I’m sitting here with a great big grin on my face—because my summer vacation started about five hours ago. Hurray!

You may know a teacher or two—heck, you may be a teacher yourself—so it probably isn’t much of a surprise that as much as we love our jobs, we also delight in our summers. Teaching is intense, no matter what age or subject, and I’m certain that most of us would lose our minds without the summer break.

Of course, while we love summer, we must first ride the rollercoaster that is the chaos of the end, that final stretch to get our kids as prepared as possible before the screeching brakes of finals, grades, and the inevitable close of shop. Honestly, I have no recollection of where the last two weeks went. I appear to have dropped off Twitter and most of my other social media outlets. My dishes are piled everywhere. My laundry could take days. My poor, poor house could use a heavy-duty cleaning. (Uh, did I pay my bills?)

Fortunately, sweet summer is here! It’s a wonderful job perk for which I am eternally grateful, and one I also don’t like to waste. It’s a time I morph into a completely different being: I stay up late, I socialize more, and my creative output is seemingly endless.

And what will I accomplish this summer? For starters, I have a few shorts whose submission status I’m due to check on. I’m also almost 75% done with my last edit on Kyresa, and I plan to wrap that up by late next week so as to start querying agents. Then there’s another novel and a couple more shorts in the works…nevermind reading about 100 posts by my favorite bloggers that I’ve overlooked in the craze of the last couple weeks. I have some preparation reading to do for my start as an English teacher next year, and of course, there is the very exciting Cascade Writers Conference I’ll be heading to at the end of July. All in all, it should be a fantastic summer!

Now while I’m very excited to do all of that, I will need a transition out of the madness and into the summer. It’s that ever-so-important “chill time” to break down the teacher brain and regrow the full-time summer writer brain…a little bit of relaxation and recuperation to get all the gears aligned and working properly.

So, I guess I should start by tackling those dishes. 🙂