I made a promise and while I'm not always good at keeping them unless blood or marriage or money are involved, this one I'd like to. I said that when I'd finished editing I'd write about something else, and that something else is the life I'd like to have now. Or the life I'd like to have until I begin working in earnest on the second novel, which won't happen until I've read everything ever on the business of publishing. Meanwhile, back in the real world, I'll be making pesto from the basil in my garden. I'll croon to green bean buds curved and pale as festuses beneath womb-veined leaves. I'll slather Mod Podge on bottle caps and balsa wood and anything that dares to reveal a blank and boring surface in want of a bird. Friends I haven't seen I'll see again, games I haven't played I'll play again, favorite books will be thumbed and loved and read over for all the very same reasons and new ones, besides.

And in good time I hope to see fruits of a literary kind. I might still be thrilling from having finished, really finished, with a novel that no longer feels like a draft to me, but I hope my hope isn't only that. But now I'm talking about writing again when what I really ought to be doing is planning and dreaming and growing. Though not, I hope, my hips. With time enough now to be a warrior of another kind, I'd like to lose the eight pounds I've been wanting to all year. Priorities, right?