Hi all,

I have some great news! I am preggers. Pregnant. Expecting. Knocked up. It’s traditional to wait until the end of the first trimester to tell everyone, but I’m impatient, so you guys get to find out now (at 11 weeks). Yep, you can totally wish me mazel tov. (I’ll wait 🙂 )

This is our first offspring, and he/she was a very welcome surprise. Sam and I are both happy and nervous and Every. Possible. Emotion. On Earth. Because kid! I’m due in December, and poor kid may end up with a Christmas birthday. We’ve already laid down the law to relatives: no joint presents. No really. We may end up celebrating the half-birthdays in July, just to be fair.

But what about me? I’m so glad you asked! I’ve been horribly, horribly sick with morning sickness and low blood pressure and a flu that I wasn’t allowed to take any cold medicine for. At all. Vomiting–my least favorite thing on earth–has happened several times, and nausea is a constant companion. Plus exhaustion! If you’ve ever wanted a nap right after you took a nap, you feel my pain. I literally slept 4 hours yesterday mid-day and then another 9 overnight. (A lot even for me, but you know, preggers.) It’s been a rough few months. With any luck, though, we have maybe three weeks until I feel a lot better. I’m seriously on countdown.

So this is the big secret, the reason why I’ve been so incredibly sick and running behind on nearly everything. So if you’re one of the folks who had to wait a bit for me to recover from illness, sincere apologies and I had a good reason!

In fact, I have pictures.

See? Pictures!

Isn’t Pip cute? I’m probably hopelessly biased.

But that’s okay 🙂 you can totally lie to me and tell me he/she is the most adorable thing ever.  (He/she is currently the size of a lime, and a very adorable lime at that.)

 

So you probably have questions about the writing. I mean, Pip is adorable but Book Five already! I totally sympathize.

So here’s the deal. I am planning to work my little tail off and Get Things Done as much as humanly possible before December. Book Five is penciled into the calendar to be released by self-publishing sometime in October. I’ve got a book for writers penciled in to be released over the summer. And I’ll have some Mindspace extras and a short story collection coming out somewhere in between.

I’ve also figured out what was holding me back with Book Five: too much planning. After months of struggling with my outline, I realized that all the work I did to sell the book to my editor last fall was just too much planning. I already knew what was happening, and I didn’t care anymore. So, I went to my writer’s group from Odyssey and asked for help. We have a new plot and a new (half-planned) character arc to work with. I’m cranking out the words. And it finally, finally feels good.

I’ve got a street team of amazing people already poised to help me get the word out about the books, and I couldn’t be happier. Things are lining up.

But what about Book Six and series and stories and… am I going to stop writing and stuff now that Pip is a thing? Take heart, dear reader. Writing runs in my blood, and I would no more walk away from the writing than I would from several internal organs. I’m putting in a big push before December for a reason, to get set up. I’ll take a maternity leave, like I would from any job, early next year. Then Pip and I will figure it out. Child care will happen if necessary (I already have evil plans for child care swaps with another writer I know). And words will start to happen again. There will be adjustment! And we will take it as it comes. But I know many amazing writers who wrote when they had small kids, so it is Totally a Thing.

So, a happy day all around! You can totally wish me mazel tov now. I’ll wait 🙂