With next year's women's fiction book turned in and release month for A Daughter's Truth not in my rearview mirror, I'm getting to sit back and enjoy a little bit of summer before it's time to start writing again.

For me, these rare non-writing breaks are a great time to refill my personal well. I still work out most mornings, but on the mornings I don't, I give myself permission to sleep in an additional thirty minutes. When I do get going, I take a little more time with my daily gratitude journal before firing up my computer for my morning social media routine. But the best part is the time to read... Now, instead of just reading at the gym, I'm reading there and again in the afternoon and I'm actually using those different reading spaces to read different things. In just the past 10 days, I've read three books and I'm about 30 percent through a fourth. I'm getting to try out writers I've been wanting to read for a while--books that call to me from bookshelves with the promise of an escape.

I feel lighter during these breaks. Like my mind is freer, my thoughts quieter. This is a good, I've learned, as it slowly starts my writerly gears clicking--bits and pieces of characters and plots that bubble just below the surface, luring me closer, to figure out where they might lead.

This afternoon, alone, I sat on my back deck and jotted notes for what will be my 2021 book. And while I've still got a lot of things to figure out, it's beginning to form into something real, something intriguing.

I love summer.