The Five!

1.
Okay, so I got beaten to the punch with the Big Cover Reveal by both a blogger AND Amazon, but what can you do? It's not exactly a bad thing that people are enthusiastic about a new book. In fact, it's wonderful. At any rate, here it is. Finally! Now, everything starts to feel, well...real. Which is also wonderful.

2. Thanks so much to ALL the booksellers and others who responded to my questions about what readers should do if they happen to buy a novel with missing pages. I've alerted my publishing company that this was happening---they were horrified---and which books I think have been affected, so they're on the case. The upshot is that you should probably take it back to where you got it and it will get replaced, with the damaged book hopefully going back to my publisher so they can figure out what's going on. Don't you love it when a problem is solved? It's like cleaning a drawer. Or, in my case, reorganizing my daughter's dollhouse so the bathtub is not in the kitchen, filled with suitcases. Order and answers: they are good things.

3. I know that lots of you are fans of Susane Colasanti, a fellow YA writer who is also published by Penguin. (The cover of her new book was also blogged and up on Amazon without her knowing: she got trumped too! So I was in good company.) Right now, though, I am just so jealous of Susane that I can't even stand it. Why, you ask? Because last week she went to the Austin Book Festival and got to stand on the football field they used on Friday Night Lights. OH MY GOD! Of course she had to tell me, as we are fellow squealing fangirls, and share pictures. You can see the proof on her blog here . It's the next best thing to hanging out with Tim Riggins. If, you know, he was a real person and all. Sa-woon!

4. But things are not all dullsville here in Chapel Hill. Not at all! Get this: today, I'm going to the bank to make a deposit. Routine errands, routine day. And parked RIGHT outside my bank is this:

Oh, my goodness. Can you even imagine? What is Bret Michaels' tour bus doing outside a Wachovia, just steps from a freaking Food Lion, at 10:30 in the morning? No one had any idea, but there was a lot of speculation. I talked to a teller to get the lowdown. No one had seen Bret, just a bus driver, and it had been there about an hour. All I can think is that they were driving some equipment home and pulled off of I-40 (which is just down the street) to grab some pork rinds or something. Still, SO surreal. It was all I could do not to go up, knock on the door, and announce I was there rock Bret's world. But then I remembered that I am 40, married, a mom and am not really into longhair types. Still, very exciting.

5. Finally, for you fellow shopaholics, a milestone: yesterday, I bought my first NICE purse since my daughter was born. For the past three years I've been carrying mostly big, waterproof things I could literally hose out if necessary, as I was always dropping goldfish and sippy cups and wipes inside of them. I am ready to be an adult again, at least in the handbag department, so I went to Nordstrom yesterday. On the clearance table, I found this mustard yellow Dooney & Bourke number that just jumped out at me. It is such a weird color it goes with nothing and therefore everything, just like my old orange purse. And it was on sale! And it looks like a doctor's bag, kind of, so I feel all official. The saleswoman told me it could be a fall purse but not a winter one, like I was someone who actually follows those fashion rules. Puh-leeze. I will rock my banana purse in the snow. Just watch me. Now I just have to keep the goldfish crumbs out of it.

Have a great weekend, everyone!