I’m finally done with my revisions to the Harlequin American-targeted manuscript. I typed in the last of the revisions tonight and e-mailed it off to my agent five minutes ago. YES! I’m taking tomorrow to get caught up on e-mail and clean the neglected house. And then I’m taking a glorious weekend off to hang out with family and read — for fun!

And for anyone out there who thinks they’re too old to start writing, I say read this inspiring story of a pretty cool guy, age 96, whose memoir is being published and who already has publishers in several countries signing on to publish his next book. Thanks to Allison for sending me the link.

Have you ever heard someone else utter a phrase and think, “Oh, that’s good. I’ve got to use that in a book someday.”

I had that experience a couple of days ago when the hubby and I were looking out at our poor, pathetic, drought-ridden lawn. The exchange went like this:

Me: “Yeah, it’s a lovely shade of–”
Hubby: “Dead.”

It just struck me as funny, and I could imagine a Buffy-type character using “a lovely shade of dead” to describe one of the vampires she’s hunting. Or it could be used to describe someone with a grayish complexion, dead vegetation, or any number of things that have seen better days.

What phrases have you overhead that you immediately filed away to go in a book someday?

You ever notice that no matter how many times you read through a manuscript, you still find things to change? I’m currently on the third go-through on this manuscript targeted toward Harlequin American. The first time through, I was slashing lots of suspense stuff (and cutting the page count in the process) and addressing other things in the editor’s revision letter. The second time through, I was reading for clarity and flow following all the big changes and tidying the copy editing. This time, I’m addressing suggestions made my faboo Mary to make the conflict and romance stronger. After I finish this round this week, I’m e-mailing this off to my agent so I don’t have to look at it anymore — at least for a little while.

If you’re here, you’ve noticed that I gave the blog a new look. While searching for templates for my new teen-centered blog, I came across this adorable puppy template. I can’t resist a puppy so decided to use him here.

And speaking of that teen-centered blog, I launched The Girl Hood last night (actually very early this morning) as my young-adult writing alter ego Tricia Mills. It’s a blog targeted at teen girls, and we’ll be talking about books, music, movies, fashion, guys, etc. So if you know any teen girls, please send them by.

So, what do you think of the new look? Of the new The Girl Hood blog?

After spending the past several weeks working on revisions to a book, I took the day off yesterday while super fantabulous friend Mary reads through the latest version with her red pen at the ready. It so happened that I’d been invited to the combined birthday party for my friend Kristy’s little boys, ages 4 and 7. So I loaded up my iPod with some Pottercast podcasts and off I went, driving the hubby’s truck (aka The Gas Hog) since there’s something wrong with my car and it won’t start.

The first hour of driving was normal interstate travel. The second hour took me along smaller back roads in Kentucky. I’m used to driving a Nissan Sentra, so driving the Dodge Ram is kind of like driving a large piece of farm machinery like a combine — of which I saw several. In fact, I had to hug the side of the road as I met two combines on the road. Another was in a field I passed, and it was raising the dust like crazy. We’ve been in a pretty severe drought with temps above 100 degrees for most of August, and everything is beyond dry and dusty.

On that note, I noticed a church sign on the way up that said, “Pray for rain.” I noticed the other side of this same sign on the way home, but that side said, “And you think it’s hot here?”

Other observations from the road:

*In a small community called –I kid you not — Tiny Town, there’s a little store that has a really large, plastic Holstein cow out front. The cow is wearing sunglasses. Why, I have no idea. If I hadn’t forgotten my camera, I would have taken a picture for the blog.
*You can tell the instant you cross over into Kentucky even if there isn’t a sign. Suddenly, no one is wearing a motorcycle helmet because there’s no helmet law there. I cannot imagine riding a motorcycle without a helmet. It’s worse than riding in a car without a seatbelt. I used to work at a newspaper and had to cover wrecks where people weren’t wearing the suggested/required protective devices. Not pretty. And so many preventable injuries and deaths.
*Road shoulders are a good thing. You don’t miss them until they’re not there. Try driving a Dodge Ram and meeting a combine with no shoulder on your side of the road.

On this day last month, I got the call that I’d sold my first book. So, what’s happened in the first month afterward?

1. I decided on a pen name, Tricia Mills, for my young adult work.
2. I bought the Tricia Mills domain name.
3. I started a Tricia Mills MySpace page.
4. I talked to the young adult librarian at my local library branch about how to go about getting my books into the collection when they’re released.
5. I’ve started gathering information about contacts at bookstores.
6. I’ve communicated with my editor. Squee! I still love saying that.
7. I was invited to take part in a published authors breakfast with librarians and booksellers at the Moonlight & Magnolias Conference at the end of September.
8. I’ve been brainstorming ideas for a teen-centered blog to start building a teen readership even before my books come out.
9. In an effort to sell my adult fiction, I’ve been working on requested revisions to a manuscript for Harlequin American. I plan to have that completed and to my agent next week.

In the weeks since the RWA Conference, not only have I sold but four of my friends, all past Golden Heart finalists, have as well. Fellow Romance Bandits Jeanne Adams and Beth Burgoon, 2005 GHer Delilah Ahrendt, and two-time GH finalist Trish Cerrone all sold their first books. It’s been a great second half of the summer for the GHers.

My mom won’t see this post, but I’m going to write it anyway. My mom turns 65 today. While we’ve had our differences and frustrations through the years, I’ve never once doubted my mom loves me. That’s something, unfortunately, many kids can’t say. Mom’s had what could be called a hard life, and much of the struggle has been because she can’t read. It’s quite the irony that she can’t when my sister and I love to read and love books so much. And oddly, that’s partly because of Mom.

When my sister and I were little, before we even started school, Mom would have us practice reading every day. I remember those faded, worn, cheap Little Golden Books. She’d also have us practice saying big words like “hippopotamus”. She couldn’t read, but somehow she knew it was important for us to be able to.

Over the years, I’ve helped Mom learn a little bit of reading here or there. Instead of reading her birthday cards to her (including one she got from her sister last week), I’d have her sound out the words. Same with road signs. She ended up being able to figure out more of the words than she thought she could, which leads me to believe that my mom’s inability to read at a functional level has a lot to do with some learning disability and the time and place in which she grew up. She attended a one-room school in rural Kentucky in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Despite her not learning the schoolwork, her teachers passed her because they evidently felt sorry for her. There were no such things as one-on-one tutoring or special education classes, and no one had even heard of attention deficit disorder, which I think Mom probably suffers from to some extent. I don’t know if her educational struggles were there from the start or are a result from having rheumatic fever twice as a young child, but they were there nevertheless and she didn’t even make it through the 8th grade. She grew up in a hardscrabble farming community in a time when education wasn’t at the top of most families’ priority lists. So the deck was stacked against her. And still, nearly 30 years later, she instilled in us the knowledge that reading was important through those simple daily reading lessons.

In another bit of irony, I was the first person in my family to ever go to college, followed by my sister as the second person in the family four years later. No one else in our generation went beyond high school. It wasn’t until the next generation (my cousin’s son) that anyone else ventured to college. I think my sister and I going to college was a result of an early love of books.

So, Happy Birthday, Mom, and thanks.

I’ve been reading for as long as I can remember. I love books. I love the feel of them, being surrounded by them, reading the stories housed within their pages. So when I saw this story on Yahoo saying that a recent AP-Ipsos poll found that only 1 in 4 people have read a book (as in 1 book) in the last year, I was dumbfounded. I just can’t comprehend not liking to read. I’m reading three different books now — Anne of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery, Marked by P.C. and Kristin Cast, and The Secret by Rhonda Bryne (though I have to say the latter hasn’t really grabbed me yet, despite its status as a huge bestseller). This year alone, I’ve read 36 books — and I’m a pretty slow reader.

I know reading is losing out to other forms of entertainment like the Internet, but there’s got to be a way to rejuvenate interest in reading. There are so many great stories out there to read if we could just get people to pick up the books. The Harry Potter series has done a lot to popularize reading again, but there’s obviously still more to do.

I’ve been busy little writer chick this weekend, working on those revisions to the book for Harlequin American. The light at the end of the tunnel (i.e. the end of the first go-through) is in sight, and I think I’ll reach it either tomorrow or Tuesday. Then it’s time to print it out again, then start over to smooth everything out and make sure it makes sense after all the great slashing cuts. So far, I’ve cut 25 pages!

Yesterday was my local RWA chapter meeting, and it was really, really fun after a decade of attending chapter meetings to announce my first sale in person. Much clapping ensued, and I was grinning from ear to ear. It was also fun that we had good attendance and some new potential members there.

While typing in revisions this weekend, I’ve been listening to a new music discovery — the Dutch band Delain. They have connections to another favorite Dutch band, Within Temptation, and are in that vein of symphonic rock. Check out their MySpace page, where you can hear a few of their songs, two of them in the video format. My favorites are “The Gathering,” “Sleepwalker’s Dream” and “See Me in Shadow” (down in the videos). That last one is how I discovered them. Someone had set a fan video to that song on YouTube.

I blogged before about how fantastic my friends are, and how many of them had sent me presents to celebrate my sale. I wanted to report on a couple more. Mary not only sent me that awesome First Sale T-shirt, but she sent me this great necklace, which I wore for the first time yesterday. Sorry, I couldn’t take a picture of it. Each time I tried, I couldn’t get close enough to it without blurring the image or the light messed up. Mary rocks, by the way, and when she sells, I’m going to dance up and down my street, no matter how hot or cold it might be outside. Dianna Love Snell sent me a couple of gifts that were truly awesome in that they made this sale thing feel a little more real. She sent me this Cross pen, which I’m going to use to sign my contract when I get it, and a roll of “Autographed by the Author” stickers to put on my books. Squee! I get chills just thinking about that.

This weekend, the hubby and I also had to say goodbye to an old friend. The microwave we’ve had during our entire nearly 15-year marriage finally bit it.

But I’d say I got my money’s worth. I bought it in the summer of 1991, while I was a college student and doing my summer internship at a weekly newspaper and living in a crappy old apartment with my younger sister. College student doing internship = poor, so I paid a stunning $25 at a yard sale for this beauty. She’s made her home in five apartments, one dorm room, and one house since then, but this weekend she said, “You shall warm up no more pieces of pizza or leftover potatoes.” When hubby tried to warm up some nachos, he turned the timer knob and nothing happened. We just looked at each other and made sad faces. After a moment of silence, I headed off to Wal-Mart to get a replacement. Wow, if it lasts 16 years too, I’ll be 53 when it bites the dust!

I’m going to be writing my young adult books under the pen name Tricia Mills to keep them separate from any adult books I sell in the future. Because my target audience is going to be teens, I have to think of marketing and promotional in different ways. One of the areas where teens hang out is MySpace so the “other me” has now joined MySpace. Check out the site at:

http://www.myspace.com/triciamills