Anyway.
The long and the short of it is this: the current economic climate has left us in a financial pinch that would make it difficult to pull off even a small, intimate wedding and semi-fabulous honeymoon in Mexico. We've chewed this over every which way we can, and it's just not happening. We found ourselves making compromises that felt uncomfortable, like cutting our best friends' spouses from the guest list just so we could meet a smaller quota. We even brainstormed alternatives to taking the Mexican honeymoon, like the possibility of a quaint road trip to Myrtle Beach or some such instead. After hours and days and weeks of discussing all of these compromises, we realized that there was no plan that would make us truly happy. Which is why, despite the fact that it's already been a year since we got engaged, we decided it was in everyone's best interest if we push the wedding back to fall of next year.
The upside: Joe and I have chosen 10/10/10 as our new wedding date. Joe's really into numbers and codes, and in binary, 101010 = 42. Fans of Douglas Adams will recognize the significance immediately, but for the uninitiated, you should check out this Wiki entry here. A fall wedding also opens a lot more possibilities than a winter one; for instance, we can now hold the ceremony outdoors (something that wouldn't be wise in February). And the biggest boon of all is that it gives us more time to save up for the wedding/honeymoon we truly want, instead of something we're just settling for.
Anyway, yeah. Nothing too terribly sexy about the story, and obviously we're not thrilled about waiting another 15 months to officially become husband and wife. But at the same time, we don't HAVE to tie the knot anytime soon; it was a preference more than a necessity.
As to why I've been off the grid for a few days: I'm swamped. It's been a couple of years since I've had to usher a new book into this world, and I'd forgotten how completely exhausting all of the prep is. My web site overhaul should've gotten started months ago, but per usual, I was Last-Minute Lara, and am only just getting the last bits of content needed to
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
slayground today. This for a site we're relaunching on Monday, in anticipation of THE SWEET LIFE OF STELLA MADISON's Tuesday release.But finally - finally! - the bulk of the work is almost complete, and I think I might actually get to have a non-working weekend for a change.
Squee!
- feeling:
content
So there are some substitutions, but the essence of each soundtrack is essentially the same. Tonight I was actually finalizing the one for BONES, and oh my god, suddenly it was like I was 26 all over again. Hence the subject heading "musical time capsule." What strikes me is how incredibly sad the playlist is, and how, even after all of these years, I still tear up whenever I hear Edie Brickell's "He Said," Tori Amos's "China," and the acoustic version of Colin Hay's "Overkill." (Oddly enough, the acoustic version was playing in BJs yesterday, which totally caught me of guard. I mean, hello! One minute I'm picking up a six pack of black beans and the next I'm fighting back the weepies.)
Anyway, here it is, in all of its heartbreaking glory:
- feeling:
nostalgic - ear candy:Soundtrack to BRINGING UP THE BONES
The thing is, Joe's schedules mostly cover the hour and forty-five minutes before he leaves for work and the hour and a half before he goes to bed. He's got a desk job, one with regular hours and duties, and his priority list there changes at a moment's notice. Because I work from home, I don't normally have to report in anywhere by a certain time, or worry about beating rush hour traffic, or dress myself in anything other than what basically amounts to PJs - like the baggy Elvis t-shirt I refuse to give up, even though it's three sizes too big, and the workout pants that used to fit me like leggings but now barely stay on my waist. Unlike Joe, who hops into the shower each day between 7:15 and 7:20, I can postpone my shower until after, say, my 8 - 8:45 a.m. yoga session. It's nice, having that kind of freedom, but also kind of ... well, overwhelming. I mean, my daily to-do lists (previously my lone stab at organization/efficiency) often have 17 items on them, more than half of which usually get cut and pasted onto the next day's list. It's so easy to think you'll spend 45 minutes reading/answering e-mail, only to have three and half hours fly by just like that.
So last night, after making my schedule and powering down the laptop for the night, and counting how many ounces of water consumed that day (76, if you're wondering), I felt good. Like, really good. I had a schedule! I was prepared to kick time management's butt!
But of course, my schedule was predicated on waking up the same time the alarm went off for Joe - a fact I neglected to mention to him. So while 6:30 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. read something like this:
Wake up, vitamins, wash face/brush teeth, pour first glass of H20
I didn't, um, even get out of bed until 6:57 a.m.
No worries, I told myself. This is why I'd given myself half an hour to accomplish five tasts that shouldn't take more than 10 minutes total. Since I was already so behind schedule, I made the executive decision to skip the face-washing, which I then moved to the 9 a.m. shower block.
But then Scout needed to go out, which is something Joe normally does at 6:45 but didn't today because Scout, like me, overslept. When I got back in, it was already 7:11 a.m. - 10 minutes into the hour when I was supposed to "write blog, read e-mail." (Oops! Forgot that e-mail part. Pausing to read.)
And there's no no e-mail, because it's only 7:26 a.m. as I type this sentence and I always check my in-box before bed. So, that's definitely a part of the schedule that will need to be tweaked.
What to do, what to do?
Another problem with today's schedule is that, even though I left myself large blocks of time for certain tasks (like 11 a.m. to 12 p.m., the hour in which I am to "prep packages and decide how best to mail"), I didn't quite count on waking up all zombified. If I'd gone to bed at 11:45 p.m. the night before, as planned, then I might have risen with the alarm, fresh as a daisy and ready to conquer the day.
As it was, Joe and I got sucked into our mini WEEDS marathon, and he didn't even head off to sleep until 12:45 p.m. himself. Then I made the mistake of flipping through EW before turning in, and read that EUREKA, a show that we both really like, returns to the Syfy (formerlly Sci Fi) Channel Friday night. I figured that I better set the DVR right then so I wouldn't forget, but even before I could press "record," the blue glow of the television transfixed me. I thought, "Hey, if I watch THE NEXT FOOD NETWORK STAR tonight, I won't be tempted to tomorrow, like during my 9:45 a.m. to 11 a.m. block ear-marked for 'phone calls, breakfast, pull[ing] recipes for the week, Shoprite list, coupons.'"
And this was how I found myself dragging my butt into bed at the completely unsanctioned, unscheduled time of 2:10 a.m., because of course, after THE NEXT FOOD NETWORK STAR, I couldn't resist the pull of the season premiere of RUBY, recorded earlier that evening. Also, staying up past midnight usually requires a small snack (your body knows it's supposed to be asleep, after all, and if you won't let it, then by god, you better give it some fuel!). So after my crackers-and-cheese fix, there had to be a second round of teeth brushing, further delaying my nighty-night.
So now it's 7:39 a.m., and I'm still moving as slowly as a hungover frat boy on Sunday morning (metaphorically, not literally). And there's nothing really stopping me from crawling back into bed and catching a couple more hours of snooze time. No set appointments, no places I need to be by X a.m. Just an optimistic schedule, scrawled on a 4" x 6" notebook around 11 p.m. last night.
This is where the bargaining begins: Did I really need to leave myself 45 minutes for "protein drink/make bed"? Will it really take me another 45 to "shower/dress"? Even if I lotion every inch of every limb after I towel off, the most time I need for those tasks is, like, twenty minutes, right?
The schedule, clearly, will be a work in progress. Because I know - not just think but actually know - that if I don't get some more shut eye, there's no way I'll be able to make it through my 3 p.m. energy crash. Which is crucial, because the 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. block is devoted to the revamp of my web site.
Oh, well. At least I wrote this blog post while downing 14 ounces of water - and in that regards, I'm at least 6 minutes ahead of schedule.*
*yawn*
*Actually, after hyperlinking all of the TV shows, it's more like 2 minutes ahead of schedule.
- feeling:
groggy
Cindy's Cooked Blueberry Pie Thing
INGREDIENTS
Cookie Crumb Shell*
1 1/3 cup finely crushed vanilla wafer cookies
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon good vanilla
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Blueberry Filling*
4 cups blueberries (fresh would work best), divided
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
3 tablespoons corn starch
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon (optional)
1 teaspoon fresh-squeezed lemon juice (optional)
1 tablespoon fresh grated lemon zest (optional)
1 8 oz. package of regular cream cheese, softened
1 cup confectioner's (powdered) sugar
PREPARATION
Cookie Crumb Shell
Adjust oven rack to center and preheat to 350 F.
Butter the inside bottom ONLY of a 9-inch pie pan (do not butter the sides or the shell will slump).
In a medium-sized bowl, combine the cookie crumbs, sugar, and vanilla. Add the butter and toss until the crumbs are evenly coated.
Turn the mixture into the prepared pie pan. Scatter the crumbs so that they are evenly distributed and press onto bottom and up sides to make an even shell. Bake for 8 minutes, or until set and just barely beginning to brown. Cool to room temperature on a rack.
Blueberry Filling
In a medium, heavy-bottomed saucepan, cook 2 cups of the berries with the sugar, water, corn starch, and salt over medium heat. Cook until thick, stirring occasionally. Remove from stove, stir in remaining uncooked blueberries, and, if desired, the cinnamon and lemon juice or zest (but not both!). Let mixture cool slightly.
While the blueberry mixture is cooling, mix softened cream cheese with confectioner's sugar until well incorporated (a hand or stand mixer would be really helpful here). Spread this over the bottom of the cookie crumb shell. Make sure shell has cooled enough, or this will be quite difficult!
Pour blueberry mixture over cream cheese layer. Refrigerate until ready to serve!
* Crust recipe from Jim Fobel's OLD-FASHIONED BAKING BOOK, which Cindy says is "so worth buying ... it has family photos and great anecdotes in addition to fab recipes that use butter - gasp! - and no low-fat products. If you're going to eat dessert, by God, eat DESSERT!"
** Filling recipe from Cindy's blueberry farmer neighbor, Deb Madl
[NOTE FROM CINDY: This is probably my favorite pie. ... I usually make this with a glazed strawberry pie (also in the Fobel cookbook) for a red, white, and blue holiday dessert table. Enjoy!]
[NOTE FROM LARA: As I said, I haven't made this yet, but I would think about adding a heavy pinch of salt to both the crust and the filling. Salt tends to bring out the sweetness in desserts, even if that sounds counter-intuitive. Also, I'd definitely opt for the zest over the juice - just from making my baked blueberry French toast I can tell you that the zest melts into the mixture in such a way that you can't even notice it - as Joe says, it adds this bit of "brightness" that you can't quite put your finger on until you taste it without that ingredient.]
RECIPE OF THE WEEK - coming up later today; just need to make some edits to the fabulous Slow Cooker Pork Pozole I made yesterday (YUM!).
And now for the other thing (if you're reading this over at Facebook, you may want to avert your eyes, though there's nothing graphic here so much as a recommendation for a good girly parts doc in the area):
( Cut in case you're so not interested in anything having to do with )
- feeling:
bouncy
Then the grad student loans kicked in, and my loan company told me that just to keep up with the interest, I'd need to be making $400/mo. payments. This was on about $68k of student loans, which at the time, was almost as big as a mortgage on a small condo in a not-so-nice, but not-so-terrible area of Wilmington, DE.
Um. Yeah.
I was living in a $500/mo. rented condo in a much nicer part of Wilmington, desperately trying to find a job in the post-9-11 market. This is when I first started teaching part-time at UD. I ran through my savings pretty quickly, and by fall was teaching six classes across three different campuses. I also got a case of bronchitis that lasted five weeks, and nearly had a nervous breakdown.
I utilized deferments on my loans, because at least some of them were subsidized by the government - meaning, they paid the interest for me. I kept making payments, even if I could only send in $250/mo., because I didn't want this to come crushing down on me later. During the two years I lived with my parents, saving up for my house, I made really big payments on my loans that knocked out about $4k of the principle while still keeping the interest down. This is also when I managed to squirrel away $10k for my house, pay off my car, and pay down my credit cards enormously. All this while still giving my parents some money toward utilities, groceries, and paying the rent on a storage unit we shared, while also keeping up with my own personal bills, like the loan, the credit cards, the cell phone, and insurance. It didn't hurt that I was signing a lot of contracts during this time, and getting nice chunks of money, which I wisely used for all of the above and my yearly max contribution to an IRA.
After moving into the house, I began to realize how expensive being a homeowner actually was. It didn't hit me until the first summer I lived there, when I wasn't pulling a regular paycheck from UD, had no book money due to me, and couldn't find a part-time job to help bridge the gap until fall. I didn't have any kind of deferments left, but because I'd paid down so much on the principle, the loan company considered that my "monthly payment," and over the past three years, they've been eating steadily away at all of that progress i made years ago.
Earlier this month I called to find out when my "montly payments" would run out. Thankfully, because I have been able to make some chunk payments during this three years of homeownership, I won't begin owing a real payment until October of this year. Which gave me some time to figure out how I was going to cough up $427/mo. toward this insane debt. That's more than half of my mortgage. That's Joe's student loan payment, our car insurance, and our cable/phone/Internet package combined.
I did some digging, and that's when I found out about this new Income-Based Repayment plan, which goes into effect this summer - in fact, you can officially apply for the program as of today. It was designed to help people like me not find themselves in a financial sinkhole from pursuing a higher education. Under this plan, the loan company cannot ask for more than a certain percentage of your income. This also means that on your credit report, your IBR monthly payment would be listed as what you owe them against the total of your debt. (For instance, currently my credit report shows that I owe $427/mo. to my student loans, which really screws up my income to debt ratio.) The best part? If you haven't paid off the total of your loan in 25 years, the rest gets excused. Period. End of discussion.
Even better news for people who work in the public sector, like teachers and social workers and lawyers who opt for Legal Aid over a cushy corporate position. Their loan gets forgiven within 10 years. This is so that people who choose to work in the helping professions don't get penalized for making that decision.
I used the handy-dandy calculator on the IBR info page, and under this new plan, my monthy payments work out to a whopping $50/mo (roughly). Which is more than doable; in fact, I could probably make $100/mo. payments, if I knew it was going to get me somewhere down the line. Currently, sending $100 into a company that assesses me an interest rate of $10/day - yes, EACH DAY - seems futile. The money seems better spent paying down the principle on our home equity loan, or Joe's student loans (in the two years we've been together, I've managed to knock his down by $2k - but he only owed $7k when I became the family accountant). Of course, when we get married, the amount I will owe under IBR changes. You have to reapply every year, so if I have a particularly lucrative book year, like I did when STARLET got made into a movie, my payments would be higher. But if I have slower year, like I did in 2008 when I was out of work for eleven months and only got a small lump sum of book money, then yeah - $50 payments.
The idea that these payments could be forgiven in full within 25 years makes me so happy. Honestly, one of my biggest concerns was that I'd still be saddled with the debt when Joe's and my kids were prepping for college. But this new plan sort of safe-guards me from that, to an extent. At any rate, it's good news all around.
I haven't actually applied to be considered for this program yet, because truth be told, I had to file an extension on my 2008 taxes and haven't completely finished them. That's next up on the list for the summer - finishing my spreadsheet of tax-deductible expenses from the previous year and getting the whole mess to the accountant. But I did want to make sure that those of you who may not be aware of the program could find it here. Also that there's a bipartisan bill in the House of Representatives that would make any loan forgiveness taxed as income, which sort of defeats the purpose of the program to begin with (at least in part). You can read more about that here, and write to your local state rep to fight this bill.
Hope this helps at least some of you!
Had a great chat with my agent this morning (which is typical - George is always making me laugh, recommending obscure films he thinks I'll enjoy, or telling me about articles he's read recently that he wants me to check out, too). One thing that boggled my mind was what he said about how different BEA was from years past. I haven't exactly been vigilant about keepin up with the blogosphere, but he mentioned how some publishers, instead of distributing galleys, were offering stick drives with up to seven books on them in PDF form. My first thought was that this is brilliant in terms of controlling cost. My second was, "Oh, god - how are they going to be able to protect the manuscripts from being passed around the Internet?" This is something we authors haven't really had to deal with on a large level, besides the Google Books fiasco and the difficulty controlling the distribution of audiobooks through the same sites where people illegally download mp3, games, and programs.
I think we're only really starting to get an understanding of how the recession will effect the book biz. Harold Underdown's article, "Working in Children's Books and the Recession of 2008-09" really hit me hard yesterday, because even it ends on a hopeful note, it wasn't until I saw the "who's moving where" link that I realized how bad things are for the publishers. I mean, in a lot of cases, you often feel like you're outside the publisher, because no matter how much you love your editor or house, there's still that slight tinge of bitterness that everyone else makes a comfortable living off your books except you (unless you're a superstar, or crazy prolific (I'm looking at you, Elizabeth Scott!), in which case, this may not apply).
[Tangent: in his article, Harold recommends reading Leonard Marcus's MINDERS OF MAKE-BELIEVE, about the history of children's book publishing, which I second. George sent it to me to read while I was recovering from surgery, and it's amazing. This is definitely a case of not judging a book by its less-than-fantastic cover.]
Back to the galley-on-stick-drive thing: one thing George mentioned that never crossed my mind is how this system of distributing paperless books pre-pub is going to have a profound effect on librarians. Thoughts on this, librarians?
Last, George made a point about teling me that I needed to read Elizabeth Bluemle's recent PW blog about the do's and don'ts of promotional e-mailing. One thing I want to add to her incredibly informative list is that when you're sending promotional emails to fellow authors, make sure that they either A) asked to be on your mailing list or B) have the option of unsubscribing without having to tell you WHY you're unsubscribing. I recently got an email blast from someone I can't even remember ever meeting, who doesn't write in my genre, and who sends out blasts every two to three weeks. I responded to one "Unsubscribe," thinking that was enough, but no, she demanded to know my name and the reason why. She had my e-mail address, obviously, so why pressure me into telling her that I think her books sound lame and that I'm not interested in learning that she had a mini-interview in her small-town's coupon clipper (okay, that last part is totally made up).
I'm even more excited to get this advice from a bookseller's perspective, as I'm in the final stages of my PR prep for THE SWEET LIFE OF STELLA MADISON, which is out in just over two weeks. Also coming soon is the long-promised website overhaul I'm working on with Little Willow - the delays in merging Lola's site with Lara's have been entirely mine, as I always have about 50 things going on at the same time. She's been so patient with me, though, and a total sweetheart - I definitely recommend her work to any of you soon-to-be first-time authors seeking a web designer who does good, clean work and makes it fun at the same time.
Tomorrow: a post I keep delaying about changes in the laws regarding repayment of student loans (it's all good news, so yay!).
- feeling:
sleepy
From the Inbox page of the 6/29 issue of TIME, in reference to the magazine's recent cover story on Twitter:
"The overblown coverage of Twitter in the media has grown tiresome. Steven Johnson reports that Twitter had 17.1 million visitors internationally in April, but with the U.S. population at more than 300 million, the percentage of users that are American is pretty small. Furthermore, according to Neilson, 60% of all users drop out after a month. 'Once just a fad'? Sounds like it's still a relatively small and concentrated fad. Members of the media never grasp that they are not representative of the country as a whole." - Barb Neff, Santa Monica, Calif.
This is pretty much me. I tweeted in, stayed active for about six weeks, dropped out. It took too much time to read through everyone's tweets, think of interesting things to tweet about, respond to other people's far more interesting tweets, and and respond to people who responded to my often inane ones. Of course, I left Twitter before the latest celebrity invasion, which I probably would've found amusing/addictive in the same way that I find myself actually Googling things like "what will happen now that Lauren has left THE HILLS?" and "Stephanie Pratt bulimia" and "Are Whitney and Jay back together?" Which leads me to ...
Random Bit #2
From the Books page of the 6/26-7/3 issue of ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, in an article titled "When Stars Write Novels":
"Is there nothing LC can't do? Well, uh, yes. Write a 'novel.' Authos need to be judged as writers, not as mutltasking buzz generators .... Publishers these days are laying off staff and cutting the number of titles on their lists; the book business is suffering along with everyone else, and there's little room to gamble on an untried writer, however exciting that new voice. Yet with one eye on marketing opportuntites and the other on TV ratings, these same publishers have given the okay to a larky novice who'd be the first to admit that she just thought authoring might be, you know, cool." - Lisa Schwarzbaum
Two things: One, this is exactly why, despite my morbid curiosity about LA CANDY, and the obvious ghostwriter hired to pen LC's thinly-veiled "fiction," I refuse to pay a penny toward actuallly reading it. There will be enough HILLS-obsessed teens lining up to fork over their (or their parents') hard-earned money, which will only affirm Harper Collins's prediction that this book will be an enormous blockbuster. The underlying message? "Sales dollars trump quality any day" - which is already a huge beef I have with YA currently.
Second, despite a ton of press about Conrad's decision to enter the YA market, few have addressed the fact that it was the publisher who approached HER and not vice-versa. On a recent interview she gave to the ladies of THE VIEW (you know, the one where she admits that Spencer never actually apologized to her - that they filmed his half with her NOT on the other line, thereby confirming suspicions that the "reality show" is heavily scripted), Conrad was asked by a visibly disgusted Whoopie Goldberg why she bothered to write this book. Conrad wiggles for a minute, saying that she'd thought about becoming an author and at first had pitched the idea of a dating book (though anyone who watched her disastrous relationship with cokehead Jason on TV would wonder why LC ever thought - for even a second - that she had valuable advice in the romance department) before switching over to wanting to write something fashion related. Then, she says, her publisher approached her with this idea. (I'd figured this all along; I've heard of YA editors courting certain celebrities whose names would guarantee sales, though when it's someone like Margartet Cho, who actually CAN write, I'm less disgusted by the practice. In fact, I've been disappointed that Cho's entrance into the YA genre has yet to materialize, because when I read about the sale on Publisher's Lunch, and later asked the editor who signed her about the decision, I was seriously excited. Cho writing about adolescence? Yeah, that's something I would have to read.)
The appeal, as Conrad tells it, is that the YA novel gave her an opportunity to explore the side of THE HILLS that the public never gets to see. Critics have often wondered by MTV chooses to shoot the show as if LC and her crew of super-thin, super-cute, super-shallow friends AREN'T super famous; apparently, Conrad shares this frustration. In that same VIEW spot, she talks about how there'd be times when they'd be filming and she'd sneak off to "video village" to hang out with the directors/producers, fascinated more by their process than the carefully edited version of her life that's run since she was a teen. Producing, she says, is one of her ultimate goals; fashion, it appears, is just a pit stop on her way to mogul-hood. Tyra Banks would be so proud.
Not-Quite-as-Random Bit #3
The current state of the YA book biz is something I've been chewing over a lot lately, for a myriad of reasons. Like the fact that despite knowing I should be shooting for commercial fiction with the kind of sexy slant that sells (a la my Lola Dougals books), the truth is, writing something with a prescribed format doesn't interest me at all. Morgan Carter's story, as told in the two STARLET books, was something I dreamed up on my own, and it just happened to have high commercial appeal - not something I crafted to be commercial in the first place. There are dozens of authors who I admire who've become huge successes not by writing flash-in-the-pan, semi-disposable novels, but by culling massive reader audiences the old-fashioned way: through strong writing, patience, and perserverance (see, for instance, the career of Sarah Dessen).
Also, I've been wrapped up in a professional editing job for an accomplished non-fiction author whose first foray into young adult fiction has amazing potential, but has struggled to sell. The thing is, her book, too, sprung from a personal passion but also has that sexy commercial appeal that publishers pant over. So I've had to puzzle over why the book's had trouble finding a home, despite the author's kick-ass idea and impeccable pedigree. My guess is that at one point, before sales dollars trumped everything else, an editor would've taken on the project immediately and helped the author develop her vision. In this market, my first novel, BRINGING UP THE BONES, wouldn't have made it to the contract stage - it needed too much work between the draft I submitted and the one that got published. But back in 2001, when I was named the honor winner in the Delacorte and offered a deal, editors still had the time, energy, and freedom to take on flawed projects such as mine - ones that didn't have the potential to blow up like TWILIGHT. This just isn't the case any more.
Yesterday I traveled down to Dover, to talk to my friend Peggy Dilner's current crop of YA lit students, most of whom are pursuing certifications to become school media specialists. When Peggy first started inviting me to talk to her classes, it was more about being a YA author from Delaware, which was a novelty then (we now have several other YA'ers we can boast, including but not limited to Tony Varrato). Now she asks me to speak to them about my persepective on the industry as an author, and the changes I've seen take place between BONES' publication and STELLA's upcoming one. It's not sour grapes on my part when I tell them how drastically different things have become; when CONTENTS came out in 2004, all YA novels pub'd by mainstream houses were guaranteed review space in every major journal. Just 18 months later, when ANYONE BUT YOU debuted, this was no longer the case. The market had become so glutted that an author had to feel grateful when they were awarded space in a review journal, even if that review was mixed. (Of course, here I'm talking about B-list authors like myself, and not people like John Green or Laurie Halse Anderson, who are superstars and don't need to worry so miuch about whether or not they'll be reviewed as much as if their latest offering meets the high expectations set by earlier best-sellers they've delivered.)
Peggy's heard me speak about my career path and my mixed feelings about the industry for several years now. Last night she got to see a more bubbly side, because right now I'm feeling good about STELLA's general reception, this editing project (which has been so much fun, despite the quick turnaround), and my career in general. I joked to her students that I've declared on more than one occasion I was hanging up my keyboard and done with being an author forever. This week? I'm not feeling "over." I'm feeling inspired to dive into my current WIP, a passion project that's been nibbling at me for six years now. It's good to be in this place again - wanting to write, instead of feeling like I have to, and being more concerned again with telling a great story than whether or not my publishers will be pleased with my market-directed sensibilities. If, for example, this current WIP should fail to find a home (and at the risk of sound cocky, which if you know me in real life, you know is not who I am at all - I have no doubt it WILL find a home), I'd be okay with it. Because I'd have written it for all of the right reasons, instead of the wrong ones that lead me down this bitter, jaded path to begin with.
[I'm far too tired to do all of the hyperlinking I should do here, or even proofread what I've written, so I think I'm going to just wrap up now and hit the sheets until my 11 a.m. conference call with the aforementioned kick-ass writer I'm working with. Please excuse the lack of linkage and the possibility of typos; I've had six hours of sleep in the past three days and I'm about ready to fall over.]
- feeling:
exhausted
1. Who was your FIRST prom date?
I never went. This, sadly, is probably the biggest thing I regret about high school. Other than hooking up with Shawn Rairigh, that is.
2. Do you still talk to your FIRST love?
Uh, no. Not since ... 2000?
3. What was your FIRST alcoholic drink?
According to my mother, beer. As a toddler, I'd follow people around at parties and finish their drinks. My parents, at the time, thought this was hilarious. (Which tells you a little something about my parents.)
4. What was your FIRST job?
Checkout girl at a grocery store. I got fired without even realizing it. When I was hired I told them I could only work two Sundays a month, because Sundays were the days I spent with my dad (typical child of divorce). They put me on for four Sundays in a row, and I complained. The next week, my name was on the schedule, but I didn't have any hours. I thought, "Whee, a vacation!" The next week, my name was gone. I never even had to turn in my smock.
5. What was your FIRST car?
A 1988 Subaru station wagon with power windows that didn't go down. Try explaining that to the guys in the inspection lanes at DMV.
6. Who was the FIRST person to text you today?
No one. I'm not a big texter. Sometimes I get ones from my aunt, Wendy, or Cindy. Every once in a while, I get a love text from Joe. But no. Not a texter. Or a tweeter.
7. Who is the FIRST person you thought of this morning?
Joe, because his alarm is going to go off in about five minutes, and I still haven't been to bed. WORKING! (And playing a little HARVEST MOON.)
8. Who was your FIRST grade teacher?
Mrs. Whorl, at Brookside Elementary, but I'm betting I'm spelling her name wrong. Hell, I think I spelled my own name wrong back then.
9. Where did you go on your FIRST ride on an airplane?
Boston. My mom grew up in Belmont.
10. Who was your FIRST best friend & do you still talk?
I don't remember anyone from my PA kindergarten, except Nathan, with whom I got caught "making out" during a performance of PETER PAN. To us, making out meant holding hands and rubbing our noses on each other's necks. Cara Ward was my best friend from my DE kindergarten, as was Heather Hartrim. Found Cara on Facebook recently, but we haven't done more than exchange wall posts.
11. Where was your FIRST sleep over?
I don't remember. I do remember having an enormous one for my 10th birthday, and my mom rented a VCR for the event. We watched some movie with Rick Springfield, paused on the naked butt scene, and giggled forever. The pictures from this monumental event are priceless.
12. Who was the FIRST person you talked to today?
Define "today." It's 6:29 a.m. and I'm still awake. After midnight, I talked to Joe and the dog. Right now, they're both still sleeping, though as I said, the alarm will be going off at any minute.
13. Whose wedding were you in the FIRST time?
My aunt Barbara and Uncle Jeffrey's. I was supposed to be the flower girl, but after they got engaged, they found out that my cousin Zach didn't feel like waiting to be conceived. So it was a small ceremony at a synagogue, and I wore a blue taffetta dress and white tights, but didn't have any flowers. This was so distressing to me, because not long before I'd attended my uncle Dick's second wedding, and my cousin Caroline was HIS flower girl, and at the time I thought she was the most worldly, beautiful, glamorous person on Earth. When they picked us up at the airport, she was wearing pink leather pants and already knew how to work them (she was, like, nine). We played DALLAS in the downtime, though I'd never watched the show, and oh, man. I have a short story I started years ago inspired by that trip, but I've never known how to finish it.
14. What was the FIRST thing you did this morning?
Now that the alarm's going off, I suppose the first thing I'll be doing is explaining to Joe why I never went to sleep, and then going to sleep.
15. What was the FIRST concert you ever went to?
Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, somewhere in Philly.
16. FIRST broken bone?
None. I have freakishly strong bones.
17. FIRST piercing
Ears, age 6. Every girl in my class was wearing crosses and I wanted some and didn't understand why my Jewish parents wouldn't let me get them.
18. FIRST foreign country you visited?
London, when I was a junior in college. It was over a winter session. We took a weekend trip to Ireland. I made it to Canada years later, both coasts. And that's about it for me and foreign countries.
19. FIRST movie you remember seeing?
Drive-in double feature - STAR WARS and CLASH OF THE TITANS. I fell asleep during the second one. Just read in EW that they're doing a remake of it - weird.
20. When was your FIRST detention?
Sixth grade, I think. I got in a fight with Rhonda Lynam for stealing my chair, and somehow I got blamed for the ensuing scuffle. Rhonda was always getting me into trouble, even when she sicced her much older brother on me. Because he was a baseball star, and the principal was the coach, I was the one who ended up in detention.
22. Who was your FIRST roommate?
Jen Pennington (now McLaughlin). We were both nerds who attended UD's summer college program the summer before our senior year in high school. We also roomed together two years in college, and are still pretty good friends.
23. If you had one wish, what would it be?
Selfishly, that we had enough money that I could choose to work, instead of needing to work. My life would be so much less stressful if every decision I made was about choice and not necessity.
24. What is something you would learn if you had the chance?
I'd love to learn how to sing, but I have a crappy voice. This is one of the main reasons I was envious of my middle school best friend, Kim Walters (now Aziz), because she had the voice of an angel and I was tone deaf.
25. Did you marry the FIRST person to ask for your hand in marriage/you asked to marry?
Not yet, but I will - Feb. 27, 2010.
26. What was the first sport you were involved in?
Gymnastics. I rocked, too.
27. What were the first lessons you ever took?
Ballet and tap dancing, simultaneously. There's a picture from one of my recitals that my father dubbed "Tiny Dancer," after the Elton John song, that is still one of my favorite pictures ever. I just look so sad, but also weirdly beautiful. And I was, like, four.
28. What is the first thing you do when you get home?
Pee, take the dog out, or put on my PJs - whichever is the most pressing.
29. Who do you think will be the next person to post this?
I'd say my mom, but she's leaving for a 10-day road trip/family vacation tomorrow. So, I don't know. Maybe Kim?
BTW, the alarm has now been going off for 11 minutes. Funniest thing? In the summers I don't get up with Joe, and never even HEAR the alarm. I actually sleep through this? Then again, I slept through not one but two fire alarms during a winter session when I was living all by myself in the Towers at UD. So, you know. Heavy sleeper.
Hey, look! Scout's up! So I guess the first think I'll be doing this morning is taking him for a walk.
- feeling:
awake, unfortunately.
Still haven't gotten that cooked blueberry dessert recipe, but I will share it as soon as I do. For now, gumbo away!
Slow Cooker Chicken, Sausage & Shrimp Gumbo
INGREDIENTS
1 lb. Kielbasa or Smoked Sausage, sliced into ¼-inch rounds
3 tablespoons butter, divided
1 large onion, chopped (don’t dice – bigger chunks are better)
1/2 red or green pepper, chopped (ditto)
2 stalks celery, chopped (ditto)
4 cloves garlic, minced (Trader Joe’s frozen cubes work great)
1 10 oz. package frozen sliced okra, thawed (I used a 16 oz. package and it was fine)
1/3 cup canola oil, plus 1 tablespoon, divided
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
3 cups hot chicken broth
1 cup hot water
1 ½ cups chopped cooked chicken (OK to use rotisserie chicken, even though harvesting that meat is messy and gross)
1 can diced tomatoes, undrained
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon filé powder (optional)
12 oz. peeled and deveined raw shrimp (see note below)
PREPARATION
Heat 1 tablespoon oil (olive or canola) in a wide, heavy-bottomed pan over medium-high heat. Brown the smoked sausage; remove with slotted spoon to slow cooker. Next, add 1 tablespoon butter to sausage drippings and sweat onion, red pepper, and celery over medium heat until tender and onions are translucent; add garlic and sweat for another minute before placing the contents into the slow cooker.
In the same pan, melt 2 tablespoons of butter and sauté thawed okra over low to medium heat until it starts to lose its sticky gooiness (you’ll know what I mean when you see it – it takes about 10-15 minutes). Add to slow cooker.
In a medium-sized saucepan, heat 1/3 cup canola oil over medium heat and then add flour, whisking constantly for five minutes. Reduce heat to medium-low and continue cooking and whisking until roux has darkened to the color of pecans (roughly 15 minutes). DO NOT LET MIXTURE REACH A SIMMER, and DO NOT STOP WHISKING – the mixture will begin to separate immediately.
When roux has reached the desired color, add 3 cups hot chicken broth and 1 cup hot water, whisking as you pour. Keep whisking until mixture is smooth and then pour into slow cooker.
Finally, add chopped chicken, tomatoes, salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper to the slow cooker. Stir all ingredients until well incorporated. Cook on low heat for 6-8 hours. Add shrimp during the last 20 minutes and cook until pink.
Serve over hot, buttery rice (I use brown, for the whole grain factor).
LARA'S NOTE: My shrimp were questionable, as I mentioned above, so I omitted them. To thicken the gumbo, I added one tablespoon of filé powder – a traditional gumbo ingredient usually used when you aren't relying on okra as a thickening agent – at the point when I should've added the shrimp, had my shrimp not gone all icky. It's available at Jannsen’s in Delaware, or online if you don't have a store that sells the stuf. I have to say, this gave the gumbo great flavor and did thicken the mixture quite a bit. Gumbo shouldn't be gluey-thick, though - it has to be wet enough to mix well with the rice.
Anyway, you should really check it out, if you haven't already. (EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW, I mean. Well, and TRUE CONFESSIONS, the film and the books. And of course, STELLA, too.)
/ shameless self promotion
- feeling:
EXTREMELY busy
Um. Yeah. About that ...
Crazy busy weekend here, with Conor's grad party up near the Poconos. Thanks again, everyone, for your gift suggestions; while we weren't able to afford them all, and couldn't find some - I'm still annoyed that oversized coffee mugs that can double as bowls are not in vogue right now and therefore impossible to find - we did use a good deal of the ideas you shared. And, despite Grammy advising us to go with cash instead, Conor whispered to me as we were leaving that he liked our gift best, because it took a lot of thought and was really fun and personal. Afterward, Grammy told us that Conor hates getting gift cards for presents, so yeah - Freshman Survival Kit FTW!
Got back really late from PA, as we spent some time at Grammy's house before heading home. Didn't actually reach our front door until just after midnight, and then spent the next two and a half hours prepping my stepfather's brunch for the next day. Originally, we'd planned to have an early breakfast and then go see UP in digital 3D at the theater across the street, but Joe and I were so amped from cooking that we didn't even crawl into bed until 5 a.m., and my mom had a sinus migraine from the near-constant rain, so the movie idea got scrapped and we did brunch closer to 11. Still a really fun day - the baked French toast is always a hit, and we did this sausage-and-English muffin strata (with veggies, cheese, and bacon on top - I joked, "Happy Father's Day! How do you like that heart attack we're giving you?") that Mom says she liked better than the pumpkin-and-sausage strata I traditionally make Christmas morning.
So, we didn't actually get to have time at our house until late Sunday afternoon, though in between all of the traveling and cooking and family visiting, I did manage to sneak in some really important e-mails and a few loads of laundry. Also exciting was receiving this link from Cindy Dobrez, about her and Lynn Rutan's review of THE SWEET LIFE OF STELLA MADISON for Booklist's blog, Bookends. Almost as exciting was her offer of another blueberry recipe, this one featuring a cookie crust and a cream cheese layer - I'm so making that for Fourth of July, and it will definitely become a Recipe of the Week.
One point that Cindy brought up in her review was that she was disappointed that the cover didn't look entirely as I'd described Stella - namely, the cover model lacks Stella's prone-to-frizz curls that she obsesses over. I have to admit that, I, too, wasn't crazy about the model's ambiguous hair (is it straight? wavy? curly but blown out?). Even so, I'm still very much enamored with this cover. And its designer, Vicki, was very gracious about making some requested changes from the original image. Many books use what's known as "stock photography" for their covers, and mine is no exception. The actual model on this cover is blond with pale blue eyes, and she wore a baby pink tee that clashed with the salmon, red, and purple of the font. So, I asked my brilliant editor, Jodi Keller, if we could make some alterations - like turning Stella into the brunette I intended her to be, tinting her eyes violet as referenced in the book, and making over her t-shirt in a more complementary color. All in all, I'm pretty pleased with the final result, lack of curls nothwithstanding.
Making beef stroganoff for dinner tonight - anything in a mushroom and onion laden sauce thickened with sour cream is aces in my book.
- feeling: busy
When Stella Madison’s boyfriend says he loves her, those words are not what the17-year-old wants to hear. Max is adorable, sure; it’s just that commitment is not really her thing, and she has a lot on her plate. The daughter of a famous chef and a restaurateur, Stella has a paid summer internship at the loca lnewspaper, and she is sneakily swooning over Kitchen’s irresistible new intern, Jeremy. Juggling Max, Jeremy, work, semi-separated parents, and friends is not easy, and Stella learns that you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Sweet Life is brimming with teen appeal. Zeises has created a refreshing protagonist sure to captivate readers, who will enjoy following along as she learns about romance through food, and vice versa. –Emily Chornomaz, Brooklyn Public Library, NY
I am feeling SO relieved. When ANYONE BUT YOU came out, the only pre-pub review I got was from Kirkus, who always reviews pre-pub. So knowing that SLJ's review is out on time means ... I don't know. Maybe good things?
Now, if only I could get on top of the website update and the stuff my publicist just asked me for ...
- feeling: happy
"Oh... her? Really? She's the knew 'it' thing?"
But then I read this article in the latest issue of EW. (I know what you're thinking: blueberries and Entertainment Weekly - can the girl blog about anything else? It's temporary, I promise.) Anyway, I love her brash brand of honesty, highlighted with a slim streak of bitchiness. And, barring her over-use of the word "uber," she comes across as pretty smart in this piece. So, yeah. She can be all hot and stuff, but how many pieces of Hollywood eye candy actually admit that's what they're getting paid for? Or that their tentpole summer movie isn't meant to be anything more than a "popcorn flick"?
[On a slightly unrelated note, even though I'd been picturing a younger Maggie Gyllenhaal as Marissa in TRUE CONFESSIONS OF A HOLLYWOOD STARLET, after reading this piece on Megan Fox, I think she might be more the Marissa I'd envisioned.]
Baked French Toast with Blueberries
INGREDIENTS
Butter, for greasing
6 eggs
3 cups whole milk
3/4 cup maple syrup, plus extra for serving
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, plus 1 tablespoon
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 lemon, zested
3 (1-inch thick) slices (8 ounces) day-old challah or sourdough bread, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 cups (12 ounces) fresh or frozen, thawed, and drained blueberries
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
PREPARATION
Place an oven rack in the middle of the oven. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9 by 13-inch baking dish. Set aside.
In a large bowl, beat the eggs until frothy. Add the milk, maple syrup, cinnamon, salt, and lemon zest. Add the bread cubes and mix until coated. Stir in the blueberries. Pour the mixture into the prepared baking dish.
In a small bowl, mix together the remaining cinnamon and sugar. Sprinkle the cinnamon sugar over the egg mixture in an even layer. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes until the top is golden and the filling is set.
Spoon onto serving plates and drizzle with maple syrup.
Lara's Tip #1: To ensure the day-oldness of the challah, what I did was slice it up the night before and put the slices on a plate in the fridge, uncovered. The second time we made the recipe, it was on the fly and we couldn't find any challah, so we used an equivalent amount of egg rolls, which tasted about the same. Not sure I'd like the sourdough, but that's just me.
Lara's Tip #2: Our second time making this was from memory, and I totally forgot about the lemon zest. You really can't taste a difference, so if you don't feel like buying/zesting your own lemon, you won't be missing much.
Anyway, reading through the latest issue of EW, I come across an article about Rudolph that made me go, "OH MY GOD I HAVE TO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW." Why? Because it's directed by Sam Mendes (AMERICAN BEAUTY, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD), and the screenplay is by - and why did I not know this? - Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida (who are married). Also, why did I not know that Maya Rudolph's boyfriend/baby daddy was Paul Thomas Anderson? I think the last time I was up on his love life, he was still with Fiona Apple (and where is she now, anyway?). The film's supporting players include, but are not limited to, Allison Janney, Catherine O'Hara, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Jim Gaffigan.
BTW, here's the official trailer. This is NOT the commercial/preview we caught a couple of months ago, which painted the movie as a screwball comedy that didn't seem all that funny.
For those of you who are reading from home, I've embedded the real (good) version below as well:
- feeling:
excited
Yes, you read that correctly. I've been rearranging my books in the middle of the night, even though our alarm is set to go off in a few short hours and I promised Joe that I'd make sure he got up on time so he can start running his reports remotely from home while he's brewing coffee and taking a shower. This is not something that I regularly do - if anything, Joe's usually the clock-watcher trying to make sure I get to places on time.
But I digress.
Normally my middle-of-the-night organizing projects consist of things like going through magazine stacks that have spread from room to room, tearing out articles, recipes, and other things I want to keep. The goal is always to put them into clear plastic page protectors, organized by topic: cooking, cleaning tips, craft projects, etc. But usually the torn pages end up in white storage bins waiting to be catalogued.
Instead, my night took an unusual turn in that I climbed into bed, figuring I'd read a chapter or two before starting to do a face plant onto my current book's pages. Instead, I got sucked into this three-hundred-page novel that I wasn't even sure I would ever finish. The first fifty pages or so were tedious and hard to get into; too many bread crumbs dropped into too many directions. But then, out of nowhere, I couldn't put the sucker down. I finished it at 2:09 a.m., wider awake than I was before I got into bed in the first place.
So, I did what I usually do when I finish a book, and that is go try to pick out my next read. Only, nothing grabbed my attention right away. This is due to poor organization; all of my most recent reads were stacked in front of piles of books that I hadn't yet read, thus obscuring them from my view. Which meant I needed to sort. My sorting process, though, is kind of complicated in that I'm currently trying to streamline my personal library. One, because the books are overtaking the house, and two, because I need to refinish the two super-tall bookshelves in my old office so that I can move them into my new one (the still-unfinished craft room I've been
Only, this time, I still couldn't find any tome I was willing to make a commitment to. I actually broke down and ordered a few things from Amazon last week, temporarily suspending my own no-buying-new-books rule, but I was able to rationalize the purchase. One of the ones I bought was Amber Kizer's ONE BUTT CHEEK AT A TIME, because Amber's part of the ALAN panel I'll be on this November (as is her mother, an educator, and my good friend Liz Gallagher), and I've been meaning to get Amber's book since Liz raved about it months and months ago. Another was IF I STAY, which is one of those buzzy books I should've read ages ago (even my agent mentioned it as a must-read). I also felt the intense need to order THE HUNGER GAMES, which I've wanted to read forever, but was recently reminded of because of everyone who went to BEA squeeing about its eagerly anticipated sequel. Lastly, Sarah Dessen's ALONG FOR THE RIDE is just about to hit the shelves, and I never make myself wait to read one of her books. NEVER.
[A bit of an aside: did anyone catch the HOLY WOW, full-page ad in this week's EW touting ALONG FOR THE RIDE, as well as the entire Sarah Dessen collection? I think my eyes just about popped out of my head. Super freaking cool. Also: when scanning Amazon to hyperlink the book, I noticed an "erotic romance" that has the same title (by an author named - get this - Michelle Pillow. Think it's a pseudonym, or are women born with the last name "Pillow" naturally drawn to writing erotic romances?). I find the whole thing kind of hilarious. Two of my previous books, CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE and ANYONE BUT YOU, were also shared titles, the first to a mystery novel by Edna Buchanan (although, now scanning Amazon, I see there are like 16 other books with that title as well - at least mine comes up at the top of the list) and the second to a very popular romance by Jennifer Crusie (she bests me in the Amazon title search).
Thinking about Sarah's new release got me thinking about PERFECT FIFTHS, Megan McCafferty's supposedly final installment in the Jessica Darling series. I was almost positive I had FOURTH COMINGS buried in my office, but I can't find it. Which means I either lost it somewhere in the house OR somehow managed to miss buying it in the first place. Which isn't like me, because I'm a huge Megan McCafferty fan. Then again, I didn't read FOREVER IN BLUE: THE FOURTH SUMMER OF THE SISTERHOOD until the first movie's sequel was released on DVD, because I knew I couldn't see the movie without reading the book first. Even so, I think I'd had FOREVER IN BLUE for like two years before actually reading it. Which isn't totally unlike me, because as I've said, I often lose things in my own house for ages and ages.
While trying to dig up FOURTH COMINGS, I found books missing dust jackets; dust jackets missing books; books that I'd borrowed, read, and never returned; books that I'd borrowed, never read, probably never will read, and should return ASAP; books that I want to loan to other people who may or may not read them, and who may or may not return them. I almost never loan out something that's part of the permanent collection, even to trusted friends, because you never know what will happen to those precious babies in someone else's hands. I learned this lesson the hard way, when my mom managed to seriously mangle one of my very first galleys; to this day, I always tuck one pristine galley of each book onto my special "I Wrote These" shelf. So in those cases - when there's a book I know someone should read but I can't loan out, I usually just tell them it's a must-read in an e-mail or something. My friend Carolee, who's great at using her local library, has no problem tracking down these titles on her own, and I love her for it. I myself am eagerly awaiting the grand re-opening of my local library, which was literally demolished a couple of years ago and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. It's supposed to be open for business by August, and just the other day we saw that they'd finally put in a parking lot where there used to be a pit, so I'm so super psyched.
I just looked at the clock on my laptop and realized it's almost 4 a.m. WHY AM I SO FREAKING WIDE AWAKE? This is probablematic not only because I have to make sure Joe is fresh as a daisy and out the door by 8:15 a.m., but also because my Monday to-do list is something like 17 items long. As many women will attest, when the spouse or spousal equivalent is on vacation, it's difficult to get your own stuff done. Why should we work when they get to play? This is why Joe and I have subsisted mainly on Lean Pockets or Annie's Naturals Shells and Cheese, both bought in bulk at BJs, for the past week. I've got a freezer full of things like beef tenderloin and boneless pork tenderloin and bone-in chicken thighs that need to be turned into minor culinary masterpieces, but even though I've had recipes pulled for a few weeks, I haven't had the energy/determination to make a shopping list for the missing ingredients. It doesn't help that obtaining said ingredients will most likely require trips to three different stores - Shoprite, which is just down the street, the Newark Farmer's Market, which is a little bit further down, and Trader Joe's, which is all the way up by my mother's house. That last stop is particularly pressing, as I'm down to the last few squeezes of their store-brand version of Tom's of Maine toothpaste that tastes like licorice (I have this weird mouth issue where I can't tolerate fake mint or cinnamon or even orange in my toothpaste - they make my tongue break out in tiny sores. Even at the dentist, when I get my twice-yearly cleanings, I have to ask for the strawberry or bubble gum flavored kid's polish, because everything else gives me those same sores).
So, yeah. Four in the morning and I'm only slightly sleepier than when I started reorganizing my book collection some two hours ago. This is so not good. I wonder if diving into Amy Koss's THE GIRLS (which is what I ultimately decided I will read next) might help. Then again, it might keep me just as awake as Joshilyn Jackson's THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING did.
[MONDAY UPDATE: Didn't start THE GIRLS yet; opted instead for writing some silly Facebook quiz about "How Well Do You Know Lara?" Finally got sleepy at 6 a.m. and crashed so hard that I didn't hear the alarm go off in the morning. Joe, did, though, and was confused as to why I wasn't hitting the snooze button. He got me up at 8:15 so I could see him off, and I was determined to stay awake all day so that I could go to bed early and get back on a normal schedule. This resolve lasted until 2 p.m., when even HARVEST MOON couldn't hold my attention any longer. Took a three-hour "nap" in the living room before waking up and deciding to chuck all and climb into bed. Was woken up at 7-ish, when Joe, now home from work, slipped in behind me and pulled me close. I explained to him about the not sleeping thing, and then, because all I'd eaten the whole day was a peanut butter on whole wheat sandwich, I was starving. I grabbed the only quicky thing we had - a partial pint of ice cream - and after six spoonfulls felt so sick I ended up puking. AND I was still tired. So we climbed back into bed and took another three-hour "nap," waking around 10:45. Joe went into caretaker mode and heated up some soup and made me a toasted cheese sandwich. We watched the last 40 minutes of a PUSHING DAISIES episode we started two weeks ago before hitting our respective laptops. Well, I actually watched a hilarious MIGHTY B episode I'd DVR'd before coming to edit this post. Now it is 1:12 a.m. (so much for complying with our new house rule of turning all electronic devices off at midnight) and we both should be in bed, but of course the "napping" made things worse. Oy. So now I think I will go start THE GIRLS and try to get myself sleepy. This is all probably far too much information than anyone needed, but I seem to have diarrhea of the mouth lately, so ... it is what it is. Until tomorrow ....]
- feeling: exhausted (now, I mean)
Now for the "blues" part: while the Fair Hill Inn is gorgeous, and we have plans to use each of the Inn's separate dining rooms for themed food/wine selections that relate to us as a couple (for instance, the Jalisco Room, named after the region in Mexico where Joe's dad's side of the family is from, will feature Mexican cuisine with matching wine/beer), there's no room in the entire place large enough for us to hold the actual ceremony, which needs to accommodate anywhere between 75 and 100 people. One night during the first weekend of our "staycation," Joe and I were up until 5 a.m. researching possible venues with the following criteria: 1) it had to be relatively close the Inn, 2) it had to have no religious connotation, 3) it had to allow us to bring our own officiant to the space, and 4) it had to be within a rather small budget, which also meant that 5) seating needed to be included and the room couldn't require a whole lot of decoration to make it seem like a lovely setting. (Yes, I know that's a lot of criteria - this is why we were up so late!) I e-mailed a bunch of places that might've worked, as well as three separate Chambers of Commerce (City of Elkton, City of Newark, and New Castle County), and would you believe that not a single person got back to us? So, this weekend I pulled together a file that included contact names and phone numbers and decided I'd have to do my investigating the old-fashioned way. Still, it's an awful lot of work; even though I do regard the ceremony itself as one of the most important parts of the day (if not THE most important), it won't last more than 20 minutes. So if I knew that our families could tolerate the cold, I'd just do the thing in the gardens of the Inn. That's the one drawback about having a wedding at the end of February - every single area is discounted because it's off-season EXCEPT for the ceremony space, because it the summer it's easy to find parks and stuff that will let you do it there for a small fee or even free.
The other thing: Friday Joe and I found out that our plumbing problem was way worse than expected. The guys from K.C. Weaver & Sons that snaked our drains didn't tell us that they thought the real problem might be that roots had grown into our pipelines, threatening to collapse the whole system (probably because they didn't want to freak us out. But they did tell the owner, who passed the information onto me). And since our house is built on a concrete slab, having to replace the plumbing would mean ripping up the floors as well. The cost of having the guys send a camera down to accurately diagnose the situation is pretty hefty, but because Ken Weaver's known and worked with my mom (who used to be a property manager) forever, he's giving us a 50% off discount (god bless him). The scary part is that if he's right - and the roots are the problem - it will cost anywhere from $800 to $3,000 to fix. Not fixing it, though, will inevitably lead to the whole collapse thing, which would certainly cost a hell of a lot more (though it would mean getting brand new hard wood floors, which would be nice. Expensive, but nice).
So Joe and I have gone back to joking about getting eloped. If you get married in the City of Wilmington, it has to be on a Wednesday before 4 p.m., but it only costs $60 ($30 for the license, $30 for the service), and they WILL broadcast your ceremony live over the Internet for $30. For an extra $20, you can get a DVD of the event. Of course, this would mean having a sterile, run-of-the-mill ceremony, without our Rev. Annie Lawrence, who I've known for more than a decade, and without our own vows or selected readings, etc. But, if we opted for this kind of elopement, I wouldn't need a fancy dress, and my bridesmaids wouldn't need fancy dresses, and flowers would be at a minimum, and we could still take 30-50 guests out to a full-on dinner at the Fair Hill Inn. It just wouldn't be as weddingy, is all. And we couldn't use Scout for the ring bearer, or even need a ring bearer. But we could take the money we'd save and have ourselves a hell of a four-star honeymoon. Plus pay for the plumbing repairs, provided that they were on the low- to mid-range.
I really hate that weddings are so expensive. And I've found ways to cut back on expenses that even my overly critical mother thinks are genius. I also hate that I can't decide if I'd regret going the elopement route (with immediate family and best friends only) or the average sized shin-dig we've been planning that has more traditional elements (traditional with a spin - I'm walking down the aisle to the Eels' "Fresh Feeling" <-- WARNING: link has sound, so may not be work safe).
Also, I'm so tempted to turn off the comments feature, because every time I write a wedding-related post I get a zillion responses/e-mails of people telling me that I'm being shallow, or that their expensive first wedding lead to divorce, while their quicky second wedding lead to decades of bliss, or that it's totally possible to have a gorgeous wedding that will fill you will lasting memories for less than $3k. I'm sorry, but Joe and I knew we couldn't have a wedding without certain things: good food, an open bar, a dance floor, and a cake from Sweets to You by Ginger. Some brides have no problem spending $2k or more on their dress and accessories and then serving their guests the aforementioned rubber chicken and making them pay for even a glass of seltzer. This is not me. I'd like a pretty dress but am having Joe's grandmother make it, not just to save on the cost but to make it more meaningful. As for the reception, I feel like I'm throwing a party to celebrate our union, and for that party to be successful I need to be able to feed people tasty things, let them drink for free, and dance their pants off after they've had their fill of both. It's just who I am - who we are, together.
Thanky!
Yeah, it was that bad.
But one of the worst side effects of this career crisis was that I lost something that had been very, very dear to me as early as the age of two.
I lost my love of reading.
My bookshelves overflowed with novels - ones I bought, ones I'd been given as gifts, ones I'd gotten free from appearing at trade shows or conferences. Lots of books by wonderful authors that had great premises and seemed like stuff that, just a few months prior, I'd been devouring at the rate of six to ten a month. But with burnout came apathy, and suddenly I didn't care anymore if I'd read the latest Printz contenders, or the hot novel everyone was blogging about. I even stopped reading most blogs, and became terrible at keeping up my own - odd because I'd been a fervent blogger as far back as 2001.
But then, not long after I returned from last fall's ALAN conference in San Antonio, I got the carton of books given out to every attendee (provided that attendee pay for shipping or transport the enormous and weighty carton home by themselves). In it I found books like Laurie Halse Anderson's WINTERGIRLS, and John Green's PAPER TOWNS (which, oddly enough, I'd purchased for myself right before the trip, and ended up gifting one of the copies to a stepcousin who's also an avid reader). There were books by authors new to me, like Madeleine George's LOOKS, and Donna Freitas's THE POSSIBILITIES OF SAINTHOOD. I can't remember how it started, or which book I devoured first, but suddenly, after a long dry spell where the only things I was reading were Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series (and don't get me wrong - I love these books and they were exactly what I needed during my self-imposed exile from YA) and the many magazines I subscribe to through discount sites (a full year of both EW and TIME for $24 total? Sign me up).
So, yeah. I made a deal with myself not to purchase any new books until I'd managed to wade through the thick stacks in my office, in the living room, in the bedroom, the dining room, and the bonus room we've dubbed the Jungle Room, because when I purchased the house the previous owner had nothing but 10,000 plants in the poorly insulated space walled off with energy-inefficient jallousy windows.
And then, I got back to devouring.
I hadn't realized how much I missed reading until I started up again. Instead of passing out in my living room easy chair, ingesting hours upon hours of DVR'd TV shows (some good, some marginal, some downright bad), I began canceling series recordings. NIP/TUCK didn't hold my attention like the aforementioned WINTERGIRLS did - and if you haven't read it yet, you need to get yourself a copy, because it's some of the most harrowing, heart-breaking fiction I've read in a long time, and the characters were so real and disturbing to me that the night I finished it, I couldn't fall asleep for hours because the story kept replaying itself in my head.
Two weeks ago, when Joe and I were up in Bethlehem for the private family viewing held the day after his grandfather passed, I had in my bag an ARC of E. Lockhart's THE TREASURE MAP OF BOYS. In it, the main heroine Ruby Oliver is, once again, grappling with anxiety issues often triggered by sticky relationships with both her peers and the boys who make her heart go pitter-pat. I'm a huge fan of E's writing, and have been since she asked our then shared publicist to send me an ARC of the first Ruby Oliver installment. Reading this book, though, at that particular time, reminded me of the healing power of fiction. Ruby is my favorite kind of protagonist - smart, funny, fully flawed and yet still completely relatable and endearing. And it was ironic, because all of the tragedy Joe and I had been experiencing in our personal lives were giving us both regular panic attacks - serious ones, the kind where your heart races and you want to rip your skin off because everything feels so unhinged. In one scene of TREASURE MAP, Ruby practices a trick her therapist taught her to control anxiety, passing a ball back and forth between your hands. Something about the repetitive motion was supposed to quell the brain crazies. So when I was experiencing my next panic attacke, I reached for a stress squeeze ball sitting nearby and tried out this method. It worked. That's a practical thing. The less quantifiable part of reading this book and that particular time was that it made me laugh. It made me marvel, once again, at Emily's brilliant wordplay.
Bibliotheraphy: it was exactly what I needed.
In a few months, I'll be participating in the upcoming ALAN conference in Philly, speaking on a panel of gusty girl writers about books featuring gutsy girl characters. And I'm excited about this, because it's not only a topic I'm passionate about, but it brings me to a conference filled with brilliant writers (including my very good friend Liz Gallagher, who I only get to see a couple times a year since she insists on living on the opposite coast) and editors and educators and librarians. But you know what else I'm totally jazzed about? Getting that trademark carton of new, exciting, possibly YA-canon-changing novels to feed my rekindled habit.
This is one habit I definitely don't intend to break.
Lavender-Blueberry Muffins
INGREDIENTS
1/3 cup sugar OR 1/3 baking sugar substitute (I like granulated Splenda or Splenda Baking Blend)
1 cup oat bran flour
½ cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon of salt (Kosher works, but fine sea salt is even better)
¼ cup dried lavender (buds only – no stems)
1 egg
1 tablespoon vegetable oil (we use an Omega 3 blend that’s AWESOME)
1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup nonfat plain or vanilla yogurt (we use plain, fat-free Greek yogurt – it gives the muffins a really rich taste)
¾ cup fresh or frozen blueberries (see Tip #1 below)
¼ cup unsweetened applesauce
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 375º F. Spray a muffin tin with nonstick spray.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the sugar or baking sugar substitute, oat bran flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and lavender. Stir to combine.
In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the egg, oil, vanilla, yogurt, and applesauce, just enough to combine. Then stir in blueberries (see Tip #2 below). The batter should be slightly lumpy.
Fill the muffin cups two-thirds full with batter (and they will rise, trust me). Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the middle of a muffin comes out clean. Let the muffins cool for 15 minutes before turning the tin over to release them. If the muffins stick to the pan, a slight tap on the back should help release them. (We do this over a clean kitchen tea towel just in case the muffins try to escape. Then we each eat one warm one and let the rest cool completely on a wire rack. As for storage, we put them in the fridge, on a plate covered with plastic wrap to retain moisture. Because of the yogurt, we weren't sure they'd be okay sitting out.)
Recipe yields 12, 2 oz. muffins. If made with Splenda, each one has 90 calories, 3 grams of protein, 15 grams of carbs, 2 grams of fat, and 2.87 grams of sugar (from the fruits). If using table sugar, the carbs go up to 21.64 grams and the sugars end up 9.20 grams.
Lara’s Tip #1: If you’re using store-bought frozen blueberries (either regular or wild will both work), place them in a small sieve put the sieve over a bowl deep enough that the sieve doesn’t touch the bottom. Let the blueberries defrost overnight in the fridge – this way the juice doesn’t bleed into your muffins and make them soggy. You can freeze that juice, by the way, and use it as a flavoring in other recipes. Of course, fresh berries are best, but freezing your own berries produces the same results as fresh ones. You do this by spreading the fresh berries over a sheet pan in a single layer, freeze them overnight, and then move the berries into a freezer-safe bag. We learned this trick from Alton Brown, and it works perfectly.
Lara’s Tip #2: This is actually something I learned from watching Ina Garten. Before adding your blueberries into the batter, toss them with a tablespoon of flour (we used the all-purpose kind). This keeps the blueberries from sinking to the bottom of the muffins. Of course, it will change the carb counts slightly – but so slightly that it probably doesn’t matter to anyone who’d be making these muffins to begin with.
The power went out.
In the summer. In a house with a newly stocked fridge/freezer. A house where the only things not powered by electricity are a battery-run clock in the living room and a lone blue flashlight.
My first thought was, "Oh, it's okay if the A/C is down. The ceiling fan will keep us cool." And then, of course, I realized that the ceiling fan wouldn't work either. Duh.
Our phones are all cordless and run by a cable modem. We each have cell phones, but they're both crappy Motorola models and Joe's won't hold a charge for longer than a couple of hours (and this was after we purchased a brand new $80 battery to "correct" that problem). Fortunately, my own cell had three bars. So at least that was something.
But then I'm trying to figure out how I can call the electric company to find out what's wrong, because I have the number programmed into Outlook, which is a pretty useless system for storing information when there's no power. Joe and I end up wasting several minutes thumbing through a phone book that we almost sent to the recycling center because who uses phone books in the age of Google, but it's been so long since either of use have used a phone book we can't figure out which section would have the number. Then I remember there's an emergency number printed on the electric bill, so I go grab that and (finally!) make the call. They tell me they're aware of the problem and that we should have power by 5 p.m. I groaned inwardly, because the electric company NEVER fixes anything in the time frame they say they will. They promise to have an automated message sent once the power's been restored.
Meanwhile, Joe's in the laundry room throwing the main breaker switch on the off-chance that it's just our house and not a neighborhood issue. Without even waiting for me to get word from Delmarva Power, which would've answered that question less than a minute after he starts futzing with the switch. I give him the news, but then - oh, this is classic - he can't flip the main switch back to "on." We don't know if it won't go on when the power's out, or if he just wasn't pushing hard enough, but Joe was terrified of breaking the breaker and decided it would be best to wait until we got word from the electric company. In the middle of this, my friend Wendy rings my cell phone, trying to get in touch with Joe. She's covering for him while he's on vacation, and she needed to know the location of some data. Which of course Joe couldn't give her, because there was no Internet, either.
I fly into survival mode. I tell Joe that if they need the info immediately we could run to Panera, where there's free Internet access, but his boss says no, they can wait until tomorrow. Then I call my mom and put her on alert, because if the power didn't come back by evening, we were going to have to spend the night in her guest room. She understood completely, because not only does her neighborhood lose power routinely, they have well water - which means when there's no power, they can't even flush a toilet. My parents even splurged on a generator, but it only powers a small portion of the house - usually the fridge, the microwave, and the small TV in the kitchen.
Because I'm paranoid about our house getting too hot, my nose breaks out in a sweat. Purely psychosomatic, I'm sure. So my next move is to strip down to my undies and head for the bedroom, which is one of the cooler rooms in the house. Joe follows suit and we spend the next hour talking and cuddling the dog.
Joe had a doctor's appointment at 4 p.m., so I went with him and brought a book, figuring I might as well read in someone's air-conditioned waiting room. Then we had a couple of errands to run, and sure enough, by the time we pulled into the driveway, we could see that our neighbor's lights were on and that his ceiling fan was circulating.
The irony? Just as we were leaving Wal-mart, a huge bolt of lightning sliced through the sky and we heard a rumble of thunder so loud it made me grab Joe's sleeve. So even though we were able to throw the breaker and get power back in our house, I was freaking out about the lightning storm shorting stuff out. I made Joe move his super-duper surge protector from his desktop into the dining room, which is where we both house our laptops (and almost never eat dinner). I just knew that if his work laptop blew he'd have a major meltdown.
Now all is well and calm at our house. Joe's pulling up the data he needs to send to Wendy, and I'm typing this post, and Scout is curled up on the dining room chair at the head of the table, snuggling into a sweatshirt of mine and snoozing soundly.
Ahh, bliss.
It's funny, though, how much I take certain things for granted. Like electricity. It's kind of like a person's general health - you never really appreciate it until you come down with a nasty flu. Or like my legs: I never think about how much I need them for until my back goes out and my left leg can't do anything without sending me into excruciating pain. There was this one time, though, that I spent half a day marveling over toilets. I mean, think about what a toilet does. There's this thing in your bathroom, and you push a lever and the stuff you put into it disappears through a system of pipes and you never have to worry about what comes next. It's pretty amazing, right?
And on that note, I think I'll wrap this up and fire up the Wii. HARVEST MOON is crack, I tell you what.
Up next: the return of RECIPE OF THE WEEK!
- feeling: grateful
Here's the deal: 2009? Hasn't been exactly kind to me and my family. I'm not complaining here; I'm just explaining why I kept disappearing for long chunks of time.
THE SHORT VERSION (no, really - this IS the short version):
January - Went back to teaching at UD for the first time in a year, and more importantly, the first time since my gastric bypass surgery in Sept. 1998. It was winter session, which at the University of Delaware means cramming an entire semester's worth of work into literally five weeks. It was also E110, which is what we call the freshman comp class, and every year I can't understand what possesses a kid to take E110 over winter session. It's kind of a suicide mission, because department guidelines dictate that you have to write a certain number of pages in essay form. Plus, this winter I had a group of largely apathetic kids who took the class because someone told them it was a cake walk. Me: "They lied." Fortunately, I had a couple of really awesome students in the mix, who helped remind me of why I love to teach (thanks, Erin & Kelsey!). Plus, I started teaching adult creative writing classes at the YMCA on Monday nights. So, I went from zero to 99 in like six seconds, and by the end, I was exhausted. Oh, and somewhere in the middle of the month, my dog broke his junk from humping a new stuffed animal my mom had gotten him for Christmas. The running joke was that the bear gave him an STD. The non-joke? The cost of the vet bill and the meds he had to take as a result. One of them was a steroid, which left Scouty eating everything that wasn't nailed down. He also put on two pounds, which for a little guy like him, is a lot. Oy.
February - One of the drawbacks to teaching winter session is that spring semester starts literally right after winter ends. I think I had three days between my last winter class and my first spring one. The good news: I got to teach a fiction writing class for the first time at UD. I wasn't sure what kind of writers I'd end up with, but I have to say - some of the talent in that class really blew me away. There will be published authors (in fact, there already is one - but more on that later). AND my freshmen? So good. Every class discussion was lively, and that makes teaching fun. Plus there were some real characters, like a computer hacker who was super pissed off about the marketing of the "green" movement. So in that way, the semester got off to a great start. On a personal level? My car broked down right before Joe and my mom were going to look at a venue for the wedding reception, and we had to have it towed to the shop. Then, after getting my car back (with a hefty bill), we had to put Joe's car in the shop (another hefty bill). Then, two weeks after we got his car back, it broke down AGAIN, this time requiring a tow (and an even heftier bill). Oh, and our heating oil ran out. So the shortest month of the year ended up being one of our most expensive. Go figure.
March - This was when I really went missing, and here's why: early in March I started to get sick. I'm on a medicine for my psoriasis that lowers my immune system, so sniffles turn into major colds quite quickly. Only, I didn't think to stop taking my psoriasis meds (an injection I give myself every other week). So the cold hung on. Then, the third week in March, I flew to St. Pete's Beach with my friend Wendy, where I was her plus-one for the wedding of her friends Amir and Pepper (her husband hates to fly - as in, even heavily medicated, he can't do it). The beach was awesome, the wedding was beautiful, and I never wanted our mini-break to end. I came home happy, relaxed, sunburned ... and just a wee bit behind on my grading, because I'd been sick the two weeks before we left. Then, to add insult to injury, I got sick AGAIN. Literally, the day after I got back. This time it was flu-like (the non-swine variety, even though I'd gotten my flu shot and even a pneumonia shot like a good girl in the fall). As it got progressively worse, we realized that I had to stop taking the psoriasis meds so I could get better. But by this time, I had a head full of snot and a crazy-high fever of like 102 - so bad that Joe wanted me to go to the hospital. Fun!
April - The cold/flu wore on, and by this time, I'd managed to give it to Joe, who's a typical guy in that he's a pain in the butt when he's sick - a total whining baby. Plus, he refused to take any real time off from work to recover and kept working crazy hours from home. Meanwhile, I'm getting my freshmen prepped for their research papers while still grading their second essays that they turned in while I was in Florida. I had to skip another psoriasis shot, so my feet were cracking like crazy and I was back to the gel bandages to keep my feet workable. I had a couple of speaking gigs at the beginning of the month, while I was still grappling with the flu, one of which was for the Eastern PA's SCBWI mid-winter retreat (an awesome conference - we had such a great time!). But overall, April was NOT a good month at Casa Zeises/de Loza.
May - Things took a turn for the worse. I'd just gotten caught up on my grading and made it through two Mother's Day celebrations - Joe's grandmother on Saturday, where we made a huge brunch for the family, and my mom on Sunday, where we got to see a private screening of the new STAR TREK (thanks, Em!) and had Chinese food. The Monday after, I had a sore knot on the bottom left quadrant of my back, so I thought I'd go to the gym and workout, thinking that would loosen my muscles up. BIG MISTAKE. Afterward, as I got back into the car, I knew something was wrong, because it hurt. Like, bad. I won't go into major detail, but let's just say that by mid-week, I was crying every time I had to put on pants or go to the bathroom. Meanwhile, the dog somehow broke his junk AGAIN (this time, we're not sure how, because we'd confiscated all humpable toys), and that ran us another $200. This in the middle of the back injury pain, which by the end of the week was so excruciating that our doctor sent us to the ER. And because Christiana Hospital was still reeling from the swine flu epidemic, we actually got chastised for going to the ER. So the next day we ended up in St. Francis's ER, where we actually got some care. Within a couple of days, I was back to walking again. Which was great. But of course, that's when we found out about Pop.
Pop is Joe's grandfather, who along with his grandmother, helped raise him after his mom passed away when Joe was 12. So he was more like a dad to Joe than anything. And we'd just seen him Mother's Day weekend, and he was making all of these plans with us, like to go see the new Harry Potter movie, and to go to the Poconos over 4th of July weekend, and to go to the shore with them in early September. When we said goodbye, we didn't realize it would be the last time we'd see him. Pop passed away rather unexpectedly - we're pretty sure it was a heart attack - the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend. Needless to say, this was a very devastating time, and not just for Joe. I'd only known Pop for a couple of years, but his death hit me hard. Plus, watching Joe and his family grieve was excruciating. It's always hard to see the ones you love in so much pain. We spent the next 10 days shuttling around to Bethlehem and back. In the middle of this, my stepfather's uncle lost his long battle with cancer. My semester at UD was wrapping up, and through all of this I was trying to grade research papers and magazine projects and writing portfolios. The Sunday after Pop's memorial service, I pulled two 14-hour marathon grading sessions, so by Tuesday (this would be last Tuesday, the beginning of June) I was crispy fried.
June - Both Joe and I were struggling to find normalcy in our lives, and in doing so, we completely forgot our two-year anniversary. What a wake up call. I spent all of last week running expensive errands, like the three-hour trip to the Saturn dealership that cost $420. Joe was pulling some marathon work sessions of his own, so that he could take a much-needed vacation. Between last Thursday and Friday he worked 36 hours straight, with no sleep, and finally started his vacation around 8 p.m. Friday night.
So, there you have it. Now Joe's on vacay - our "staycation," I keep calling it, because I often like trendy buzz words and am still annoyed that we can't find a Brangelina type nickname for ourselves (Loe? Jara?). But it's hard. Between my back injury and losing Pop and both of us overdoing it on the work front, we're barely treading water. Joe spent the weekend writing a computer program for himself, and I spent it glued to HARVEST MOON on the Wii. There was a short stint Saturday night where the two of us performed surgery through TRAUMA CENTER: NEW BLOOD, but for the most part, we've been trying to process on our own.
And now, because I can't stand to end this post on a sad note, I figured I'd recap some of the good stuff that's happened:
- Joe made my January birthday super special this year, and without spending much money;
- We had the awesomest Valentine's Day ever, starting with getting a family portrait with Scout at Petco, followed by Scrabble in front of the fireplace at Panera, and finishing with an entire weekend of gourmet cooking;
- In March, the Lifetime adaptation of TRUE CONFESSIONS OF A HOLLYWOOD STARLET came out on DVD;
- We booked the Fair Hill Inn for our wedding reception, which is a dream come true AND will cost several thousand less than what the wedding factories wanted to charge us;
- There was that whole trip to Florida thing, which was so so so so so much fun, and the great SCBWI conference experience;
- My best friend gave birth to a healthy baby boy at the beginning of April, and he's not only adorable, but he's given us MAJOR baby fever;
- When I was recovering from the flu, I watched the entire third season of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS on DVR, and it was so good it warrants its own line here;
- Six words: PRIVATE VIEWING OF STAR TREK ROCKED. (Did I mention that Emmett's wife made cupcakes frosted in the colors of the original TV show's uniforms, with flavored cake to match? She's so freaking cool.);
- My friend Cindy sold her first book (we met during the very first round of adult creative writing classes I taught at the Y), and Cassie, from my fiction writing class at UD, just had one of her workshopped stories accepted into an anthology;
- I've lost a total of 145 pounds (and no, I don't have new progress pictures, because we took the last round when I got back from aerobics and I'm all red and sweaty and ugly, but we're planning on doing more soon);
- and finally, I got my first review for THE SWEET LIFE OF STELLA MADISON, which I posted last week, and it was good and gives me hope that this book - the first book I've published under my own name in almost four years - will do well.
There are other moments, smaller moments, private moments, sweeter moments, etc., but you get the gist.
Today is Monday, which means the beginning of a new week. My semester is totally wrapped up, and Joe's got the next seven days completely OFF. So again, I'm feeling hopeful. Which is always a good thing.
See you tomorrow!
- feeling: hopeful
Seventeen-year-old Stella has multiple problems in this breezy adolescent dilemma story. She’s almost at the “I love you” stage with her boyfriend, Max, a sweetie, but she’s shamefully attracted to her mom’s new intern, Jeremy, a hottie. Zeises doesn’t just depend on teenage romance for the plot’s fizz, though; she introduces additional difficulties for her struggling heroine. Stella has the misfortune of being the only daughter of a famous French chef, and her mom’s also a “foodie,” running an upscale restaurant that features cooking demonstrations from a different chef each week. Stella rebels against gourmet food but lands a good summer job as a restaurant critic and has to depend on Jeremy, with awkward consequences, for advice. The author keeps the narrative moving along at a good clip with some well-developed, recognizable characters. The story never descends too deeply into actual angst but floats along merrily on the surface. That’s fine for this genre and makes this effort one that will appeal widely among teen girls. Good, chatty fun. (Fiction. YA)
I can't believe the book will be out in less than six weeks! Starting Monday, I will be on a new, daily blogging regime. Also, next Wednesday will mark the return of "Recipe of the Week." AND my seriously out of date website is in the process of getting a facelift, which I'm super excited about. So, yeah. Good things on the horizon. Finally.
Woot!
She's, um, my cousin.
- feeling:
surprised
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