Rita Arens's Blog, page 32

Prop It Up and Stay On

When we moved to Chateau Travolta in 2008, the housing market was on the verge of tanking. Then it tanked, and the For Sale signs started popping up like dandelions. Some of those houses took years to sell, which made me realize just how stupid it was to take on two mortgages at once when we sold This Old House to move here.

This week there are ladders all over my neighborhood, as the houses built in 1978 have begun to show their age. Shingles pushed well beyond their limits topple from roofs...

Children's Book Week Giveaway Hop: THE OBVIOUS GAME

It's Children's Book Week! Yay!

And to celebrate, I'm giving away a copy of THE OBVIOUS GAME and joining a bunch of other great authors and bloggers on a blog hop. (Although teens aren't really "children," YA falls in this category.)

In order to enter to win, please fill out the form below. Also! If you want to read THE OBVIOUS GAME but don't have a book budget, don't forget to ask your library to order it. Or if you just want to be nice, ask your library to order it. I'm not afraid to b...

RT Booklover's 2013: Fun & Weird

Last week, I attended the RT Booklover's conference in Kansas City. I wasn't sure what to expect, as it's primarily a conference for romance novelists, and I quit Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star, because there was too much sex. I'm not much of a romance reader. But, wow, there are a lot of romance readers, and they read a lot of books, so all hail anyone who's supporting authors, right?

This guy? Is a romance novel cover model (Band Name of the Day) and Mr. RT 2009, or so he reported when I ins...

Lisa Allen and Me on Kansas City's Up to Date

Podcast is here -- talking all about Listen to Your Mother!

Giveaway: Two KC Listen to Your Mother Show Tickets!

The Kansas City Listen to Your Mother show is this Saturday, May 11, at 7 pm at Unity Temple on the Plaza. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door. Unless you win two here.

Now that my conference is over, I'm starting to get really nervous for the show. I've heard all my castmates' performances, and they are both hilarious and heartbreaking. If you're local, I highly recommend the show, and not just because a portion of the proceeds go to the Rose Brooks Center.

What is Listen to Your...

Does Everybody Daydream?

The reason I haven't been here on the blog this week is because I've been at RT Booklovers Conference, this year held in Kansas City. As many of you know, I live here, and I decided to attend because my budget to support THE OBVIOUS GAME is near nothing, and an authors' conference in my hometown is a benefit that fell in my lap. So I've taken almost a week off, and I went.

Today I met up with Jen from People I Want to Punch in the Throat, my new friend and fellow castmate of the upcoming Kans...

Fun with SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK & LET'S PANIC ABOUT BABIES!

It's the fifth anniversary of the publication of my parenting anthology, SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK, this year, and so in honor of Mother's Day coming up, I rang up two of my contributors --Alice Bradley and Eden Kennedy--who went on to write their own parenting tome, LET'S PANIC ABOUT BABIES. We decided what might be really fun to do in a veiled attempt to remind you our books make excellent Mother's Day gifts for the lovelies in your life is update you on one of our vignettes from SIFTW and pond...

Let's Talk About Belching

So for the past two weeks I have had the my-diamond-shoes-are-pinching-my-feet problem of a kitchen remodel. We've been in Chateau Travolta for five years, and this baby has been a long time coming. For the past two weekends, Beloved and I have ripped out soffits, torn out cabinets and nearly severed our hot water pipe (on accident, that last one). We've also had much use of the world's most fun tool, the fubar.

Now that we've found the linoleum under our linoleum and chiseled away the offe...

BLERGH

That is all.

Champagne Hubris & Listen to Your Mother KC

Yesterday, I went over to Erin Margolin's house to do a practice run-through of the Kansas City Listen to Your Mother show. Basically there are somewhere near a dozen of us, and we're all performing a short essay we wrote about motherhood, daughterhood or some mix of the two. Before we started, Co-Director Laura Seymour was all, "Hey, is anyone good at opening champagne?"

I've worked at four restaurants and a dog track. So I was all, "I AM." There was nervous tittering, because let's face it...