Whew! The holidays are over which means the madness of making stick horses, beaded bookmarks, and fabric totes is over. It was crazy with all the crafting—not to mention the baking and shopping and wrapping presents. I love the holidays, but I’m also grateful when they end. Which reminds me, we need to take down the Christmas decorations today. Yeah—I can totally understand why some people leave their lights up all year round. It’s a pain to put them all up and then take them all back down again. Or maybe I just have too many decorations. Nah!

The kids are back in school (except for the one who stays home and does online school), and I’m finding time for my writing again. Yay!I don’t have as much time as I’d like, but I’m carving out some time each day (so far—the year just started, after all). It’s great to be able to immerse myself in my characters and worlds and be creative without sitting at the sewing machine or table where I construct my bookmarks.

And speaking of creative. I’ve come across some awesome software for writing. it’s New Novelist 3. I’m loving getting to know this program (very user friendly) and writing with it. It doesn’t really work for my picture book manuscripts, but it is called “novelist” for a reason. It works great for my novels!

I’ve revised a couple of old picture book manuscripts and am looking into signing up for 12×12 (by Julie Hedlund—info can be found here). I think it will be a tremendous help for my picture book writing (and basically my writing in general). I’ve also been writing on a MG manuscript that waited very impatiently through the holiday madness.

And then there’s my poor neglected blog. I hope to do better in 2014 with keeping things updated, but it’s become painfully obvious to me that I’m terrible at it—and twitter and other social media for that matter. It’s partly because I don’t have much time for social media—at least not if I want to be productive on the writing front. So, I’ll do my best and pop in here when I have something to say or a book to review (which I need to do soon since I’ve read a couple I want to review), but don’t hate me if my posts are infrequent or lame (like this one).

How was your holiday season? Are you glad to be back to “normal” now that it’s over?

Write on!