So last Sunday, my e-mail downloaded twenty-three-thousand e-mails to my inbox. Yes, that’s right. Twenty-three thousand.

I called the stupid internet company and they told me that it was because I had (somehow, while sleep-walking, perhaps), changed the settings on my mail server, and it was downloading every message I’d ever gotten since 2001.

So I deleted all of them — I have some sorting to do, because it wasn’t until I got a few thousand of them in that I realized I should relocate the contents of my inbox — and the mail server started working correctly.

Until the next day, when it downloaded all twenty-three thousand of them again.

It seems to be taken care of now — and no, evidently it was not due to my sleepwalking that it happened, it was a problem with the Yahoo! server — but between that and the fact that one of my kids was home with a fever most of the week, making me a bit short on sleep and working time, I haven’t gotten quite as much done as I’d hoped.

However, I finished the rewrite today, am planning to review the rest of my page proofs tomorrow, and plan to dive into the home stretch of this book (ON THE PROWL) on Monday. Hopefully it will be done ahead of schedule.

Oh, and I read a book called Arctic Homestead and made a batch of yummy blueberry preserves, but I already blathered on about all of that over in Jam making and cabins on Cozy Chicks.

BTW, I was thinking about how many hours of my day get swallowed up by cooking and ferrying children around and emptying lunchboxes and doing laundry and taking out the trash, and realizing that I don’t consider that ‘work’, but I think I’m wrong. What do you think?

P.S. Just found out this week that my editor at Ballantine is moving to England. That’ll make this the third editor I’ve had for this series… and the first book isn’t even out yet! Can you believe it?

We’re back from Alaska, nobody drowned, the kids are in school, Labor Day is over, we’re all done having the stomach flu… and I have a SCHEDULE again.

Hallelujah!

Alaska was marvelous — I have lots of pictures I have to figure out how to transfer — and I just found out I also have the new cover of HOWLING AT THE MOON. (Since I found it on the Random House site, I figured it was public knowledge now.) I think it’s gorgeous — it’s always amazing to see what the artists come up with, and I think this one is fabulous. It gives me chills to see it in print! (Although Sophie is definitely rather different from Natalie, don’t you think?)

At any rate, how are you? If I’ve missed your e-mail in the past few weeks, I’m working through them — feel free to drop me a reminder. I just posted on Cozy Chicks about what I’ve been doing other than writing, although for the next six weeks, writing is going to be at the top of the list (next deadline Oct. 15 — yikes).

Cheers, and happy end-of-summer!

Karen