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Showing posts from July, 2007

Martinis with Mandy Moore

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All last week, I called in to a radio station to win tickets to an event where Mandy Moore would sing a few songs, then mingle with the crowd signing autographs and answering questions. The event was called "Martinis with Mandy." I was so goofy with excitement when I won that the DJ asked me how old I was, because he was pretty sure I was a kid who could not drink martinis with Mandy. Yeah, my voice does that. I have to consciously NOT sound like a 12-year-old, particularly when I'm excited. I don't have a high-pitched voice, but for whatever reason, it sounds young. This is one of the reasons I'm wary of doing radio interviews. But anyway. I've admired Mandy Moore since A Walk to Remember . Didn't know her early albums, which is apparently a good thing, because she thinks they were pretty lousy. Her latest, though, Wild Hope, is a folk album. That's my stuff. So today was the big day and I, of course, brought my brother-- best audience member in the w

We interrupt this blog with an important message...

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She's sleeping through the niiiiiight! Extra exclamation points all around!!! O joyous day! This is her, practicing her pout. I'm still staying up half the night, though, because I have several more books to read for the Writer's Digest Self-Published Books competition in the next couple of weeks. I guess I thought I was a faster reader than I am; it's taking me a long time to get through them. It's worth it, though. I really like the idea that at least one book is going to get plucked out of relative obscurity and get some big attention. I interviewed a fellow a couple of years back who won the contest and wound up with a 2-book deal with-- HarperCollins, I think. I keep hoping the big winner will be one of the ones in my pile, though the odds of that are low (there are thousands of entries; I'm reading about 65 of them).

New Motherhood and Patronizing Twits

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I'll tell you the single most frustrating thing I've encountered as a new mom: hand-washing and the arguments that ensue over it. No, seriously. As I've learned in various places, one of the most important things you can do to protect a baby is to make sure that anyone who handles her washes his or her hands first. So I do my best to uphold that. And I'm sad to say that after four months, I'm still having the same arguments with people. I have no idea what's so difficult or traumatic about hand-washing, but there are people-- in my family-- who are determined never to do it. And who manage to seem freshly shocked each time I ask for it. (What? I'm supposed to wash my hands? I washed them last week when I came to visit! Isn't that good enough?) There are also people who can't seem to resist saying patronizing things after hearing me ask someone to wash his or her hands. The most common one is: I can tell you're a first-time mom. or It's becaus

Hair Today

There's a lot of stuff no one tells you about pregnancy until it's too late. I have run headlong into the latest one this week: somewhere around month 3 of your baby's life, YOU GO FRICKIN' BALD. I had learned that you lose hair after giving birth, but thought that was no big deal because you actually hold onto a lot of hair during pregnancy, making it super-full. I had great pregnancy hair. Only fair to lose it afterwards, I figured. But no. I'm not just losing the extra hair I gained. I have two actual, factual bald spots now, right above my temples. The rest of my hair is breaking and looks horribly damaged and thin all of a sudden, so I went ahead and did the cliched thing-- I got a "mom cut." I didn't mean to. The stylist actually apologized while cutting it. And it looks... bad. That's the sad thing about hair-- it takes so long to grow it back if you want it long (and I do). I need to cut it even shorter to get past the damaged parts, but it

Mail Woes

This is one of those deflating moments you never really think about when you're in the honeymoon stage of book publishing-- you know, the time between when you sign the contract and the first month or so after the book comes out. Those months are so full of possibilities. Then, there you are five years later with an unearned-out advance and a statement showing that you've managed to lose money in the last 6 months. How, you ask? Simple: the number of returns exceed the number of sales. "Returns" doesn't mean that a customer returned the book. It means that the book was sitting around on the bookstore shelf and someone who works in the bookstore finally decided it was just taking up space there and probably would never sell, so they get to return it to the publisher for full credit at any time. I guess some of those stores have been hanging onto the book for the full five years. Nice of them, really. Anyway, there does come a point-- maybe after the first two or t