Category Archives: Randomness

Unnamed Trope

23 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by in Randomness, Rant, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

One of the sessions that I went to at the FWA conference was titled something like, Putting the Super in Your Hero and it was a fun look at what makes superheroes entertaining and what authors can do to make their characters more like superheroes. Characters should be decisive — they should make decisions, not just let the universe push them along. They should be active — even if their action fails or has negative consequences, characters that simply react are less interesting. Then, for the superhero thing, they should be courageous, take the high moral ground, be colorful, do extraordinary things, be flawed, and be likeable. The two that most interested me were the first two, though — making decisions and taking action. I’m definitely adding “Make decisions, take action,” to my little mental list of rules to remember. (Others: “Abandon reality” and “Solitude sucks”.)

And I have no idea why I got onto that digression. I started this post meaning to write about searching tvtropes for a name for a trope that I’ve decided I hate, hate, hate. Hate with a deep passion. Wish to never see again and will always stop reading when I uncover it in use. But I can’t find its name. It’s some kind of a mix of Broken Bird and Bratty Half-Pint only… she’s playing the heroine.

In the case of a book that I downloaded yesterday, started, and returned to the library after fifty pages or so, the heroine is a grievously abused teenager. Parents dead young in a tragic accident, she’s been sold as a slave multiple times, starting from when she was five years old. In the first few scenes there are repeated incidents of violence against her, as well as plenty of implications of the miseries of life as a slave, scarring, and implied sexual violence against children. And yet… she has absolutely no hesitation about talking back, being defiant, doing exactly what her new owners ordered her not to do, and being incredibly rude to people who have not offered her threat or unkindness. What kind of caricature does that? I like urban fantasy’s damaged, kickass heroines just as much as the next genre, but I don’t like it when they’re stupid. And I don’t like it when abuse is trivialized, so that years of torture just become a convenient backstory for why a character is wary. I like unrealistic genres, but I want the characters I read about to behave like real people might, even when they’re super tough, magically gifted, super-hero characters.

It’s funny, I hated the book so much that I have immediately forgotten its name. It had a pretty cover, though.

So many interruptions today — it’s almost 5 and this blog post, which I started at 8:30, is my sum total of accomplishment. Well, except for phone calls and laundry and cooking and assorted other useful things. But words must get written, so on to the real work!

Stew(ing)

08 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in Food, Grace, Randomness, Stew, Therapy, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

Along the way of writing A Gift of Grace, I had an idea that raised the stakes, which I approved of, and so I intended to use it. I’m finally at the point where I need to write it and it doesn’t have a secure foundation. That means I should go back and write that secure foundation in, but the very thought makes me want to stab myself. Hari-kari? Was that the ritual suicide that involved ripping open your guts? I should go look it up, but I refuse to succumb to the lure of random internet research today.

I’ve been working on this book for almost a year now — I started it as last year’s NaNoWriMo — and I am not going to start revising it until a first draft is finished, even if my draft readers are going “huh? what? where did that come from?”

I also realized yesterday that an element of the story that was always clear to me is never once explained to the reader. It is a bit much to expect the reader to read my mind, and so that also makes me want to go back and revise. But no. No, no, no.

This is the question I’ve been stewing over and this is the decision made. But the process of fretting about whether I should revise made me think about the word “stew” when it equals worry. It suggests that worry is a process of cooking, as if there’s heat to the idea of worrying. Not a lot of heat, not a boil, but a low heat.

When I was working on becoming a therapist, the kind of therapy I wanted to practice was called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. One of the things I liked about ACT is that it teaches techniques that… well, felt more in line with my experience of the world. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is probably the most commonly-used type of therapy today, teaches people to look at their thoughts, logically analyze them, and reject the bad ones. So if you’re feeling self-loathing, a CBT approach would be to look at the good that you’ve done in the world, the people that care about you, and remind yourself that you’re a good person who is loved.

It does not work for me. My thoughts are great at telling me that I’m fine, but my feelings let me know that actually, I’m just lying and not very convincingly. I can think as loudly as I like, as positively as I like, but it doesn’t change the underlying feelings. ACT instead says, yep, that’s a feeling, embrace it, this is the way you feel, and now move on, what can you DO that will help you feel better? Not what will you think, because thinking isn’t the problem, but what action will you take? And in that “embrace the feeling” stage, there are exercises to do, specific techniques to let yourself experience pain, feel it, and let it go. You don’t do the exercises to escape from the pain (known as experiential avoidance in ACT and considered not helpful) but to allow yourself to feel the pain. Anyway, after turning this into a very long story, I’ve decided to work on developing a stewing exercise, where I let myself ruminate and worry, in fact focus on my worrying instead of trying to escape from it, while I visualize my worries slowly cooking and breaking down. Worry stew. Maybe not delicious, but the imagery is so satisfying somehow.

My second reason for thinking about stew is that CostCo had fresh cranberries yesterday and so I bought meat to make stew. (This seems like a non sequiteur but cranberries are a fantastic ingredient in beef stew — they add a delicious tang and a beautiful color.) This morning I realized that for various reasons, namely a commitment to make pot roast on Sunday, I should either make my stew today or freeze the ingredients until sometime next week. But eh. I was not in the mood. So I made a lazy stew — no flouring and browning the meat, no deglazing the pan with red wine, no fancy stuff, just throwing some raw ingredients in the crockpot and hoping for the best. Ingredients: carrot, parsnip, celery, onion, three cloves of garlic (peeled, but not crushed), dried parsley, dried rosemary, fresh cilantro, salt, 1/3 cup of balsamic vinegar, 2/3 cup of chicken broth, stew meat. I’ll add the cranberries about an hour before I want to eat. If it works, I’ll be pleased, because it seriously cuts stew-making time and effort down to… well, I had everything in the crockpot before 8AM, with time to eat leftover coconut curry seafood stew for breakfast and still be at my computer by 8. Fingers crossed that lazy stew tastes good, though. I will be seriously annoyed with myself if I’ve wasted my stew meat with something that I don’t like enough to eat for three days.

Worry, worry, worry

05 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in Randomness

≈ 3 Comments

I hit a point in my writing over the weekend where I couldn’t remember what I’d already said, so I had to go back and reread what I’d already written. It was a good reminder to me to relax. I spend so much time picking at individual words these days. Twisting and turning sentences. Asking myself if the characters are working, if I’m being too repetitive, if my backstory is too much, if I need to include more action in patches of dialog.

And then I reread it and its funny and entertaining and if it’s sort of annoying that I’ve written 20,000 words in which nothing much has happened… well, they’re still 20,000 entertaining words. So maybe this will be a story in which nothing much ever happens. Things will not happen in an entertaining and highly readable sort of way, so maybe that’s good enough?

I’m determined to go to yoga today (it’s been a while because I have been not well and struggling), so I thought I’d write a blog post instead of writing my book, but even just writing about writing my book makes me want to go back to writing that. Nothing is happening, but it is amusing me. So enough blogging, time for a 30 minute writing sprint. Wish me luck!

SF:SE 2015

27 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Randomness

≈ 3 Comments

I spent my weekend at the Speculative Fiction Southeast convention, which I found out about just a couple of weeks ago.

I think this was the first year for this convention, but I hope it won’t be the last. It was tiny, but I loved the focus. After spending a decade going to many, many conferences/conventions — I usually did between 3-6 a year, ranging from the enormous (Macworld, SXSW) to the tight knit — I’m a little cynical about them. It’s so easy to go to a con and get all inspired and equally exhausted and then a week later, life’s back to normal and everything that you were inspired to do is just a distant memory. Although, ha, I just remembered that I started this blog at a conference one year. SXSW, I think it was. Oi, that was a long time ago.

At any rate, this con was fun. Interesting people, good conversations, and sessions on subjects that I am actually interested in. I did find one session on publishing modes to be acutely painful — it is surprisingly close to torture for me to sit still in a room where someone is giving information that is (IMO) horrendously bad. I had to put my hands over my mouth at one point to stop myself from objecting and I finally did raise my hand and say something, but it was frustrating that the panel didn’t have a good representative of indie publishing on it.

Also frustrating — if you’re going to change the rooms where people are presenting, why not put a sign up? Sure, technical difficulties happen, but tape, paper, a marker, and you don’t have people sitting around wondering why no one is showing up.

But I don’t want to complain too much. It was fun, a worthwhile investment of both time and money (although I’m going to guess that they’re horrifyingly in the red — there’s no way they had enough attendees to cover the expenses of so many conferences rooms, even if they got a great deal), and I do hope they come back next year.

Favorite info: Orson Scott Card’s rant about first person narration, which completely validated my own feelings about first person pov.

Favorite experience: Funnily enough, Maria Snyder’s sister shares my sister’s name and birthday! That was an extraordinarily random connection, but it will make a very nice story when I give my sister her birthday present next week. (And yeah, it’s a little complacent of me to assume that she’s not going to read this post and have her present spoiled, but I feel safe.)

I wish I could say that the conference inspired me writing-wise, but… not so much. I did not come home with story ideas pouring out of my ears. I wrote a couple paragraphs last night just to keep the story going, but I don’t think that’s going to happen tonight. So it goes.

Bookmark giveaway addresses

22 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Randomness

≈ Comments Off on Bookmark giveaway addresses

April, Patty, Kristin, and Janet — please email me your addresses (to sarah at sarahwynde-dot-com) so I can send you bookmarks! Yes, that’s four instead of three, so one of you won’t be getting A Gift of Ghosts bookmark, but really, choosing one person to not get a bookmark is well beyond my abilities.

Fortunately, the bookmark for The Wedding Guests is also super-pretty, so I hope whoever gets that one is happy with it, too.

Thank you all for doing good deeds!

Commemorating 9/11

11 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by in Randomness

≈ 7 Comments

Today is the National Day of Service and Remembrance. I didn’t actually know that, until I went looking for something I’d heard on the radio about doing a good deed on September 11th as a way of acknowledging the day, but apparently it’s very official, federally recognized and everything. Forbes has a story about it, if you want more info.

For me, commemorating through remembering and memorializing comes a little too close to wallowing, not because the tragedy affected me personally but because it was so overwhelming at the time and maybe also because I’m a pragmatist. I could light a candle and say a prayer, and maybe I will, but what good does that do anyone? Especially right now while hundreds of thousands of desperate people are fleeing the middle east. It doesn’t exactly feel like we’ve come a long way in the past 14 years, or if we have, maybe it was in the wrong direction.

Fortunately, Patrick Rothfuss has given me a better outlet for my need to remember the day. Doing What We Can is surely better than doing nothing, especially today. I’ve never felt so grateful to donate money, to have the opportunity to say, yes, I am not quite helpless in the face of the world’s horrors. Pretty much helpless, but not entirely.

Anyway, today is also World Suicide Prevention Day, which seems sort of like terrible timing on their part. I would think the date’s other significance would get in the way of getting much attention. Although, I don’t know, it is a depressing day, so maybe they figured now was a time when people needed to be reminded that the world is not always as bleak as it seems?

In that spirit, I’ve decided to give away the pretty beaded bookmarks that I got to celebrate 250,000 downloads of A Gift of Ghosts. I meant to do one of those serious Rafflecopter things with them — tweeting and liking pages and all that jazz — but eh, that does not inspire me. This does. If you donate to Worldbuilders and/or suicide prevention and/or do some other good deed today and share it in the comments to this post, either on Facebook or on my blog, I’ll enter you to win one of three bookmarks. I don’t get a lot of traffic, so your odds are pretty good, and the bookmarks are lovely. (This is not the world’s best picture, but it gives you the idea, I hope.)

2015-06-14 09.29.08

Plus, even better, you too will get to know that in a world that sometimes seems impossibly dark, you’ve chosen to be a little tiny flicker of light. That doesn’t feel like enough, but you can never tell which spark will light a fire. Maybe it’ll be yours.

Four years

07 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by in Grief, Mom, Randomness

≈ 4 Comments

When my mom knew she was dying — early on, like maybe three days after she knew (which was probably a solid ten days before a doctor confirmed what she’d already deduced from a radiology report) — she said to my sister and me, “Your father will find someone, you be nice to her.” My sister said, “Of course.” I said, “No. Absolutely not. You don’t get to decide how I grieve and I am going to be grieving for a long, long time.”

Today is the fourth anniversary of her death and I spent it helping my stepmother unpack and move into her new kitchen. My mother would be proud of me. I know that. I can feel it. But, oh, I miss her.

She was so good at moving. I mentioned it in the eulogy I wrote for her, that was how important it was to who she was. When she moved, it was like a whirlwind of efficiency and energy, invisible 99% of the time, suddenly popped into existence to make the move painless, to turn it into a little subtle transition for her kids instead of the disruption that it really is. We’d move and a week later, it would feel like we’d lived in the new place forever. She was GOOD at moving.

I told someone recently that I’m only good at three things: editing, cooking, and writing (in that order.) And then I threw in a couple caveats about things that I might also be sort of good at. I forgot moving. I am very, very, very good at moving. Sometimes, though, moving and running are the same thing.

Today, I wish I was moving. But mostly, I think it would be running.

For Tim

06 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Randomness

≈ 6 Comments

I threw out my plot this week. Kept the characters, but tossed the outline & most of the ideas that went with it.

Ugh.

I had thought that when I finally got a beginning that satisfied me, I’d be able to use most of the 30,000 words I’d already written. Or at least a lot of them. Instead, I finally got a beginning that satisfied me and it changed everything. I’m simultaneously really pleased — I’d been wondering whether my imagination had just shriveled up and died and wondering what I was going to do with my life if I no longer had an imagination — and dismayed.

But so it goes. Onward and upward, right?

If you’d rather not be spoiled for a book that’s headed back to the drawing board, stop reading now, but for Tim (and anyone else who wants to see a rough draft of the new beginning) …

Chapter One

The voices were driving him crazy.

Crazier than usual, that was. After ten years of auditory hallucinations, Noah already knew he was insane. Today was worse than usual, but it was the circumstances, not the sounds.

He was sitting on a bench in the hallway of the courthouse, waiting for his turn in front of the grand jury. The investigation was calling in anyone who might know anything about AlecCorp, the military contractor owned by the late Raymond Chesney. Noah knew his testimony would be useless—working for a notorious criminal enterprise would be a black mark on his resume, but he’d only been there for a few months. It hadn’t added more darkness to his soul.

Still, he needed to hold it together. If he got confused, answered the wrong questions, the prosecution might get suspicious. He wanted to put AlecCorp behind him, not get dragged into the depths of an investigation likely to go on for decades.

He let his head rest against the wall behind him and closed his eyes. The courthouse was noisy, sounds echoing off the tiled floors, voices carrying. Could he filter the real world from the one his over-active brain insisted on dumping on him?

The woman speaking Arabic wasn’t real. She never was. He’d been listening to her, the little boy, and Joe since The Worst Day Ever, so they were easy to ignore. The worried woman wasn’t real, either. She hadn’t been around as long as the others, but Noah still recognized her voice. He’d heard it before, so he could disregard it.

But what about the other woman, the one speaking in a husky contralto? Noah cracked open his eyelids, peering through his lashes. The crowd mostly consisted of men in suits — lawyers looking sleek and polished, the ex-military AlecCorp staffers looking stiff and uncomfortable. Just across the hall, though, a redhead held a cell phone to her ear. Noah watched her for a minute, his eyes intent on her lips, matching the movements to the murmured words until she caught his gaze. He dropped his lids hastily. Yeah, she was real.

“So you just follow him around?” That voice was young, too young. It sounded like a teenage boy. And it was close, too, as if the teenager stood directly in front of Noah.

A babble of hallucinated Arabic answered him. Noah couldn’t pick out any words from the flow, but his mouth twitched with reluctant amusement when the boy’s voice replied, “That is so weird.”

That was one word for it. Noah might have chosen another. Nightmarish, maybe?

“You need help,” the teenager continued.

Noah didn’t flinch. He’d had the thought himself too many times. It felt like a slippery slope, though — one that led straight to a future of glazed eyes and slurred voice, drugged out on whatever anti-psychotics the VA was in the mood to experiment with. No, that wasn’t for him. Ignoring the voices worked. Or at least it had until there’d gotten to be so many of them. His lips tightened, a muscle in his jaw jumping as he clenched his teeth around the bitterness that wanted to escape.

“I know someone. She might be able to do something.” The kid sounded thoughtful. “Give me a minute.”

Multiple voices answered at once, in Arabic, English, even the mellifluous mystery language that Noah thought was his subconscious attempting to annoy him by pretending to speak Chinese. Noah hadn’t often heard spoken Chinese, but he’d heard enough of it to know that his hallucination was doing it wrong.

Eyes still closed, he raised one hand and rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease the tension. He should think about something else, anything else. Focusing on the voices never helped, but it was impossible to escape from them.

“Excuse me.”

Noah blinked his eyes open. The redhead stood in front of him, her lips curved up but her eyebrows drawn down as if in doubt. She extended her hand to him, a business card in it.

Shit. She’d seen him looking. He hadn’t been checking her out, at least not the way she probably thought, but how would he say so without being rude?

He took the card, forcing a smile. Noah knew he’d gotten lucky in the genetic lottery and he tried not to be ungrateful. Plenty of guys would be thrilled to get hit on by a hot redhead. “I’m flattered,” he started.

Her eyebrows arched. “You are?”

He paused. What, did she have self-esteem issues? She wasn’t really his type – maybe in her mid-thirties, with the pale, almost translucent skin of a natural redhead, minimal make-up and hair drawn back – but the scooped neck of the t-shirt she wore under a suit jacket offered an enticing glimpse of cleavage. She was attractive enough, just not for him. “Of course.”

“Don’t be.” Her smile warmed and she held up her phone. “I’m just following orders.”

His eyes narrowed. “Whose orders are those?” He’d walked away from AlecCorp with no regrets. Taking the job with them had felt like a mistake from the very beginning. He needed to get away from the war, away from the past. But jobs for vets with no experience outside a combat zone weren’t easy to come by and AlecCorp had seemed better than nothing. He didn’t want to get pulled back in, though. He was done with military work.

“That’s a long story.”

“I’ve got plenty of time.” He glanced down at the card, frowning.

General Directions, Inc.
Tassamara, FL
555-347-9779
info@generaldirections.com

He flipped it over. No name, no scrawled phone number or message. So maybe she wasn’t trying to pick him up.

The door to the grand jury room had opened and the last witness was leaving. A woman in the open doorway called out, “Sylvie Blair?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t,” she said as a suit approached her. “I’m up, I’m afraid.”

The suit was expensive. Well-fit. Probably Italian, Noah thought. It looked like something his brother would wear. The guy in it looked like someone his brother would know – also expensive, with the gloss of success over an easy confidence. With tanned skin and dark hair, he could be Italian, too, but something about him said Eastern European heritage, maybe Russian, to Noah. Or Irish, Noah thought, when clear blue eyes took him in with a quick, incisive glance.

“Ready?” the suit asked, touching the back of the redhead’s upper arm with a gentle brush of his fingertips.

The two of them exchanged a long glance, before her lips crooked. “As I ever will be, I suppose.” The intimacy was unmistakable. If the suit was her lawyer, he wasn’t charging by the hour.

“Remember what we talked about with Jeremy. You’ll be fine,” he said.

She nodded, before shooting a last glance at Noah. She gave a flick of her finger in the direction of the card he still held. “You’ll need that,” she said. “Tell Akira that Dillon sent you.”

Akira? Dillon? Noah had no idea who the redhead was talking about, but she was already moving away, the suit walking next to her. And his voices were chattering again, all speaking over one another. Noah couldn’t catch the words, except for Joe saying something like, “How did you do that?”

“Fraternizing with the enemy?” The question sounded disgruntled.

Noah almost ignored it before realizing that it came from the man sitting on the bench next to him. “What?”

The guy nodded toward the doorway. “That’s her. The one who killed Chesney.”

Noah glanced back but it was too late. The redhead had disappeared into the grand jury room. His brows rose. She hadn’t looked tough enough to be a killer. Looks could be misleading, though.

“Lost us all our jobs and put us here,” the guy continued.

“Pretty sure that was our boss working for the drug cartels,” Noah replied. He kept his voice mild. Some of his former co-workers struck him as unreasonably bitter given the circumstances. It wasn’t like they were all innocents. Some of them must have known what was going on.

“Allegedly,” grunted his neighbor.

Noah didn’t answer. The redhead must have confused him with someone else, he thought. He looked at the card again. General Directions. So many rumors had been flying around in the wake of AlecCorp’s implosion. What had he heard about General Directions? But the rumor, whatever it was, wouldn’t come back to him.

It didn’t matter. Whatever the redhead wanted, Noah was done with AlecCorp. All he needed was to get through this day and he’d be moving on. He didn’t know to what, he didn’t know to where, but he didn’t care. Anywhere but here worked for him.

“You should rip that up. Throw it away,” his neighbor said.

Instead, Noah slipped it into his pocket. He wouldn’t call, but he didn’t take orders from ex-AlecCorp employees.

**************

Unedited, obviously, but — compared to how much I have hated every previous beginning — I’m feeling pretty okay with this. Noah feels right to me and the ghost mob comes across as it should, I hope. In other words, not an overwhelming list of characters for a reader to remember but a sense of Noah as a man surrounded by sounds he doesn’t understand. I hope I can hang on to being satisfied with it long enough to move on!

Two years

20 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by in Bartleby, Personal, Randomness, Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

In two days, it will be two years since Bartleby arrived in the backyard. Given that I got to spend $400 last week running liver tests on him because he has some elevated enzymes — liver tests which found basically nothing except, yep, his liver enzymes are too high — the pessimistic vet who predicted that he would be a very expensive dog to own was not wrong.

On the other hand, the ridiculous little dog has brought me joy and snuggles, just the way dogs are supposed to. I’m feeling as if I’d like to celebrate his anniversary with me somehow, but I’m not sure how. He does not need chocolate cake or pizza, my two favorite celebratory foods. Maybe I’ll take him out for dog-friendly ice cream. My only hesitation is that I’d have to bring Zelda, too — no way does B get to come out for ice cream when Z does not — and juggling two dogs and two doggie ice cream cones, while driving the car sounds just a little unsafe. Okay, a lot unsafe. But it’s not until Wednesday so I’m going to figure out a way to accomplish it. It’s a nice plan.

Today’s plan — words, words, words. I took the weekend totally off. Read a lot, swam some, did useful house stuff. I actually felt pretty damn proud of myself yesterday when I’d finally finished dragging all the bougainvillea branches out to the curb. Bougainvillea is such a mean plant. I never manage to cut it back without losing some blood in the process. (Although, as my nephew pointed out last week, if I wasn’t chopping it down, probably it wouldn’t be making me bleed… yeah, point taken. But if it didn’t grow so fast and have such harsh thorns, I wouldn’t have to chop it down!) Anyway, the garbage guys — justifiably — require that it be tied up in neat piles to be disposed of and I’ve gotten satisfyingly good at getting big branches of thorny viciousness out to the curb in neat little bundles. So it wasn’t word count, but I still got to feel accomplished.

Today, though, it’s time to be all about word count. I was looking through past posts, trying to find the exact date B appeared, and then curious about other Julys, and at this point in July 2013, I was 25K words into Time. In 2011, I’d spent months writing the first five chapters of Ghosts, and finally had a first chapter that satisfied me. It was a good reminder that I’ve been stuck before — repeatedly — and still managed to produce a satisfying book in the end. Although I really hope that once I break loose on Grace, I don’t need to agonize quite as much as I did on Time because I remember that autumn as being… difficult.

In entirely random other numerical notices, I added up the number of reviews I have on Amazon.com yesterday because it occurred to me that I was pretty close to a milestone, and my books have received 996 reviews, not including any reviews from the anthology. (The only one of the anthology reviews that mentions Guests, though, described it as “super fun, sassy” which pleased me so, so much – sassy, in particular, is really endearing to me.) Anyway, 1000 reviews also feels like something to celebrate so I’m going to have to think of something nice for me, too, although it probably be another couple of weeks before I get there. Nothing food-related, so maybe I’ll do another kayaking day trip. I bet it’s really damn hot right now, though. Maybe I can steal a kid or two — my niece, maybe? — and go inner-tubing next week. First though, words. Lots of them.

Fingers crossed that Noah is obliging!

Bookmark Winner

23 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Randomness

≈ 4 Comments

Thank you so much to everyone who entered the bookmark giveaway. It’s funny, I didn’t do the typical Rafflecopter because I didn’t want it to be the kind of promotional thing where authors ask people to tweet or like pages on Facebook or have to work to enter — I wanted it to just be for people who already like the books. So instead I got to read so many lovely, lovely compliments — talk about a win for me! It was really nice. I wish I had bookmarks for everybody. Alas, though, I don’t. So the winner, picked by random number generator, is Leanne. I’ve emailed you for your mailing address, Leanne, so if you haven’t gotten the email, please check your spam folder.