The last six weeks have been a struggle.

Two illnesses (both of which required a trip to the doctor along with prescriptions for antibiotics and steroids – if you know me well, you’ll recognize that’s a big concession), no exercise, a trip out of town to visit my parents before my dad had his own run-in with doctors and surgeons, every kid in the house (four of ‘em) involved in two sports simultaneously, trying to squeeze in a turkey hunt a time or two before the season runs out, getting the house prepped for summer – the list seemed endless.

The illnesses really took the wind out of me. Literally. I could barely climb a flight of stairs without a major coughing fit. It meant a temporary end to exercise and a practical end to writing – at least for a time.

I struggled to write my three weekly blog posts, and spent much of the rest of my energies paging through Facebook and fiddling around with my Ancestry.com account. The bottom line was I simply lacked the energy to plow through the first draft of CHANGE AGENT, the next story in the Joel Smith series.

So it sat. And I sat, doing other things.

This week I finally felt well enough to dig back into the tasks at hand. Got the property prepped for summer, finished a woodworking project I started weeks ago, restarted my exercise regime, and got back into the mode of writing.

CHANGE AGENT has roughly 14K words written out of a projected total of 83K or about 15% completed. A long way to go, but at least I’m moving again.