This is a week of playing catch-up. So far the only thing I can be truly honest about accomplishing is the mountain of laundry we somehow acquired on the way home. Here's what is still on my plate:

1. A birthday party for a certain six-year old boy. We don't do the big birthday parties with gift bags and all that; never have. I grew up with mostly family parties when I was young and only started including lots of friends as a teenager - well past the gift bag stage. My son likes to have his best friend Kassie over and they make the cake together (really!) and enjoy the heck out of each other all day long. So it's not a big scary party, but still my night was spent turning the dining room into a combination military/Star Wars design (it actually came out good) and tomorrow will be squeals of excitement all day long. Lots of fun, but not conducive to getting much else done.

2. That whole day job thing. I don't write about it much but my husband and I own an aircraft leasing company which is not a whole lot of day to day work (not like working at the Company was) but still generates lots of paperwork that must be attended to. Right now I have a month's worth of said paper staring me in the face. Must tackle that pile soonest.

3. That whole Alaska memoir thing. My agent is looking for what I have thus far on the Alaska flying memoir ("The Map of My Dead Pilots") and I want to get it to her right away. I made some handwritten changes to the latest chapter though while in the car and need to transfer those to the computer and all that. I promised by Friday so that will be my Wednesday job.

4. Contribute to Robert's Snow. I am blown away by how well organized Jules at the Seven Imps has made this big project. The early posts are so impressive and I really hope that we generate enough interest in Robert's Snow to bring the auction some new buyers and increase the take on these snowflakes. I am writing about Carin Berger on Monday - and she has no web presence at all that I can find. So sometime this week I will write all about how cool her books are, how sweet her snowflake is, and my own personal experience with the Jimmy Fund. This is one post that I want to really do a good job on.

5. Conduct my interviews for the Winter Blog Blast Tour. That's right - I've only done one of FIVE interviews so far. I am so far behind on this it is not even funny. So tomorrow night I will have questions off to two of the other subjects and be ready to send the others as soon as I hear back from their publicists. I swear, this will never happen again. I hate not being ahead on a project this big - waiting to the last minute is so stressful!

6. Write reviews of four books - including Ned Vizzini's wonderful It's Kind of a Funny Story. More on that book here this week. None of these reviews should be hard to write but still, it will be nice to have them done so I can not worry about forgetting what I read! ha!

7. Figure out just what I'm going to do with the 75 books that showed up while I was gone. For some bloggers that might be a small number but for me it is pretty daunting. I've already weeded out the ones that are duplicates or I'm just not interested in and still, I have 75 left. Some of them I requested, some sound great and some I might not review but still - I might if given a chance. Right now I have almost all of next year's columns stacked up on the floor in my office: SF, Fantasy, Coming-of-age funny, Coming-of-age serious, Nonfiction, etc. I know from experience that I will start to read some of these books and then decide not to review them (this just happened with a book I started last night), but still - that's a lot of freaking reading. I'm thinking I might not request anything for awhile unless it is something I really really really want to read. There are so many good books already waiting for me; it seems crazy to go looking for more. (Hilary McKay's last Casson book is already requested!)

I also need to rework my outline for Winter, as one of the characters from the past is developing as more significant to the present and I need to figure out just what dead pilots I plant to include in total in the memoir. That's all fun stuff though, and should be a nice afternoon of writing and thinking.

I'm not generally such a list maker but with everything piled up around me, writing down what I must do in the next few days makes it all seem a bit more manageable. A return to regular literary content here tonight though. One can whine about their stacks of books only so long before the blog gets more than bit boring!