Home & a Surprise in the Forest

All is right with the world.

I am home, where I belong. BH greeted me at the airport with a dozen red roses. (I told you he was the perfect author spouse!)

My adopted-hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, ran a wonderful review of TWISTED. (Thanks, Greg, for the link and Hippo Bird-Day again!)

The Creature With Fangs finally conquered her fear of the stairs and spent part of the morning with me in my third-floor office, for the first time ever. That was really sweet.

I finished the last of my thank-you notes and have made a dent in the email.

But best of all, Spring is well and truly here. No, the snow isn’t gone yet. (And we are expecting more later this week.) But the farmers are boiling maple sap into syrup down the road, and the snowbanks have retreated from the sunny patches of the yard.

Last October, I planted several hundred daffodil bulbs in my Forest. This was not as easy as it sounds because the Forest grows on top of boulders, not dirt. In order to plant the bulbs, I had to use a pick axe to pry out the boulders. While engaged in the sweaty task, I realized it was a great metaphor for writing. When I spoke at the Rutger’s One-On-One Plus Conference a few weeks later, I brought the pick axe and a bag of bulbs and used them as a tool to talk about the writing process. Then I gave away the bulbs, because I figured 300 bulbs in the Forest was enough.

While I was on book tour, someone (thatgirlygirl, was it you?) gave me an email from a friend of hers who had received one of my Rutgers bulbs. She planted it in a pot and attached to the email a photo of the bulb shooting to life. And then I heard from tracyworld, whose Rutgers bulbs have popped up, too.

So I wandered out to my Forest, still in my post-booktour brain fog. And what do you know?

Image and video hosting by TinyPic As quickly as the tide of snow can recede, daffodils are shouting themselves into our world.

::beams::