Happy Swigging

I just wrote a catch-up email to Meg in which I got started listing the things I've been working on lately and couldn't seem to stop listing. I realized... there's been a LOT of work happening here lately. It made me feel good, especially since yesterday I got to check several things off my ever-present list: three new collections of images for my licensing agent, as well as mailing some prints of my Cricket cover off to an amazing school in India (more on that in a minute). In the midst of that I've been working on my revisions to Blackbringer and I THINK it's going well. I actually LIKE revising, for this reason: it's easier than writing!!

Then, some celebrating had to be squeezed in there somewhere, celebrating Jim getting to illustrate my book jacket, and just the book in general. The contract process was so long and halting and filled with waiting and anti-climax and more waiting there was never that one moment to throw a hat in the air and shriek, but now it's feeling more real all the time, talking "trim size" and other real, tangible things makes me realize: my book is going to have physical form and be in bookstores! So, that called for some happy swigging. Though tempted to go to our favorite restaurant Bombay Cricket Club, we branched out and tried a Cajun place called Acadia. We started with cocktails, then moved into wine with dinner, and then to some chocolate + liquor concoction for dessert, along with pecan pie and "gooey butter cake." Oh my. And I forgot to mention we opened a bottle of amazing zinfandel from our trip to San Luis Obispo before going out, so basically, we met our booze quota for the next several months, but we were still up before seven this morning, so all is well. (Though I did have a strange dream in which I had a peg leg, and not some fancy prosthesis either, but a plain pirate-style peg, and interestingly, it was extra long so I could wear it with my 5-inch-heeled cowboy boots!)

About the school in India: a few months ago I got one of my favorite emails of all-time, from a fellow whose company sends books and magazines to the Shanti Bhavan School in Bangalore, India. It's a school that takes destitute slum children right off the streets and gives them a world-class education. How about that? Why isn't there MUCH MORE of that in the world? Imagine if all rich people spent money setting up schools for poor children. That million dollars Lindsay Lohan spent on clothes last year? Anyway, the part that made it my favorite email of all-time was that the kids loved my Cricket magazine cover, because it's a scene set in India, and they said they thought I must have been Indian in a previous life! They renamed the painting "The Tigre Raj" which is so much better than my uninspired "Parade." It is so exciting knowing that kids around the world are seeing my art! There's just no feeling like it.

I've been feeling like I don't have much to write about in my blog lately. I've been just work-work-working, and when I read other people's blogs I'm often jealous of what a rich inner life they seem to have. For better or worse, I don't spend much time in self-contemplation. I just get up with Jim, eat breakfast, walk the dogs while daydreaming about work, then get home, brew coffee, and... work. Til about midnight. Hm. But we HAVE been showing signs of trying to live a little, and I don't mean just the swigging. The little one-night trips, little hikes, cafe-writing expeditions, those are a move in the right direction for us. But usually, we just want to be working!