Sheesh, people! It's only Monday, and I feel like I'm ready to take a nap until, oh, May. Last week was seriously one of those weeks. Somehow it seemed like eight thousand things were happening, and yet mysteriously nothing got done. Well, a few things, but it's that weird stage of writing where I'm mostly doing it in the back of my head—I'm puttering around doing research, taking notes, making outlines, doing character sketches, and preparing to write the next section, so at the end of the day I look at my desk and see mostly, um, coffee cups. And indecipherable pages & pages of scribbles. This is one of those times when I hear the chorus of sages over the ages (nice rhyme, no?) saying peacefully, "Trust the process!" and I just want to kick them. Who wants to trust the process? I want results! I want instant gratification! I want magic! Sadly, that's never the way it goes, and you'd think I'd be used to it by now–I've only been doing this for almost twenty years—and if it was that much of a problem, I'd have learned how to do something more sensible. Instead, my friends, I gnash my teeth and bitch.

All's well here in Minneapolis, insofar as February is right on track and delivering its usual ghastly landscape of soot-blackened piles of snow along the streets, bleak grey (gray?) sky, and miserable-looking Minneapolitans trudging around in their jackets/hats/scarves/gloves/boots, all of them with that expression on their face that says "Get me the hell out of here before I die of an overdose of the color grey (gray)." As for my brain chemistry, it too is right on track, and with the arrival of February it has defected entirely, and I spend my days talking myself out of the conviction that I should crawl under my desk and stay there until, oh, May (see above), when it will finally be sunny again. This is the part of the year where we Minnesotans, with our possibly annoying ever-present cheeriness, start to wonder if everyone else in the country is right about how totally insane we are to live here in the north. Well, it's not Alaska. Though wouldn't Alaska be cool? Aren't there polar bears there? Maybe not. I know my geography not so well. I passed 8th grade geography only very marginally, because of the kindness of the teacher, who overlooked the time I punched Jeff Carver in the nose (a poor decision) because he said girls were dumb. Well, he said girls were dumb! What was I supposed to do? Maybe not punch him. Nevertheless, somehow that is why I don't know geography, and was absolutely convinced until very recently that China was sort of directly under England. Jeff, who learned this not long after we met, mentions this to strangers as often as possible.

Madness inches ever closer to publication. This is alternately exciting and anxiety-producing, partly because I sort of believe that my books don't really exist, in any sort of literal sense, and are actually only books in my head. I feel the same way about articles. Whenever I see one (a book of mine or magazine containing an article I wrote), I'm shocked, and want to know how it got there. I feel like hiding under my jacket so no one will know about it. But I hear they are, in fact, books/articles that I wrote, and that people do in fact read them and are aware of them as actual things, so I am trying to wrap my brain around the idea that soon Madness will be sitting on a table in a bookstore when I walk into it, and I will once again fall over in shock and try to take the whole stack and hide it under my jacket, for which I will probably be arrested. No, not really. I'll just leave the bookstore as fast as I can. This will not work well during tour; I am supposed to stay in the bookstore and give a reading. So I suppose I will do that. I hope many many of you will be at those bookstores for those readings—when I'm not being bewildered by the whole situation, I actually love readings and meeting and talking with readers, so on that front I can't wait. However, if you do see me looking bewildered, or catch me running out the back door, you'll know why.

In the meantime, I'm just plugging away at the new book. It too is exciting and anxiety-producing, as writing always is when it's going well—on the one hand, there's the whole thrill of watching a book take shape in your hands, and on the other hand, there's the worry that the book is in fact awful, and you're just deluded into thinking it's going well, and you should probably delete the whole thing and start over. But you keep going...and that's where I'm off to now. Have a great week!

Cheers,
M