NEW RELEASES
More exciting Lady Belling’s news
It may come as no surprise to you that Ava and I are crazy. Not talk-to-ghosts and never-bathe crazy. Still, I’m not going to say that Ava and I don’t have very distinct leanings towards becoming Crazy Cat Ladies in our in golden years though. I suspect if you’re a reader of the blog you’ve already diagnosed that particular peccadillo. I don’t know if there is such a thing as Crazy Panda Ladies, but Ava and I are willing to be trailblazers.
As part of the Lady Belling’s Secret book release, Ava and I decided that we should give away Francesca’s engagement ring.
That seems easy enough, doesn’t it?
Clearly you’ve never shopped with the two of us. It’s painful. Excruciating. Mind boggling.
At some point during the whole experience I usually lose my temper and yell at Ava that she’s crazy and I’m totally right at the time. She won’t even disagree. My crazy comes in different forms – my issues encompass driving myself too hard and obsessing over details. That doesn’t mean Ava’s still not crazy.
It took us FOREVER to find the right ring. We ordered it. It was done. Then it took forever to be delivered. AND IT WAS WRONG. So Ava took up the banner and made our complaints and we ordered the right one.
And it didn’t come and it didn’t come and it didn’t come. So Ava got back in touch with the vendor and guess what… The ring is no longer available.
Oh dear God.
This was bad. I didn’t know if I could go through with shopping for this ring with Ava again. The last time gave me a migraine.
We were back on the web, searching and searching and searching. Our conversations went like this, “How about this one?”
“I don’t hate that one,” she’d say.
“OK, let’s get it.” My mouse would hover over the Buy Now link.
“No.” There’d never be a reasonable explanation. It was too pink. It wasn’t round. It was silver not gold. It was ugly. It was too cheap. It cost too much. Her karma didn’t feel right about it. I don’t freaking know.
After a while, I went back to my own office and just started yelling across the hall. Then I’d email her a likely contender with subject lines like Here’s Another One You’ll Hate or Option #17 or Option #83.
Finally I sent her one with the subject line, I’m Giving Up Hope. HOLY SHIT! she liked this one. I put it in the virtual cart that very instant before she had a chance to think.
Here it is. It’s a gorgeous Sterling silver and 14K gold created ruby and diamond ring.
Contest starts on Friday, March 1st.
Stay tuned……
Apparently, Preppers prep for snow. Who knew?
An odd thing happened the other day. The Sisters tweeted out that our daily blog was posted and the “Prepper News” people RE-tweeted it. That’s right, the
Prepper News people. It was about snow . . .
We had no idea, what-so-ever, that the Preppers read our Blog. The Sisters are not preppers nor do they know any preppers. No self respecting preppers would ever have anything to do with us. We aren’t even prepared to handle normal life let alone end times. If doom is going to happen, it’s happening without us. We’ll be the first to die just before asking, “Doom? What doom? No one told us to dress/prepare for doom. We’re pretty sure our doom sandals are in our other bag.” Comment from Amylynn: Prepping sounds inconvenient to us and we’re not willingly getting involved with anything that sounds even
We don’t see any cake here. Yeah, we’re out.
slightly inconvenient.
Any preppers who think that there might be any valuable prepper information on our blog will be sadly disappointed when they get to our website. We can see it now – their perplexed little prepper faces as they realize we mainly talk about dessert and baby animals. “Good Lord!” They’ll say. “How in God’s name will they survive the coming apocalypse with non-nutritious cake and eating baby animals with no meat on them?”
We’d really like the prepper folks to contact us and let us know why they re-tweeted our snow in the desert blog. Who’s in charge there? Does anyone have a name?
Olives by Birdboxstudio
I LOVE the Oscars
I was really trying to write a blog tonight – but the Oscars are on and I’m watching them and Twitter at the same time and I can’t get over how freaking funny people are.
And the dresses. Dear God. My Mom keeps asking when I plan to be over my diet. I have an answer now. When I look like Stacy Keibler. Of course, I’ll have to grow like 3 feet as well.
I loved Daniel Day Lewis’s speech. Who knew he was so funny? I’d guessed he was charming – he is Irish after all. But funny seemed like too much to hope for.
I do have some advice for Jennifer Lawrence ~~ Honey, I fall down and embarrass myself all the time and I really understand your desire to get up as quickly as possible when you do it in front of an international audience. That’s just the natural instinct of self-preservation kicking in. I’d hate to fly against natural instincts, especially one’s I employ so often myself. But, pumpkin, when Hugh Jackman jumps up to your aid, you lay there for a minute. For Zeus’s sake, girl. Lay there. Perhaps you lean against him, suggest he carry you up the stairs. Find a boo-boo for him to kiss if at all possible.
You know that girl is going to resent leaping up from those stairs for the rest of her life.
February 22
It’s entirely possible Amylynn has lost her mind. Ava’s no help at all, either. Mostly she just rolls her eyes and says things like, “OMG – is that a spread sheet?” or “Are you trolling Amazon AGAIN?” Nevertheless, we spent a lot of time giggling. We do that. It’s either that or we kill people. I think we can
all agree that we don’t want option #2. Unless, you happen to know someone who really, really deserves Option #2, then we might be persuaded. Here are the five things this week.
1. All the alcohol. Maker’s Mark freaked everyone out last week when they had a press conference and informed the drunks of the world that they were lowering the alcohol percentage of their bourbon. Apparently, it was a gasp heard around the world and they quickly recanted. Look, after a long day at Bank of No Forks or with your kids or whatever, sometimes you really need your 90 proof.
2. Extreme Over reactions. The Belarus Supreme Court convicted a guard to two years for allowing a light 
plane across the border. Said plane was loaded with hundreds of teddy bears wearing parachutes and human rights slogans which were dropped over the city. Can you imagine walking along the streets of Belarus only to see a crap load of Swedish teddy bears bombing your city. At the very least, it gives you something to talk about at dinner while you gulped down your Maker’s Mark. (Ava had no idea Belarus was a country, she thought it was a city in eastern Europe but no, Amy is insistent that’s its a country.)
3. Men are so dumb. A Texas couple decided to have another child. We guess their two year old was lonely, so the wife went and got herself knocked up. They told her she was having twins. OK, that’s a bit intimidating
but not insurmountable. THEN, they informed her she had managed to spontaneously conceive TWO sets of identical twins. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s quadruplets. Four. Four babies, not two. There was no fertility assistance, drugs, or doctors involved in any way. There’s like a 1 in 70 million chance of that happening. Momma managed to have four healthy baby boys named Ace, Blaine, Cash and Dylan to join their brother, Memphis. Did you catch that – A,B,C & D. Where does the dumb man part come into the story, you ask. When interviewed,
the husband/daddy/idiot actually said, out loud, that they’re going to keep trying for a girl. You just know those boys inherited that stupid gene from their father. God help that poor woman.
4. Grand niece. It’s the week of babies! Ava’s first grand niece was born on the 21st and weighed a perfect 7.1 lbs and was 20 inches. Her name is Harper Paisley and look how adorable she is!!! Deep dark secret alert – Ava is afraid of all babies under 12 months. You will never find her holding one, not even this cutey but she does like to admire them from afar. Per Ava; “No one likes
If they’re good enough for LL….
if you break their baby, in fact, they never forgive you.”
5. Chakalates. Chaka Kahn has her own chocolates. It looks exactly like her hair. We’re sure you can imagine how tasty that must be. Do you supposed she woke up one morning with a driving need for her own food line. She probably leapt from her bed, looked in the mirror and said, “EUREKA! CHOCOLATES!” Often when famous people do this sort of nonsense, the Sister wonder where their people are. You know, the people who furrow their brow, shake their heads gently and say, “hmmmmm, well…maybe not.”
Blog Tour stop #2
This time I wrote a guest post. It’s me so don’t expect a treatise on international politics from 1800 Great Britain. You can expect some ridiculous rambling on food. I can almost promise you.
I”m giving away a free print copy to a random commentor. That could be YOU! If you’re super nice I might autograph it and everything.
This can’t be healthy
I have so much work to do.
- I have a blog tour to assemble
- Subsequent guest blogs to write for already booked tour sites (more to come)
- Live signings to book for here in town
- I’m trying to find reviewers for Lady Belling’s Secret
- I have a bunch of work to do on the first round of edits for Book #2 – Miss Goldsleigh’s Secret
- I have blogs to write for this site
- I have to figure out this social media nonsense and it’s giving me hives
- That stupid, soul-sucking day job at Bank of No Forks
And the problem is I’ve become obsessed with my Amazon rankings. So obsessed, I’ve created a spreadsheet. Great Zeus – seriously – an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of my sales and rankings. I have to make a concerted effort to limit myself to checking in no more than every four hours.
And then I’ll get a Tweet like this from my writer friend, Tara Simone:
Ur book rankings are awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Of course, that just sent me right to Amazon to see what happened since the last time I was there. Tara says it’s perfectly normal. All authors go through it. The problem is I can’t manage to do ANYTHING ELSE. The book has been making a steady climb up the charts. At this very moment it’s ranked 5,021 in Amazon and – here’s the really, really exciting part – #92 in Amazon Regency Romances.
I guess my diet will go better when I stop eating altogether because I’m too busy stalking myself.
The end is nigh! Really. Seriously.
It snowed in the desert today. It’s snowed here before. I remember five distinct times in my 44 years here that it has snowed. What made this day different was that it snowed during the day. It started around 11:00 and stopped around 12:30. Real honest to God snow. From the sky. Usually what happens here is that the weather man comes on in the evening and hints that it might snow that night and the homeless people should find shelter and you should let your dogs in the house. Then all the school children pray for snow. Pray pray pray – to God, Zeus, Odin – anyone who’ll listen. I talked to Odin a lot when I was younger figuring if anyone knew about snow it would be a Norse god, right? It rarely happened, but some mornings you’d wake up and there would be a very thin layer or snow on the ground. Not enough to make a snowman out of or even a very good snowball, but that wouldn’t stop us from trying. We’d run to all the neighbor’s houses and scrap all their snow up and cart it back to your own yard. Often we’d build a mud man and then cover it in snow. It was a feeble attempt, but we weren’t swayed from our plan.
So now Ava and I are wondering where the hell is Global Warming?
The end of the world is here. Don’t worry – I have entertainment suggestions
First – the most important thing.
MY ACTUAL “BOOK” BOOK IS UP FOR SALE ON AMAZON! So if you were holding out for a print copy, now’s your chance.
Next, and not nearly as important, is that it’s possible the end of the world is here.
Several of us got a very weird texts this evening from the National Weather Service. Suddenly our phones started screaming an alarm we’d never heard before. It was piercing and painful and certainly attention getting.
Emergency Alert
Blizzard Warning this area til 11:00 PM MST Wed. Prepare. Avoid Travel. Check Media, – NWS
What the hell? I live in the American Southwestern Desert. DESERT. At the time of the message it was 65 degrees and we think THAT’s chilly. If there is a 35 degree drop in temperature from tonight to tomorrow morning and there is indeed a freaking blizzard in the ARIZONA desert, it’s the end of the world. I promise you.
I mentioned this potentially disastrous development to My Honey (who was wearing shorts at the time) and he informed me that if that was the case, he was going out for beer. I’m going to need cake. There is no way I’m going into the apocalypse without cake.
You might need something to read, too. There’s nothing worse than sitting through a blizzard with nothing to read. Don’t, worry, I have a suggestion.
My first blog tour interview…
I popped over to the lovely site of R.E. Hargrave and did an interview. I answered in my usual way, so you can assume there was goofiness involved.
I also ordered 50 copies of my first book, Lady Belling’s Secret, today so I’ll have plenty at the Tucson Festival of Books in March. You’ll be able to purchase your own print copy this week. I’m just waiting for Amazon to do their internal stuff… Don’t think about it too hard, the minutia of publishing is mind boggling.
Anyway, If you want to know where I’m hiding an elephant, hop over to the interview.