We’re back from a wonderful week away.  Four days with friends in Boston, then four days in Maine.  There we visited an old friend, Don, and his wife Samantha.   Don and Samantha own Rabelais Books, a bookshop dedicated (and I do mean dedicated) to cookbooks.  We loved our time with them.  I will write more about it in another post.

In the meantime, it seems like there’s a lot to report.  Up until now my posts have, more by accident than by design, usually been rather focused on a particular topic.  Today is a little different.  Rambling dialectic is the mode du jour, if you please.  I’m going to try (try, mind) to be a little more chatty and maybe not quite so, I don’t know, agenda-driven, or something.  Chill, mon.

So.  In no particular order, as they say.

• Today I signed my publishing contract with Penguin.  It’s galling to think that people give us lawyers a hard time for producing unreadable legal documents.  Ye gods.  Just in case the impenetrable legalese wasn’t confusing enough in itself, they make it more interesting by adding multiple footnotes and additional riders down the margins.  I think I may have just agreed to ship off my second-born into indentured slavery on her fifteenth birthday if I miss my deadline.
• On which subject… rather to my surprise, I was able to forget about the rewrite almost completely while I was away.  (Leaving your laptop behind will do that.)  Tomorrow morning at five o’clock I will be back at the coal face, and I am a little apprehensive, I will admit.  Everything was going pretty swimmingly before we left, and I do hope I haven’t jinxed it all by taking some time off.  Because, you know, there is a deadline, and I am actually quite fond of Catherine…
• Instead of writing or rewriting, I read like a maniac.  We always pack loads of books when we go away on holiday and then scratch our heads in puzzlement as we unpack them a week later, most of them still unread.  (Because parents don’t get to read on holiday.  We get to be parents.)  But this time I somehow managed it.  I have been gorging myself on a couple of utterly wonderful novelists whom I have recently discovered: Emily Mandel and Jennifer Egan.  I’ve written more about them both and will post later this week.
• I did a guest post about college sports (stop laughing at the back) at the always-interesting www.capturingcomo.com.
• Weirdly, our house is on the front cover of a magazine.  Well, maybe not so weirdly, since Christina is the magazine’s publisher, but it certainly feels weird.  Click here to see the e-zine, or whatever they call it.  If you click on “Homes Old and New” on the cover it will take you to the article about the house.
• As always on returning from vacation, work today was nuts.  Things have piled up, and I am not sure that I’ll be able to award myself my day’s writing this week.  Inevitably when this happens, I spend a lot of time moping about and dreaming about giving up the law and writing full-time.  But I’ve been there, done that, and I won’t do it again.  (These blogs aren’t contractually binding, are they?)

More soon.  It’s good to be back.