OVERWHELMED

3 red peppers in winter, originally uploaded by patryfrancis.

Okay, you know me by now. In fact, you know me so well that when Amy King recently tagged me for the "Five things you don't know about me" meme, I was stumped. All I could come up with was two boring tidbits. Then when I tried to blog them, I realized, damn, I already told you those, too.

So, as I say, you know me. You know I like to hang out in my pajamas till noon and talk to my imaginary friends (aka "my characters").

I drink too much coffee in the morning, and too much tea in the afternoon. I eat a piece of dark chocolate every day, and I swear it's the reason I never get colds.

I ruminate on the existential questions, but not too seriously.

I read the obits and wonder what the distilled life means.

On spacious afternoons, I might write a poem, or take the dogs to the beach and pick up shells, or hang out at the health club, and talk to my glamourous seventy-five year old friend, Lina.

I'm neither organized, nor efficient; and in spite of owning the world's most complete collection of sweetly hokey self-help books, I remain utterly unhelped and probably unhelpable.

I love blogs, and I love the people who write them.

But now it seems, my life is changing, and I have no choice but to change with it.

It seems I have a book coming out in less than four weeks, and there's some things I need to do to make it a success.

Things that don't involve pajamas or picking up shells or passing an afternoon listening to Lina talk about all the men who were once in love with her.

I'm also in the dead middle of major revisions on the new novel, a fairly daunting task that needs to be done before February first.

And the thing is, I love this stuff. Every bit of it. I love the writing and the marketing, the networking and the planning. It's the life I've dreamed of and waited for, chased after madly and worked toward with quiet diligence--and damn, I mean to enjoy every blasted minute of it!

But just now. Just today. I'm a little overwhelmed.

Too overwhelmed to think about reading Middlesex, though I've been wanting to for a long time, and will hopefully get to it when my life goes back to normal, whatever that might be.

In fact, I'm too overwhelmed to read anything too demanding. Thus, for The Third Day Book Club, I'm going to do something unprecedented. I'm going to choose a book by an author I've never read--simply because it looks entertaining.

Nicci French, a husband and wife team write psychological suspense novels that are apparently quite popular in England, and the one I chose Secret Smile, was made into a mini-series on the BBC.

This is the review from Publishers' Weekly:

"Nobody does the dark underside of sex in the city better than the British couple who write as Nicci French, and their latest (after 2003's Land of the Living) is one of their most sustained and believable studies in terror against women. Miranda Cotton has an ideal life in London, doing work she loves (building and contracting; she always seems to have a spot of paint in her hair), with no current love interest but lots of dating opportunities. Then a short, nasty liaison with a man who calls himself Brendan Block rips her comfortable world apart. A charming and dangerous psychopath, Block worms his way into the Cotton family claiming that he dumped Miranda (when in fact it was she who tossed him out when she caught him reading her diaries); he immediately wins the trust of her flustered parents and does serious damage to her older sister, Kerry, and her mentally fragile younger brother, Troy. The trouble is that nobody believes the rather rough-edged Miranda when she tries desperately to stop Block's rampage. Studded with sharp insights into the strange compromises involved in modern relationships, this novel could be the horror version of Bridget Jones's Diary. And the authors are so subtle at bringing Brendan and Miranda to life that readers might even begin to doubt that what she's telling us is the whole truth until the stunning climax."

I hope a few of you will read along with me--just for the fun of it! (And meanwhile, if anyone has a cure for the overwhelmed flu, I'm listening.