Re-Entry Problems, and A Cloudland Excerpt

I'm having one of those days.

You know the ones. You have a vacation, you tear yourself away from writing and blogging and work and chores and everything screaming for your attention - not without some effort, mind you - you immerse yourself in the joy of doing nothing, and then, eventually, you have to come back to the real world. But in the process of coming back you find you're moving about 3 gears slower than usual, and you're not really getting all that much done...

...and this is where I am. I'm fully back in the real world by now, but last week was one of those slooooow re-entry weeks. Meaning I have nothing new to report in the world of writing. Except re-entry. Which is boring.

SO, I will report OLD things instead. Those of you who've been following along since the A-Z Challenge know I have a novel-in-progress that's now on hold, but I also have a finished novel that's on hold from querying. It's called Cloudland, And Other Stories, and it's about a little boy named Jake who loses his mother; the social worker assigned to his case, who recently lost her father; and the strange, wild journey they end up on together as they try to find their parents.

I blogged about it quite a bit when I first started posting, but it's been a very long time since then, so I thought I would post an excerpt from it. This bit is the beginning of the book. I hope you enjoy it:

Jake settled himself deeper into the cloud-nest of his bed, top-bunk, high and lofted, closer to the sky and the Stories. When mom came in, she would have to climb up the ladder to reach him, and he would have time to watch the darkness under her eyes crinkle up and break apart, and there would be humor and soft pillows to lean on instead of the edged cliffs her face had earthquaked into, ever since she started school. School and work and him and dad and church and still somehow the quiet spaces she needed to fit herself into, he knew, were too many things pushing together. It was like the tech tonal plate things under the ground they’d talked about once in school, that made big earthquakes where houses scrunched up like people who are too cold, and roads flew up in the air, to the sky, to nowhere, toward the Stories. He didn't like either kind of earthquake; he liked the windy open sky, the soft pillowed clouds, both here on the earth, and in the smooth light brown of her face. That’s where the Stories were.

How's your re-entry going? Better than mine, I hope? What are you working on?