I would love for you to think that for the past month or so I’ve been dwelling in a sod dugout with no computer and only a kerosene-fueled Twitter feed, working on the book in pencil in my store-boughten notebooks with the orange covers. (I know that for some of you, that last sentence totally made sense, whereas the rest of you will think I have just lost my shit.)

But yes, I have been working on the book, and I forgot how hard it is to start a book, how completely daunting those first weeks are.  I feel like the last time I was this overwhelmed was when we moved to our current apartment, and now that I think about it, I’m convinced that starting a book is a hell of a lot like those first few days and weeks, when the whole place is just empty rooms with boxes of your stuff and you don’t know which boxes to open first, which ones have the important stuff in them, so you just unpack everything and clutter the whole place up with extension cords and stacks of books and lampshades, and suddenly you’re strangely miserable about the placement of the couch, because even though that’s probably the best place for the couch, you understand all too well that putting it in that spot means that you can’t put it anywhere else, and you can always move it later, yes, but then that means for sure you’ve picked the wrong place, which means you’re probably getting other things wrong; plus then there’s all this new stuff that you need, and this other stuff that you love suddenly doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

That’s how it’s been inside my head for awhile now. But room by room, it’s starting to happen.

Oh, and believe it or not, I’m flying to Italy this weekend. Will any of you be attending the Bologna Children’s Book Fair? If so we should party and try to sell each other U.S. or foreign publication rights!  It will be awesome!

That’s all I have to report right now: cluttered apartment book-brain, impending Italy trip, and exhaustion. Next time I post here I will probably be even more tired, but worldlier, too. Have a good weekend, North America! Catch you on the flip side!