Ah, summer vacation

One fact about writers: We never REALLY take the weekends off. Even when we're not physically writing, we are still thinking about the writing. We're playing with ideas, rewriting sentences and toying with scenes.

For a while, I wasn't physically writing on the weekends. I took weekends off to just relax, hang out with the kids and do fun stuff.

No longer.

With my deadline fast approaching, I'm busy with the book EVERY DAY. If I'm not writing, interviewing, researching or checking out sites, I'm reading articles and planning out how to write chapters.

That was pretty much obvious with me today. Today was officially proof that I'm no longer taking a break on the weekends. I had emails to answer, interviews to do and research. And I don't normally log in at MySpace on the weekends, either -- for the same reason I don't write on the weekends -- but now I am because I'm networking on there with sources for my books. And that's working out pretty well, too.

Like I said, today was proof I no longer take the weekends off. But now it's summer vacation. Children may get summer vacation from school, but writers NEVER get a "summer vacation" from being writers!

One of the things I did today was go to the bookstore to do research. My oldest wanted to come along and, despite my warnings she would get very bored because Mommy will be spending hours paging through books and writing things down, she was insistent about coming along anyway. OK, I figured. I'll just give her a lot of books to read to keep her preoccupied.

Yeah. Riiiight.

The thing about my daughter is that, not only is she a gifted reader, she's a FAST reader. She'll plow right through books. Honestly, I gave her 6 books to read (one of them a comic book), and she was done in less than 10 minutes. Gah!

So it wasn't long before she started talking -- a lot -- and getting restless. A lot! It got pretty frustrating trying to write things down while keeping her quiet and preoccupied. But I was able to pull it off. After about an hour (instead of SEVERAL hours like normal), I was done. I got ALL of the info I needed because, fortunately, I finally found a book with all the info I needed. And I told a very-eager-to-leave Jennifer, "Now you know what Mommy is busy doing when she spends all day at the bookstore."

Now I have the rest of the week with a bunch of work involved with the RGT book. I am thankful that, number one, the baby still takes naps. And, number two, the oldest child is able to keep herself busy with art and crafts. At least, for a little while.