Exciting Day at the Voodoo Cafe~~Yowza.

There are few things I like better than a new project. Oh, sure:  a cool adventure or a fabulous trip are up right up there. But nothing beats the excitement of the very beginning of Something New.

Now imagine combining all of those things—a new project, a cool adventure, and a fabulous trip—a ROAD TRIP, no less—into one big honkin’ package, and you’ve got what my day was like today.

It started at 7:15 this morning when I called My Poor Beleaguered But Nevertheless Lovely Editor Tonia, bless her heart, because I needed to talk to her—actually talk, as opposed to e-mail, which is amazing in itself, since I hardly ever, ever talk to anyone on the phone—about an idea we’d been trying to work out. Like she has time to talk on the phone. Oy—talk about Busy. But I did it—and before I had a cup of coffee! Theoretically, I could have called her at 5 a.m. my time, since she would have been at her desk by then. But, nah. That’s just perverse, you know? Who calls someone at 5 a.m., unless it’s 1) love and 2) intercontinental?

And when I got on the phone, the idea was pretty much surely going one way, and when I hung up, it had taken a sharp turn and was going another way entirely.  Another fabulously exciting way.

Obviously, I’m talking about a book project, but since it’s in the very earliest stages, I’m not ready to really talk about it talk about it, you know? I can talk about it, but not talk about it talk about it. Since I don’t have, like, an actual contract or anything.

The thing is, I have ideas for dozens of books I want to do. Dozens. At the beginning, they all sound equally fabulous. As things narrow down, though, one of them starts to grab me, and by the time someone else likes it, I’m obsessed. But there are still all these other ones I want to do eventually, and My Job, As I See It, is to convince my editor, bless her heart! to let me get started on a new one just as soon as I finish the current one. Send good thoughts her way, as I’m sure she often thinks of sending me a fake e-mail address so all my nagging notes will go into a spam folder in some government office in Uzbekistan.

The fun part of this one is that it’s unlike anything I’ve done before, and I get to work with some fabulously creative people, and it involves travel and seeing a lot of other really cool people. So I’m totally jazzed. Can you tell?

The tough part, besides not having things pinned down—which we Anal Retentive Types reallyreallyreally kind of like a whole lot—is that I have to organize my ideas about the project, plus I have to plan the first of several trips, this one to take place in less than a month when we drive—yes, as in Drive on the Highways—to  Oregon. So I’ve got these two completely separate things going on in my brain:

--organizing the project

--planning a long, involved trip. ‘Coz, you know, if you’re going to drive all that way, you might as well drive home through some of the wine region in California, right? Of course! Plus those pesky mountains are in the way between here and there, necessitating much out-of-the-way highways and stuff. I wish they’d just get busy and make some straight roads from here to there. You know, like a huge overpass across the whole country. So if you want Scenic, you can do the whole Blue Highways thang, but if you just want to Get There, you could hope on that puppy and zip along, just like on the autobahn but faster.

And then take the Scenic Route on the way home. But no. Right now, it looks like we drive to Albuquerque and spend the night, drive to Gallup and turn right, drive up to Salt Lake City via some roads that take us through Farmington, NM (lived there) and Cortez, Colorado (lived there) and Moab, Utah (lived there) , and Price, Utah (lived there)–and that’s not a route I made up, just so we could go through those places. Nope—that’s the route mapquest.com spit out. And spend the night there and then drive to Boise, Idaho, only not really—to some suburb place nearby. I don’t know, but Idaho scares me. Did you know they have multiple La Quinta’s in Coeur D’Alene? I’m sure they have some very lovely, very wonderful people there, but I always think Home of the Racist Nazi Wackos. I’m sorry. Mark Fuhrman lives up there somewhere, doesn’t he? Just the name “Fuhrman” was always enough to do it to me.

Never mind that I thought OJ was a guilty rat bastard. In fact, was there anyone in that whole mess who didn’t come off looking like trash, one way or another? Remind me not to get murdered. Good grief. They start out feeling sorry for you, but it lasts about as long as it takes someone to ask, “Hey, wasn’t she the one who. . . ?”

Where was I?

Oh. I’d have gotten a lot more done today, but I’ve been unable to sit still. I sit down to do one thing and think of something else that has to be done Right This Second, and I get up and go do that, and then I think of something else that should have been done Already, and I go do that. I try to sit down and chill and stitch, but I keep making notes or grabbing the atlas or going to find The EGE, who’s now officially in charge of planning this whole route thang, as he’s the one who’ll be driving it. Once he decides on the exact route, I can start looking for La Quinta’s along the way. Racking up those points, baby: by the time we go to Houston for the quilt show in October, we can stay free. Which is always nice.

OK. Time for another walk. I’m the one out there every couple hours, muttering to herself and stopping to scribble things down in her little notebook.