What a week!

I'm so exhausted, I don't have the energy to post much. But at least I did survive my first week handling the kids and everything else alone with my husband gone (to his new job in another city, until the rest of us can join him), and I'm more than halfway through the second.

He did get to come back on the weekend, so I got to go to Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls book signing at BookPeople! A group of us from the Austin SCBWI had a reception with Laurie before her signing, and she volunteered to do a Q&A session for us at the reception. It was a wonderful, inspiring event, and Laurie is very personable, with plenty of hard-earned wisdom she was glad to share. Wintergirls looks like an amazing book, too. I've put off reading it just because I don't have the time right now to plow straight through it, but I can tell from the excerpts I've read, once I get started I probably won't be able to put it down.

Donna Bratton put some photos of Laurie and the reception group on her blog. You can click on either one to see it bigger. (In the group photo, Laurie Halse Anderson is third from the left on the second row, and I am third from the right.) Cynthia Leitich Smith also put a couple of photos from it near the end of Tuesday's Cynsations post.

Before and after that, I was trying to figure out how to write, write, write, while also managing my very high-maintenance kids--especially the wildly active and strong-minded 2-year-old! I recently increased his preschool days to 4 mornings a week, just for the short term, to help me get stuff done while my husband is gone. And that, plus a night-time offer of babysitting by a friend the other night while I wrote in her spare room, is the only way I made it through the week! I wrote and wrote and wrote, trying to get something out by an approximate deadline of yesterday, and got it done! Whew. Turned out my recent freelance writing gigs really taught me how to get in gear and meet a deadline, whether I felt "inspired" or not. I didn't get nearly enough sleep this week, and when I finally had 8 hours in bed last night...thunderstorms kept me up for most of the last 2 hours. Oh well!

Soon I have to go the "picnic" at my older kids' school (I hope it's indoors, given the muddy ground outside and the high wind advisory!). So, I still don't know when I'll get a moment to clean up the mess my house has become as I've ignored it--let alone start getting ready for our move!