You know that I love the writing life…but I have to say that there was a lot about it that I didn’t expect when I signed on.

For instance, I didn’t know that a lot of it would consist of me sitting alone in a room typing things, then finding postage and envelopes and sending these pieces of writing out into the world, where other people would receive them, then send them right back to me with notes saying, “This does not meet our current needs.”

I also didn’t know that when you are writing things that you made up (e.g., fiction), it is almost impossible not to think about this world you’ve invented FULL TIME, and sometimes it starts to seem even more real than the world you’re living in…and again, you write it all down, and rewrite it again and again and again, and then night after night you wake up from the deepest of sleep with your heard pounding (sort of like Allison in the show “Medium,” coming stark raving awake) and have to GET OUT OF YOUR BED and go find your computer and write down whatever couldn’t wait until morning–and then you read it the next day and…well, in the morning light, it turns out it was really no good after all. You made the main character sound like an airhead, and turned her best friend into a caricature of a stereotype of a cliche, and oh by the way, you also you didn’t get enough sleep and now you’re tired.

And that, I’m afraid, sums up the writing life most of the time.

But then sometimes–well, good happens. Yeah, even in writing.

Sometimes you send the thing out, and the agent likes it, and then she shows it to a publisher–and one day you’re just at home cleaning mildew out of the tile grout and wondering if they still have debtors’ prisons in this country and is the food any good in them, when the phone rings and somebody on the other end says, “WE’RE BUYING YOUR BOOK!”

This week I had two of those kinds of moments happen to me, and I feel it’s only fair to share them because so much of writing–and even writing about writing–is all about the bad stuff.

But this week, Patricia Gaffney, one of my very favorite authors, wrote a blurb for my new book, KISSING GAMES OF THE WORLD. And this is what she said, which made even ME want to go and read this book:

Sexy hero, lovable heroine, adorable kids–KISSING GAMES OF THE WORLD has it all.  A complete delight.  Fall into this buoyant, funny, genuinely touching story of two incomplete people finding the rest of themselves in each other.  I loved it.

I could not be happier! Seriously, I was ready to sit down and read the galleys one more time, except that I’ve read them about 1,369 times and I could recite them in my sleep at this point.

And, as if that weren’t enough to make somebody happy for months, the second good thing that happened was that the Doubleday Book Club and Literary Club bought the rights for the book. Yay!

And so now I will go on vacation for a week on the Cape, and all I want to do is eat lobsters and ice cream and drink wine and sleep lots of hours and then sit on the beach and stare numbly at the horizon. But who am I kidding? I am writing a new book and it now owns me, body and soul, and IT will decide how much sleeping and staring at the horizon there will be, thank you very much.

I’ll be back during the last week of August!