NEW RELEASES
No Sunday is complete without a temper tantrum
I was still reading the Sunday paper when Sassy stuck her head in the front door. “Dad wants to know if you’re going bike riding with us or not?”
It was already over a hundred degrees and climbing. Bike riding. CRAP.
“Well, I suppose he needs another grown up, doesn’t he?” It was decided that our children were going to learn to ride their bikes this weekend if it kills both them and us. My Honey and I found it appalling that neither of the kids could perform this trick. Kids have very different lives than we did at their age. We lived on our bikes from morning to night in the summer. We rode to school. Hell, we rode all over town. My kids don;t even have friends in the neighborhood. It’s weird.
I took this from the shade of a tree
“Then he says you have to go get your bike.”
I rolled my eyes. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I do not wish to spend several hours in a park at a million degrees being yelled at by my children because “riding a bike is hard.”
Things actually went really well – much better than I expected, to be honest. Sassy managed to master it and the boy is super, super close, but there were some spectacular fits thrown first. He would throw his bicycle on the ground, wrap his arms around his chest and storm off across the grass.
Well, one more bastion of my childhood has been preserved for another generation.
A last aside. Our quick free Sunday excursion ended up costing $50 when you factor in the bicycle pump, new tire tubes, and a replacement helmet. Why do these free events always end up costing a zillion dollars?
I’m feeling a headache coming on next Thursday and Friday
Next week Ava will be on vacation and I’ll be all alone. Work is going to seriously suck. I’ve been whining and pissing and moaning all week about it.
And then it got worse.
An email came over that Ava’s boss will be visiting our office while she’s gone. Why? WHY? Why would he come when she’s not even there. When he’s been in there in the past, he’s barely even spoken to us. He sits in a spare office on conference calls. Apparently he FORGOT Ava was going on vacation.
Do you remember how things worked out when the other corporate guy was there last time. I wasn’t able to keep my mouth shut. I 
damn near made him cry. It wasn’t my fault. He asked me my opinions about the company and, well, I told him.
Ava likes to point out that we need to keep these awful jobs until we don’t want them anymore. She’s totally right. Book sales are good but not good enough for us to leave just yet.
We got in the car at lunch and Ava looked at me very sternly. “When he gets here next week you are NOT to speak to him. You may say ‘hello’ and ‘I love working with Ava’. Otherwise you are to pretend you don’t speak. Sit in your office and act like you have laryngitis. Exhibit all signs that you are preternaturally predisposed to mutism.”
The receptionist suggested every time I felt compelled to chat him up I should hug him instead. That idea was vetoed as there is a very fine line between hugging and strangling.
It was also proposed, if he indeed shows up, that I simply be sent home ill. ***cough cough cough***
The beginning of the end of my sanity
So what did you do this weekend?
Have a barbecue in celebration of Father’s Day? Go to a guitar festival at the mall? Torture yourself by going to the human society and kissing all the puppies? Get your car washed an hour before it rained because you thought when the newspaper reported “the thinnest chance of rain” that meant it was safe? Watch a movie you’d been very excited about seeing only to be disappointed and bored?
I did all that. Even as busy as I was that was all still secondary to my real obsession over the weekend.
My Amazon rankings. It’s completely unhealthy and yet, I can not stop myself from refreshing my Amazon page at least hourly if not more. In fact, right now I had to stop and look. Down 40 points.
Then the next time I’ll be up 12. Down 27. Steady, steady, steady. It’s insanely nerve wracking.
I took my phone with me to bed on Saturday night and woke up twice in the night to check. That’s bad. I’m certain I’ll be completely batty by the end of next week.
Here’s my best ranking this weekend. It caused a great deal of celebratory dancing and squealing.
June 14
This has been an awesome week for book sales and rankings – at this very moment Miss Goldsleigh’s Secret is ranked #5 in Regency – and a very bad week to expect us to pay attention to anything that isn’t book related. How can we be expected to pay attention to work stuff when there are much more fun things to obsess over? We have no idea. At this point, the children are fed and clothed and the pets are alive. That’s really all we can be expected to accomplish right now. Maybe when this whole thing gets much more blase, then we’ll be like, “Whatever, #1, that’s nice.” Now, though, every time we move up in the rankings there is a new and exciting happy dance. It’s a 
veritable disco over here. We’re in such good moods we’re laughing all the time. Here are five things we picked out to share with you.
1. Crafty bears. We might be missing for a couple of days. We’re driving up to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. There is a young bear up there who has figured out how open car doors. It seems he climbs around in parked cars looking for food. We picked up a bunch of lunch
We’re gonna live right there
meat and a roasted chicken and we’re going to leave our car “unattended” in a parking lot. We’re going to name him Stewart and he’ll be very happy in our backyard.
2.Greece will be ours! Oh, yes. It will be ours. They keep getting in more and more trouble over there and pretty soon you’ll all be eating your scoffing words. Things are so out of control they’ve been booted from the list of developed countries by the MSCI. We don’t know who they are, but they’re making our jobs much easier. Still, we ask, how the hell can the home of democracy and freaking math no longer be a developed country?
When the Sisters get over there, things will be much better. You’ll see. Before you know it, everyone will be breaking plates, drinking ouzo, and eating baklava. All will be well.
3. Oldest man in history. The fellow finally died at 116. That’s not funny, but his picture in the obit is. He looks like quite a jolly fellow. Of course they interviewed his family. His nephew – WHO IS 80 – said lovely things about him. That always amuses us about these
squirrel and raccoon friendship
stories. The “kids” are always like a zillion years old themselves. Anyway, good on you, Mr. Kimura.
4. Squirrel and raccoon. Would you look at this? Just look at it a moment. Don’t you feel your blood pressure decreasing? Normal people have that reaction. The Sisters don’t, but we’re certainly not normal people. When we see this picture or the bear above our immediate reaction is to yearn for whatever fuzzy animal has been placed before us. You know those idiots that are always getting mauled because they stupidly pet a wild animal? That’ll be us one of these days. We’ll be the one 
drowned by the whale and sliced up by the mama tiger and trampled by the elephant auntie. Just you wait and see. This is a cute story. Follow the jump and see.
5. Sir Stanley. This has been a real crappy hockey season – what with the strike and losing half of the damn thing. Playoffs picked up with some really tight series and now the first game of the Stanley Cup kicks off by going into THREE OVERTIME PERIODS. Holy cow. Amylynn will tell you she’s a Blackhawks fan but that she likes Boston, too, so she’s just happy to be watching good hockey. Ava doesn’t like either team but she’s from New Jersey so what the hell does she know?
a rambling story about nothing but it has a moral
Ava and I were starving at lunch today. S.T.A.R.V.I.N.G. So hungry, in fact, they could make a country song about it.
So we got our big bunch of cooked meat – honestly, we’re getting tired of this diet. We really wish it wasn’t working, but alas it is so we must stick with it – and headed back to the office. Ava asked me to drive approximately 756 miles per hour as we could get back and eat before her stomach ate itself.
Instead, I called our super nice mailbox place to ask if we had anything in today. To be fair, the mailbox place was directly en route. (Ava – to be fair? Fair to whom? Not me, that’s for sure.)
LO! We had a box.
We’ve been waiting for the gorgeous bookmarks we ordered. I veered the car into the left turn lane to make a quick detour.
“Don’t worry,” I told her, “I”ll just run in and grab the box. You can wait in the car.”
But then I looked across the car at Ava sitting next to me, several takeout bags of delicious smelling meat on the floor at her feet. I realized that was probably a bad idea. I had visions of returning to the car and there being no food left and Ava covered in the flotsam and jetsam of Korean ribs.
So, I made her get out of the car into the 107 degree desert heat. That made her snarl, but I wasn’t worried since she was about to eat a boatload of meat within a few minutes. Whatever, I didn’t want to return to my Sister with bones in her hair and the carcass of a cow littered throughout my car.
The moral of the story is: Don’t get fat then you won’t have to eat tons of meat on a stupid protein diet that unfortunately works and consequently you won’t worry about your Sister getting heat stroke instead of eating all your lunch.
We’re like Hemingway. Really, only with less bullfighting.
Have you ever wondered who I want to play me in the movie version? I dish on that and much more at Musing of a Manic Blond. Check
it out. It’s…shall we say, extensive. But I think it’s a good interview if you ever wondered about my process.
Also, If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll see that sales of Miss Goldsleigh’s Secret are doing really well and I’m offering a $25 gift certificate to someone who shares my Tweets or postings.
You should repost. Really you should. If you don’t know what you want to spend 25.00 on then I’m absolutely certain that I can help you come up with some stuff.
Should you chose to select Amazon – they have everything. The Sisters are going to need Sloth Chow and surely Amazon sells Sloth Chow. OR you might want to buy a book. Amazon sells a few of those and if you need some suggestions, I have a bunch of those. I happen to know many fine authors.
Besides, it ups your cache when people think you know writers. We’re wacky and interesting people.
I didn’t die alone at my book signing
I had my very first solo book signing this weekend at Mostly Books. Actually, things went really well. A whole bunch of my author friends showed up and some of my friends from an old job. It was soooo fabulous of everyone to come and be supportive. I was so afraid I’d sit there alone and mortified.
Getting ready was a nightmare. I tried on 500 different dresses. I finally decided on a one but then was tortured by the shoe selection. Or lack of shoe selection. Honestly, all 79 pairs of my shoes suck. Then there was not a single necklace that worked.
The only thing I was happy about was my hair and I can’t even tell you how unusual that is.
Sassy decided to come with me so she and I met Ava at one of our favorite restaurants which happens to be next door to the bookstore. We shared an eclair and a chocolate hazelnut tort three ways. It was to calm my nerves, but that wasn’t working. I’d decided not to get a latte because I was already wound up enough, but even my iced tea couldn’t stop me from dropping my fork twice, 
buttered bread on my dress and flinging hazelnut tort across the table.
The poor girl next to us pretended she wasn’t alarmed, but she totally was. I am 100% positive she was laughing at me as we left.
Ava was like, “Are you nervous or something?”
Also, having nothing to do with the actual signing event but it still almost made me late was a Basset Hound Adoption event between the restaurant and the bookstore. That’s so not fair.
I offered them a box of autographed books in exchange for a sloe-eyed, long-eared baby but they politely declined.
It’s probably best in the long run. I’m not sure how my sloth would have taken to a Basset hound.
June 7
We vowed that we’d stop complaining of the heat out of deference to the people on this planet who’ve been living with deadly weather like tornadoes and tsunamis and hurricanes. Unfortunately, it turns out that either we’re really awful people or total narcissists because every time we go outside the first thing out of our mouths is, “Wow, who turned on the dryer?” Somehow we do manage to make everything about us. It’s destiny. Sorry. We’re repentantly shallow — at least where heat is involved. To be fair, we don’t like wind or too much rain either, and we detest snow. We’re equal opportunity weather haters. Even while we melt, we do find things to laugh about 
though. And we do share.
1. Jeans. Since no one ever notices us here at Bank of No Forks, we’ve taken to wearing jeans everyday. That is a glorious thing. What is it about wearing jeans in an office that makes you feel like you’re getting away with something? Honestly, jeans are kinda hot and depending on how much cake you’ve had recently, tight. But still, we LOVE wearing our jeans. Especially when 
we’re not supposed to. We figure, if this is the reason we get fired after all this nonsense, then so be it. Levis for everyone! Power to the denim.
2. Souless. We’re very intrigued by steampunk. It’s so stylized and interesting. We’ve tossed around a couple ideas of our own for steampunk stories, but we’ve got so many other projects going on that we’ve restrained ourselves and not started another project. Don’t know what steampunk is? Dear lord, where have you been? It’s everywhere. You know all those interesting people you see wearing copper stuff and sporting goggles? They’re dressing the part. Anyway, we LOVE this cover. The story is delightful, too. If 
you’re interested in tipping your toe in, give this one a try.
3. Pretzels. You know how when you’re craving something it keeps showing up everywhere? For us this week it was pretzels. Funny how that seems to happen to us at the same time. Or perhaps we’re both highly suggestible. Either way, we wanted pretzels. On Monday, Ava suggested we head over to Philadelphia on our lunch hour for a nice street vendor pretzel. Amylynn was game, even though that would have put us over our hour by quite a bit. On Tuesday, Amylynn wrote soft pretzels into her current work in progress. On Thursday it came to fruition. Glorious pipping hot ubber salted pretzels with mustard and cheese sauce. All is right with the world 
again. Until the next craving…
4. Food craziness. Dunkin’ Donuts has introduced the Glazed Doughnut Breakfast Sandwich. It’s eggs and bacon sandwiched between two glazed doughnuts. Swear to Zeus. Now you all know we’ve been seriously dieting. For the most part that’s been going pretty well – for some of us. We really don’t have any intention of eating this concoction. First of all, Amylynn doesn’t allow her food to touch so this is unspeakable heresy (Ava would eat this). Still we do love ourselves a good glazed doughnut. And you have to hand it to the Dunkin’ people for basically showing the health food demographic the finger.
5. Thinning the herd. There is a woman in Seattle who’s decided that she can live off of water, air and light. She’s not eaten anything for 32 days. She’s lost 20 pounds – which we thing is a hell of a way to diet. She’s reported nauseousness, dizziness and exhaustion. Really. RE-freaking-LLY **eyeroll**. She’s part of a growing number of lunatics who call themselves Breatharians. We call them idiots. Or delusional. We wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to find that we’re related to several of them. We certainly hope they have a lot of money to inherit because this working for a living thing isn’t’ really working out.
It’s like watching TV with my dad.
I’ve recently become intimately involved with a BBC show, Orphan Black. Really, this is the the fault of the son of a friend of mine. He said I should watch it, it’s really good. He knows my type of show, and so I took his advice to heart. I found the show and last Saturday, when they were running the entire season back-to-back, I DVRed them.
So now I’ve been watching them late into the night – like until 2:30 in the damn morning, three or four at a time.
I only have two left and I really need to get some writing done, so I stupidly turned the second to last one on while Sassy was still awake.
She wandered into the living room. I paused the show.
“Do not ask me questions,” I warned her. “I’m not answering ANY questions.”
“Jeez.” She threw herself on the couch next to me. “I won’t ask anything.”
I looked at her skeptically but turned the show back on.
“Who’s that?” It took less than 20 seconds for the first question.
“Be quiet.”
“What’s wrong with that girl?”
I huffed out a sigh, but answered quickly so I wouldn’t miss anything. “She got hit by a car.”
“Why?”
With a great deal of ceremony I paused the show again. “What the hell do you mean, ‘why?’ She got hit by a car.”
“Yeah, but why?” I don’t see irony expressed on her face.
I helpfully point down the hall. “Go do something else.”
“No, I’ll be quiet.”
I restarted the show. Important stuff is happening and I’m seriously paying attention.
“Is that a good guy or a bad guy.” Fifteen seconds and counting. I knew it wouldn’t last.
“I don’t know. That’s why I have to pay attention. Be quiet.”
“Oh. How bout that guy? Is he a good guy?”
“SASSY! I’m not explaining this whole show to you. Go do something else.”
She never did leave. She peppered me with a hundred more questions.
Eventually I shot the television in frustration. I’d like it noted to the Nobel committee that I did not strangle the child.
If I beg will you come?
First and foremost
I have a signing.
MOSTLY BOOKS on Saturday 6/8. Mostly Books is at Speedway and Wilmot in the Bookman’s shopping center in Tucson, AZ. I’ll be there from 2:30 – 3:30 and there’ll be copies of both books available for purchase and signing. If you’re in Tucson, I really hope to see you. Otherwise, I’ll be the lonely author sitting at the table pretending like I’m having fun.
Next thing.
They’ve taken away our office cat again. There is a tremendous amount of tears and whining involved. You’d think we’d put on our big girl panties and get over it, but no.
So now we’re considering a hamster. Seriously. A hamster. I vetoed a ferret because they smell. The smell is more than I am willing to put up with even for the cuteness factor.
But a hamster…
