My Coming Week In The Garden:

Sunday Ginny and I recuperated from car shopping. That project will continue this week.

More importantly we discussed my next career move.

This involved a slight disagreement:

She thinks I should move on to the top A-1 priority on my list of writing projects; I feel I want to clear my desktop of two B-list projects so I can devote full, uninterrupted time to that A-1 project afterwards.

We agreed that since I’ve been working so intensely on the Richard Rogers diary that, God willing, for most of the coming week I should spend working on outside Spring cleaning and heavy-duty gardening — uprooting and transplanting some large azaleas and shrubs, cleaning rain gutters, either tearing down or repairing the bridge on the jungle path, planting more cedar trees along the back fence line — chores designed to get myself away from writing for a week between one book and the next.

I’d forgotten, as I always do, the rubber band effect of completing a manuscript; once the tension of that final push to finish is gone, I pretty much collapse… You know, like when you take the last final exam in a college course how the surge of exhaustion hits. After all these years, I should remember that that happens at the conclusion of every book, but I always forget and think I’m stronger than I really am.

Some lessons God has to teach me again and again.