'writing the book is the hardest part', I'm going to give them an atomic wedgie... and maybe a swirly. Writing the book was the easiest part. It damn near wrote itself, constantly surprising me with twists I never saw coming. Condensing the complicated plot into a freakin' paragraph with a short tagline and a brief bio is extremely difficult. One page? Are you kidding me? It's even worse when it has to be in double-spaced, 12 point Times New Roman. I'm currently wrestling my manuscript down to 130,000 words (about 500+ pages) and then cramming all the important points into a two page synopsis-- including the end. What a nightmare!

Clyde is up to my nose and we share a shoe size. Creepy. Heidi is still a straight A student, and I swear she's starting puberty already. It's horrible. Jack is still an adorable little guy, six years old, with his first loose tooth. Eric just started preschool, and is a smart little sucker. Josh is two and walking. I can't believe he was ever so tiny. Go back a few posts and check out the pictures of him when he was a teeny little preemie. It's nuts.

More to come. Feel free to nag me if you don't see anything new in the next week.