It was great to be back to the lake. I dipped my toes in, but it was still far too cold to think about going in. I read a lot–magazines, books–and looked after our niece and nephew as they played in the sandbox.

All in all, exactly the restful recharge I'd wanted.

A couple weeks ago I posted that I'd removed Google Reader and Facebook from my bookmark bar. I still sneak over to Facebook every so often (though nothing like how I used to check it). But Google Reader is now a treat that waits for me on my iPad. Every morning there are about three blog posts I'll read before I start anything. But those are carefully screened to not be about breaking news or things that would grab me immediately. Just enough to put me into the mood to write or work at the start of the day.

It feels weird to get to the end of the week and find more than 1000 blog posts waiting for me, but these last two weeks that's exactly what's happened. It also makes it easier to skip over the ones I'm marginally interested in.

I really do feel like this one change has helped my productivity during work time enormously.

I'm still writing! I'm still sitting on The Marinara Murders and will make some edits to it next month.

But outside of that, I have two different novels that I'm into the first chapter on. One is the next book in the Arthur Beautyman series, and the next is a science-fiction novel that I've been toying around with in my head for awhile. (Would you believe I have both a sci-fi trilogy and a fantasy trilogy in my head. It appears that since I started writing genre fiction, I'm now more interested in ever in other genres.) But the sci-fi story is much more developed in my head than the fantasy story, so I finally decided to just get some of it on paper and see what I think. At some point in the next couple months I'll have to decide on one of them and stick with it. I'm not sure yet which one that will be. But both have been fun so far!