Write Stuff

Judging books by covers

2012-02-14T15:40:00.000-08:00

Not My Type made it into the genre head-to-head finals for best cover. To vote on the covers (doesn't matter if you've read the books for not), you can hop over to here and pick the ONE you like best. I think it's an excellent way to acknowledge the great work these cover artists do, so take a minute to gawk at all the pretty shiny things, will you?

Not My Type is doing well but won't win, so vote for whichever cover you like with a clear conscience. :)

Happy Valentine's Day, my lovely friends. I have many good things to tell you soon. Believe it or not, the main thing that's stood between me and blogging has been a baby blanket and that's nearly done. (Okay, my friend had twins so TWO baby blankets and my crochet hook and gobs and gobs of time, but the border goes on tonight, so I'LL BE BACK.)

But seriously, treat yourself to some Downton Abbey and chocolate tonight, and you and I will hang out soon.

Taking a flying leap

2012-02-06T08:41:00.000-08:00

I have tried and tried and tried to write the true rest of the story about my getting-an-agent story. But it doesn't feel right somehow, no matter how I explain it. So I give up. If you don't know already because you forget (as I do kind of a lot lately) that I even have a blog, I got an agent for my Hoarders meets Project Runway contemporary YA novel and getting an agent is a very hard thing to do and I'm excited about it. The story is here.

The extremely abbreviated version of the rest of the story is this: when I realized I had a national market story on my hands, I got a little nervous because that was never my plan. Publishing in the national market didn't make sense to me. Dither, dither, dither. Finish the story or go back to the sure thing? Finally pray. Hear with clarity that I should submit to the national market. Freak out because suddenly I'm dealing with a test of faith. That won't make sense to most of you. *Shrugs.* It'd take a really long time to explain why. Trust me. I drafted that really long blog post twice.

I'll skip to the embarrassing part now. I really admire Janette Rallison. Love her books, admire her standards in her writing, would love to emulate her career. In the midst of doubt and "Why on earth am I doing this?" in regards to my national book, I approach her as almost a total stranger at the LDS Storymakers conference last May. I ask her advice. She listens. I cry. I cry some more. I feel completely stupid about crying so that makes me CRY MORE. This goes on for a half hour that she probably should have been doing other things. She is patient. She says, "Trust the Lord. Go for the national market."

I know this all sounds very dramatic. Just trust me that this was never about the book or being published nationally. It was about having faith to do something that made no sense. I'm not good at faith.

But I decided to exercise some. So I finished and things went really well. And it helped my faith a lot. And I realized something: it's probably not very important to the Lord that I publish in the national market. But I think it was very important to Him that for the first time in a very long time, I who have weak faith approached him with a question where He set me up to test and prove Him. And it was not a request for a favor, either. It wasn't a prayer of, "I really want this, please make it happen." It was a prayer of, "What do you want me to do?"

So He granted me an experience He's probably been wanting to give me for a long time but I was never asking the right question. And I learned from that.

Trust me, it makes sense in my crazy head and only in my crazy head, I get it.

I guess my only point here is to say a public thank you to someone who put up with an emotionally unstable woman for thirty minutes she didn't have to spare. And to say that I learned a lifelong lesson about listening to the spirit, and for that I thank my Heavenly Father.

And that's enough about the craziness. In other news, the finalists for the Whitney Awards were announced on Friday. My name is in there and I'm STOKED. Check out all the nominees and find some great new books to read here

And for more fun, the LDS Publisher blog has chosen finalists for the best book covers by genre from last year, and mine are in there. To check out all the covers and vote for the COVER you like best, you can check that out here. It's fun to browse.

Good Monday, everyone.

Missing Mom

2012-01-25T16:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of my mom's death. I spent it helping out at a funeral. I didn't know if that was going to be okay. It totally was. It was a good thing to do. I stand in a room full of mourners now and I look around and I know, "I am one of them." I am not separate or apart. I have been there. I understand.

It was a good day to remember my mom, the kindnesses of others during that time, and to take the morning to pay it forward.

In remembering her, in thinking about this somber anniversary, I had two small breakthroughs. One will sound dumb to you, but it told me some interesting things about me. Yesterday would have normally been a day where I would decide I had an excuse to overindulge in either food or shopping. "This is a sad anniversary. I think I'll eat a bunch of crud." Or "This is a sad anniversary. I'll buy new shoes to cheer me up." But I didn't have time to do that. Because I was busy helping others. And it felt better than new shoes or pigging out would have. And just like that, in a rough moment, I walked away from two emotional crutches I've leaned on heavily in the past. It wasn't even conscious; those things just didn't matter as much as the other things that needed doing.

I had another realization, too. I wondered what my mom would have thought about my big announcement on Monday. My dad would have been busting buttons and telling everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, that his daughter has an agent, that she's a writer, etc and so on. But my mom wouldn't have. She would smiled and rubbed my arm. And if I said, "I learned how to make bread," she would have smiled and rubbed my arm. And if I said, "I made honor roll," she would have smiled and rubbed my arm. Because it was all the same to her. In a good way. She was not more proud of me when I did more impressive things. She just loved me, whatever level I was at. "Mom, I won the Nobel Prize in Literature." She'd still just smile and rub my arm.

I keep a bookmark in my scriptures with her picture and obituary on it. James stole the one I used to keep upstairs. I read it to him, and we talked about her and shared a couple of memories. The conversation wandered to memories of other things. He wanted to know the funniest thing he'd ever done. He wanted to know about the time he was really sick when he was little. And so on.

It was good to talk about stories from our family. It was good to reminisce and remind us both of where and who we came from. I like that something little every day can become part of my story. I believe so much that our stories matter, that when we share them we grow closer. Stories connect us.

I used to run a scholarship competition for 8th graders. I organized it for a simple reason. Yes, it gave them experience in essay writing and resume writing and interviewing. But more importantly, it taught them that the winner wasn't the kid with best grades; it was the kid who could tell their story best. That's who the judges connected to and awarded a scholarship to, every single time.

I know you've heard about the Story at Home Conference March 9-10. The info has been floating all over the internets lately. Check it out. It's sponsored by Family Search and Cherish Bound. I'd look hard at the schedule; there are so many great storytelling tracks, for people who think they aren't born storytellers. Guys, it's cool. Super cool.

Go.

HOORAY!

2012-01-23T06:53:00.000-08:00

I've got exciting news. But if you want to hear about it, you have to wander over to the blog I keep under my maiden name. And why I'm using my maiden name has to do with the news. And it's GOOD NEWS. I am still happily married and will stay so forever because I haven't mentioned it a thousand times, Kenny rocks. So don't worry.

Anyway, the point is, you can wander over there and read all about it.

Happy Monday!

Good-bye, Etta James

2012-01-20T12:19:00.000-08:00

I'm reposting this because a nice lady died. This is way back from when my blog was a baby (November 2008) . . .

I was a hostess at a Chinese restaurant my senior year in high school that, in its heyday twenty years before, used to get a lot of celebrity customers. There were pictures of the owner with Jack Lemmon and Bill Clinton and a bunch of other famous people all over the walls of the entrance.

My job was easy. Eat as many fortune cookies as I wanted and consume gallons of free Sprite every night. Oh, and seat people. You got five people? You get a five seat table. You got two people? You get a two seat table. It worked pretty well and whoever thought of that system should have gotten a raise or maybe free steamed rice plus free fortune cookies.

Except there was one time it didn't work, and it was this lady and her two sons who came in and always wanted a five people table. But there were only THREE of them. She was a pretty lady (large, though--she didn't back away from the egg rolls), light-skinned black, what the old folks call cafe au lait. I would always gently suggest a smaller table (I don't know why because they always came mid-week when it wasn't busy anyway but I'm uptight like that, shut up), but they just smiled and took their same table they always did.

One night when they were leaving, the lady says, "I'll bring you one of my pictures to put on your wall of fame," and I smiled blankly and nodded, anxious not to disturb the crazy lady, because why would I put her picture on the wall when she didn't even understand about five people tables? I think she saw through it, though, because the next week when she came, she said, "You watching President Clinton's inauguration?" (This was the first one, because I'm old.)

And I said, "Yes" because I had Bush vs. Dukakis debates in middle school for fun (because I'm old), so of course I was watching the inauguration.

She said, "Okay, well, look for me, because I'm singing."

I said, all perkily, "Oh, are you in a choir?" because that's why any large black lady would be singing at the inauguration, right? (I'm so embarrassed by that question now).

She said, "You just watch on Friday night and you'll see me sing."

I rushed home after my shift that night and made my dad turn off Star Trek and switch it to the inaugural coverage. I said one of our customers was going to be singing that night, maybe in a gospel choir. We watched for about a half an hour, and then, the lights went low, a single spotlight came on and lit up my customer in a magnificent white gown as the emcee announced..."Etta James!"

Aaaagh! I knew who Etta James was. I just didn't know that's who was sitting at my table once a week, who I'd been trying to move to another table every time. And you may think you don't know Etta James, but you do. Oh, yes, you do. Beyonce is playing her in a movie coming out soon.

Check out the clip below (just wait for the first two words of the song. You definitely know it).

Etta Freaking James!

After that, it was, "Hey, Ms. James. It's good to see you, Ms. James. Why don't you come sit at the five people table, Ms. James?"

Coolest celebrity sighting EVER.

A potpourri. Kind of the cheapy, discount kind. But a potpourri.

2012-01-16T09:23:00.000-08:00

Lately blogging goes like this for me: "Haha, that was funny. I'm going to blog it."

Then I clean up another mess, make a meal, or two, write (or most likely revise something), read a painfully average book (by assignment, unfortunately), referee a couple of spats, think of four different activities for Grant to do, and then . . .

I sit down to blog. An I stare at the screen. And I go, "Wait, what was that funny thing I was going to write?"

So . . . sorry.

The more I blog, the more ideas I have to blog about. Now that I'm a tad out of practice, the idea well has dried up. I feel like I should make a breast-feeding analogy here.

Hm. No. Let's not get breasts and blogging all tied up, and yes, you're welcome.

My toddler is riding a toy pony and pushing a toy stroller. At the same time. A couple of months ago, BAM, that would have been its own blog post somehow. Now, it's just kind of funny and also a good reminder that we need to go visit somewhere with horses so she understands the fundamentals because right now . . . she doesn't have it down yet.

But it's okay. I'll do a better job of making mental notes when something funny happens. Or interesting. Or otherwise blog worthy. But I'm also not going to stress it. Because why? I've never used this blog to make money. I don't use it as a family bulletin. I don't have any obligations to blog. I'm definitely at I-blog-because-I-want-to now, and that feels good.

And now for some randomness. I have lost six pounds now. And my BMI is officially in normal range. I am apparently no longer overweight. Thank you, raw almonds, green smoothies, and protein shakes.

Downtown Abbey totally lives up to the hype.

I still really love fairy tales.

My husband makes a mean mango and sticky rice dessert.

The board game Pandemic is fun.

I need my upcoming girls' weekend desperately.

I can't remember the last time I read a book just for pleasure. Four more books to read in the contest I'm judging and I can read whatever I want again. That's not to say that within that category there aren't some really fun books. But I have about six to-read-just-because books on my nightstand and I'm itchy to get to them.

I am craving chocolate far more than normal lately.

Grant just told me I could be Strongbad because I'm writing an email.

The children are shooting each other with giant pipe cleaners. I just said, "Quit hitting. You can only shoot each other." I find myself making a lot of equally absurd parenting comments. And now I'm going to make more of them because the kids want to play. And I kind of want to, too. So . . . progress.

C'est la vie

2012-01-12T07:29:00.000-08:00

It's funny how life is so full of highs and lows. I think whichever one you find yourself in, the trick is to hang on. You either have to soak up every last second of the good times or grit your teeth and tough out the bad times, and those are the times where all you can do is hang on to hope.

I guess it has to be like that. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe we could be perfectly happy in and of ourselves except that sometimes we're forced to live with the consequences of other people's mistakes and in those moments it's hard to be happy. So maybe it doesn't have to be good and bad. But it IS good and bad. So we have to deal.

I remember the insight that changed my life. I was a teenager. And someone said something about that scripture (it's probably not even a scripture and I don't feel like Googling because I want to pretend it's a scripture even if it isn't) that says, "This too shall pass." And I had this realization that there were things that had seemed earth-shattering the year before when I was fifteen that by sixteen had become no big deal at all. And now twenty years on, I can't remember anything that was a big, bad deal when I was fifteen. I remember some fun stuff, though. And that's a lesson.

It's one I've been able to cling to when I've been in the very lowest troughs. It can't last forever. Einstein proved it with a mathematical formula, I think. At any rate, reminding myself of that makes the challenge of the moment more get-through-able.

I'm braced for the onslaught of messages and comments. "What's wrong? Is everything okay? Can I help?" The answers: I'm not going to tell you, No, and No. But I would also add I have lots of help, the best kind of help. I also have lots of hope. I am not sick. No one is dying. I think we're dealing with something fixable. I'm married to the best man I've ever known and it makes everything doable. He is my rock.

But I appreciate your worry. I feel better venting this tiny bit of steam. And now I'm going to walk into the kitchen and engage in the hundred little repetitive things I do every day that someone how right now make me feel so much better. And I will be fine and on my way to getting finer.

And also, I will probably spend some quality time with Veronica Mars and a pile of clean laundry and that will help tremendously, too

Yeehaw!

2012-01-06T12:13:00.000-08:00

It's here! The new cover is here! And I'm sharing it on my Facebook author page! And it's really cute!

Go check it out here. If you don't like that page, LIKE IT. And yes, I intended that to sound exactly that bossy and threatening.

And then tell me what you think--OVER THERE. I'm closing comments here.

HOORAY!

I love you THIS MUCH.

2012-01-02T20:15:00.000-08:00

You know what's a big number?

BRACHIOSAURUS.

That's as big as it gets. Ask my four-year-old. He'll tell you. "What's the biggest number?"

"Eleven hundred seventy three seven twenty one hundred brachiosaurus forty thousand two one."

It's huge. A HUGE number. Because brachiosaurus is the biggest dinosaur so it must also be the biggest number.

If Grant runs super fast to the car, he'll tell you. "I ran a million brachiosaurus fast!"

And if you're his favorite, which four of us in this house are tied for first place to be, he'll tell you how much he loves you, too. "I love you brachiosaurus."

Which is how much I love him.

Little old lady

2011-12-19T22:30:00.000-08:00

My oldest had a piano recital at an old folks' home on Saturday. I love me some old people. Did you know that? Specifically, I love me some old men. This is probably because I didn't lose my last great-grandparent until I was sixteen. My great-grandmas were all senile. Not so fun. But my great-grandfather was cool. And my grandfather, Pawpaw, was the coolest of all. SUPER cool. So that probably explains the old man thing.

I even urge Kenny to get old faster. "Don't dye your goatee. I like the gray." "Hurry up and have a birthday already." "Olden up, dude!"

But some of this is explained by the fact that I know very few cool old ladies. There's one in my ward named Lois. She's awesome. But mostly the old ladies I know are either dotty or bitter. Such was the case at the old folks' home this weekend. And it got me thinking about what kind of old lady I'm going to be.

I probably will wear orthopedic shoes, elastic waistbands, and yell at people to get off my lawn.

Well, I'm not sure about the orthopedic shoes, but I'm one short-of-sleep night away from living in my sweatpants forever. And for sure I don't want people on my lawn. Mainly because if even one person stands on it then I can't see it anymore.

But it made me feel kind of determined to not be a pain in the butt to everyone when I reach my dotage. Because I'm pretty sure I'm headed on that trajectory.

And seriously, I only have, like, thirty-five years to figure out how to not be crusty as I age.

I'll start tomorrow.

Wassup?

2011-12-12T21:11:00.000-08:00

Um, so I'm returning from the longest hiatus of my blog's life. And it was totally unintentional. I am not tired of blogging. I am not tired of reading blogs.

But I am also not made of free time, and I had some CRAZY writing deadlines come up. So in order to make my life work, I put blinders on.

It worked. But I missed you guys. And in typical Me fashion, I've got nothing special to tell you. I'm just here, kicking it.

Uh, so how's everyone's Christmas going? I think I'm done with all but two people's gifts. This is happy-making. Want ideas for stuff? Here's a couple:

If you have an adolescent boy, especially one who loves Mythbusters, DON'T BUY HIM A CANNON. But you might want to buy him this book: Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction. My brother gave it to my 12-year-old and he's been in heaven building things like Tic Tac guns and aluminum foil and match missiles.

Oh, or you have a mystery reader, you can give them this book from Stephanie Black:

I really thought I had this one nailed right out of the gate, and of course, I was wrong. Or rather, I was partially right. But Stephanie is super good at throwing you a bunch of viable possibilities and making it super hard to figure out which one is right. If you know any mystery lovers, they'll love it. You can get it here.

And I'd post some other cool ideas but the people getting those gifts read my blog, so it'll have to wait. Sorry!

What else? Oh, I got my new cover for my next book. I'll have to see when I have permission to show it to you.

And I lost 3.5 pounds so far this month. I'm working HARD. But still enjoying some Christmas treats.

We have to replace part of our roof. Not awesome. And that's after replacing our furnace and air conditioner two weeks ago. Oh, and the van radiator. We're still having Christmas, but only because Kenny's cool with working until he's dead and skipping the whole retirement thing.

I hate these Christmas songs: Baby, It's Cold Outside (this is totally what Edward sing to Bella, I think), I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (it caused my 4 year old to have a breakdown in the van last week), and Santa, Baby because EW, and no, there is no cute version of this song. They're all gross. Also, I've noticed when Celine Dion sings Christmas carols, they manage to sound as if they're entirely about her.

And . . . now I have to go bake stuff, because this day is never ending.

Oh, although I think you can win my book Not My Type here if you want: http://www.ldswomensbookreview.com/wordpress/2011/12/11/not-my-type-by-melanie-jacobson-countdown-to-christmas-2011/

And your odds are super good right now, so GO.

Seinfeldian

2011-11-14T11:23:00.000-08:00

I've got nothing to tell you about to buy, support, donate to, or anything related.

In fact, I have nothing at all to say today. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could do a blog post that required none of the preceding things.

Also, you should know, Chuck E. Cheese sucks.

Four-year-olds are hilarious.

Shoe obsessions can manifest as young as 20-months-old.

I can do hard things.

Like walk away from a loaded buffet table with a sensible plate. Or clean. Or fast. I proved it to myself this week.

Up All Night makes my husband laugh until he cries.

I am beta reading my friend Becca's book and I really like it.

Taking a shower when your heater's busted = NOT FUN.

I married such a good man.

Nothing beats a slow cooker roast on a Sunday.

Yep, I can still blog about nothing.

Help a brother out

2011-11-10T08:17:00.000-08:00

Want a shot at winning a $50 Amazon gift certificate today AND help out a really good guy? Robison Wells wrote a great book called Variant, just out from Harper Teen. Kenny, James and I all read it last week and had a great time discussing it. Well, Robison's had some amazingly crudtastic things happen to him lately and a friend of his came up with the idea to "Book Bomb" him, organizing a one day effort to buy copies on Amazon and drive his sales up to get the book some well-deserved exposure.

The awesome Luisa at Kashkawan is offering you a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift certificate. She explains the whole story about Rob, his disorder, the fall out, and how you can help. It's easy: buy a book. If you have anyone in the 10+ range, this would a great gift and TODAY is the perfect time to buy it.

To enter the contest, check it out here.

To just straight up buy the book because it was a well-done, fast-paced read, just click right over here. Publisher's Weekly named it one of their Books of the Year. I don't make this stuff up, you know.

And I promise to be back soon with tales of ridiculousness. Seriously. It's just that lately there have been lots of good causes.

All the single ladies!

2011-11-08T19:55:00.000-08:00

Have I mentioned I spent seven years as a single mother?

No? Or maybe only a couple of times?

I don't really talk about that part of my life. Because it was super hard. But I have this thing about helping other single moms because of it. See my nifty new widget in the sidebar over there?------->

You can help fund a scholarship for single moms called the Horizons of Hope scholarship. And actually, if you go check out DeNae's blog, donating even just five dollars will be enough to enter you to win the Greatest Blog Prize of All, of which I am an honored recipient: she will write your family Christmas letter for you. Check out the one she did for us last year. It's the best family Christmas letter EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.

I'm donating because I have been where these women are and I already had an education and a career and it was hard. I know how much it will make a difference.

Also, I want DeNae to do my Christmas letter again.

So CLICK RIGHT HERE to get the details, cough up the green stuff (money! Not phlegm. Ew.) and you might WIN. Yay!

Bringing the dead to life.

2011-11-06T21:16:00.000-08:00

November 12 is a death/birth anniversary. Five years ago my dad died. Four years ago my little boy was born on the very same day.

He doesn't know, of course. I don't think I'll tell him the story until he's much older. I say that like there's all these other stories I tell him about his grandad instead. I don't. I don't tell him much about my mom either, even though she died only two months later.

Kenny does. My little guy can pick my parents out of pictures. He knows they live in Heaven. He knows their ears were broken so they used sign language. And that might be it.

It's pretty sad. He's nearly four. He should probably know a lot more than that. But I don't know what to say. Somewhere in the back of my mind is this idea that I'll write it all down for him. And for my daughter. So they'll know that my mom was an incredibly talented artist and that my dad defied more odds than most people ever face in a lifetime. I tell myself I'll write down how my mom used to Indian leg wrestle us to see who had to take out the garbage or how my dad had an insanely green thumb and grew vegetables none of us would eat.

I tell myself that. I should be able to, right? I'm an author, for the love of Pete. This is my thang, isn't it?

But . . . I can't.

I don't know how. How do you take something as huge as the sixty years each of them lived and distill it into a story that your children can hold and read and somehow know them? I can't.

I'm pretty good at knowing my limits. When I know that something is beyond me, I drop it in favor of doing something I can rock. I like to be productive. But this need to tell their stories . . . it doesn't go away. I'm the only way my kids will ever know my mom and dad. I truly don't believe my husband would fully understand me if he hadn't met my parents before they died. And my kids will be missing a key to understand a part of themselves, the part that they get from me, and that I got from my parents.

When the Casual Blogger Conference rolled around last time, I passed. I know my voice, I'm not trying to make money, and I don't care about growing my audience. But I kicked myself later. I missed out on meeting and hugging a lot of cool people I would never otherwise see. I swore to myself that the next time it rolled around, I'd be all over it.

Enter the Story at Home conference in SLC and its blogging track. I thought, "Ah! NOW I can meet and hang out with my blogging friends." But then stuff started coming up, logistical stuff, and I was like, "Not this time either."

But I changed my mind again. Because I'm not doing the blogging track. I'm going to learn about how to write a family history. Specifically, my dad's history, to start. I'm going to learn how to make him come alive again for my two littlest ones in a way that they can maybe feel like they know him, so that they can see him in themselves, and love him even in his absence.

You should come. Whether it's a family story or your own personal one you need to figure out how to tell, whether it's just so you and I can finally meet and hug, or whatever your reason, you should come. It's the cheapest conference I've heard of: $79. Seriously . . . come.

(Here's the info: This super cool conference for blogging / storytelling / personal and family history /writing is happening March 8-10, 2012 in Salt Lake City. It's called The Power of Story @ Home, and it's sponsored by Cherish Bound, Family Search, and the Casual Bloggers Community. This is a link to their website.)

When upon life's billows

2011-11-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

I've decided that I must the kind of person whose moods fluctuate so wildly that I don't even know what normal is. As in, maybe I don't even know that I'm crazy. Or better yet, wildly fluctuating moods IS (my) normal, therefore, I will endeavor to embrace it. I'm just going to hug the good times so I'm near about squeezing the life out of them, doing barbaric yawp-ish carpe diem type stuff, and then when those moods sneak up on me where I'm like, "I have no talent, I have no friends, BUT I DO HAVE zits," then (and please avert your eyes if you are above vulgarity but sometimes there is only one way to explain things), I will kick that mood in the nuts.

Let me be clear here: I am not prone to depression. Anxiety, yes. Depression . . . not so much. These are fleeting moods that annoy me only because they're also recurring. When I have these little talks with myself and then I realize, "OH, YEAH! I HAVE LOTS OF BLESSINGS!" I am generally fine within a very short period of time. It's just annoying that I even need to remind myself sometimes that my life is pretty awesome.

The cure (for me, because remember we're not discussing anything clinical-grade here), is free, fast, and instantaneous: counting blessings. Trite but TRIED and TRUE.

So I am going to count some now.

1. My good moods outweigh my self-pitiful ones by a lot. Think mountains and molehills. I have lots of big, sparkly mountainy days. I'd say . . . 90/10 split. But I'll ask Kenny. He's better at math.

2. I am living every dream I've ever had for myself. This should probably be a dramatic #10, the clincher, the ooh-la-la. But it's what I thought of next and I don't want to edit.

3. My kids love to hug me. Even my twelve-year-old will accidentally say he loves me sometimes.

4. My husband adores me and I know it.

5. I have really fast Internet access and I can connect to amazing people who have made my life richer and better because of it.

6. Books that make my soul happy deep down. Finishing up Peace Like a River again. I love that book so hard.

7. Bathrobe and hot chocolate days. I declared one this morning. I feel like a genius right now, because nothing goes better with a rainy morning. And for dinner: gumbo. A perfectly bookended day.

8. Old things. I love stuff that's been around. At least in small doses. I love our old piano and our old books.

9. Roses. I didn't used to love them. I still don't want them in a bouquet (bring on the tulips or daisies). But we inherited a ton of them in our yard and there is something pretty perfect about waking up to a testimony of Heavenly Father every morning because that's what those bright, gorgeous things remind me of every time I glimpse them outside my window. (Wow. I know that paragraph just made you wonder if you accidentally started reading someone else's blog in the middle of my post. Nope. Still me. Roses are pretty. Just saying.)

10. Kenny. Oh, look at that. I really did save the best for last.

And now, unrelated to anything, totally unprompted by me, Mary at The Sweet Bookshelf is giving away a prize pack of both of my books on Kindle. It's super easy to win and you can check it out here. If you already have my books, (clearly you love me and also) you might like to gift them to some Kindle-owning friend if you win.

High five

2011-10-28T16:56:00.000-07:00

All right, let's throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, okay?

You can win a Kindle at my friend Kristy's blog. Don't tell my son (who is thankfully uninterested in my blog so I can say this) but we got him a Kindle for Christmas. Why? Because most libraries now have Kindle lending programs. He's borrowed my Kindle four times in the last week to "check out" Encyclopedia Brown books. Now I don't have to deal with the "I'm out of books" whine anymore. Yay! Anyway, check out her Kindle contest here. It's easy, and right now your odds are really good.

Also to check out, iffin' you want to, is this silly interview I did back in May about The List.

And I have another favorite thing:

The Rule of Five

This is also known as Saving Melanie's Sanity. So I'm sure this never happens to any of you, but sometimes when I put my head down for three weeks and write for hours a day to finish up a manuscript because I can't take it being undone anymore, when I eventually pick my head back up, I'm shocked, I say, SHOCKED to discover that my house looks as if it has been inhabited by a weird frat that leaves diapers lying around in pools of dried milk and various items of clothing hanging from our chandeliers, only it's Batman t-shirts and ruffle bottom bloomers instead of bras and thongs.

Anyway, it's a little overwhelming trying to figure out where to start, so I just follow the Rule of Five. Any time I go into a room, I must put away five things before I leave it again. By the afternoon, my house is not "clean" (something I think may be a myth perpetuated by home decorating magazines and ad campaigns for Chlorox), but it is livable and that's usually a vast improvement over whatever it started out as in the morning. As a bonus, whenever a wild hair seizes me (someone please explain that expression to me) to actually clean ALL THE WAY one of the disaster zones in my house, if I've been following the Rule of Five all day it feels . . . not daunting. Possibly even do-able.

And now I need to go put away dishes but I'll be putting away a set of blue vampire fangs, a stuffed kangaroo, a Reeses's wrapper, some size 2T striped leggings, and a pencil sharpener before I leave the living room to do it.

Then I have to make a hippie wig out of brown yarn. Because my son changed his mind about his costume. Again.

Vomit Elbow

2011-10-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

Do you want that one hilarious blog post I thought of? Or what about that other one, the shoot-milk-through-your-nose one? Maybe you want the laugh-til-your-sides-hurt one?

Too bad. I can't remember any of them. (Imagine a mime face with a single grease paint tear rolling down it. Because that's how I'm picturing you.)

See, what happened is, I used to be funny but then my kids started puking. Like every day. And then they started doing it at night. And coughing. Until they puked. And then after I washed a bunch of puke sheets, I wore out my funny bone. I think it's located near my elbow, right? Or in it? So I guess my funny bone got tennis elbow or something. Except I don't play tennis so I guess it just got vomit elbow.

It's fearsome, y'all. Vomit elbow will sneak into your room at two in the morning and cough in your face smelling like toddler puke breath and it will suck your funny out just like El Chupacabra. RUN!

I would like to hug the world.

2011-10-19T23:45:00.000-07:00

SOOOOOOO many things have been making me happy lately. They're little things and a couple of huge ones.

Like for example . . . I FINISHED ANOTHER MANUSCRIPT.

Whoo hoo!

And it was way too long and even the edits, which I normally loathe, have been going pretty well. I have to cut at least 13,000 words out and I've already knocked out 9,000. Yes!

And there's other good book news. For various reasons that turned out to be utterly stupid, I thought my Not My Type wasn't doing so hot. As it happens, I'm crazy. It's selling really well. Better than The List, even. And do you know what that means? DO YOU?

It means I GET TO KEEP WRITING! And that is what I want the very mostest. After happiness for my family and world peace.

Here's other stuff that's making me happy. See this apron?

The cute lady in the picture with me, my friend Sarah, made it. And it is PERFECT. Perfect length and on my right, if you squint, you can see one of two reasons why: the pocket. This is the perfect place to drop my iPod so I can listen to podcasts (especially This American Life) while I cook. Suddenly, dinner is less of a chore. And I can't hear the children, whose meltdown hour coincides with dinner prep hour. The second reason is the length. I have a couple of other great aprons that are shortish and the proportions look goofy on me. And this is just right.

I bought it. I bought two, actually. Because I believe in great causes and good deals. See, Sarah's little boy was recently diagnosed with Type I diabetes. And their family is in the incredibly tough position of not making enough money to be able to pay for his insulin but making just a little too much to qualify for any of the programs that would help subsidize it. The shortfall is $500. A MONTH. So instead of despairing, Sarah got right to work sewing and selling aprons. She just barely opened an Etsy shop that you can check out here or here. And since I've spent time pricing aprons on Etsy in the past, I can tell you that the $30 she charges is a great price. Plus, you can tell her what you want and she'll make it for you.

So go. You know you have an in-law or girlfriend, or co-worker who would love one of these for Christmas!

Here's a couple of more things that are making me happy. I bet you didn't know that I've been on the hunt for the perfect nude lipstick and gloss. I FOUND THEM!

Loreal Color Riche in Fairest Nude (I know, it's getting all PG-13 up in here)

(Not my lips)

And then the gloss. Urban Decay Lip Junkie in Wallflower. So basically I can stand around totally naked and no one will notice me? I don't know. But this stuff is extra awesome because it has spearmint in it and it feels like your lips are getting a massage for an hour after you put it on.

Which looks like this:

(Still not mine)

Also, buying this gloss proved once again that I can't say no to cosmetics when they're peddled by gay boys. Even when they're wearing more make up than I am.

Other stuff making me happy . . . good books I've read. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins (PG-13), In the Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson, Variant by Robison Wells. Yay!

Only the good die young

2011-10-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

My dad only lived a month past his 60th birthday. Today he would have been 65. I'm doing things to help me remember him today. Wearing an LSU shirt, eating orange Tic Tacs and a Payday candy bar. And this, writing a list of 10 Things My Dad Taught Me.

1. No one can get in your way. No one.
2. The gospel is true. If you can understand that you're a child of God, that will be the permanent bedrock of your testimony.
3. Never leave a good bargain unpurchased. Even if you don't need it.
4. Change the oil in your car regularly or you're an idiot.
5. When someone needs help, help them. Without conditions. Just do it.
6. Let people help you. They really actually want to.
7. Education is the great equalizer.
8. The ability to teach is a gift. Use it, and teach what you love.
9. Star Trek: Next Generation is the greatest show ever made.
10. Being the dad your daughter can talk to is one of the most valuable gifts you can give her.

He was so awesome, you guys. So awesome.

Saying "Cheese!" and also "Sorry!"

2011-10-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

Reminder, check out Fire and Ice book reviews for the second to last chance to win Not My Type.

All right, so I know I've been pretty absent in the blogosphere. I've been getting some posts up but not commenting nearly as much as usual. That's kind of normal for me (I'm learning) when I have a new book come out because life is hectic. But this time, I'm also so close to finishing a new manuscript that I can taste it. Therefore, I've been writing twice as much as usual (literally) every day for days and I'm giving up other things to do it. Like commenting. And proper hygiene. And The Practice because that show is dumb now.

I'll be coming back around soon. But now you know: you don't have body odor. I just have poor time management skills.

There's been other busy stuff, too. Like more book signings. And my son turned twelve. Here's my (lame) photographic evidence.

This is about right:

Sad you can't see this darlingest girl's darlingest pigtails but look closely at the right side of her head and you'll catch a glimpse.

When given a choice between a great face/fat tummy pic and a constipated face/no tummy pic,

constipated face will win.

Me and my friend Becca at my Saturday book signing. I miss her!

Me and one of the coolest ladies I know, Sarah. More about the apron on Wednesday, but how much do you LOVE it?

Swag

2011-10-10T10:21:00.000-07:00

There is muchness to report and I SHALL, beginning tomorrow with photos and everything!

In the meantime, I did a sort of funny guest post over here at Fire and Ice Book Review Blog. Also, it's your second to last chance to win my book, so run on over and leave a comment. It's easy.

Hasta la manana, y'all. (I'd do the squiggle thing if I knew how.)

The most expensive book signing EVER.

2011-10-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

All right, tomorrow is the last day to enter to win my new book Not My Type by commenting on my last post here (for those too lazy to scroll down. Geez).

Uh, and I'm signing books from 11-1 tomorrow (Oct. 8) at the Ensign Books in Temecula. As always, I'll have fudge.

So, book signings.

Many of you have been to them for some author. Some of you have been to mine.

I really like book signings. Also, I kind of hate them.

I have done several now. Not a lot compared to most authors, but I'd say at least a dozen. So here's the deal: Not ONCE has it ever been worth the money. Not even close. But then again, that's not really what a book signing is about.

Let's take an April book signing I did. A 90 mile round trip (gas + $14 in tolls), the cost of the fudge I make and bring ($10), plus I like to buy a book at the stores where I sign ($14). That day, I bought paintings for my kids' Easter presents ($80). Oh, and I got a speeding ticket on the way there. ($450.) And I sold 4 books, two to people I knew.

Minus the speeding ticket, that's kind of the norm. I know, you'd rather poke your eyes out with pencils than spend your entire Saturday six weekends in a row doing the same.

The thing is, when I sell a book through a store, I make a little over a dollar a book, and I only get those dollars twice a year in my royalty checks. I'd have to sell A LOT of books to pay for just the gas money of getting to the closest LDS bookstore which is over 20 miles away. And I have not ONCE broken even yet on a single signing I've done.

The most books I've ever sold at a signing is the one I did in Utah a couple of weeks ago. That was in the 20 something book range. And every single person who bought one was someone I knew at least a little. And um, that was a $200 plane ticket to get up there, plus a car rental.

So that's the part I hate. Really hate.

Then why do them? Just because it's expected? No. They're still a potentially smart business decision. Because bookstore visits aren't really about selling books to the random customers who come in. It's about building a relationship with the store owners and booksellers who work there so that mine is a book they keep recommending even when I'm not there.

The thing is, even that wouldn't be enough to drag me into spend the bulk of my Saturdays for a month in a bookstore, feeling foolish at my little table while half the people in the store try not to make eye contact with me. (What? You thought this was GLAMOROUS? Ahahahaha!) But there are other parts of this equation that make it totally worth it.

First, the booksellers and store owners generally love books and that leads to some really fun conversations. I often get to tell them who in the market I'm reading lately and get their opinions on which books I should try. I can't be talked into doing boring things for money. (Yeah, I realize that's the luxury of having a stable household income). But fun? Yes, sign me up! That's because I value my time over my money. (Again, I know that's a luxury.) And talking about books is definitely fun.

Second, the strangers. The strangers are fun to talk to because when I can tell they aren't going to be into my book, if they're in the fiction section I still see it as a challenge to find them a book they WILL like. That also leads to a lot of fun conversations.

Third, and my tied for first favorite part, is the rare times that a stranger comes specifically to see me. They've read my book, they want the new one, they want my signature on their copy, they just want to say hello. SUPER EXTRA fun. I'm not actually sure I can explain in words how cool that feels and why. It's validating, yes, but it's a little more than that. It's kind of like they come in because they feel like they've connected to me, because something in one of my stories feels familiar and real to them, like I understand them, and I feel happy that I could do that for them. It helps me feel like what I do is worthwhile and it matters.

And then fourth, my other tied for favorite part of book signings are the people I DO know. Because when they show up it's always a great time to chat and catch up. I get to see people I haven't seen in a really long time because of these signings. But what most of them don't realize is that it's a vote of confidence, and a lot of times, during signings where ten people in a row have blown right by my little table to grab their copy of 17 Miracles without so much as glancing my way , I really need the pick-me-up of someone stopping in to say hello TO ME. I value that so much.

So . . .

I think I have about four book signings to go before I worry about this for the next book. But as long as I've got my bowl of homemade fudge and fellow bibliophiles to chat books with, that's all right by me.

Dumbest giveaway in the world.

2011-10-04T22:03:00.000-07:00

(This is one of the most airheaded giveaways I've ever done, but stick this whole post out to find out how to win a copy of my new book, Not My Type. All right, continue.)

The problem with asking people to review my book is that they might ask me to review theirs. Publicly. And I might hate it. And it could go very, very poorly for me. As did the last review I posted for a book that wasn't my favorite. Ack.

So when Jolene Perry was like, "Sure, I'll review your book. Wanna review mine?" I was like, "Uhhh . . . yes?" And I had this really weak smile plastered on my face. Which is sort of stupid because Jolene lives in Alaska and it was an email exchange, anyway.

I'm sure you've figured out by the very fact that I'm even telling you all this that it turns out I had nothing to worry about. The Next Door Boys by Jolene Perry is her debut novel and it's a great read. I don't do long reviews because I don't want people to bounce away, so here's what you need to know in one of my patented World Famous Two Sentence reviews:

The Next Door Boys has a main character who is wonderfully flawed and utterly sympathetic and lovable. The whole crew in this story is kind of awesome but in a completely believable way; this is great LDS fiction that you will enjoy spending a few hours with.

What? That was a semicolon; therefore, it was still a two sentence review.

You can read what it's about here. And check out the super cute cover:

You can click to buy it here or here.

And then of course, THE GIVEAWAY.

Here's the thing. I got all excited about helping Jolene promote her book. And sometimes I have these really good ideas. But they're more like really "good ideas" because I have them at night and then in the morning, they make no sense at all. So I was like, "Yeah, I'll totally review your book! Ooh, and we can do a giveaway of my book to get people to read yours!"

You know what? That really does make perfect sense when it's late and you're sleep deprived. But now I have no idea what I was thinking when I offered her that. *Shrugs.* She was kind enough not to point out that I'm a crazy person though, and so here goes a very ridiculous giveaway.

In the book, the main character, Leigh, spends some time coming up with the most perfect costume for a masquerade ball. And since it's Halloween time, your entry to win MY book (oh my gosh, SERIOUSLY, this giveaway could not make LESS sense) needs to be your favorite Halloween costume you ever wore. Just tell me in the comment trail and that counts as your entry to win. (Jolene, I'm so sorry. This really seemed brilliant on no sleep. WTH?)

Got it? To promote Jolene's book, The Next Door Boys, you're going to comment on your favorite costume you've ever worn for Halloween. Because that's connected to HER book. But then somehow you win MY book.

Ah, crap.

All right. I shall now play.

I have two. When I taught 8th grade, my students would ask me every year what I was going to dress up as for Halloween. And every year I told them I wasn't going to dress up because I had to dress up every day and this was the one day a year I got to wear my OWN clothes. And then I'd show up that day as a witch. And they'd be like, "You said you weren't going to dress up . . . OH!"

And then another year, in a I-have-five-minutes-to-come-up-with-something frenzy, I threw on a bathrobe, stuck a curler in my hair, fastened on my pearls and smudged my lipstick. DESPERATE HOUSEWIFE. Easiest costume I ever did and it also got the most laughs.

All right. Your turn. You have until Saturday night. GO! (If you already have my book, you can win a wood piece of your choice from Kenny. As in a small wood piece. None of you can claim any bowls. I have dibs on ALL of them. ALL THE BOWLS.)

Cliff diving

2011-10-04T04:06:00.000-07:00

So yeah. We were standing at the precipice. Or rather I was. And trying to figure out if it made any sense at all to fling myself off.

Cue the insomnia and craziness and a downward spiral that culminated with me under my bed covers on a Sunday afternoon, completely undone from all the worrying and thinking. And then, Enter Husband.

I feel like I keep saying that Kenny is amazing. And a lot of you hear that as white noise. But it's not. I don't say it because it's the nice wifely thing to say. I say it because it is the STONE COLD TRUTH. He's incredible.

And he gently started talking me down. And he said a lot of things that were soothing and uplifting and encouraging. But he dropped a little pearl that stuck out. He said that I write books that give a lot of women a chance to escape hard situations and allow them some laughter and relief for a few hours. He said that it was really important for me to keep doing that because it was a blessing for them.

Me. I, the maker of meringues.

I do that? Could he be right? Because if he was right, if beyond making people laugh I actually delivered a tender mercy that God needed someone to have, then . . .

I should keep writing and stress a lot less about it all.

So I treasured that pearl, that single shiny thought, and then just two days later, I got an email from a stranger.

This isn't unusual. People often track me down through my author website and send me emails. "Loved your book!" "You're funny!" It makes me feel very narcissistic and ridiculous sometimes, but I'm not going to lie: fan mail is incredibly fun.

But this was something different. This was an email about The List, a book that I definitely did not write with the intention of setting the world on fire. I wrote it for fun, because I thought it might be fun to read. And it's about Not My Type where I tried to share a very personal feeling I have about the transformative power of gratitude, but of course it's done with very little seriousness. And this is what the email from a total stranger said in a week where I wondered if it made sense for me to do what I do and where my husband had been close enough to the Spirit to suggest an answer. The writer said: : When I read The List I laughed at myself realizing how many of the situations Ashley had with Matt were just like ones I've had with my ex-boyfriend. Then this new book was more than an enjoyable read. My break up was long and hard and I'm still getting over it. It's not easy but after reading Not My Type I was able step back and reevaluate, a lot. I feel like you were inspired in your writing, at least for me. I can't wait for more of your books to come. Again thank you for your books. They have entertained, edified and educated in ways I didn't think possible. You are amazing and so are your books!

So I cried. Of course. I do that way more than people would think for someone with snark hardwired into my genetic code. And it's over super cheesy stuff too, but that's another post.

This is a post about how Heavenly Father prompts to use the talents He gave us, and then sustains us when it becomes hard to use our talents, because they matter. They matter because WE matter to Him and He uses us to get to each other, to speak to each other in ways we need at very specific moments. And so sometimes, I make people laugh when they really, really need to. And I help them to think, even.

Yes, I feel good when I get to write. But others feel good sometimes when I get to write too, and that's why I'm supposed to be doing it. It's so humbling that it makes me want to rip open both of my published books and tear through them to make sure I've used my talent wisely. Did I do right by the gift He gave me? I hope so. But I can definitely work to do better in every new book. And to never, ever be so silly again as to think that this is or ever was about ME.

Use my hands, Lord. Please.

Cliffhanger

2011-10-02T22:13:00.000-07:00

Don't you hate it when I'm all, "I'm going to tell you a story!" and then I don't?

So I owe you a story.

I believe I mentioned something about a slight breakdown a couple of weeks ago. I am fine, by the way. But the episode produced a tiny gem of a moment that I have polished and re-examined a few times in the last two weeks.

I'm a writer. Either I'm a writer, therefore I'm neurotic, or I'm neurotic, therefore I write--but I'm not sure because I've been both since as long as I can remember. Writing won me essay contests. Writing won me my college scholarships. Writing got me my job.

But I always wrote for a reason. It wasn't really the story-telling kind of writing. Because I'm a pragmatist. I do things that make sense. Sometimes. And when I do things that don't make sense, I get upset at myself because I can clearly see they don't make sense and then--VOILA! Le Breakdown.

So I wrote but I didn't do much storytelling. Still, I would always say I was going to write books because I love telling stories. I grew up listening to my grandfather, one of the greatest storytellers to ever live. And you can't spend more than a few minutes with me before I tell you some kind of story. It's almost compulsive.

And this idea that I should write a book was almost compulsive, too. But for a long time I didn't write. A whole space of years between the birth of child number one and the career and the marriage and the caring for of ill parents and the planning of funerals and . . . I did not write.

But it felt like I should Write. A story.

I don't know. It's that thing we're all brought up with: if you have a talent, share it. No squandering under bushels, y'all. Bushels bad. Bad, bad, bad.

And finally I had time. A second baby, no job to worry about each day. But I didn't write an epic. No big old weighty work with a meditation on life and death wrapped in some layered family drama. That's steak and fingerling potatoes in a rich burgundy wine sauce. No. I produced a . . .

Well . . . a confection. Not even a rich one. More like a meringue, as in lemon. Slightly tart. Definitely frothy.

Those are the stories that come to me, probably because those were the ones I liked to climb into on exhausted Friday nights when I was single and too tired to date because I'd been caring for a kid and my parents and 150 other people's kids in my classroom all day. Or at least I used to read those, until it got too hard to find ones in the national market that weren't, um, filthy.

And so I wrote the kind of book I couldn't find. There were a few fun ones in the LDS market. But a very few. Most of the romances were more issue driven, not utterly silly like mine.

It was fun. I felt good about finally using my talent after the nagging feeling I'd had for years. And I wrote a book. And it was accepted. And then I wrote another. And another. And then a fourth. And then my first book actually came out. And being an author became more than writing. It was suddenly all about marketing and . . . anyway, it was fine. It wasn't my favorite part of the job, but I'm good with people so none of that stuff was hard.

But it was very time consuming. From the time to draft a book to the time to edit it while trying to hit a deadline on a new project and then launch a book while trying to hit a totally different deadline and then OH YEAH BE A MOM. That.

And my husband was so super supportive through it all. He cheers for me when I hit writing goals, celebrates my milestones with me, brags about me to all of his friends, tells me what an amazing writer I am all the time, praises me, wants to know how my stories are going.

I'm so lucky.

But when this new book came out three weeks ago, I was also feeling incredibly guilty. Yes, this is a "hobby" I actually feel prompted to use. And yes, I get paid a little. My oldest has some shiny new braces, courtesy of my August royalty check. But this all costs A LOT of time. Book signings, conferences, critique groups, and the writing every single day.

So I stood on the verge of a new book release, which kicks the madness up crazy high for about a month, and I wondered, Is this all worth it for a silly meringue? Meringues don't change the world. Meringues don't even feed people. Steaks in rich sauce feed people. Potatoes feed people. Not so much fluffy pie toppings. What am I doing?

And here's the thing. This is super long already, but I've already written this whole thing, so I'm going to do you nice people a favor and cut it in half and post the rest tomorrow to give your heads a rest. So since I've been rather steak-y today instead of my usual meringue (and we're reading that as in lemon meringue, not dancing a merengue, right?), if you would like a tart dessert, may I recommend Regarding Annie? You will enjoy her. And I'll be back tomorrow with my whole watchamacallit? Point.

Randomness!

2011-09-28T04:26:00.000-07:00

I started a political debate on my Facebook status update and I totally shouldn't have. I still don't regret the original statement but I got a little big for my britches in the comment trail. Note to self: the original impulse that something is a bad idea is usually the right one.

I was going to get my feelings hurt because I'm pretty sure I'm about to be left out of a carpool because I'm the new girl. I was going to. But then I came home and I played with my little girl and she WANTS to be with me all the time and I am never the new girl to her and it made me happy so I decided not to have hurt feelings. Also, The New Girl on Fox is my favorite new show of the season so far.

My little book finally cracked the Deseret Book top ten list in romance. I rejoiced. And I didn't take an extra piece of chocolate to celebrate. That made me rejoice again. Because I know I'm going to take these last ten pounds off one good decision at a time. We all know BMI kinda doesn't mean much, but I'm finally .04 pounds back INSIDE the normal weight range. Yeehaw.

My sister sent me the booksigning pics from her camera.(Uh, no one better ask me if I'm pregnant. That's a food baby. The last ten pounds I'm trying to lose is all in my stomach. There. Now I've saved us both from embarrassment. Got it? DON'T ASK.)

Do you recognize this lady on the right?

IT'S SUE! Aaaaaaahhh! She looks amazing, right? I KNOW!

And in one of those weird confluences that happens sometimes, this picture below is our now-mutual friend Cristina. I grew up with her in Louisiana and they ended up in the same ward together in Utah. It's a Small World After All. (You're welcome for the ear worm.)

I would like to point out that I'm a very amazing friend for posting all these pictures where I don't look nearly as photogenic as usual. I'm picking the ones where my friends look the nicest. Proof that I don't usually look pale and bloaty:

Oh, of course the uploader quits working now.

You'll just have to believe me.

And this is my very own little table poster they made at Barnes and Noble. For me! Another fun milestone.

And here's my faux in-laws who came to support/heckle me. Three guesses who the heckler was.

And just in case there's anyone who still hasn't rushed right out to get my book and sleep with it under their pillow, you can win it at Donna's blog today. So easy! Click on over and check it out. Donna is a fun, spunky lady I met at LDS Storymakers when she turned up in my boot camp. We had a fun day together talking writing and whatnot. Cabbages and kings, maybe. So comment on there for the book!

But that's not all. Remember how I said that this book is a lot about gratitude? Stay tuned this week for a chance to win the really cool "Grateful Heart" necklace from my husband.

YAY!

Still paddling

2011-09-25T22:48:00.000-07:00

So I inadvertently stumbled on a brilliant marketing plan to get people to book signings. It's pretty simple if you don't mind the total loss of your dignity: have a very public breakdown immediately before a big signing. Then everyone you know will come, just to keep an eye on you and make sure you don't lose your . . . ahem, JUNK.

I won't be repeating this particular feat in the future, but as it turns out, the signing I did this past Thursday in Utah was superfantastic. There just isn't a less cheesy word for it. My camera died after the second picture I took and my sister is holding the ones in her camera hostage, but let me sum up:

SUPERFANTASTIC.

It was busy the whole night. I saw writer friends, and childhood friends, and long ago job friends, and blogger friends, and college friends, and friends of my parents, and IT WAS AWESOME.

This is me with Sarah. We've been best friends since we were nineteen and bonded over our mutual love of Audrey Hepburn.

Sarah Eden and Josi Kilpack are really fun to sign with, in case you were wondering. And DeNae came early, brought bottled water, monitored the refreshment table, left late and I didn't even ask her to. She's just made of glitter and fabulousness and it was all knit together with the sure knowledge that she had to keep an eye on me in case I fell apart.

But I didn't! Because DeNae was there. As were SO many of you: Wonder Woman and Vivian (delightful to meet you in real life finally!), Stephanie from Diapers and Divinity, my former editor, my blog friends Kazzy, Becca, and Crash who have become the dearest of friends well outside of blogging. Writer friends I won't claim because they could have just as easily been coming to see Sarah or Josi, but it was really fun to see Julie and Heather and Annette there.

Then the next day I had a lunch with some truly spectacular women:

And I found a lot of peace in this less-than-two-day trip.

There are times I've wondered if writing makes sense for me to do. It's that pragmatic part of me that worries about stuff like whether writing time would be better spent doing other things. But I've come to the very distinct conclusion this past week that writing is what I should most definitely be doing. I'll tell you a couple of stories about why soon, but in the mean time, if you want to hear what a couple of more people thought about my book, you can check out Kazzy's review here and Chantele's review here.

And I'm still trying to figure out how I want to do the next giveaway of my book, so once I've figured it out, I'll let you know. I know I should be a little more on top of my game with that, but to be honest, I kind of cut back on worrying about stuff like that this week in the interest of enjoying my life.

Guess what? It worked.

The War and Peace of blog posts

2011-09-20T22:54:00.000-07:00

I keep threatening to tell you about my mini-breakdown. That's why blogs were invented, right?

So when I was little my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He lived. But from about ages 3-8, I had this emaciated, frail chemo bald man living in my house who was quite often blown over by the lightest gusts of wind. And my mom had a few gentle talks with me about how my dad was going to die and what that meant.

It all worked out. I think a thirty year remission counts as cured, right? He still died young, but at 59. Not 29, like they told him the first time. And it wasn't cancer that did him in. Anyway, back to me as a kid. A dying dad is a heavy emotional load to carry, but like most kids, I was resilient. Tough, even. That kind of baggage still takes it's toll, but I found ways to deal with it.

Like, for example, if I slept with my stuffed animals in a certain rotation, nothing bad would happen. Oh, and if I climbed stairs taking an even number of steps on each leg, then chemo would go well. There were light switch things. And not stepping on cracks things. And counting things.

And wouldn't you know that as my dad got better, these tricks became less and less necessary?

Yeah, I had OCD. It runs in my dad's family, I guess. He didn't have it, but lots of my uncles and cousins do, most of them not too severely. I didn't even know I had it until I was adult. It's been latent for years.

One thing I did know and that OCD points to sometimes is that I am a control freak. I have always been a control freak. Guess what? Totally another coping mechanism.

What I didn't figure out until about a year after I married Kenny is that I also had some anxiety issues. Again, this is all very obvious in hindsight, but in the anxiety spiral, not so much. And in reading more about this over the past few years and thinking through it and analyzing blah blah blah, this is what I've learned: my anxiety is mild to moderate. I've had only two panic attacks in my whole life. My anxiety isn't chronic and it has identifiable triggers. Maybe once have I ever been in a tailspin long enough that had I realized I was suffering from anxiety, I would have been smart to go in and get some meds to help me manage it until my mood stabilized.

But on balance, my anxiety is usually near the mild end. This doesn't mean it's delightful. Or even a mild annoyance. It's super annoying actually, especially for someone who is highly, HIGHLY logical and sure that ALL things can be thought through and resolved through the mere application of reason.

Um, that's not how anxiety works.

Anyway, it's given me an empathy for people who suffer with this to a far greater degree. It really can't be controlled. But it can be managed.

It took a year of being married to my amazing and patient husband for me to realize that I had anxiety and to understand the triggers, etc. But I got to a place finally where I could let go of a lot of it and just be happy. The letting go took a long time, but it happened.

And that brings us to last week, specifically the tail end of the week where I spiraled into some anxiety. For once, I recognized what was happening. Unfortunately, I couldn't simply talk myself through it. Anxiety is more than stress--it's an extreme reaction to stress involving a lack of control over a situation. Or my form of it is.

There are certain things that I know set me off. I used to think that I was weak if I couldn't handle spinning a million plates at once. Now I realize that I totally can do it but my family pays the price because taking on too much can trigger more than simple stress for me. Also, I know that conflicts in really important personal relationships can cause problems (if I'm the reason for the conflict--that makes me even more anxious). And being excluded from stuff. That causes anxiety, not just hurt feelings (I do this crazy obsessive thing of wondering how I can control everyone's perception of/feeling toward me. Stupid.). And then of course, there's this huge category of Huge Life Events I Have No Control Over.

And trust me, I know everyone deals with this stuff. And most of the time, most of these things cause me stress but no anxiety. Sometimes, though, the stars misalign and Venus and Mars duke it or something, I don't know. But when that happens, normal stress turns into This Big Thing, days of insomnia, freak outs, panic, etc. Like I said, it's been a few years, but last week anxiety came to visit again.

I've already gone into a million billion boring details so I won't bore you with more now. Here's the thumbnail: my road to publication was really easy compared to most people's (I'll tell you the story some time) and it's set up a little disconnect between me and reality. And those two things didn't reconcile for me last week. And suddenly I realized how little control I have over the success of my new book despite my intention to be Supreme Ruler of the Universe and Most Especially My Book. And I am not good at relinquishing control over things that really matter to me (I'm going to be a peach of a mother-in-law). And a book release . . . there's very little I control about that in the first place.

And so suddenly I was dealing with a lot of self-doubt and frustration about lack of control and worry and all kinds of things. And that was the trigger and it all went downhill after that. And then I started getting really frustrated that I couldn't sleep and my brain wouldn't turn off and that I couldn't just talk myself into not being crazy which made the anxiety worse. And off went the merry-go-round.

I did some retail therapy. (Kenny, don't flinch: the following damage was done to discretionary funds, I promise.) It resulted in five new skirts, four cardigans, three sweaters, a necklace, a handbag, a pair of stilettos, two new shirts, and a lip gloss.

Yeah, yeah. I have issues. I GET IT. I think some of that will be going back. Not nearly as much as should go back, but some. Like the kinda cute stuff. I'm keeping the really cute stuff.

Anyway, guess what? That kind of retail therapy only makes things worse because then there's this whole, "I suck and have no self-discipline" fueling the downward spiral. Fun!

And finally Sunday I couldn't take it any more. The one advantage of knowing you're sometimes prone to anxiety and that it only reaches moderate levels at your worst points, is that you can explain it out loud even though you can't talk yourself out of how you're feeling.

And so I talked it out with Kenny. And I cried. And I let it out. And he prescribed nightly back rubs for me. And an afternoon in bed reading a funny book. And then he told me how he felt about my talent and why he feels so strongly about supporting me and it was really inspired, what he said. Then he started praying extra hard for me.

And then I got an email yesterday that was a tender mercy. I'll tell you about it soonish because this post is already so long I don't even want to go back and proof it so bless you if you're still reading.

But I realized: I cannot control the advertising for my book. I can't control who I'm positioned against. I can't control who will take the time to rate my book on Goodreads or other places. I can't control who will come to a book signing. I can't control a million other things.

But I can write a good book that does something good for someone. And I did. And I can be thankful for everything my publisher does for me, and I am. And I'm slowly feeling better. (Although full disclosure: I did buy one shirt, skirt, and handbag mentioned above this morning so I'm not ALL the way there yet). And I'm coming out of it and this has turned out to be a very small blip in the grand scheme of things. And I slept well two nights in a row. And I didn't eat my feelings: A HUGE VICTORY. And my pants were too big this morning and I never felt so excited to look so dumb in a too big pair of pants.

And fun things are happening this week. And I did the right thing for once and scaled down my DO EVERYTHING tendencies and turned my impending road trip into a mini writing retreat. The idea makes me feel calm.

Many of you will ask how you can help because that's how you are. You can't help, because the things I need from you are things I want you to give without me asking. I suck, I know. But that's how it is. Maybe I will become better at asking for what I need and accepting that even though what I get in return is prompted it will still be genuine. Baby steps.

But you can do this if you want: win my book at my friend Brittany's blog. I want to help get her twenty new followers and although I'm trying to move away from goals like that because failing only makes me crazy, I also was all humble bragging to her about how I thought this giveaway would be SO GOOD for her blog. So yeah, you can click over and follow her and maybe I will feel a tad less dorky than usual. I think she started at 29 before the giveaway.

And if you're still reading this post, I probably owe you chocolate. Which, if you live in Utah, you can come see me at the book signing on Thursday night (B&N in Murray, 6-8) I can give you because I'm bringing homemade mint fudge. And since I'm trying not to eat my feelings, you can do it for me. Although, if I run into cool weather and a good corn chowder up there, all bets are off. Probably I will eat my feelings and be totally fine with it.

Thanks for listening. Seriously.

Winning! Again! Because that's all I ever talk about anymore!

2011-09-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

So I had like a mini-three day breakdown. And I'll tell you all about it. But later. Because it's a good-ish story.

What I want to give you now is a chance to win my book. Normally when I ask someone to participate in a giveaway, I choose someone who has a biggish blog following because that equals more potential readers. But this time I asked my friend Brittany who is very new to blogging (maybe . . . May?) because she is easily the first blogger I've seen find her voice so fast. Y'all, she's freaking funny. And you really need to check her out. She just whips out these throwaway lines that kill me. Anyway, go check her out because it's super easy to win NOT MY TYPE this week. Go on. Go over to My Life Herding Cats. I wouldn't lie to you. About this, anyway.

Also, Erin at If You Give a Mom a Moment blogged her thoughts and paid me one of the best compliments ever at the end of it, so it's going a long way toward resolving the mini-breakdown issue.

But anyway, stay tuned tomorrowish and I'll 'splain about this one time I went a little crazy.

For now, I'm off to make a Weight Watchers casserole. Try not to die of jealousy, people.

Come and get it!

2011-09-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

I was totally going to be funny today but then I went and cracked myself up over at my other blog, and apparently, I've got it in me only once a day to the funny thing.

So I'll just announce the winners for the giveaway:

The necklace goes to Wendy Williams and the book goes to Melany (who spells our name wrong but won anyway). However, I have no way to get in touch with Melany so if she doesn't claim her book in 24 hours, but that would be a shame because for the first time ever, Random.org picked the actual last number in the drawing and I think that's cool.

Hasta manana, peeps.

Super fun party people

2011-09-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

Reminder: You have until Saturday night to enter and win a copy of NOT MY TYPE. It's super easy: either scroll down or click here and comment. Yay!

I love parties. And this month is full of them. Two book parties and a super cute son turning twelve.

Tonight was a book party and it was a smashing success. Extra smashing because it wasn't literally smashing: nothing broke, all was well, people fed on sugar and conversed and won things and it was lovely to be surrounded by friends.

Here's peeeeeeeeeekcherrrrrrrrrrrs.

I signed with my friend Kristine at this cute cake shop called Nothing Bundt Cakes. Do we look bored? Worried that no one is coming. HA.

THEY TOTALLY CAME!

It was so cute. We set up a little cafe environment outside with thank you cards for people to fill out for someone in their life, truffles, recipe cards, and door prizes.

And so then I was happy!

And busy signing books! Lots and lots of books!

And hoping no one gets mad if their name doesn't get pulled in a raffle. Eep!

Life is good! YAY!

I got swag for you.

2011-09-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

Comment on this post.

That's all you have to do to enter to win my book today. Easy enough, yes? Yes.

If you'd like 10 more chances to win my book, copy the button for the new cover over there in my sidebar and stick it in your sidebar. Let me know you did it and you've got another ten entries. I KNOW: super easy.

But wait . . . there's more! A major ingredient in this book is Thank You notes and the main character, Pepper Spicer, learns a little something about gratitude, so ALSO up for grabs this week: a handmade necklace of my husband's own design called the Thankful Heart.

HOOOOOOOOORAAAAAAAAAAAY for new books and excuses to give things away!

Also, Jolene Perry put up one of the most genius reviews I've ever seen, genius because it's simple and perfect and I wish I had thought of this format. You can click over and read what her five favorite lines from the book are. She picked some good ones! Also, if you're an aspiring writer, her blog is a great one to follow.

Also up is Stephanie at Diapers and Divinity's review which even I haven't seen yet, so I'm off to read that right now. I love having Stephanie review my books because she is honest, is incapable of being other than honest about things like this, and it makes me reflect on the character of my characters. So check that one out, too.

Don't forget, COMMENT to be entered to win the book or necklace. Put the button up in your sidebar and get TEN MORE CHANCES (but don't forget to tell me you did it. You can even do it all in one comment. See? Easy).

I remember

2011-09-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

I'm a defiant person. I am obstinate and contrary. And when terrorists told me that were going to change the way we did things forever, I said, "Screw you." That's what I do. Shortly after 9/11, I had to fly into Denver for business. The airports were virtually empty except for armed National Guardsmen with their submachine guns slung across their chests.

But I marched through the airport defiantly, glad to take my shoes off to clear security, glad to be one of the few people straggling through the eerie climate of the post terrorist attack airports. No sick, warped terrorists were going to scare me. No way would I let them win.

It's one way to do it, I guess.

But last year I met Sally. She was the primary president in our new ward. She's a tall, quiet woman with a soft voice and sweet smile. She has two neat teenage sons. She is kind and humble and you would never know how fiercely intelligent and accomplished she is if someone else didn't tell you. And she greets the whole world with guilelessness, such openness of spirit, that you would never know her brother was on the first plane that crashed into the first tower ten years ago, that crash that made the whole world gasp at once.

I remembered that today when our stake president stood in conference to address this anniversary and honor the fallen. Immediately I wondered how Sally was doing. Then several people were asked to share their testimonies. One elderly gentleman spoke of how the gospel has sustained him through sixty-four years of marriage. One woman spoke of a funny missionary experience in rural Ohio. Another man spoke simply of his gratitude for Jesus Christ. And then Sally's husband stood and talked about this very tender day for them, and of the love they had for the prophets and apostles who reached out to her as a young mother to stand in comfort when she needed comfort in the fog of those days after the towers collapsed and took her brother with them. I think of what I've seen in her in the year that I've known her, her graciousness and lightness of spirit, her simple testimony of her Savior, her surety that she'll see her brother again. And she goes on living the gospel, because nothing that happens makes it less true and so she just keeps on following Christ.

And I think that's the better way to do it.

Hemingway is pretty good.

2011-09-09T08:11:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is your last chance to win this week's copy of Not My Type so click over to iCandy Handmade to enter!

It's that nerve-racking time again when reviews start rolling in. First up is Jenny at Mommy Snark. You can check out her take on it here. (I think she liked it!) Oh, and here's why you should be reading her blog anyway: she's a mom of five who has a funny, snarky (obvs!), and often tender take on motherhood. She's expecting her sixth and shares the joys of the comments she gets from her nosy North Carolina neighbors (bless their hearts). "Here's a pamphlet on where babies come from."

How about some book conversation not related to my book? Yeah, yeah, you thought I was incapable of talking about anything else. All right, snapshot from book club last night:

Mel C: So this kid is emailing my sixth grade daughter. It's darling. He tells her he likes her and he signs his first, middle, and last name.

Book club: Awww, cute!

Me: All three names? Serial killer.

And scene.

Blue Steel, baby!

2011-09-08T05:21:00.000-07:00

*Don't forget to enter for your chance to win a copy of Not My Type over at the iCandy Handmade Blog

I'm so not a picture girl. As in I just am not awesome in the wielding of cameras, large, small, or cell phone-esque.

But I think pictures are fun to look at it. Unless my sister is making me try to put dates to family photos of uncertain origin. Then I don't like it. But besides that I do.

Oh, wait. No, I don't like it too much if I see a BUNCH of pictures of someone's kids I don't know. A little bit is okay, but not so much A LOT.

But besides that I like pictures.

Anyway, here's two that made me happy this week. This first one I stumbled across on the LDS Storymakers website in the conference highlights section. Becca, the cute lady I'm hugging, is incredibly photogenic. She looks great in every single shot. This one made me laugh because I was attempting to do a Zoolander joke picture and it came out like I'm claiming Becca for my girlfriend. But I live in California and that's against the law still.

Then there's the other super fun picture I got today from my sister. Since I rarely get to see my books on shelves in the wild, she's been keeping an eye out at Seagull and DB for Not My Type to show up. And it has! Check out the very good company I'm keeping:

That's me right underneath the awesome Josi Kilpack and next to the highly entertaining Sarah Eden. Hooray!

You guys are all coming to our book launch party, right? On Sept. 22 at the Murray Barnes and Noble? It's going to be so AWESOME. Life is so good!

Get it, girls!

2011-09-07T05:15:00.000-07:00

Seriously, want to win my new book? SO EASY. And there's not a lot of entries yet so chances are good. Go check out this post here at iCandy Handmade.

Did I mention it's easy?

Throwing the Book at You

2011-09-06T05:41:00.000-07:00

It's my Book Birthday!

I did it! I did it! I made a book! I wrote words and then put them together and named some of them and they turned into people who did stuff and then I had a story! And today is the official release day! WHOOHOO!

This is my favorite of the four I've written and I hope everyone loves it as much as I do. This month is going to be about a lot of chances to win stuff. And a lot of talk about gratitude. And a few tales of crazy people from book signings, their identities changed to protect the guilty. And lots of other stuff.

BUT I AM SO STOKED! Whoohoo!!! Did I mention that part yet?

All right, surely you've seen my cute cover over in the sidebar, yes?

I love it.

Covenant, my publisher, does so right by me.

If you haven't yet, you can read the first chapter here. And if you want to read more, today is your first opportunity to win it over at one of my favoritest blogs, iCandy Handmade, run by my friends Jen and Autie. It's an easy contest: you just comment and name your favorite fashion indulgence and that's it. Hurry on over and then explore the site, because they do some amazing stuff.

And here's the back cover copy for my cute book:

Twenty-three-year-old Pepper Spicer is not living the dream. She ended her engagement at the last minute because fiance—a musician an soon-to-be reality TV star—wanted her to sacrifice her own career ambitions for his. Now she's stuck at home sharing a room with her little sister, trying to pay off massive debt for a wedding that didn't happen, and spending Friday nights Facebook-stalking everyone who has a better life. Her therapist father urges her to choose her career dreams and count her blessings by writing weekly thank-you notes, but gratitude is a tall order when she botches an important job interview and has to settle for writing an undercover dating web-zine column—the last thing in the world she wants to do. Still, as Pepper (byline:Indie Girl) chronicles her bizarre and hilarious blind dates, she gives her father's challenge a try and slowly finds herself leaving self-pity behind. Life takes a major upswing as Pepper's column hits the big time and she tastes the exhilarating thrill of success. But there's one tiny problem: the intensely hot man she's falling for is having issues with her job (again). Will Pepper trade her personal ambition for another chance at love?

Bookin' it

2011-09-04T21:01:00.000-07:00

Guess who was sitting three seats down from me in church today?

You can't guess. It was The Mormon Bachelorette. Her sister, who is a friend of mine, is in my ward and I had no idea they were sisters! Isn't that hilarious given my stalkerish obsession? How lucky for Ashley that I found her! (Actually, this is one of those times where I had a prayer that I didn't even know I had and then Heavenly Father answered it by delivering Ashley right to me and now I have to laugh at how He works sometimes. But this little bit of good fortune is going to make writing my next book much, MUCH easier. More on that another time.) Anyway, if you're not following this season yet, you should. She's cool.

Moving on: Thanks to everyone who calmed me in my little freak out last week. I'm all the way up to #40 and I think it will climb steadily. Here's a fact: my publisher is pretty dang awesome and they want all of their books to succeed and they have faith in me, and readers seem to like my stuff, and my husband has faith in me, so now I will have faith in me.

And here's another fact: this moment of Zen is brought to you by the fact that I was cutting carbs for two weeks and now I'm allowed to have them again and CHOCOLATE MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER. That is why I am thankful for chocolate.

That's probably why I got a kick out of my friend Kristine's new book so much. WARNING: Book reviews ahead. I've read a couple of good things lately that you might like so I will give you my brand new, patent-pending, definitive two sentence statement on why you should buy these books:

First up, I mentioned chocolate and a book and these are two very good things together. Stealing Mercy by Kristy Tate (who happens to be my critique partner) is a fun historical romance/mystery set in Seattle when it was still frontierish. There are lots of pies, a brothel, a ninja, and PIES. Oh, and it's only $2.99 on Kindle right now! Whee!

My friend Sarah and I ditched many a party in college to check out Regency novels at the Provo City library when we'd had enough of real life boys (totally true--we were brats), and Sarah (who is a different Sarah but probably also ditched parties for Regency romance novels) Eden's Seeking Persephone is a REALLY STINKING FUN book. She's a great writer and this is a perfect Friday night read.

Then, of course, there's a slight nip in the air in some places that speaks of . . . FALL. And Josi Kilpack's book, Pumpkin Roll, is her latest, spookiest, and best installment in her Sadie Hoffmiller culinary mystery series. Also, there's a recipe for a pumpkin roll that is worth the price of admission by itself.

And I've been reading lots and lots of contemporary young adult novels lately, so let me recommend two that I got wind of via the super awesome Luisa and now I owe her big time for the fun reads: Suite Scarlett and Scarlett Fever by Maureen Johnson. They have a kind of I Capture the Castle vibe about them except they're set in this cool art deco hotel in the right now present.

Also so fun: The Ruby Oliver books by E. Lockhart. Ooh, and for pure escapism: The Heist Society books by Ally Carter.

Happy reading, everyone!

Oooooh, and stay tuned for Tuesday when it's my Book Birthday and many fun things begin to happen!

Thankful Thursday

2011-09-01T11:59:00.000-07:00

I've discovered I'm neurotic.

No, that's not quite right. I've discovered new levels of neuroses. Yes, that's it.

In addition to the other assorted bits of crazy I have hoarded over the years, now I've developed author issues.

Sigh.

It works like this: when The List came out I was super nervous. What if it doesn't sell? What if nobody likes it? What if Covenant doesn't publish my stuff any more?

But the stars aligned and not only did it sell, it sold well. I had placement in the DB catalog, I wasn't up against any other authors writing to the same audience, and my cover rocked.

I guess that's why I thought the release of my second book wouldn't be so nerve-wracking, I was wrong.

Now I have new fears: what if all the people who bought the first book just to be supportive don't feel the need to buy the second one? What if people bought the first one to try something new but don't find it compelling enough to buy the second one?

And there are other fears: my cover is AMAZEBALLS but what if it looks too YA even though it's perfect for the story (which is not YA)? And I'm being released the same time as Traci Hunter Ambramson who is a MONSTER in this market (deservedly so). And Sarah Eden who is also an A-list Covenant author who also writes romance? And Deseret Book didn't put me in the catalog this time (because I'm a big deal only in my own mind and I know it). And they just barely put the picture of my cover up on their website and my book is debuting at NUMBER FIFTY? I debuted at number 12 before. Yikes.

So I think about these things and I start to hyperventilate.

And that's why I'm thankful for my husband who says things like this:

"Melanie, I know you have lots of friends, but you don't have X,XXX (the number who bought the first book). They bought it without knowing you. It'll be okay."

Who without being asked says, "Hey, I just did all this stuff to your Amazon author page" because it's one of the few things he can control so he immediately fiddled with it when he saw me sliding toward panic this morning.

Who is giving up his one favorite monthly activity and will skip his woodturner's meeting to support me at my book release party (which conflict is totally my fault and he never says a word about it).

Who posts about me on his Facebook page whenever he's proud of me. Which is a lot.

Who humors me in my writing frenzies when my job takes about half the time his does but makes only a twentieth of the money.

I'm really thankful for Kenny. I love you, honey!

Navel gazing

2011-08-31T05:11:00.000-07:00

Um, so now I'm on YouTube. My publisher interviewed their authors about their books, or the ones who have fall releases, anyway. It was pretty unnerving, but I think it came out okay. So if you haven't met me in person and you want to see my crazy snaggle tooth for yourself, press play. Also, according to the PR gurus at my publisher, if you comment on the video on YouTube, it helps me win Google. Um, so . . . could you?

Also, if you want to win a copy of Not My Type, you have a shot on my writing blog until tonight, so click on over and find out how.

And now you may laugh at me:

A curl in the middle of her forehead (such a stupid nursery rhyme, btw)

2011-08-29T04:30:00.000-07:00

I used to make fun of my parents all the time for being infomercial junkies. We got steam vacuums and jar openers and the Magic Bullet and this yard doohickey and Shamwows and Snuggies and . . .

If it was advertised on an infomercial, we owned it. But not regular commercials. Those guys just make stuff up. So it was with a great sense of embarrassment that I made my first infomerical purchase ever. I blame it on the Jetblue TV service on a redeye from LA to NY. It seemed like a good idea at the time to purchase the Top Styler. And I was going to show you pictures today so you could decide for yourselves whether it was a good purchase or not. But the pictures are on my new phone which is a Smart(er than me) phone, specifically an Android which has become sentient and doesn't want to relinquish controls of the snaps. So . . .

Not today, friends. No Top Style report today.

However, I think I have better news. It's almost September which means my book is almost out which means there will be some chances to win it, starting NOW! Yay! The info is on my OTHER blog (which if you didn't know that it's because you don't already follow it and SHAME ON YOU FOR MAKING ME CRY!) so head over there and check it out. Is super easy. Is good book. You likey. Go. GO.

Also, welcome to Monday, which started kicking my butt last night.

Thankful Thursday

2011-08-25T19:15:00.000-07:00

Dear bloggers,

I'm grateful for all of you who still come around when I'm serving up everything I blog drenched in lame sauce--if I serve it up at all.

Now that this author thing is a semi-steady gig, I'm trying to that hokey-pokey voodoo dance where I have time to write, revise, review manuscripts for others, blog, comment on blogs, and oh, yeah . . .

THE HOUSE.

And THE CHILDREN.

Them, too. I'm trying to mother and housewife and maintain a Zen thing where the incessant screaming rolls off my back because it only stops when I play with them and I JUST CAN'T DO THAT THE SIXTEEN HOURS THEY'RE AWAKE every day. I wouldn't even if I didn't have other demands on my time because I'm not that mom, the get on the floor mom.

Did you know, and I have empirical proof of this after two boys in a row, that if you play Hot Wheels with a three-year-old that he is the only one who knows the rules for winning and that no matter what, he's always going to win? And also pitch a fit when you break the unspoken rules of Hot Wheels? The first of which (and of course I can only guess here) seems to be that you must never, ever do anything with your Hot Wheel that is cooler, faster, or higher than what he does with his Hot Wheel or he will scream and turn purple.

But I do try to play with them during the day. We do floor time. This usually happens when the two smallest ones start draping themselves over my laptop. I think that's a hint. And I get them out of the house at least once every day, and no, I don't mean we walk to the mailbox. We actually go somewhere. It's best for all our sanity that way.

It's hard, though. The balance thing.

So thanks for dropping off nice words or LOLs in the ever-dwindling comment box on days I don't rant about why Grease is not good clean family fun, etc.

I appreciate you. And I solemnly avow that when my Nigerian friend sends me the Timeturner I ordered, I will do a far better job of getting to your blogs from now on.

Love,

Melanie

Ah, amore!

2011-08-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

Me: I don't know why I watch this show.

Husband: . . . Research? . . .

Me: Grmph.

The show in question: Bachelor Pad. Yes, that giant televised STD that I mostly have to watch on fast forward.

But then after last week's episode--which I just caught up with--I found the answer to why I sit through it. It's because it's a fascinating character study. I hate all the making out. I'm nearly as bad as my tween son is when kissing comes on the TV while he's watching. I roll my eyes and hit the fast forward button.

But the dynamics between the players? I'm kind of sucked in.

The fakes are pretty easy to spot and they're fascinating because I sit and wonder if they really don't realize how transparent they are to other people.

But there are a few people on the show who are as close to genuine as people who go on Bachelor/Bachelorette type shows can be. Like Ames and Jackie.

One look and kablammo! They're in love! And when she gets voted out of the house, he leaves with her! And it doesn't sound very exciting even when I use quotation marks! But the thing is, if you've paid attention to Ames at all (and most of you are way too Klassy for this kind of TV), it was extremely exciting. I must have rewound and watched that three minute scene where he runs after the limo at least ten times. And I'm not that kind of girl. But there's something so priceless about the expression on his face as he walks away from the limo and then realizes he has nothing to say to the people still in the game. So instead of saying anything, he smiles at them and gives them a double-handed wave goodbye, and he runs after Jackie's limo with this funny little laugh like he can't believe what he's doing.

And then she opens the door for him and he says, "Do you have room for one more?"

And ohmygosh I wish I wrote that scene. The PERFECT ending for a book.

I don't recommend taking up the show because 1) ew and 2) I had to sit through about 117 minutes of crap to mine that diamond, but OH MY it was a pretty one.

And then I made my husband watch it and even he was like, "Uh, that dude's red pants are lame. Also, that was kind of cool."

I love LOVE!

Thankful Thursday

2011-08-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Mrs. Herring,

You're probably dead, I know. You were old twenty years ago and the cigarettes were aging you exponentially even back then.

You were the coolest teacher I ever had. When they talk about "old broads" they mean you.

I remember how mad I was that you wouldn't put me into Honors English because I was new to the school and you didn't know anything about me. And I'm so glad the guidance counselor had the foresight to put me in your advanced English class so we could feel each other out.

I still remember the little glances that you would shoot me when you started to catch on to who I was. Even then, I believed in myself. I wouldn't pretend that I wasn't as good as I was at doing the two things I loved best: reading and writing. You nurtured that. You had me doing the honors work by the second week of school.

When you rearranged my schedule to move me into journalism without telling me, I was taken aback. But honored. Honored that you thought I could do it. I hope I did it. Even when I wrote that article about how everyone should wear denim jumpsuits to prom and half the school didn't realize it was a joke. Thanks for laughing.

I loved your stories of meeting and learning from Robert Frost and Allen Ginsburg. I was awed.

I hope you had a comfortable retirement. I hope you spent long days reading books and smoking, damn the consequences. I hope you know that because of you, I felt really seen, a minor light in a bright constellation, but a light nonetheless. My own light. A light you fueled.

Thanks for teaching, Mrs. Herring. We need more like you.

Love,

Melanie Bennett (Jacobson)

Notes from the road

2011-08-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

We meandered up to Bear Lake, UT from California last week. Don't anybody go robbing my house, by the way. For one, we have a housesitter who is cranky with strangers and for two, I had the carpets done while we're gone and I'm going to be mightily peeved if I'm not one of the first people to walk on it.

Anyhow, I made some observations on our road trip. You should print these on 3 x 5 cards and keep them with you at all times. Just because, mainly. I doubt they'll actually help you.

1. However many changes of clothes you pack for an eighteen-month-old for the first eight-hour leg of your road trip? Is not enough. Especially not when that precious little girl has eaten eight (yes, EIGHT--they were keeping her quiet) packs of fruit snacks. Here's a hint: three changes is not enough. She will still be down to a diaper when you pull into the parking lot of the Super 8 Motel (we keep it klassy) in Cedar City (I waved at you, Erin!)

2. If you exit for the Super 8 and signal for a left hand turn but then realize that's going to put you on the freeway again so you veer right and then into the correct left hand turn even though you saw NO traffic around due to the late hour, the Cedar City police will pull you over to find out what the hell is wrong with you.

3. If your vaguely vomit-scented baby yowls through the cop's entire conference at your driver's side window, but your husband (who is driving) clearly does not smell like booze, the Cedar City policeman will be very nice and wave you the remaining fifty yards into the Super 8 parking lot.

4. There is a Conoco station in Meadow, UT with a ladies' room you simply must visit. The tampon dispenser has a handprinted sign renaming the dinky wall box the "Ladies Boutique." I sort of love that.

5. I saw a guy at Granny's wearing a cowboy hat and a Billabong t-shirt. This not something we actually see very often in California. (Becca, I did not wave because it was Sunday and I was ashamed to be there.)

6. The chinstrap beard seems to be a hot look for many of the Heber guys. Not sure that's going to catch on.

7. I have just discovered that my toddler is wild for Honeynut Cheerios. I have regained favorite parent status! Yes! Not that it's a competition, honey.

I'm going to go vacation my brains out some more.

Winner!

2011-08-11T18:53:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm SUUUUUUUUUUPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPERRRRRRRRRRR overdue to announce the very first giveaway copy of

NOT MY TYPE: A Single Girl's Guide to Doing It All Wrong

Are you ready? And the winner (according to Random.org) is:

Michelle Fish

Hip hip HOORAY! I'll be in touch as soon as I get copies of it in my hot little hands!

Happy Birthday

2011-08-02T13:12:00.000-07:00

Today would have my mom's 64th birthday and in honor of her, I'm going to not make a big deal out of it, because that was her way.

She lived this quiet, extraordinary life, a small stone with giant ripples. She wasn't one for making a fuss. She liked simple things: action movies, folk art, M&Ms, drugstore brand hair conditioner, oatmeal, pearls, and the mountains.

She was shy. She was beautiful. Her smile could melt stone hearts. She didn't make friends easily because she never figured out where she fit. With the hearing? The Deaf? She married well, but my dad's health made everything a challenge. She raised three kids she would be proud of. She has two grandkids she doesn't know.

She drew and painted and crafted. She taught. You will never see anyone sign a song more beautifully. She worked hard. She wasn't much for housework or cooking. She sewed well. She loved word games and cheated at Scrabble all the time.

She was highly educated. She was a dedicated teacher. She never really believed in herself but I saw her move metaphorical mountains.

She believed with her whole heart in God. She showed it. She lived it. She walked it every day.

She died happy, surrounded by her legacy: children who dropped everything to be there for as long as she needed, for as much as she needed. Who would do it again. Who never thought to do differently.

She liked pumpkin pie. I think I will have a piece tonight.

Winner!

2011-08-01T12:18:00.001-07:00

The winner of the $25 Amazon gift certificate for preordering NOT MY TYPE is Desiree Recendez! Yay! I'll announce the winner of the first giveaway copy on Thursday!

WHOOOOHOOOOOO!

2011-07-29T06:06:00.000-07:00

At last, it's here, it's finally (almost) here! My book comes out in a month and it's available for preorder NOW. To celebrate, I'm doing some super fun stuff today. Check out the cover (feel free to tell me you love it because I do, so much!) and then read the backliner (and the first chapter if you want to), and THEN find out how you can win the very first copy of my book I give away or an Amazon gift certificate. Here we go:

Twenty-three-year-old Pepper Spicer is not living the dream. She ended her engagement at the last minute because her fiancé — a musician and soon-to-be reality TV star — wanted her to sacrifice her own career ambitions for his.

Now she's stuck at home sharing a room with her little sister, trying to pay off massive debt for a wedding that didn't happen, and spending Friday nights Facebook-stalking everyone who has a better life. Her therapist father urges her to choose her career dreams and count her blessings by writing weekly thank you notes, but gratitude is a tall order when she botches an important job interview and has to settle for writing an undercover dating web-zine column — the last thing in the world she wants to do. Still, as Pepper (byline: Indie Girl) chronicles her bizarre and hilarious blind dates, she gives her father's challenge a try and slowly finds herself leaving self-pity behind. Life takes a major upswing as Pepper's column hits the big time and she tastes the exhilarating thrill of success. But there's one tiny problem: the intensely hot man she's falling for is having issues with her job (again). Will Pepper trade her personal ambition for another chance at love?

Sounds so fun, right? If you want to read the first chapter, you can check it out HERE on my website.

So how do you win it? Easy! There are two ways.

1. If you're on Goodreads, add it to your "To Read" shelf. This link will take you right to the book.

2. You can go to my writing blog and become a follower. It doesn't matter if you follow me here or not. This is kind of more where my friends find me so I'm not really into adding people who don't want to come back on their own. My writing blog is a different story. Go follow me there. Go! (Please?)

So if you add it on Goodreads, or follow my writing blog and want to win, leave a comment and let me know.

How do you win a $25 Amazon gift card? Preorder it, let me know you did, and you're entered! Deseret Books has it available for preorder here (even though they don't quite have the cover yet) and and AND . . . You can get it for 30% off today and tomorrow only. Just enter JULY30 for the discount code.

Hooray! Hip hip hooray!

(Tweets are not mandatory but appreciated, btw!)

Hump day, ya'll

2011-07-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

I have something SUPER EXCITING to announce on Friday.

IT'S AWESOME.

But until then, I give you my new favoritest thing in the world, discovered via someone's Twitter feed.

Enjoy. No, I mean it. ENJOY.

Thanks a lot

2011-07-24T08:49:00.000-07:00

On Friday night, my sister took Grant out to play at an indoor bounce house gym. Grant said, "Thank you for taking me to Jump N Jammin."

He did it unprompted. He did it when they were lying on his bed for story time an hour later and he interrupted the book to say, "Thank you."

I didn't tell him to say it. She didn't tell him to say it. He said it because he meant it.

Here's the thing. Grant sometimes throw epic tantrums. Screaming, hysterical, can't-even-get-him-to-listen-to-you-fits. Or if you tell him no for something, he might immediately launch into this annoying fake cry that's not a great look or sound on a nearly four-year-old. He will knock his toddling sister over so that he can pick her up and hug her, and then turn around and do it again. He will eat nothing but chicken nuggets. And he's still not consistent about coming when I call him. He hates to clean up. Reverence is a foreign concept.

There are days when he flat drives me nuts. I extrapolate his behavior into the future and I wonder what it means for him. What clues are buried in his meltdowns? What character flaws are real and permanent and what is just standard three-year-old psychoticness?

But then I don't worry. Because the thank you he told my sister is something he said because he meant it. And it's not the first time he's done it. He has the ability to be in a moment he's really enjoying, a little snapshot of happiness, like when my neighbor gave him cold water on a hot day, and he can stop and look at whoever made his happy moment possible and say, "Thank you," with genuine delight. Because he wants to.

A grateful heart . . .

I didn't teach him that. He came to me that way. It's one of the special little things that makes him Grant. And a grateful heart is a powerful gift. It will keep him humble. It will help him find joy in everyday life. It will draw people to him. It will multiply his blessings.

And the tantrums still make me nuts. But I worry less for his future. Because his core, his essence . . . his spirit, are good and true and with a little nurture, he will grow to be great.

I love him. Crazy stinker.

Just ten.

2011-07-22T05:32:00.000-07:00

1. I'm super tired of all the Comic Con tweets. But I sort of love Twitter.

2. Everyone on Burn Notice this season has terrible hair for some reason. Just bad dye jobs and bad cuts. It's not good.

3. I have far more books to read than I have time to get to. There are worse problems. But I sort of wish there was a pause button on my day where I could stop time for an hour and read without anyone needing a single thing from me and I wouldn't need to feel guilty about neglecting them. Ah, bliss.

4. I don't like big gaudy gold watches.

5. I really like Just Dance 2 on the Wii but I absolutely cannot do it for exercise unless, per my three-year-old's demands, I do the Monster Mash song first.

6. I have never had a black eye, a broken bone, or a bloody nose. Now that I've put that out there, I'm sure can I expect one of the three any time in the next week.

7. I don't think of myself as being superstitious, but I totally am. I believe in the rule of three (deaths and maybe even pregnancies). And I have other weird superstitious quirks. I've been wearing the same underwear every day for three years because I'm sure it's how the LSU football team got a big win. And I'm so totally making that up. Anyway, I also think that extreme superstitiousness and OCD might be cousins and I think they're in the control-issues family.

8. I only just discovered Honey Badger and Marcel the Shell. I am in love.

9. I've gotten to be both of the things I wanted to be when I grew up. That feels pretty good.

10. I think pregnant ladies are really freaking cute.

In which I feel sorry for others . . .

2011-07-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

I blogged today at my writing blog. The little follow widget is working now for those of you who wanted to follow me there before, so feel free to hop on over and click it. And by that I mean hop on over and click it.

Anyway, you can go see why I feel pitied Robison Wells and Sarah Eden by clicking here.

Bag it.

2011-07-18T05:43:00.000-07:00

I didn't know designer handbags were a thing until college when my roommate's mom was loopy for Dooney & Bourke purses. Then I thought maybe it was a rich suburban mom thing.

I found out that everyone my age was into the designer bag when I started teaching in California. Their poison was Coach. When I first saw the Coach logo purses, I was like "Meh."

And then suddenly I was like, "Ooh, I want one."

And that is why I don't buy expensive purses. I'm slightly obsessed and wished I owned one, but I don't know if it's because I genuinely like them and think they're cute or if it's because all my friends have them. And I haven't been able to figure it out for at least seven or so years.

I guess there's also the thing where I won't buy one because I usually have other things to do with $300 at any given moment. Like buy three pairs of shoes.

I owned a Coach purse once. It was a gift from my sister-in-law. I loved it. And then Grant smote it with my MAC Viva Glam V lipstick and now it's beyond repair. It's the primary reason I won't be paying for his college tuition.

Anyway, I think my conscience would bother me if I spent a bunch of money for a purse because most of the time when I see a really cute purse in the $200-300 range, I can find a really similar one at Target for oh, say . . . $20. So every time I have an impulse to buy a Coach purse (and I have it often), I think, "You should go write that check to Japanese disaster relief."

And I don't, but I also don't buy the purse.

But now I own an expensive purse. Want to see?

Kenny and I stumbled across this cool little design gallery on a meander through Laguna Beach last month. I liked the bag, but I was like, "That's too expensive." It was somewhere around $100. But then this lady came in, the one who sells them to the gallery, and she was bringing more in to sell. And I got the inside scoop. The bags are made by women in South Africa as a path out of poverty. They're constructed out of repurposed tires and old license plates and there are a few different silhouettes. You can check them out here if you want. (They're a better deal on the website than what I paid retail, btw.)

And I have to thank the purveyors of fair trade goods and microfinanced trinkets and lovelies so that I can own completely cute useless things AND make the world a better place at the same time.

It's like I'm a better person every time I whip out my credit card.

Grab bag

2011-07-14T12:01:00.000-07:00

So every single day that I've been in the car since pitching a fit about Grease, a song from the Grease soundtrack has come on the radio. And here's what I think about that: Olivia Newton John could sang. Moving on...

I don't know why I continue to be horrified weekly by The Bachelorette. It's like I forget from week to week what the show is even about. And still last night as I watched the playback, I heard myself saying things like, "What is wrong with you people?" and then, like, pleading for at least one, yea verily, even ONE to find some dignity. But no one did. And yet, I leave it on my DVR.

It's gray outside today. I don't know know why I love it, but I do. So much.

I ate bacon last night. It's a rare treat and it made me so happy.

I had pumpkin ravioli with shaved Lorna Doone cookies on top the night before htat. I couldn't get enough of the crunch. Who'd a thunk?

One time, I was like, I'll never put my girl in frou-frou ballerina skirts and giant bows. And I am SO that mom now. I love it. I call her princess. It is terrible. I will not be stopping.

I am already counting down to the delicious dinner I will make for Saturday night. I love food. Also, I am gaining weight again. But at least it comes from honest-to-goodness delight in food and not emotional eating. Unless you count the thing where I get a piece of chocolate as a reward for even the most minimal exertion. Which I don't.

I have made a goal that at the very least I will sweep my kitchen floor every night. It just seems like something normal people do.

Did I mention that today's post is random?

And do I even need to mention that random is my blog's default setting?

I'm going to have an omelet now because my husband makes me one every morning because I was very, very smart about who I married. In case you're not my Facebook friend, you should know that he was so moved by the bizarre disconnect in the SYTYCD Lost Children of Uganda dance last night, he performed a totally unprompted interpretative dance of his feelings about the lack of consensus over the debt ceiling. A few weeks ago, he treated me to some spontaneous krumping and then promptly twisted his ankle.

I know, I know. You all want to come over on Wednesday nights now. Too bad, so sad. I would have to clean before you come by and apparently beyond the sweeping-due-to-meet-social-norms, I just don't do that anymore.

URGENT!!!!!!!

2011-07-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

A decision MUST be made my 3 p.m. Mountain Time today. Which of these three covers do you love best for my next book? The design team at Covenant needs to know ASAP because it goes to press THIS AFTERNOON! Please click here to vote! http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Z829NMZ

A)

Choice B:

CHOICE C:

I am desperate for your help. HELP ME! Nevermind the sidebar poll. My publisher wants you to use the link above!

Bloghopping

2011-07-11T04:31:00.000-07:00

You know what I always do when I have way too much to do?

I find one more thing to do.

Um, do you think this is coded into female DNA?

Anyway, here's the thing about this blog. It is my happy place. I come here to ~~rant~~ hang out. I've got lots of like-minded friends who stop by to visit me. This is good and makes me happy.

But did you notice the name of my blog up there? Write Stuff. And that's what I do on this blog. It's also what I originally meant this blog to be about: writing. Only, then I got bored with talking about that all the time and then this blog became something else.

Right now, though, my brain has gone all writing haywire. And I find myself wanting, even needing, to have conversations about writing to let it all out. However, I kinda still don't want to do that here. Here is still for about shoes. And kid vomit. And how I got ripped off by this one infomercial (oh, I cannot make the spelling on that look right to me) because I was delirious, but have now decided I don't mind. I guess I need to tell that story. Wednesday, maybe.

Here's where doing yet another thing I don't have time for comes in. (You thought I forgot, I know. While senile dementia is a certainty for me, I've still got twenty years before I worry.) I'm taking a tentative step toward publishing in the national market and it occurred to me that I need a proper author blog for that. Only it's me, so there won't be anything proper about it. But it will be author-y. And write-y. And I've only got three posts up but they discuss things like how Melanie Jacobson is ruining my life. Or at least harshing my mellow.

So if you're one of my writer friends (i.e. Annette, Jenny P, Susan, Becca, Chantele, Maggie F, etc.), would you mind hopping over there and waving hello? And by that I mean click the follow button? I'm still only posting three times a week but it will be twice here and once there. I need the outlet to pour out writing thoughts, yes. But it's not really fun to talk into a void.

Anyway, I kind of hate my template there but it'll do until I figure out what I do like. Or rather, I know what I like. I just have to figure out how to go about getting it done.

I digress.

Duh. It's me.

I'm World Class, Baby!

2011-07-06T16:50:00.000-07:00

I have finally figured out what I'm better at than anyone else in the world.

Are you ready for this?

I am a first-class, elite-level, totally phemomenal...

Underachiever.

Oh, yes. If I knew how to do bar graphs in Blogger, I'd make one to illustrate my potential versus my actual acheivement. I imagine it would look something like if you built a mud hut next to the Chrysler Building and then asked, "All right. Who nailed it?"

Me=mud hut. Almost always.

Here's the thing. I have moments, measured by flashes in the pan, of greatness. Tiny little discrete instances in which I accomplish spectacular things. My father's eulogy. A couple of stellar scenes of dialogue. A perfect jambalaya.

Those were some of those moments.

But mostly I am a three-toed sloth in a herd of cheetahs, distinguished only by my total lack of engagement with all the things that matter: dishes, dinner-making, grocery shopping. Et cetera. Et cetera. Forever, amen.

There is a suitcase on my living room floor. It took me about four days to empty it, an armful at a time every time I went upstairs at which point I deposited at least half of what I schlepped up on the first available surface that may or may not have had any discernible relationship to where said pile of crap actually belonged. And three days later, the suitcase is still on my living room floor. I have no idea why.
I was feeling pretty bad about my underachieving until I realized that every skill we've been given, including this most unusual talent of mine, can be used for the greater good.

So I now officially invite all of you to drop by my house without warning whenever you need to feel better about yourselves. When I answer the door mid-afternoon still in my pajamas to reveal a living room strewn with toys and food wrappers, and one of my children crawls up to you wearing nothing but a diaper that's sort of almost all the way on, and the other runs out with his underpants on his head screaming, "Look at my stupid hat!", I promise you . . . your self-esteem will immediately improve. It's almost magical.

If you are allowed to see my kitchen, you will be mildly disgusted but feel like a superhuman.

Also, my underacheivement increases in direct proportion to the heat. It's over 90 today. Come on by. You'll feel amazing when you leave.

Greasy . . . goodness? Maybe just greasy.

2011-07-01T06:51:00.000-07:00

From an NPR interview about the Grease singalong at the Hollywood Bowl this weekend: "Why do you think this movie still captures new fans?" Answer: "It's just good, clean fun."

Ahem.

Wrong.

Or maybe right, if you define "clean" fun as tales of high school pregnancy, sexual conquest, and abandoning your morals to take up spandex pants and cigarette smoking in pursuit of the hot guy at school.

Then I guess that's right.

This is one of the funniest things to me about Mormon culture. And by "funny," I mean it makes me roll my eyes a lot. Hold on one second...

*Climbs on soapbox and taps microphone.

Attention, everyone! Attention, please! Adding a peppy musical score to something does not automatically make it family friendly. I'M LOOKING AT YOU, GLEE. Among other things.

I do not care if you love Grease or Glee. I like Grease. I just wasn't allowed to watch it until I was in college and then when I saw it, I was like, "Your parents let you see this? Aaaaagh!"

I don't like Glee for oh, so many reasons but again, I get why people do and it doesn't bother me in the least if you're one of them. But the moms watching it with their preteen daughters as "wholesome" family entertainment baffle me. Because . . . have you listened to the talking parts between the songs?

Uh...

(You can read my friend Susan's most excellent rant about it HERE.)

It's because we Mormons have these little hair trigger responses to certain things. "Oh, Knocked Up was edited for TV? Then everything about it must automatically be okay!" or "Oh, this was performed on Broadway? Fire up the soundtrack for the family singalong because I'm sure it's FINE!" or "It has the word 'Family' in it? Then I bet it's edifying as the Proclamation on the Family. LET'S DO THIS THING!"

That last one especially makes me laugh as applied to the ABC Family channel.

Ah hahahaha!

What the crap kind of family is watching that network's prime time shows together? How are they not all cringing and making a conspicuous lack of eye contact with each other? I can see it as a guilty pleasure, sure. But you could not pay me enough money to watch something like The Secret Life of an American Teenager with my adolescent child. Although you could maybe convince me to do it on the grounds that all the squirming will help me burn calories. (Side note on the CW: Gossip Girls should not be viewed by anyone under the age of forty not accompanied by a parental unit who can fast forward and/or clap their hands over your eyes to shield your innocence. Even if you're a grown up, married, sex-having adult.)

Let me be clear. I think a lot of people get that you have to use a little judgment when watching any show, whatever it is. I can sing the Grease soundtrack from memory too (except I don't sing that one song because, ew). And if you're making informed choices, GOOD. What gives me a giggle (okay, no, it's the eye roll) is this line of thinking: "Oh, a show about a high school show choir! How uplifting!" or "If the word 'family' is in the title of the channel, there's no need to worry.'"

Yes, you do.

Just sayin'.

City Lights

2011-06-27T20:01:00.000-07:00

Just yesterday I was looking down over the hive of Times Square in New York and thinking how ironic it is that the busiest part of Manhattan holds the fewest New Yorkers. It's mostly tourists and the vendors who hawk their cheap souvenirs to them that fill the streets. Pretty funny stuff.

I got back today. It was heaven to hold hands with my husband and take big gulping whiffs of my kids. But Kazzy's husband, formerly Professor Burton to me, posted a quote on Facebook today that best sums up my experience. "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." — Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It)

Now, I know it's true that all profound words ever spoken in the history of mankind before 1950 are attributed to the same four men: Abraham Lincoln (anything about justice), Winston Churchill (anything about courage) and Ben Franklin and Mark Twain (anything pithy and clever). But that quote sounds exactly like Mark Twain.

Anyway, it says better than I can the exact thoughts that had been running through my head through my whole four day trip. Even as I spent a few days with my old college girlfriends preoccupying ourselves with eating and shopping, my mind kept expanding in spite of itself.

It's uncomfortable sometimes. But I'm coming back from vacation more charged up than ever with ideas about things and people and time and art and culture. And my contribution and my gain.

I love New York.

Firing up the Alice Cooper

2011-06-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

Today my oldest "graduates" from 6th grade. You know what that means, right?

I DID IT! Whoohoo! I survived another year! I will proceed to Zappos.com immediately following this post and reward my awesomeness with hot shoes for making it through elementary school and more impressively, pre-algebra. Also: fractions.

Today is a potpourri of things that smell nice on the Internet. First, if you want to read The List or give it as a gift to someone, or just hold it and stroke the cover because you wore out the copy you own doing that already, you can win a copy of it here, plus a bunch of other books, and it's EASY. Like, leave a comment easy, even.

Second, a little while ago, I posted the first page of my new manuscript for an anonymous editor to critique. I was all freaked out about it and stuff because I'm working on something different this time around, but it went well. If you want to do know what I'm doing, or offer your feedback, you can check it out here on Julie Bellon's blog.

I feel like I should write more, but really, I've got nothing to say. I guess this is a great opportunity for me to practice the principle of NOT TALKING JUST BECAUSE. Besides, a picture is worth a thousand words so here's one of the shoes I think my husband is about to buy me (thanks, honey!):

(Oh, and a quick side note. If you sort ballet flats on Zappos by popularity, the first twenty that come up are Crocs. To the guilty party buying these: STOP IT.)

Here's another tip. Wait. NO.

2011-06-15T20:56:00.000-07:00

My husband is an excellent tipper. It's one of his many great qualities. I didn't have to reform him. He was tipping well before I ever came along.

I'm a pretty good tipper. I understand the difference between tipping, and oh, say... tithing (I'm looking at you, UTAH). Answer: at least 5%. AT LEAST.

Here's what I don't understand about tipping:

Why do I have to tip EVERYBODY?

It's because of freaking Starbucks and their stupid tip jar. They're ruining it for the rest of us.

Example: I worked at an upscale Chinese restaurant in high school. I seated people and packed up take out orders for people. I never once expected a tip. It certainly wasn't as hard as what the servers did and it was just part of my minimum wage job. Not a big deal.

I managed Nielsen's Frozen Custard in Orem during college. I made a lot of sandwiches and concretes. We never put out a tip jar. We never even thought about it.

And then Starbucks happened in a one-on-every-corner kind of way after I graduated college and somehow I'm sure that's to blame for why I see tip jars everywhere I go and WORSE, why I see a look of expectation on people's faces with the tip jar.

I'm like, permanently George Constanza and the deli tip jar.

The thing is, I'm always happy to tip for good service. My hair girl? I do right by her. Ditto my waxer and manicurists (although mine are PUSHY. I tip 20% and they always act like I shorted them by $10. Puh-leeze. And no, I don't want a stupid flower on my toe.) (Um, on a $30 mani/pedi, is a $5 tip okay?). We often tip the babysitter. Always the server.

But the hostess at the Thai restaurant who packed my to-go order? No. And not the Subway sandwich clerk. And not the grocery bagger who walks me out. In fact, even when I desperately need the help to my car, I won't accept it because I never have cash for a tip.

Also, girls at Golden Spoon yogurt? You did not have to work very hard for me to get my yogurt. So no, I'm not tipping you. And I'm definitely not tipping at the self-serve yogurt place. Why do you even have a tip jar out?

Not every single service worker deserves to be tipped.

They don't.

But I wish they would quit looking at me like that!

Here's a tip.

2011-06-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

Under the heading of much awesomeness:

Check out my friend Brittany's blog and welcome her to our crazy dysfunctional blogging family, won't you? She's brand new to blogging. And by that I mean she's had a blog for about eleventy-billion years but only just decided to use it this week. But I think you'll be able to see in the two posts she's done why you're going to want to keep going back. First post?

Definitions of Computer Terms: or Why I Shouldn't Have Cheated Off That Guy In My 9th Grade Computer Class Who May Have Had a Crush on Me but Was Also My Cousin By Marriage

Also, read her "About Me" section. It's about as entertaining as DeNae's.

Also, Charette shocked my socks off with this surprise review of The List. It made me laugh. You can check it out on her blog. Apparently, once you read it, your summer is allowed to begin.

You can also read a review from the Deseret News that my husband posted on my website. Ignore the contest info. That's outdated. (Also ignore the fact that the reviewer spelled my last name wrong DESPITE IT BEING ON THE COVER OF MY BOOK [I used to not care but every time this happens, people I know suddenly start spelling it wrong. Aaargh). But check out the little flip flops in your browser window tab. He did those for me. How hard does that rock?

Lastly, I would like to publicly announce that I suck at online Scrabble. Everyone thinks I'm going to be good. I'm not. Now you know.

All right, as you were. But seriously, in a few days, we're talking about why Starbucks is making my life harder than it needs to be. Stupid tip jar.

Do you KNOW what my skill set is?

2011-06-12T21:53:00.000-07:00

Today we're going deep. Come back in a couple of days and we'll talk about how Starbucks is ruining my life. But for right now, wade in with me.

Mormons get callings. These are jobs at church. They are voluntary. They are varied. I have taught 11-year-old Sunday School and been in charge of the ward newsletter. And a lot of stuff in between.

I wasn't really involved with church in my twenties. I ran wild, showed up often enough to keep my place at BYU. That's about it. After BYU, I more or less didn't show up at all. And then I decided things needed to change and I stuck a toe back in the water and by thirty, I was up to my eyeballs in church and pretty happy about it.

When Kenny and I got married and moved to our ward (congregation) in Huntington Beach, I expected the bishop to call me in and put me right to work. I had just left a teaching career where I had also coordinated a major program that attracted national interest. So . . . I was good at my job. Lots of life experience. Lots of job skills. Lots of life skills. Blah, blah, blah.

Here's the thing. If you're ever in charge of something, trust me, I'm the best right hand woman you'll ever have. I won't bore you with a list of the reasons why, but I promise you it's true.

So when we met with our new bishop, I fully expected to be called to teach something. I mean, that's what I DO, you know? Or lead something. Probably run the activities committee because the chairperson was leaving. That would be fun. I'd only need two months for our ward activities to become legendary.

The bishop sat us down. Husband gets called as ward mission leader. I get called as . . .

The stake building scheduler.

What?

What the what?

To say I felt underutilized would be an understatement of massive proportions.

But I smiled and said, "Sure."

And then I did the job. I did it as well as I knew how and to be honest, it was so easy, it felt like cheating.

And to be even more honest, I really wished I had something more to do.

But whatever. I did it.

Months passed and my bishop, who was in charge of our stake building shared by three wards, called me in for something else. I don't remember what. And he asked me how the building scheduling was going and I smiled and said, "It's great."

And something funny happened. A look of total relief washed over his face and he thanked me profusely for handling it. He couldn't believe there hadn't been any problems and he was amazed at how smoothly things were going.

And I realized right then and there that the Lord had put my skills to use right where he needed them most: with me in a position to remove one major stress from my overburdened bishop's shoulders.

It was a humbling lesson and one that taught me that the most important thing I can do in any calling is to make sure that my piece of the puzzle is one that whoever I serve under never, ever has to worry about. Doesn't matter how large or small that piece is; it shouldn't ever have to cross their minds other than for them to think of it and dismiss it immediately as "taken care of." Then they can throw their energy to other more important things.

I don't think I'm meant to be a captain because I'm so effective as a lieutenant. And it feels really good to make someone's life a little easier that way.

I love figuring stuff out, you know?

Are you ready for your close up?

2011-06-07T11:15:00.000-07:00

Fame seems like hell on earth.

I have never wanted it.

If I were in a famous rock band, I would definitely want to be the bassist and I would never, ever dress like a rock star. I'd dress like a soccer dad so no one would ever figure out I'm famous.

My kind of fame is the author-y kind, where few people recognize you on sight. Like my friend's dad for instance, who casually mentions to his daughter that some author lady had been attending their (my childhood) ward for a few weeks because some movie was filming in town. It was Stephenie Meyer.

I can deal with that kind of anonymity and the checks that come with it.

But Mitt Romney and the South Park guys are indirectly dragging me into the spotlight whether I want it or not. Tony nominated musicals, Republican presidential bids . . . this week's cover of Newsweek:

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/06/05/mormons-rock.html

Sigh.

I'm not voting for Romney. I have way too many issues with him. Jon Huntsman is potentially more interesting. But I may vote (again) for Obama because I DON'T VOTE FOR PEOPLE JUST BECAUSE THEY'RE MORMON.

I do other stuff just because someone's Mormon, like buy their book or album, which I may not ever read or listen to. But I certainly don't vote that way. I don't even vote on American Idol or SYTYCD that way. (Um, I don't actually vote on either of those shows, anyway, to be honest.)

But that's a different post.

This is about the spotlight being on me. My neighbors know we're Mormon. Most of my closest friends aren't Mormon and I'm sure they can't miss the national spotlight we're getting.

Am I ready for my close up?

I hope so. I hope I've lived my beliefs with thoughtfulness and I match up favorably with the good things they will expect. Because now . . . everyone's looking.

Speaking of spotlights, the always excellent Melissa Bastow has produced another issue of Barrel of Blogs magazine and yours truly is in there unnecessarily taking up two pages to tell you what I'm doing this summer in case you couldn't stand not knowing. Wander over and find yourself some new bloggers to read. Also, look at all the pretty pictures!

Losing It

2011-06-02T00:56:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of things that could drive me to murder. Bookmark it so when I inevitably turn homicidal, you can point the cops in the right direction.

1. Working with my kid at 12:42 in the morning on a project for school. After nearly eight hours on said project. And repeating myself for the fiftieth time when I say, "I said do it neatly."

2. Driving behind someone going nearly twenty miles under the speed limit. That happened today. I honked. But all my fingers stayed firmly on the wheel, thankyouverymuch. ALL of them.

3. Getting stuck in an intersection when the arrow turns red because some batty woman decides to cross without a walk signal. Slowly. I honked again. Fingers still followed the commandments.

4. Rules about comma usage.

5. Commas.

6. Costco when people swarm the burrito sample lady while I'm trying to get to the frozen chicken tenders.

7. Library fees racked up people whose names are not Melanie Jacobson but who live in my house and screw with my library good-standing.

8. These TV shows: the local news (any channel), The Real Housewives of Anything, any VH-1 non-musical programming, Two and a Half Men.

9. Cutting carbs. I'm serious about this one, though. It must never, ever happen or else "rage issues" will take on a whole new meaning.

10. The birds who start chirping at TEN AT NIGHT. NIGGGGHHHHHHTTTTTTT. TENNNNNNNN. I hate them. They are loud. They are not as cute as they think they are. They are the lady in the ward choir that everyone hopes will forget to show up on the Sunday of the actual performance. They are that loud. They are that discordant. They are still going THREE hours later. I hate you, birds!

(But Sheridan, I really don't hate nature. I just don't like it when nature happens within a six foot perimeter of my house.)

So here's a thought. I shouldn't blog at (now) 1-freaking-a.m. when I am furious with my child, his teachers, our school district, the state of public education in general, the egregious use of algebra in schools specifically, and . . .

Oh, wait. He's done.

Good night.

Randomness

2011-05-31T08:45:00.000-07:00

1. Can someone go check yesterday's post and tell me if Kalola is kidding or if I randomly just got chewed out by someone I've never heard from before?

2. I had an article run in the Deseret News and the Mormon Times yesterday. It's about online dating. It even features a quote from a blogger some of you will know. You can CLICK HERE to read it.

3. I just turned in a short story my editor requested for a Christmas anthology my publisher is compiling. I kept procrastinating it but once it was done, I loved it. I doubt they'll end up using mine because it includes the line, "Watching my mom die was killing my Christmas spirit." But really, I nailed exactly what I wanted to say, so maybe if they don't use it, it will appear as a blog post come holiday time.

4. I'm obese today. I might not be tomorrow. This is because according to my BMI, if I lose one pound then I'm "normal" but at this weight and higher I'm obese. I know I should probably be depressed by this but I honestly just find it funny, probably because I don't feel fat and I have lots of cute clothes I like to wear. Granted, a lot of them are skirts, but still.

5. I don't like living in a place where there are snakes. Don't they know that we build suburbs for the strict purpose of denying that nature exists beyond our garderners' abilities to tame it? Hmpfh.

I don't want to grow up.

2011-05-28T08:06:00.000-07:00

I'm not afraid of getting older.

But I'm scared of dressing older.

Because, oh man. Sometimes folks get it wrong. The old folks, I mean. They're like, "Everything on my body has drifted south by 25%. I will now live in sweatsuits."

I don't know what the connection is between those two thoughts but I think that's how the fuzzy logic goes. Of course, these are the ones who maybe didn't dress great before.

There's another class of old people dressing that involves embroidery. I don't know what this is all about, but suddenly every sweater or t-shirt they wear has to have stuff embroidered on it. Stuff like scotty dogs and outlines of the state of Kentucky.

????

Can't you just share your love for those things in verbal conversation, old people?

And there's a third type of old people dressing that involves the wearing of old people fabrics. I'm looking at you, polyester. And elastic. Especially when you come together to form pants. This is a tough one because the intention is good. They're trying to put the effort in. They just don't realize that these poly-fabulous leisure slacks are an old-people-only phenomenon.

I WILL NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT.

When I was little, I thought old people were awesome because the coolest people I knew were old. I still think that. And the coolest old people I know have gray hair and wrinkles. Maybe that's why it didn't faze me when I plucked another gray from my scalp yesterday morning. I even thought to myself, "Wow. Even in the nesting grounds of The Real Housewives of Orange County, I am going to age gracefully. I plucked a gray hair and moved on without weeping. I am great."

But then, halfway down the mall later in the same afternoon, I had an epiphany. I went to Express to return a sweater and I saw . . . nothing, NOTHING I would buy. Shrug. Moving on. And then I pushed the stroller past Chico's and saw something in the window and thought, "That's cute."

WHAT?

Stoller. Pshaw. IT MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN A WALKER.

And no lie, for often as I forget sunscreen and burn, I think I'm secretly trying to speed up the process of roasting my skin to a fine, aged, leathery patina.

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?

Thank heavens there's Ann Taylor Loft to ease me through the next ten years gracefully. But I swear if I step into a Coldwater Creek a day before fifty, I'm punching myself in the head.

*Please note: I'm actually glad these places are going to be around when I get a bit older because they'll save me from polyester pants. I just want to walk into Nordstrom and drift toward Brass Plum instead of St. John's Knits because "their music isn't so loud."

*It's entirely possible my formative career years spent in retail management (a la the mall) have made an indelible mark on me.

Cut off

2011-05-24T11:44:00.000-07:00

Last night I unsubscribed from a few blogs I follow and I admit that in a few cases, I did so gleefully.

I am petty.

Right now, in this moment regarding this situation, I DON'T CARE.

One of these blogs was from someone fairly well-established in one community of bloggers I hang around who has every so often sent out blanket "Read my blog" email invites. So I go. I follow. I comment from time to time in an effort to build a relationship. She never reciprocates.

Bye bye.

I don't think that everyone whose blog I like has to in turn like mine and come back and comment. But I do think it takes a lot of gall to invite someone to read your blog merely so you can be worshipped and petted.

So that was a fun one to click "Unfollow."

For sure, blogging has made my life richer. But it is 90% a reciprocal relationship for me. I read very few blogs where I don't have some type of connection to the blogger. If I don't comment on your blog, I don't expect the same from you. Sometimes commenters drop by here and I'll swing by their blog a few times but I find I don't have much in common with them and so I can't think of anything to say. That's okay. It's okay if people do the same to me.

But heaven knows I wouldn't be harrassing someone to come read me if I had no intention of ever trying to be their friend, too. And I HATE the idea of blogging just for business. I have zero problem with monetizing a blog, but the idea that the whole purpose behind someone starting a blog, ESPECIALLY A RANDOM MUSINGS personal blog, to make money is off-putting somehow. That's someone who doesn't understand the social side of blogging. If you're a craft blogger and trying to parlay it into fame and moola, this makes perfect sense to me. But a personal blog that doesn't grow from an authentic place of participating in both sides of the "sharing" equation" rubs me the wrong way.

All right. I've taken a deep breath and I'm done now.

I'm off to visit blogs of people I like and want to hear from. Because that's why I blog.

P.S. I'm sure many of you are dying to hang out with me EVEN MORE after this, so that being the case, if you're Twitter, click in the sidebar to be my friend. I want to Tweet with more people I know but I can't figure out how to find all of you. Oh, and I'll give away a copy of The List if I get to a 100 followers by Friday. 78 is embarrassing when 62-ish are those creepy web-bot spammer things.

The devil made me not do it

2011-05-16T22:01:00.000-07:00

My life is not hard. I admit this. But I have to say that even still, it is hard to blog and draft new stories and revise old ones for official deadlines for my publisher.

Especially because I am undisciplined.

I can honestly spend two hours doing everything except what I need to and not have any idea where the time went. Random research for my novel on the Internet. Business-type conversations with writer-type friends. Scrabble. But not write.

I'm frustrated with myself when I do this but I keep doing it. I think the frustration comes from knowing exactly how much I can get done when I buckle down. Want to know how much? GOBS. I can bang out impressive word counts when I put my mind to it. I just too often don't.

I fritter. I'm a fritterer. I ought to have a pageant sash that says so. And a scepter made of origami-ed Wrigley gum wrappers and a tiara of jimmied paperclips, both of which I could produce if you put me in front of my laptop and said, "You have two hours to write" and then left a pack of gum and a small tray of paper clips lying near by. Well, sure I COULD write, my train of thought starts, and then wrecks on, but I could also make fantastic creations out of gum wrappers and paper clips because I am the MacGyver of procrastination.

So that's how that goes. More or less every day, really.

Anyway, Tuesday is a new day. A new day where I will grumble about not having the time to get things done, but really--I have the time. It wouldn't even be that hard to fit it in. I'd just have to, I don't know. . . quit blobbing on the interwebs for an hour or two.

I think I need to spend some serious thought on figuring out exactly how I'm using my time lately. I don't watch that much TV. I don't read nearly as much as I used to. Ditto blogging, both reading and writing. I'm really sort of confused by all this. Is it really possible that I'm spending THAT much time on TMZ.com?

Hm.

Well, before I go, it's time to announce winner of the giveaway of Bumpy Landings by Don Carey. Survey says . . . it's CYD. Whoohoo! Email me your address and I'll make sure a copy gets out to you soon!

Want to go to Hawaii?

2011-05-11T08:26:00.000-07:00

My friend Don Carey is letting me give away another of his books! Hooray for all of you! All you have to do to win is leave a comment on this post and tell me your most favorite vacation place. Contest closes on Saturday night.

Jordan MacDonald dreams of flying above his Hawaiian home, but his mother demands that he stay on the ground. Spurred by the pain of a failed relationship, however, Jordan secretly begins flying lessons. Just as he finds love again, Jordan's lies close in around him, and his dishonesty attracts more turbulence than he's ever faced in the air.

Anatomy of a BAD joke

2011-05-09T23:46:00.000-07:00

A bunch of people most of us have in common have been and will be blogging about a conference we all went to this weekend: LDS Storymakers. And it was epic. Most people will tell you it's because the classes were awesome, the speakers incredible, etc. All true, by the way. But it was epic for me for entirely different reasons.

See, here's the thing. The very first post from which most people discovered me three years ago chronicled the absolute disaster of my first writing conference. That story is here. You'll think it's funny. Maybe we're at the point where tragedy + time = comedy, because I admit, I think it's kinda funny now, too. Kinda.

Then at last year's conference, I had another moment of total idiocy which you can read about here. Yeah, you'll get the idiot shivers. Me, too. I'm learning it's a function of me + writing conferences = tragedy.

So it should come as no surprise to you that I'm fresh back from another conference and this time, I reached the highest heights--wait, no. Make that the lowest of lows, in my quest to flame out of one of these on such a massive scale that I'm forever barred from all writing conferences. In the world. EVER.

All right. Here's the thing. This comes down to a joke. Imagine if you will, a girl walks up with something scribbled on her conference name badge. Let's say someone named Becca squints and (to be funny) says, "Does that say (insert name of not very famous author) was here?" And the other girl, we'll call her Karen, says "No," like why would she want the autograph of that minor author? And then I think I'm being funny and I say, "What she's not telling us is that she now has a lower back Sharpie tattoo that says (not famous author) was here."

Okay. Not a great joke. In hindsight, marginally inappropriate. The joke was intended to circumscribe a couple of tropes (yeah, I just explained it that way--I'm too tired to think of the easy words, so let's all cope) into one joke: dumb groupies of rock stars etc. who get Sharpie tattoos on their bodies + how the tramp stamp is usually the most cliched spot for a girl to get a tattoo = witty.

So, yeah. Not a great joke. But let's now imagine that instead of me cracking this joke about two girls (because I'd been hanging out with primarily women for two days straight at this point) that I cracked it about two guys (because I'd been hanging out with primarily women for two days straight and wasn't thinking clearly about my audience). I meant the joke the same way that it would have been meant had it actually been two girls involved (tramp stamp Sharpie tattoo of minor celebrity = silly), but if it's two guys, the meaning of the joke TOTALLY changes.

Just think about it.

The poor man who I was teasing blanched and looked horrified. It took me a full forty-five minutes to figure out why he was horrified. Then I was horrified. Like, completely and utterly horrified.

I leaned over and begged Becca to tell me how to fix it. She was like, "Oh, sister. You can't." My other friend Brittany was like, "Ohhhhh. Yeah, okay, I get where you were going now, but I totally thought you were making a different joke and I was a little shocked."

And I was all sobbing and what not.

Okay, I wasn't sobbing. But I was writhing on the inside. Really, it was awful. Beyond awful.

I don't know if I'm going to have to swear off writing conferences in the future, or maybe just the vodka I'm always hiding in my water bottles. But something's gotta give.

This post stinks.

2011-05-03T11:22:00.000-07:00

So I was going to bring raw almonds as a "save me" snack during the LDS Storymakers conference I'm attending this week . . . until I found out almonds cause gas. And I'm presenting. I already have nightmares where people exit the room muttering, "Wow. She stunk." I don't need them to mean that literally.

My mom used to have all these theories about foods that caused her gas. If she ever got gas within an hour of eating any food, no matter what it was, she would pretty much never eat that food again. So yeah, she more or less lived on oatmeal. No gas! During the last month of two before she died, when she still had an appetite, she took a great deal of satisfaction in eating whatever she wanted and not worrying about the fall out. And folks, sometimes it was nuclear level.

I've learned a lot by having parents who died too young. One of those things is: don't leave things unsaid. Another of those things is: eat stuff you like even if it makes you gassy because life is short. Except if you're presenting at a conference. Then don't do that.

I'm like, pretty wise and stuff. That's how I can find a lesson in anything.

Anyway, time to figure out a plan B. Off to Google: Do baby carrots cause gas? Oooh, or better yet: Snacks that taste delicious and won't make you fat OR give you gas.

2011-04-26T21:26:00.000-07:00

My friend broke her boob.

Here's the thing. If yo're going to suffer a mediumish-to-major injury, you need to have a good story for it.

True lame story: the worst injury I've ever had was a dislocated knee. I showed up to eighth grade with a massive full leg brace and got to do physical therapy for three months. It was an impressive looking injury, and a highly visible one. I got like, a million questions about how I hurt it.

Battling grizzlies, chasing down a purse snatcher, at the bottom of a tackle pile in Saturday afternoon football: all acceptable answers.

Not the real answers, but good ones.

The answer I had to give: I did this getting out of bed.

Yeah. That's right. I ripped the cartilage in my knee my swinging my legs over the side of the bed like I did every morning.

NOT awesome.

James had a dramatic toe injury last week along the lines of oozing blood and an urgent care visit.

"It hurts!" he wailed.

I shrugged. "At least you've got a good story out of it."

"You are so wise, Mom!" is what he meant, even though his actual words were "What the crap are you talking about?"

He got the injury, in case you were dying to know, when he and I tried to rescue some wood from an HOA beautification project in our neighborhood to give to Kenny for his lathe. An extremely heavy stump defeated us and it landed on James's toe. That stump wanted to rage against the dying of the light, folks.

So back to my friend who broke her boob. At least it's because she was hit by a car crossing Pacific Coast Highway. Some ditzy blonde in her daddy's convertible mowed her down and it popped my friend's breast implant.

But it's so much better than explaining she has to get a $16,000 surgical repair because she tripped on the carpet or something.

See? Silver lining.

Quit playing games

2011-04-22T10:33:00.000-07:00

Our family is fond of games. And you can keep your Parcheesi and Monopoly to yourself, thank you very much. We like to walk the edge. Sometimes we teeter toward the brink of absurdity, like when we play Freeze Face. I've told you about this game before and if you aren't playing it, then you're missing out. You need a DVR and a complete lack of ego to play and then you're all set. Just pick a show, any show, and randomly press the pause button. The person of your choosing has to duplicate the expression on the screen. You win by. . . um, actually, anyone not doing the actual face-making wins by virtue of getting to mock the face-maker. Good fun. (I'd show pictures but the oldest isn't cooperating. I'm not a fan of the spring break lazies so I sent him to his room to think about why laying around on the sofa and refusing to do anything until the third and fourth request is a bad idea, even if it's a request to pose for pictures of your mom's stupid game. But the banishment had more to do with 18 other things he refused to do this morning until I nagged him for the umpteenth time.)

Sometimes our games teeter on the brink of danger, like in the new Jacobson family classic: Refrigerator Tetris. This game takes nerves of steel and the steady hand of . . . well, Kenny, mostly. He's the champ around here. When you have three different kinds of milks, two varieties of juice, Egg Beaters and regular eggs, four different cheeses, and assorted containers of leftovers, it takes the dead eye and calm demeanor of a bomb squad technician to add anything else to the mix. Fail, and you'll 1) end up with marinara sauce down your shirt front and far worse, you'll 2) incur my wrath. "What do you mean you jumped to avoid a bath in fish stew? You should have just taken it like a man! Now you can scrub the stinky floor on your hands and knees. What? What does being THREE have to do with ANYTHING?"

Yep, I'm a joy to live with.

I need your brains

2011-04-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

Warning: I'm not proofreading tonight. Let's all just deal, okay?

We are having a super fun vacation in Washington DC at the moment or I'd be blogging and commenting more. However, I need to mention here like I did on Facebook that our house is being house-sat by a large man with a large dog and a large gun, so don't rob it, or cause it to be robbed, okay?

I'm actually popping in for just a second to ask a favor from creative friends. I need a title for a workshop I'm doing in August for a 16-stake midsingles conference. The conference theme is Mission: Possible (as in "With God, all things are possible.") My workshop is on Internet dating. And now I need a title for it.

This is what my brainstorming has produced so far:

Mission Possible: i-Date? Yes, You.
Mission Possible: How to Have Great Online Dating Experiences
Mission Possible: One Click Dating
Mission Possible: Online Dating is NOT Home Shopping

And, yeah. You see why I need help. I don't even need this to be phenomenal. Just good enough not to embarrass me when my name shows up next to the workshop title in the program. Also, it should make people want to come to the class.

If I hadn't just taken an Ambien to ~~cope with my kids~~ deal with jet lag, I'd offer some kind of prize. But I'm a little foggy right now, so I think I'll leave it at begging for help.

Help?

NOW it's Shakespeare. Kinda.

2011-04-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

Know why I want to be Shakespeare? Do you? Do you?

Guess which of the following reasons is my real reason for wanting to be the next Shakespeare:

1. I could quit waxing my upper lip if I were a dude.
2. I would have an actual reason for rocking a massive neck ruff.
3. He has better hair than me.
4. I could wear tights as pants and it would be real thing, not something I do as if I could bend reality to my will.
5. I could settle the arguments about whether I really write my own stuff. But probably I'd just stir the pot for fun.
6. I could tell dirty jokes and be considered cultured.
7. I could probably get Kenneth Branagh to take my calls.
8. I'd get a lifetime front row pass to Central Park's Shakespeare in the Park every summer.
9. I'd be HUGE on the talk show circuit.
10. I could make up my own words.

The reason, of course, is #10. I would like to make up my own words and then everybody would have to run around using them in sentences like it was a thing. A real, honest-to-goodness colloquialism, instantly coined by MOI.

Shakespeare did that a lot, you know. Took poetic license when he needed something to fit his rhyme and meter and what not. Also, sometimes he just made up phrases because they were awesome and he was sort of a genius. Maybe even a word-coining savant. Did you know he made up these phrases:

All's well that ends well

Be-all and the end-all (Macbeth)

Refuse to budge an inch (Measure for Measure / Taming of the Shrew)

Dead as a doornail (2 Henry VI)

Faint hearted (I Henry VI)

Fancy-free (Midsummer Night's Dream)

Forever and a day (As You Like It)

For goodness' sake (Henry VIII)

Good riddance (Troilus and Cressida)

Heart of gold (Henry V)

In a pickle (The Tempest)

In my heart of hearts (Hamlet)

Kill with kindness (Taming of the Shrew)

Melted into thin air (The Tempest)

Naked truth (Love's Labours Lost)

Play fast and loose (King John)

And the list literally goes on and on.

So I want to be the next Shakespeare and coin my own phrases. I've worked up a few. Tell me what you think:

"Mac it up, yo!"--This means I don't know what we're having for dinner tonight so let's bust out the mac and cheese.

"DUDE!"--This means that I can't believe you, stupid driver, did something so idiotic while driving, but I can't say a swear word because kids are in the car.

Um, that's pretty much it. Nevermind the feedback. I'll keep working on it.

You know don't who doesn't have to keep working? REBECCA NELSON because the random number generator picked you to win one of Kenny's bowls for your reviews of The List on Goodreads and Amazon. Whoohoo!

Also, The List is now #8 on the Deseret Book general fiction list and #2 on the Deseret Book romance list. YES!

Lastly, if you still want to win something, you can check out the awesome prizes on the Worldwide Ward Cookbook blog. Killer!

Shakesp--wait, no. Bowls again.

2011-04-13T13:31:00.000-07:00

All right, I had every intention of discussing my ambition to become the next Shakespeare (and not for the reasons you think--and no, I have no idea what you think, but I bet it's still not my reason), but it occurs to me we have a little unfinished business.

Somebody is getting one of my sexyhot husband's wooden bowls. So, to make sure I know you want to be considered, make sure that you have either left a comment on THIS post saying you did a review or you can leave a comment on the post you're reading now saying you did a review. You get an entry for each one you did, and it doesn't matter whether you did it before I started this contest. If anything, it gets you bonus points.

So go ahead and speak up if you want a shot at your bowl of choice. And then come back tomorrow and we'll discuss my Shakespeare ambitions.

Best review ever.

2011-04-11T20:10:00.000-07:00

This is too funny not to link to, but you have to go see it now because the author said he built in a 36-hour-self destruct-bot due to his post exposing his sensitive side.

This is a review of The List by a dude. A dude I've known since eighth grade when he was a much older, cooler senior. Then twenty years passed and some of us old Louisiana friends reconnected via Facebook. John is an airline pilot now. After reading this review, it makes me laugh to picture him setting there in his pilot's uniform reading my book, at first surrpetiously, and then not.

I had no idea he'd even bought the book until he scrawled on my Facebook wall with vague threats of bodily harm and criminal mischief because he had started reading. Now that he's written his review, I understand why. Off you go. If you want to read it click here, because that sucker's coming down quick, I guarantee it.

Siss-boom-bah!

2011-04-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

I'm confused.

The girl down the street, an eighth grader, is a competitive cheerleader. As in, she's on a squad. She goes to competitions. She takes tumbling classes to improve her performance. But she doesn't cheer for any team. The squad is sponsored by a local cheer coaching gym or something like that.

I kind of get this. If she's investing all this time and energy into cheer because she eventually wants to make the high school squad, I can see it. In fact, I asked her mom if she would be trying out to be on the the freshman squad.

"Maybe."

Apparently, you can't be on both. If she cheers for the high school, which has actual teams, she can't cheer on her club squad. So she thinks she might rather stay on the club squad. Which doesn't cheer for anything. They just put on their cheer uniforms and go to competitions where they cheer against other cheerleaders who also do not have teams.

I do not understand this. Someone please explain the point. And let me clarify, I support cheering as a sport just like I do gymnastics. I like watching the national high school and college competitions on ESPN. But those cheer squads all have teams they cheer for during their athletic seasons.

I'm trying to figure out the concept of cheer squads that just cheer . . . because?

I don't get it.

Bowling you over

2011-04-06T20:37:00.000-07:00

Do you want one of Kenny's awesome wooden bowls? Like maybe this one:

Or this one:

Or how about this one:

How do you get a chance to win? Well, I saved my very most special giveaway for last, so this one requires a little bit of work. I need to scrounge up HONEST reviews for my book, especially on Amazon and Deseret Book's website. If you've read it (that's part of the work you had to do) and you're inclined to rate it (that's the next part) and give it a sentence or two in a review (that's the last part), then you are entered to win your choice of one of these three bowls. Just come back and let me know which ones you did, and you get a point for each entry. You can totally copy and paste your entries. (Also, while you're there, if you've read Josi Kilpack's Blackberry Crumble, you can do the same for her and be entered to win some different prizes via her blog. I had already planned this before she started hers, but some of you might benefit from the work of one stone here, know what I'm saying?)

Anyway, this has been a pretty fantastic month as far as book-related things go. You may want to look away for a moment because I'm going to shout all the things that are making me happy from the rooftops right now:

1. My local bookstore ordered 50 copies of The List. They sold out.
2. A month ago, 19 people had requested it through the Salt Lake County library. As of last week, that number was up to 184. Yes!
3. It's in this quarter's Deseret Book catalog, p. 28. THAT was fun to get in the mailbox.
4. The LDS fiction buyer for the Salt Lake library gave my book a shout out on Goodreads. She liked it! She said YOU will like it!
5. One of my writing mentors Facebooked me to say she read it and it was fabulous.
6. The List is now #3 on the Deseret Book romance bestseller list!
7. I've gotten messages from strangers almost every day telling me they loved it and begging for more.

And there's more. But that's enough Braggedy-Ann. I'm just happy.

Anyway, there are actually a bunch of ratings on Goodreads, none of which I solicited and (almost) all that I appreciate, but I've got nothing on Deseret Book and only 2 on Amazon.

If you have already reviewed it in one of these places (or any other review sites I didn't mention), and you want to win a bowl, leave a comment.

If you go leave a review at any of these sites, an HONEST review (I'm tough, I can take it), then come back and let me know which sites, you'll get an entry for each one. And then, next week, I'll let Random.org decide which of you awesome peeps gets a bowl.

Chop, chop, people! This is the best prize I've given away all month!

You don't have to read this part, but I want to emphasize, I mean it about the honest thing. I can always tell when someone's mother, sister, and aunt all put up a review of the writer's work. I like a spectrum when I'm reading reviews. I don't mind if you think it's a five star book. But don't say that unless you mean it, okay?

Good thing he's cute.

2011-04-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

Maybe you remember the lovely note I had to send to James's teacher back in January regarding a certain brick. This was the note I had to send in this morning, unaltered. Yay.

Hi, Mrs. Yarrington.

We had a little issue with James's final literature circles project. He finished it late Saturday night. Some time Sunday afternoon, my three-year-old Grant got a little water on it. No big deal, just some sprinkles. James put the pages outside to dry. Then Kenny sent Grant out to play and turned on the hose for him, not realizing James's papers were outside. Grant watered everything thoroughly: the plants, the skateboard ramp, the patio furniture . . . and James's papers.

We dried them out and reconstructed the really messed up stuff as best we could. Kenny and James were up really late last night working on it. They're legible but still a total mess, I know. If you don't mind sending him home with another packet, we'll have him fill it in again so it's acceptable. We're making him bring in the packet in its current condition just so you know he really did complete it.

Sorry about all this. We seem to have some kind of curse on long-term projects around here. (Its name is Grant.)

Sincerely,

Melanie

P.S. The winner of the last copy of The List is Jaime from Polka Dots on Parade. I'll get it on its way. :)