It smells of wet dogs outside, and I'm utterly exhausted. My eyes are dry as sand, and my head wants to fall off my shoulders, and my sleep has thinned to nervous dozing that gets interrupted by every noise, be it a bark, a honk, or the insistent gurgle of my bladder.  

These last few weeks I have expended my energy on other things besides writing, and I'm paying for it dearly. I'm judging a writing contest on Wattpad (for 13-19 year olds, so of course I agreed) and I'm overseeing the production of The Badlings audiobook (Yay! A blog post about it here.) and the kids are here (Royce's Wyatt and Josey with their wacky summer schedules, and my Peter, and my Anna who came to visit with her beau) and we're doing dinners and playing Settlers of Catan, and I went to see fellow writers at Molly Moon's Ice Cream (which was fantastic) and to listen to John Scalzi read at the library, and every day the energy I spent on writing was nibbled away by these harmless and no doubt precious activities, and so now my body is telling me:

FUCK YOU AND YOUR WRITING, I WILL MAKE YOU SICK.