MJ's Musings

I Expose Another of Betsy's Gross Shortcomings

2012-01-25T20:01:00.000-08:00

Having survived the utter weirdness of being interviewed by a cat (yeah, you read that right), I wasn't surprised to be approached by Rocco's owner. Or Rocco's pet. I dunno how it works with them. Mostly I just try to keep my head down and work on the copy edits for UNSTABLE, and think up new and disturbing things to do with the ice cream maker I got for Christmas.

(And I don't mean 'a cat' like, "She's such a cat!" or "He's got the reflexes of a cat" or "I've got nine lives like a cat so it's weird that I'm dead now," but an actual cat, as in: "Why does it always want to shit in the shit-box when I'm making French toast?" So meditate on the horror. I sure did.)

Anyway, in keeping with the cat-centric theme of Rocco's book blog, I posted a sneak preview from the first pages of UNDEAD AND UNSTABLE. There are minor spoilers within, but if that doesn't scare you, head over and take a peek.

Oh...also, in UNSTABLE Betsy kills Sinclair, buys a Payless Shoes franchise, then burns down the mansion and moves to an apple orchard in Wisconsin after killing everyone she has ever loved.

Kidding. Heh.

http://catsbooksmorecats.blogspot.com/2012/01/unchallenged-and-unconquered-maryjanice.html

My Readers Make Me Alternately Laugh And Cry

2012-01-05T09:39:00.001-08:00

Tell me about the weirdest/lamest/annoying-est Christmas present you've received. Easy, right? I proposed this idea for a contest as a way to trick unsuspecting readers into letting me force my books on them, and had no idea I would tap into my readers' deepest fears/desires/nightmares/ulcers at the same time.

I'm seriously lucky to have the readers I do; I try to run 1 or 2 contests every month and am always thrilled see so much enthusiasm and so many entries. It's always great fun to read through the entries and it's always difficult to pick the winners. And I thought that *before* the Xmas contest.

This contest visited upon me wrath and laughs and tears from same. But after getting a small glimpse of what my readers have endured through the years, I've realized all over again how fortunate I am. My oddest gift was a Frankenstein that wiggled his hips and danced and dropped his pants. That was the friggin' Hope Diamond compared to what my readers went through.

Below, the "winners", if that's the right word. I'm not sure this is a contest anyone wants to win, frankly...I ended up going with several honorable mentions because it was impossible to narrow the winners down to three.

In all seriousness, thanks for sharing your wonderful entries!

* * *

The worst/strangest/weirdest Christmas gift I ever received was called the boyfriend pillow. It's a pillow shaped like a mans torso with an arm.... and a "personal massager" inside. There is a zipper on the side under the arm. What makes this gift the worst/strangest/weirdest Christmas gift I ever received is that I received it from my 83 year old great aunt. My great aunt did not like me very much and at the time I was going through a divorce that went against her beliefs, so to this day I have no idea if it was a sweet little mistake and she had no idea there was a vibrator inside the pillow or if this was her way of taking a jab at me (calling me a slut). I was so embarrassed, it was given to me in front of the entire family... children and all. There is no way I will ever know but I do believe she was taking a jab at me.

2.The worst gift I ever received was from my ex mother in law aka psycho mom.

She fancied herself an artist and she had a "bone table" where she would lay out bones to dry (after cooking a chicken or turkey, etc) to use in her art.

One Christmas she gave me a pair of horse tooth earrings (my husband at the time also received a turkey thigh bone bolo tie) because nothing says let's celebrate the birth of Christ like a pair if molars from a Clydesdale!

As you can see, she deserved her title.

3.When I was ten I wanted a pair of roller blades so my mom thought it would be funny to get a large box for mens roller blades and put a small leaf blower in there to help me with my chores. I cried.

Honorable Mention -

When I was 12 years old, I opened a gift from Santa that was panties and matching bras... I looked at my mom and asked her "how does Santa know my bra size?"

Honorable Mention -

Undoubtedly the weirdest gift I ever received is when my boyfried came back from working on his PhD fieldwork with...a dead marten for me! It's a relative of the weasel. It had been run over...not by him.

However, it's by far NOT the worst gift I ever got! I love martens, I worked with them on my Master's project. And he learned taxidermy to prepare the fur for me in time for Christmas. I loved it, I kept it for years until it looked ratty (as opposed to weaselly).

What can I say...the man knows me. So I married him. :)

Honorable Mention -

My strangest Christmas gift has a backstory-

It starts when I picked my Grandma up to bring her to my parents house to help wrap gifts. (My grandmother is amazing, but sadly she has Alzheimer's.) After wrapping all the gifts it was time to go. My grandma got her coat on and went to put on her shoes. Her shoes, however, could not be found. We looked everywhere. My mom even asked me. "Billy, did she have shoes on when you picked her up?"

I said yes, but to be honest. I wasn't certain. My mother was doubtful and told me that I have to be careful. She could catch pneumonia. Finally my mom lent her a pair of shoes and I took her home.

Flashforward to Christmas Day. My oddest gift was my Grandmother's shoes from that night; neatly wrapped and placed under the tree. No wonder we couldn't find them.

I opened the box, held the shoes up and exclaimed to my mother; "See! I told you she had shoes on when I picked her up!!!"

Honorable Mention -

Where to begin...these were all Christmas gifts from my husband in different years:

-- hummingbird made of barbed wire
-- ceramic cactus with light up Christmas lights
-- weird elephant thing with bowl on top
-- stuffed dead kitten

After 35+ years you would think he would learn, but no. I now buy my own Christmas presents and address them from him to me. When I open them I say "Wow! Just what I wanted! How did you know?"

I Explan Betsy's Holiday Hatred Via UNDEAD AND UNSTABLE Sneak Peek

2011-12-23T12:45:00.000-08:00

Below is a chapter from the beginning of UNDEAD AND UNSTABLE. This has minor spoilers, but only if you have NOT read UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED.

To sum up (spoilers but, again, only if you haven't finished UNDERMINED):

Betsy and the gang are having a meeting over shakes and smoothies to discuss what to do about

(spoiler spoiler)

Marc being dead. Antonia and Garrett are once again living in the mansion because in the new timeline, Garrett did NOT kill himself after Antonia was shot to death...instead, he tricked Betsy into getting Satan to give up Antonia (which, given Antonia's generally unpleasant personality, Satan didn't mind so much). Also in the new timeline, Jessica is pregnant, and Nick (who calls himself Dick in this timeline, which Betsy assumes he's done purely to annoy her) is really fond of Betsy.

CHAPTER SIX

It’s funny...life can sneak up on you. Your own life can do that. Because when you’re inside all the weird stressful awful things that are happening, you can’t see the big picture.

But when you finally realize, when you get a chance, a glimpse, to really see the mess you’ve made...it’s like it’s happening all over again, only more terrible because you can see that, bad as you thought it was before, it’s much, much worse when you see just how much wreckage is in the middle of your life.

Some of my friends were dead. Some of them didn’t remember me (or remember a different me) because I accidentally changed the timeline. Some of them were well on their way to insanity and some of them never ever wavered in their love and loyalty to me, not for a second. Not for a blink.

Stepping back, thinking about that...it’s depressing, you know?

Which brings me to milkshake time.

“Smoothies aren’t going to do it,” I announced, heading for the freezer for my go-to staple: a half-gallon of Breyer’s Vanilla Fudge Twirl. Pre-death my go-to had been Hershey bars with almonds, or my mom’s risotto. I had been a simple, uncomplicated girl. Once.

Adding to my annoyance (which had never been difficult), I first had to haul out half a dozen bottles of Tina’s weird weird vodka(s) before I could extract the Precious. Just reading the vodka labels was enough to make me shudder, but I also had to handle the things: hot pepper, three olives (like one olive wasn’t vile enough), root beer (good God!), triple shot espresso (so you could take something that will make you sleepy and spazz you out at the same time), Absolute LA (which boasted acai and blueberry, and thus was good for you, except for the fact that it was alcohol which is poisonous), and plenty others too hideous to mention, all nestled together like some unholy frozen army of booze. No, wait...Three Olives was a brand, not a flavor. The flavor was tomato. Why, why had someone decided to invent flavored vodka? This changed nothing!

Finally, after a nice crop of frostbite was no doubt gonna show up any second, I found my go-to and re-stacked all the booze...upside down, so Tina would have to reach in and haul each one out to check the flavor. Ha! More proof that it doesn’t pay to mess with the vampire queen. My wickedness and lust for cold-blooded vengeance was endless.

The door swung in, and there was Jessica. For a woman who claimed she couldn’t hear me when I tried to explain why it was perfectly okay for a woman in her last trimester to wear high heels, she had no trouble hearing the fridge or freezer open from several rooms, or blocks, away. “Oh boy,” she said, see the blender and ice cream. “Pretty serious, huh?”

“Yeah, so let me get to work and then we’ll have a family meeting.”

It was out before I realized I’d thought it, never mind said it. And it was fine. Better than fine: it was right. Family meeting. Well...yeah. If these guys weren’t my family, what was any of it for? Jessica had always been more like a sister than a pal, and Nick loved me (I was pretty sure...he didn’t hate and fear me now, at least) because Jessica did, and I knew Tina loved me, too.

Maybe even Garrett, the Fiend formerly known as George, and his girlfriend, the bitchy werewolf Antonia, did. (What? She was a werewolf. And she was also bitchy. Grumpiest person I had ever, ever met. Because in death, I was fated to be surrounded by weirdos.)

For sure they liked me. I didn’t think that was my considerable vanity talking, either: they’d moved from their lives to our lives to Hell and then back to our lives. Of course, I did rescue Antonia from Hell, so maybe that’s why they were hanging around, but like I said, that prob’ly meant they liked me. Or at least didn’t loathe and fear me. (Hey, I’ll take it. Believe me. And how sad is that?)

As for Sink Lair, his love had never been in question, though I was too bubble-brained and pissed to catch on right away, or realize I loved him back with everything. So, yep, my husband absolutely loved me.

(I wasn’t quite sure about my sister Laura, the Anti-Christ.)

The coolest thing was how Jessica didn’t blink, or pause. Just took a step back while holding the kitchen door and yelled, “Milkshakes, idiots!”

I had to take a few seconds and pretend to be busy dumping scoops of ice cream into the blender, so she couldn’t see my face. I didn’t leak tears anymore, but any girlfriend can tell at a glance when you’re upset or touched or pissed.

After a few seconds I was able to turn my back when I went to the fridge, and no longer had to pretend. Because now I had a whole new problem: where were my candy bars? My precious delectable Hershey bars, always kept in the fridge (room temp chocolate = yuck) so I could chop them and dump them into a blender with the Precious and a generous splash of whole milk, were not in their appointed spot!

“This is not the right time for me to deal with this,” I growled, pawing past gallons of milk, some sticks of butter, Jessica’s vile ginger ale (with actual lumps of ginger in it, which did not belong in ginger ale!), a few boxes of leftover Chinese takeout (who was eating that, I had no idea), a bottle of blueberry vodka (what, the freezer wasn’t enough, fer Chrissake?), a box of Godiva cookies (pretty decent chocolate, but useless for my needs), and a couple of tins of Giselle’s cat food. Ouch. Another of my many character flaws: I was a little slow to do my share of the upkeep around here.

“All right, first off, remind me to clean out the fridge,” I said into the fridge, still hunting. “This is just sad, and also gross. And second, if one of you amoral thieving shitheads filched my Hershey’s, there will be blood on the streets, I swear it, blood on the st—oh, there they are.” Why they were in the door slot for eggs I did not know and did not give one shit.

I heard the ‘fwoomp’ of the kitchen door swinging open, and looked up in time to see Antonia and Garrett walk in. Sinclair and Jessica were right behind them, and Nick/Dick was behind them.

“Oh, good,” I said, grateful. Sometimes it could take over half an hour just to round everybody up.

“Uh-oh,” Nick said, eyeing the Precious and grinning. It was weird that he didn’t hate me in this timeline. The way I remembered it, he had made Jessica pick between him and me...and she picked me! (I couldn’t believe it, either.) But that had never happened now. So...had it never happened? Even though I could remember? Because it was so awkward and awful? Ow, I’m hurting my brain. “Bringing out the big guns, vampire queen.”

And that! What was that? He said it, but not in a mean way. In a happy way. Like me being a vampire was a good thing. Like it hadn’t ruined his life.

I don’t like being confused and angry!

“You keep shooting me these incredulous glances,” he continued (happily!). “I take it in the old timeline we weren’t close?”

“Uh, she wasn’t pregnant, and you weren’t living here.” To put it mildly. Also, I accidentally tortured you and then my husband did, too. Oops! “But we’ve got weirder problems.”

“Yeah. Like how she’s not dead anymore.” He pointed at Antonia, who’d gone to the booze freezer for a drink, and was now knocking back espresso vodka in a milk glass.

“Weirder than that, even.”

Antonia chortled in mid-gulp. Her black rat’s nest hair was its usual unkempt mess...on a good day, Antonia looked like a witch having a bad day. Not that she wasn’t gorgeous—she was. Sickeningly so, what with the black masses of tumbled and tousled hair and the pale skin and the burning werewolf-ey eyes. But she was weird. All werewolves were.

"Not weirder than that," Jessica mock-gasped.

“What’s weird about it? I left. Now I’m back. Don’t throw me a party.”

“Don’t worry.”

Antonia glanced around. “Where’s Tina?”

See, see? Nothing about Marc being dead. Nothing about Hell. Just “time for booze and then I think I’ll bang my man for a while, don’t wait up and ha ha, I scored more free vodka off Tina and oh by the way, where is she?”.

“Everything’s better now,” Garrett said with a sweet smile. But I expected his reaction, too. Garrett was a little...off. He’d been a Fiend (a vampire deliberately starved until it went feral and bitchy) for decades, and had been dead going on a hundred years. That had shattered any vibrancy of personality he’d ever had in life. He’d been a shell of a vamp, until Antonia swooped into his pants. I mean, his life.

Garrett looked at the world with envious simplicity: life without Antonia wasn’t worth living. Antonia was back. Knit one, purl two. All was well.

“Yeah, but with this particular problem,” I said, “it’s time to get moving. I’ve been sitting around long enough.”

“Does this have anything to do with how much you hate Thanksgiving?” Nick/Dick asked.

“Don’t speak to me about That Holiday.”

“Does this mean you’re not going to make a cornucopia for the dining room?”

“I’d rather gargle gasoline and then light up a cigarette.”

Sinclair laughed. “What an...interesting mental image that makes.”

“And I’ll save plenty of gas for you, too,” I threatened. My parents had gotten divorced in November. Jessica’s parents were killed in November. The Ant was born in November! April was not the cruelest month. “So you’d better stay on your toes, pal.”

“This,” my husband commented, sounding not at all perturbed at the thought of being burned alive, “will be the third time this week I have fallen in love with the queen all over again.”

“And it’s only Saturday,” Jessica pointed out.

“Is it really?” I was amazed. It felt like eight years had gone by. Too much happening and not much time to soak it up. “Oh, crap. So Thanksgiving is next week already?” No wonder my teeth were on edge. “God, that sounds ominous. It’s a whole damn holiday lurking in next week’s calendar. Just waiting to pounce.”

“It’s turkey and football,” Nick/Dick said, exasperated.

“With a side helping of genocide,” Antonia snickered. She had by now drained her glass. “You think it’s bad here? Try New England this time of year. It’s all Thanksgiving and pilgrims all the time out there.”

“Gross,” I said, appalled. Ye gods, I’d never thought of it, but she was right: Thanksgiving must be pure heck if you hated it and yet were surrounded by it. “Remind me to count my blessings and also, stay the heck out of New England in November.”

“Why?” She was rolling sky blue yarn so fast her fingers were a blur. “You never do.”

“Can we get back to the matter of hand if it’s not too much trouble? Like I said, weird stuff is going on and it’s time to fix it. We’re gonna fix it so hard....”

“What are we fixing?” Garrett asked. For him, that was practically a speech. A Gettysburg Address, even.

“Not Marc being dead,” Jessica said, an expression of reproach on her face. “You’re not talking about that.”

“Oh yes I am.” I must have been wearing one of those incredulous expression Nick talked about. “What else do you think would be on my mind? The new Manolos? The fact that, incomprehensibly, Christian Louboutin doesn’t exist in this timeline?”

“Well...”

Nick wasn’t looking at me. Neither was Sinclair. Antonia tossed the now-round ball of yarn into Garrett’s bag and began rolling a new ball of yarn. Garrett was carefully crocheting...uh...something red and blue and big (too big to be a potholder, too small to be a blanket...maybe a grill cover?). His lap was full of yarn; his entire attention appeared to be on the whatever-it-was he was making.

Only Jessica, who’d put up with my bushwah for almost two decades, had the courage to look me in the face and say, “Yeah, kinda. Why wouldn’t you be worrying about shoes and their designers?”

“Well, you’re totally wrong because...okay, that’s a good point about Christian, but I can’t fix that.” Probably I couldn’t fix it. I’d look into it, sure, but one nightmare at a time. “Marc, now, Marc maybe I can fix. I’m gonna try, at least.”

“Why?”

“Hello! Queen of the vampires? Power over all the dead, or however the saying goes? Ring-a-ding-dinging a bell?”

“Not ‘why’, why you. ‘Why’, why would you do that?”

“Why wouldn’t I do that?” Was Jessica’s unborn baby eating her brain? She was normally quicker on the uptake.

“Have you thought you might respect his choice?” Nick asked quietly.

“Behold, a braver man than I,” Sinclair said, rolling his big dark eyes heavenward.

“Ah, shaddup already from you. Listen, Nick—“

“Dick.”

“Stop it. Detective Berry, Marc killed himself because he was scared, I get that.”

“Do you?”

“Don’t talk—“ I paused as Jessica judiciously hit the blender, which hummed and brayed and whirred for a good thirty seconds, an endless time in which my friends and I glared at each other. This hadn’t taken long to get nasty. For me to turn it nasty, I guess it’d be fair to say. I continued as she poured milkshakes, as everyone took hasty slurps. “—like I’m stupid.”

“No, we wouldn’t want to do that.” Like that! See? There was the Nick/Dick I knew, not the Mr. Happy Cop I’d been dealing with.

“Sure he was scared. He was scared of being the Marc Thing,” I said, assuming the baby had also been dining on Nick’s teeny brain cells as well. “Not scared to keep living. He loved it here.”

“Betsy, you met him when he was about to jump off a building!”

“Well, yeah.” Anything sounded bad when you said it like that. “But then he was better.”

“Oh, so you cured his chronic depression? Is that one of your superpowers now?”

Hmm, no. But wouldn’t it be cool? “Anything sounds bad when you say it—“

“He was a borderline alcoholic who couldn’t stay sober. He was a gay man who never dated, a man who had no relationship with his father, his only family.”

“We’re his family.”

He wasn’t listening. He was leaning so far forward his suit jacket was open and I could see the gun clipped to his belt. “This was an unhappy man. For God’s sake—sorry, Sinclair—I mean, for crying out loud, just let him rest in peace.”

“Stop talking about him in the past tense!” Somehow I was on my feet and Nick/Dick was on his, and had backed up. Sinclair had moved across the table and was standing at my side, almost ready to block me. Like I was going to hurt Dickie/Nickie. And Antonia was now standing in front of me, like Dickie/Nickie was going to hurt me. I think it’d be safe to say we were all temporarily freaked.

“It seems I have not arrived in the nick of time,” Tina said, standing in the kitchen doorway, holding it open with tented fingers and totally stealing that line from Practical Magic.

I Prove There Really IS A Thanksgiving Curse

2011-12-13T08:00:00.001-08:00

I ran a contest on my Facebook page a couple of weeks ago...tell me about your lamest/weirdest/saddest/wildest Thanksgiving, and as a reward for your pain, I'll stick you with an autographed book. Despite my threats, my FB fans responded with the most amazing stories! I've posted the winners below...I was going for funny or weird or sad, and as you'll see, that's exactly what I got. Say it with me: you poor, poor kids!

* * *

The Thanksgiving that I will never forget happened when I was 12 (in 1987).

My older brother (age 15) and I were sitting at the table with our parents. My dad says, "I know it's not a tradition that we normally do, but let's just go around the table and say what we're thankful for this year." And, after much grumbling on my part and after my brother's 30-second sigh, we started to go around the table and give our thanks.

My father started us off with "I'm so thankful for my wonderful children and all the ways that they make me proud." My brother was thankful for his Diamondback dirt bike, I was thankful for all of the elephants in the world. And then, when it was my mother's turn, she said: "I am thankful that your father and I have decided to get a divorce."

[followed by 2 minutes of heavy silence]

And then our dad said, "This is not how we were going to tell them!"

And my mom said "Well, it is what I'm most thankful for."

My brother and I just moved our heads back & forth following their conversation for a few minutes until we could eventually respond with our trademarked "default" reactions: my brother ran up to his room, slammed the door, and blasted his loud heavy metal music while I immediately put myself into the mix and yelled at my parents. I remember asking them why they were being so inconsiderate to us. And then I promptly accused them both of being selfish for putting their own happiness above ours.

[Although, in hindsight, I am quite happy to report that after everything was said and done, I was pleased to discover that I like the divorced version of my parents far more than the married ones!]

But it was such a surreal experience - having to find out that way - that I will never forget that fateful Thanksgiving.

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

Many, many years ago when I was 16 years old, my family was gathering to celebrate Thanksgiving at my house.

Mother and I had spent most of the day cooking and cleaning - the standard prep when company is coming to visit. So everything was perfect and my Aunt Cheryl arrived - then shortly after that my MeeMaw (grandmother) and Pop (grandfather) arrived. We were in the dining room visiting and waiting for the rest of the family to get to the house, when I had gone into my bedroom to get something. To explain a little...my house was an older Victorian home that had been slowly remodeled through the years and in my room there was a dropped ceiling. Going into my room on that lovely day I could hear something scratching in the corner of the dropped ceiling. Slowly a hole was being formed from above by some unknown creature. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Being a girl, I totally screamed and my mother and Aunt Cheryl came in to see what was going on. During the brief period of time it took me to explain the hole and the scratching noise, the small hole was now large enough for the squirrel to stick out his head. And apparently, his body, as he then dropped to the floor and ran under my bed.

My mother rushed the door and slummed it shut, hoping to save the Thanksgiving meal but essentially trapping it in my very own sanctuary (aka: room). Being trapped seriously ticked off the squirrel and he proceeded to run around the room and up the walls... throwing all my girley stuff to the floor, ripping two intricate shadow boxes off the wall, and knocking over lamps. My mother thought that maybe our cats would like the hunt, so she escaped and then returned with Queenie and Tootsie. Well, the cats didn't want anything to do with the squirrel so they were clawing at the door and screaming to be let out. During this my Aunt Cheryl was trying to get a window open, but since it's an older home, she wasn't having any luck.

Hearing all of the commotion my Meemaw opened the door and the cats almost tripped her trying to escape the psychotic squirrel -who had ramped up his madness to climbing on the curtains and flying through the air trying to free himself from our scary house. At this time the adults regrouped and decided that they'd have to attack the window from the outside and see if they could get it open. My mother went out and managed to break the screen at the very top of a very tall window. We just now had to get the squirrel to go out the window which was at least six feet up. We had hoped that the squirrel would just go for it, but we had to come up with a plan. My mother and Aunt Cheryl both had brooms and were going to herd him to the window... mother had lost sight of him and asked me to see if the squirrel was under the bed. I slightly bent over to check as I was unarmed...when the squirrel rushed me, ran up my body, sat on my head, and then jumped out the window. My mother and Aunt were laughing at my expression while I was crying from the whole experience - looking at my destroyed room and hating squirrels at that moment.

We opened the bedroom door and went into the dining room where my Pop was just calmly reading the paper. Even during the screams and all the commotion and the cursing he never came to check on us. He was just enjoying his relaxing Thanksgiving... and wasn't going to let anything take him from it. He was the smartest of all of us.

Luckily the rest of the Thanksgiving holiday was great (once I cleaned my room thoroughly) and it's always a running joke about how I dislike squirrels. In fact to this very day, if I see a squirrel up way too close I do get a little twitchy. :) Happy Thanksgiving!

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

The weirdest thanksgiving EVER in my family.

I am the oldest in a family with four kids. Me, my brother Jason, then the twins, Jill and Mark. The twins and my brother were in high school, which made me college age. However, even though we were all teenagers, we were the only grandchildren on my mother's side and forced to sit at the dreaded kids table. Which really wasn't so bad because it was a card table in the living room, right in front of the TV.

We had a cool uncle (OK, our only uncle on my mom's side) who brought his VCR and some tapes for us to watch. (Because my grandma lived in the boonies and didn't even have cable or a VCR - boring!)

Guess what we picked to watch during our wonderful family meal - HELLRAISER!

Do not ask me why my mother or my grandmother allowed this. I am not sure if we picked this movie because we thought it would be cool, or if we did it to gross out the adults. Regardless, the meal went OK until a particularly gross part, and my brother started choking on turkey.

I freaked out and ran into the back bedroom because I don't do good with puke. I can handle a blood movie about a guy who has pins in his face while eating dinner, but can't handle a normal bodily function.

But then I thought "maybe I should call 911", so I ran back into the living room, because Grandma only had one phone. Which would have been a great idea HAD SHE NOT LIVED IN THE BOONIES WHERE THERE IS NO 911 SERVICE.

Fortunately, calmer heads prevailed......my mother did the Heimlich on my brother, the turkey came flying out of my brother's throat and landed on the carpet. Which my father picks up and says "Turkey!". Like we needed a forensic analysis of what was causing the blockage.

And dinner continued as usual for the entire family, except me, who was practically rocking in the corner from the drama. If you fast forward my life about 20 years, there is a similar story, however, it happened at a Chili's restaurant.

My husband was eating nachos. All of a sudden, he has his hands over his mouth, like he is trying to hold back a torrent of vomit. As you know my aversion to barf, much less barf in a public place, I yell "Go to the bathroom if you are going to throw up!"

But he wasn't barfing, he was choking...and I just sent him to the bathroom BY HIMSELF. After about a minute I send my son, who was 11, into the bathroom to check on his dad because I was too chicken. Zach (my son) opened the bathroom door and yelled "DAD!" and we heard my husband yell "GET OUT! I AM FINE!"

My husband comes back to the table, eyes watery and blood shot. Apparently he WAS choking. He managed to get into a stall and was trying to cough the chip out. However, he passed out from lack of oxygen. As he was falling, he falls into the wall in the bathroom on the way to the floor, which dislodged the the chip so he could breathe again. Therefore, bracing himself before hitting the cold hard floor.

And the saddest part of the story, I was certified in First Aid/CPR the week before for Girl Scouts.

So what have you learned from this story? Don't trust me in a medical emergency, because I will send you to the bathroom to die.

I Blow Up the Grocery Store

2011-12-05T10:05:00.001-08:00

I've got to come up with something to blog about. That was my thought just before the whipped cream blew up. My thought after the cream bomb detonated was, the Thanksgiving curse nailed me again, only this time it lulled me into a false sense of security and then pounced a week later. Well played, Thanksgiving curse, you magnificent bastard.

Anyway. I was doing the weekly grocery shopping, and badly...I made the classic mistake of shopping when I skipped breakfast. It's hilarious to me that when I buy food while my stomach's growling, even the weirdest yuckiest nastiest food looks delicious.

Oooh, quince paste! I'd better get a couple of those. And a loaf of rye, even though I absolutely detest rye and would sooner stick a fork in my ear then use it (the bread, not the fork) for a sandwich. (Maybe two loaves!) Pink Himalayan sea salt? Sure, I've got about nine salt shakers in the house (we tend to misplace the salt a lot, for some reason) but none of them have Pink Himalayan salt in them. How could I have gotten so far in life without buying Pink Himalayan salt? Into the cart you go, salt. I am your new Mommy. What's this? Liverwurst is on sale? What a relief: I love buying lunch meat made from the organ that makes bile and breaks down all the really gross stuff in blood. And speaking of blood, how lucky am I that they're having a buy one pound of blood sausage, get five pounds free? Yummmmm! And coffee is on sale! My husband and I don't drink coffee, we don't even have a coffee maker, but I'd better buy at least five pounds of the vile beans. Oh, and I should probably get milk and eggs, and something for supper...eh, there's plenty of time for that once I select the perfect lychee. Whatever the hell that is.

My shopping finished, I trotted over to the checkout lane with a cart groaning beneath the weight of nine organically grown spaghetti squash. I'd gotten milk, too, and a few things I actually liked eating. Plus, several cans of whipped cream. I'd never dare show my face at home without whipped cream.

See, we're big fans of hot drinks at my house...my family loved tea long before it became the new pomegranate/acai/goji in terms of trendiness, as well as hot chocolate and cider. And my kids like to go all Starbucks-ey on their hot chocolate, which means gobs of whipped cream and sprinkles (we call it Flanders Cocoa, after the awesome hot chocolate Ned Flanders made for the Simpson kids). My walking to school uphill in the snow during a blizzard story is, "When I was a kid, we used water and powder to make cocoa. And the powder had...fake marshmallows. That's right. Powder! Fake! Water! I can't believe I lived through it, frankly..."

Which is why I had three big cans of whipped cream in my cart. And things would have turned out just fine if I hadn't been invested in being an antisocial asshat. I bring a book everywhere, which was buried in my purse which was buried beneath cans of whipped cream and quince paste. I could have left my purse where it was until the clerk had unearthed it, and risked having to actually talk to the gal ringing up my groceries, or I could have hauled it out of the cart, grabbed my book, and read until all my stuff was rung up. Guess which one I picked?

So: I yanked. My purse swung free. Two or three yogurts hit the floor, followed by a can of whipped cream, which blew up. There was a 'floomph!' and the world went white; for a few seconds, the checkout aisle was my own personal Vietnam. You know how in those action movies, the desperate hero will dive toward the bomb in slo-mo, shouting, "Nooooooo!" Yeah. Like that. Except with chilled dairy products instead of C-4.

And let me tell you: the whipped cream bomb had incredible range. I was drenched from my shins to my feet. The clerk in the aisle to my right got her back splattered. The entire battery rack behind me was also splattered: a four-foot display of batteries, liberally splashed top to bottom with whipped cream! All over the carpet, of course, and all over the case to my left which held cold pop and water bottles. It was EVERYWHERE.

To say I was mortified would be half-assing it. I wished I'd ONLY been mortified. I was so startled, and embarrassed, and freaked, that all I could do was stand in whipped cream and stammer. I looked like I'd been hiking through snow (yummy fattening snow with just the right amount of sugar mixed in) instead of the produce section. Dozens of people were staring. And--this is a rare and weird thing in my life--I had no idea what to say or do. At all. Standing frozen and horror-struck was the only thing I could think of, so I stuck with it.

To my great relief, the clerks thought it was hilarious. And not in a "jeez, did your mom have any kids that lived?" way, but in a "wow, that was so cool and weird!" way. It helped that they were all in their late teens/early twenties and thought a can of compressed dairy product spraying its load across not one, not two, but three aisles was pretty much the coolest thing to happen all morning...possibly all week. They even figured out what happened: the bottom of the can is thin, with an even thinner metal circle in the middle, and if it hits the floor just right, the metal dents and fffooommph! Wall to wall whipped cream, with a horrified (sticky) NYT best-selling author in the middle of the dairy tsunami.

Two of them started trying to blot the carpet (it was like being at a crime scene, frankly...I couldn't bear to watch their tentative dabbing with paper towels...oh, the humanity!), while another one sprinted to the dairy section and brought me a brand-new can of Redi-Whip. I was still pretty rattled, which explains my panicked response: "No, what are you doing? Don't point that thing at me, dammit! All of you: TAKE COVER! Get it away, get it AWAY." The supervisor came over, took one look, and started cracking up himself. I apologized about eight times in four seconds, only to be assured it was no big deal. In fact, they were more worried about me having cream all over my boots and pants than having it all over their display cases.

"Gee, d'you want me to...I mean, I could get you a bunch of wet paper towels..." She made a tentative swabbing motion toward my dripping boots.

"God, no. I'm putting all of you through enough. I deserve to walk around the rest of the day with whipped cream drying to a crack glaze from my toes to my shins. What? Oh. Paper, please."

Turns out the clerk doing most of the clean-up was...are you ready? Yeah: lactose intolerant. Which made her laugh even harder. I was all, jeez, maybe you shouldn't touch all that stuff with lactose in it...is it an eating thing, or a skin contact thing? Luckily, it was the former. But kind of hilarious that the one who pulled the short straw for "Clean-up on Aisle 8!" was someone with no experience of any kind with dairy products. "I didn't know whipped cream could do this," she marveled. "That's because you're prejudiced against all things dairy." "I am not! I'm intolerant. Big diff."

While all this was going on, they were courteously bagging my groceries, gently teasing me and each other, offering once more to help me clean my boots, asking if I needed anything else...the Byerly's Eagan store was wall-to-wall courtesy. And whipped cream.

And to think: I had told myself just that morning that there wasn't a thing to blog about. Well played, belated Thanksgiving curse. Well played. Oh, and Byerly's? You guys were just plain magnificent.

I Explain the Link between Christmas Carols and Sociopaths

2011-12-01T10:17:00.001-08:00

I was asked to come up with a Christmas promotion for my St. Martins series, ME MYSELF AND WHY, about an FBI agent with Multiple Personality Disorder. The parameters were pretty flexible: I could write anything from setting new lyrics to a Christmas carol to weirdest gifts to nutty holiday traditions. So I instantly thought of the Christmas carol that has terrified me from the moment I heard it: BABY IT'S COLD OUTSIDE.

Seriously. It's scary, gang. It's like a prelude to date rape set to music. And I figured I can't be the only one who found the duet (the verses alternately sung by a couple) to be heavily creepy. So I put my own spin on it by writing how the MMY heroines would sing it.

For those of you who haven't read the BOFFO (Bureau Of False Flag Ops, where the main characters protect, serve, and annoy) books, the heroine, Cadence, is a multiple: two other personalities live in her head. Cadence is the sweetest, almost too sweet...if you spend too much time around her you'll need an insulin shot. Shiro is about as sweet as a bowl of vinegar and about as social, with a murderously quick trigger finger. Adrienne's the wild card: a complete weirdo and borderline psychotic, who emerges when one of the other personalities gets upset or angry. She's the FBI's version of the Tasmanian Devil.

BABY IT'S COLD OUTSIDE, actual lyrics (It's true! I'm not making it up! Prepare to be horrified.)

I really can't stay (Baby it's cold outside)
I've got to go away (Baby it's cold outside)
This evening has been (Been hoping that you'd drop in)

So very nice (I'll hold your hands they're just like ice)

My mother will start to worry (Beautiful, what's your hurry)
My father will be pacing the floor (Listen to the fireplace roar)
So really I'd better scurry (Beautiful, please don't hurry)
Well maybe just a half a drink more (Put some music on while I pour)

The neighbors might think (Baby, it's bad out there)
Say, what's in this drink (No cabs to be had out there)

* * *

BABY IT’S COLD OUTSIDE: A duet sung by three people who live in the same body. Because nothing says “God bless us, every one!” like a severe psychiatric disorder.

“Okay, here we go: I’ll sing the first part, and...well, I’ll sing the first part. I really can’t stay...um, Shiro, you missed your cue. I really can’t stay...I really can’t stay...oh, come on! Are we having trouble with this already? We’re not even one whole verse into it! I really can’t stay!”

“Ridiculous.”

“I really can’t stay.”

“You should hear yourself.”

“I really can’t say!”

“Baby. It’s cold outside.”

“I’ve got to go away.”

“Baby. It’s really quite cold outside.”

“This evening has been...”

“Been hoping that you would eventually drop in.”

“So very nice.”

“I’ll hold your hands, as they are precisely like ice.”

“My mother will start to worry.”

“I would imagine, as her daughter is clearly in the clutches of a sociopath.”

“My mother will start to worry!”

“Shrill is not a good look for you, Cadence. Calm down before you burst a blood vessel. Very well, here it is: Beautiful. What’s your hurry. Ugh.”

“My father will be pacing the floor.”

“Hopefully while cradling a loaded shotgun. What is my line? Ah...to the fireplace roar. So he’s apprehensive for his daughter and lurking near large pits of open flame? This song makes no sense.”

“So really, I’d better scurry.”

“She should just tell him she wants to leave, and if he doesn’t stop with the date rape, she’ll shoot him in the forehead with wad cutters.”

“So really I’d better scurry.”

“Beautiful, please don’t hurry. Am I truly the only one comprehending these lyrics?”

“Well, maybe just a half a drink more.”

“Put some music on while I pour—oh, wonderful. He’s going to slip her some E. He’s going to drug her so he can have his way with her. No. I’m done. This song is stupid and reads like a how-to manual for the neighborhood stalker.”

“The neighbors might think...”

“What? Think what? That they should perhaps consider dialing 911? Because that is what I think.”

“The neighbors might think...”

“I am leaving. But only after I say my next line, just so you can feel like an idiot: Baby, it is very very very very very bad out there. Uh-huh, sure it is. Oh, now look at this idiocy from the next verse: ‘Say, what’s in this drink.’ See? She can taste the roofie! And then my horrid line is, ‘No cabs to be had out there’, meaning she’s trapped like a cornered rat. No more! No more Christmas and no more singing, and that is my final word on—“

“The carols on the bus go round and round, round and round, the Shiro on the bus goes bye-bye now, allll the ressssst of the niiiiight.”

“Perfect. The other horseman is here. Good night, both of you. And don’t you dare gobble up all that hard sauce, Adrienne. Remember the rule: for every forbidden teaspoon full of sweet hard sauce, you have to eat a slice of fruitcake. I insist you obey: you get the pleasure of eating like a decadent wart hog, and all I get is a stomachache."

"You guys! Quit it and get back to singing! Shiro, don't you dare leave and Adrienne, don't you dare stay. STOP RUINING MY CHRISTMAS!"

"A Christmas without a nervous breakdown is a Christmas without sunshine."

“Deck the geese with beaks of holly, fa-la-la-la-la—because the wheels on the sleigh go round and round, round and round, reindeer round. The hooves and the deer go round and round, allll until they craaaaaash! Rudolph's nose is spread all over a cornfield! Then all the reindeer hated him! Serves you right, sqashed reindeer! Next time let me play your reindeer games! Round and round!"

"I am living in a road runner cartoon. Where did it all go wrong? Goodbye, Cadence. Goodbye, Adrienne.

"The feet! Of the geese! Are webbed with the wheels on the bus. Good night! Good night! Good night! Good night! God squash us, every one!”

“All I wanted was a nice evening singing Christmas carols with my sisters. But what I got was attitude from Shiro and psychosis from Adrienne. Worst Christmas ever, and it's only the first day of December!"

"Once more: shrill is not a good look for you."

"Good night! Good bye! Santa was too round and round; silly dumb glowy reindeer couldn't take the weight! Round and round, round and round...bye-bye, all the toys for girls and boys.

“Both of you can get lost now. Just take off so I don’t have to talk to you for a while. Just head out. Leave and don't look back, because I've had enough. Okay? Okay? Okay. Um...Adrienne? Shiro? Nuts. C’mon back...it’s too quiet in my head when you’re not there. Hello? Anyone?

"Well, shoot. God bless us, every one. Or at least some of us."

I Refuse To Cook For Thanksgiving, So Bite Me, Birds

2011-11-23T17:58:00.000-08:00

I'm on the Cape this week, visiting in-laws and enjoying one of the local B&Bs. I am also not cooking...followers of this blog know all about my dealings with the Thanksgiving Curse, being spat on by gravy packets and frantically microvaving slices of undercooked turkey breast meat, and getting lost in my own town while shopping for the big T-day...the horror is unending.

Well, this year the Curse is the Old Yarmouth Inn's problem, suckahs! All I need to worry about is figuring out if I'm eating turkey or turkey, or turkey (I'm a traditionalist, I s'pose). And sometime tomorrow night I'll get absurdly hungry and insist my husband take me to a D'Angelos for a turkey sandwich. And I'll sign some stock at the Hyannis B&N. And find and devour another sandwich. Because that's what the holidays are all about: me stuffing myself until all I can do is flop on the floor and moan, "No...more...turkey."

Mmm...turkey...by which I mean Happy Thanksgiving!

(Is it weird that after blogging this I really want some turkey?)

I'm Ancient But Educational

2011-10-31T19:48:00.000-07:00

It was an annoying weekend long before the zombies showed up (more about the zombies in my next blog). The kids and I, who never learn, decided to head to Steeple House early Halloween weekend. On the way, we were listening to the remake of "Fame". Yeah. You heard me, boys and girls, and you've not fooling me. You know the words: "I'm gonna make it to heaven, light up the sky like a flame. Fame! I'm gonna live forever, baby, remember my name." And if you're between 20 and 50 and claimed you haven't listened to the original or the cover, tell this song you're a liar! Don't make me sic King Al on you, liar. He'll stomp you like a grape, then drive you to the E.R., pay all your medical bills...like that. He won't even tease you too much about wheelchair. But once you're outta that chair, things might change.

Back to FAME: My little boy is his father's son, and rarely asks easy questions. So I embraced the terror when he asked: "Is God a Police Chief?

Hmm, good one. I figured an old stand-by was best, and went for it: "Everyone believes different, hon, so it's up to you."

"What do you feel?"

Good question. I wasn't ready for the whole murky religion thing with my kid, but I mused aloud what I'd like to see: "God is a cop. An old one and very, very street smart. Like Sean Connery in THE UNTOUCHABLES, without the bigotry. He'd kick your ass if you said something mean to his wife, then apologize. He wouldn't put up with any bullying...not from kids, not from abusive asshats, not from weird dogs or cats. He'd be tough but also super nice. You'd feel safe if you were lost and saw him, you'd feel safe going up to him and asking for help. He'd know if you were telling a lie. He'd know when you were sleeping and he'd know when you're awa--wait, that's Santa."

Fortunately my son shares my attention span: "Why do they say in the song that she'll live forever, but also be in heaven?"

Woo-hoo, we were off religion and back to pop music! "Okay, for example, you know who Marilyn Monroe is, right?"

"No."

Nuts. Luckily, my daughter came to my rescue. "See?" she said, showing him my iPod. She then began a twenty-minute play list of MM. "Marilyn Monroe's the tall skinny guy with the big giant blue eyeball, the guy who did The Beautiful People, and Tainted Love and the cover for Personal Jesus...you know."

I groaned. "That's not Marilyn Monroe!" After reminding myself not to drive off a cliff in sheer stupefied rage, I elaborated: Marilyn Monroe was the most sought after actress on the planet in her time. Girls wanted to be her, guys wanted to bang her, politicians thought she was catnip. But if you took her measurements today, Hollywood would decree her fat and only let her do plus-size modeling (at the most), because Hollywood is run by stupid asshats.

At least part of my rant got through to my son, who was surprised to find someone so beautiful (I'd shown him a picture once we'd reached our destination) could be considered fat and/or unattractive. Then I showed him a pic of Christina Hendricks, also considered by the Hollywood Elite (I can almost type that without spitting) to be obese. "Yeah," he agreed, goggling. "Total asshats."

So, officially, what with dropping pop culture references my kids have never heard of, I'm a fuddy-duddy. I knew about the duddy, but the fuddy was a cruel surprise. On the other hand, how often do I get to explain about Hollywood asshatery to my kids and think about God being a cool small-town sheriff?

Right: we'll call it a draw.

I Am Thanked by the Pontiac Price/Place VFD

2011-10-26T17:16:00.001-07:00

Awwww! I got a thank you note today for my/our donation to the Pontiac, MO fire department so they can buy a new defib so my parents don't accidentally kill somebody, or themselves. So, yay, new defibrillator!

Also, many of you have asked for the address for the VFD, wanting to get in on my dad pretending that I didn't donate shit out of kindness...that instead, he had a deep dark secret about me he would ruthlessly reveal unless I coughed up two hundred...no, five hundred...no, a thousand bucks! Now!

So I did. And here it is:

Pontiac Price-Place VFD

P.O. Box 1

Pontiac, MO 65729

Hey, man, I'll do whatever...just keep your goons away from me! Also: Happy Halloween.

My Parents Suck More At Retiring

2011-10-11T22:29:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before that my parents flunked Retirement 101. And they don't even have the sense to be ashamed! After years of busting their asses to keep me in yogurt (I was weirdly addicted to Yoplait "custard style" vanilla as a teenager), once my sister and I were out of the house they took stock, gave their notice, and retired to Missouri. Where they both got certified so they could go on ambulance runs at all hours of the night in the middle of the Smoky Mountains. Because that's their idea of retirement: take tons of classes and start a new job and invite strangers to haul their asses out of bed at 3:00 a.m. Frankly, I don't think they have any idea of the terrible example they're setting. What if more people decided retirement was a time to give back to the community? Chaos. Anarchy! When it's my turn, I'm not going to let my parents corrupt me with their perverted ideas of saving lives and being an asset to the community. I'm gonna be the polar opposite of an asset. I'll build that dream couch-fort in my living room, move in, and emerge periodically for snacks and occasionally clean underpants. That's how you retire. You turn yourself into a smelly anti-social recluse who only leaves the couch fort for an occasional chocolate malt.

But enough of my pipe dreams. Last week my dad, whom some of you know as King Al (my Alaskan Royals series), calls me and starts the conversation with, "How are you doing this month, financially?"

"Why, what'd you do? I've told you before, Dad: if you're old enough to commit felony assault, you're old enough to bail your own damn self out." (Okay, not really. But wouldn't it be cool if he did, and I had?)

Then he asks me if I know what an AED is. "Of course, duh. Who doesn't? I, um, I was just thinking the other day that it's been a while since we had an AED around here, because I absolutely know what an AED is. In fact, I should probably ask you if YOU know what it means, so I can make sure you're not sliding into Alzheimer's. Yeah, that's the way to go: you tell me what you think it means, and I'll tell you if you're..."

A defibrillator, he says. (It was a good thing he cut me off when he did; I could have gone on about the thing I didn't know about for an hour at least.) Oh! That kind of AED. Well, sure. Uh...why are you asking me this? Is it a quiz? Is it a game? Oooh, is it? What's the prize, what am I playing for? Give me another one. Go on, ask something else. Is the prize a big jar of Smarties? I love Smarties.

By now doubtless bitterly regretting his impulse to call, Dad tells me the fire department's AED is getting on in years. He also tells me that a rep for the defib warned them that they should replace it, as eventually it could be just as likely to electrocute a patient as revive them.

Cue my gasp of horror. Great: my beloved parents, blissfully enjoying their weird retirement, are running around the countryside with a machine that produces enough electricity TO BRING THE DEAD BACK TO LIFE, which they may or may not accidentally kill someone with, and if God forbid they should need an ambulance, may or may not accidentally kill themselves with.

Of course. Because this is a common issue for retirees. You gotta wrangle with the Social Security drones, you gotta fight with your health care provider, you've gotta plan a budget around a fixed income, you've got to watch you don't electrocute someone who had the nutty idea that calling 911 was a good thing...typical retirement stuff.

Not wanting my parents to pull time for negligent homicide ("The good news is, we made this run in under four minutes. The bad news is, we killed him. But we made great time!"), I asked what they wanted to do. Perhaps they could consider...maybe they could...quit and actually...I dunno...RETIRE?

Ha! Nothing so simple or sane. Dad tells me the department can get a good used one for around eight hundred bucks. And I was all, used? Used? My God, man, get a new one! Do you think I want all those accidental murders and your or my mother's possible accidental suicides on my conscience? What's a new one go for?

He told me, and okay, definitely a "cha-ching!", but not to a horrifying degree. So I said great...I'll write a check right--

No, he says. They had a meeting with the finance committee coming up, and he was hoping I'd be able to kick in $500 toward a used one. Again: my God, man! Enough with the suicide threats, and you can tell your wife the same thing! I'll cut you a check for a new one. Please, please let me cut a check for a new one.

I immediately wanted to push for that because, like many fictional kings of kingdoms that do not exist in our universe, King Al dislikes asking people for money. So I knew he would not have called if it hadn't been...well...life or death. The real thing, I mean. Not life or death like my life: "Whoever gobbled the last Milky Way, they are DEAD! Their families, DEAD! Their house burned to the GROUND!" "Okay, Mom, first of all, stop Netflixing The Untouchables. Second, you're in our family, too. And if you burn down our house, you're burning down your house." Hmm. I knew there was a flaw in my logic. I just couldn't put my finger on it because I'm suffering the agonies of low blood sugar because ONE OF THE BUMS I GAVE BIRTH TO ATE THE LAST MILKY WAY.

That's life or death in my house (for which I'm beyond grateful). But going on a run and finding a neighbor has been flat lining for half an hour...that's life or death for the retirees (not to mention the poor neighbor). So King Al would never have gone near a phone unless it was pretty damned vital. So in a very short time I went from being morbidly curious ("Are you calling me from yet another holding cell? Is it that close to Halloween already?") to real dread that he wouldn't let me pay for it ("No problem, I've just gotta find my checkbook...it's not in my pants and it's not in the crisper drawer...did I leave it in the bathroom?").

They weren't looking for one big check, Dad explained. He went on to say the burden shouldn't be on someone who lives over a thousand miles away and is unlikely to ever need to be jazzed back to life by a fire department employee in Missouri. But it was more than that. It was about pulling together as a community. "It's our town, our neighborhood, and people want to pitch in to help. Which is...you know, it's supposed to be like that." (It absolutely is, I thought but did not say, but lots of times it's not like that at all. Not one bit.) "So it's better if we all do it together," he finished.

Sensing I was smack up against both the rock and the hard place, I suggested we split the diff: I'd cut a check for $1,000 (FOR A NEW ONE) and they could raise the rest in town. FOR A NEW ONE.

"Are you sure?" he asks. "Because, hey, we'd be really happy with $500. We don't want to jam you up, here."

"Dad, it's totally fine. It's no trouble." Our book royalties pay out twice a year, in the spring and the fall, so we were having a good month. And if we hadn't been having a good month, I would have found the money somehow. I have a conscience (buried deep deep deep in the center of my reptilian brain), so how could I enjoy the solitary splendor of my couch-cave if I hadn't helped? "I'll pop it in the mail tomorrow."

"Are you sure? Because we would have been more than happy with--"

"I'm looking for stamps now," I said, cutting him off. "I'm getting my checkbook. Okay, looking for my...hey, there it is! Always the last place you look. Which in this case was the garage next to a gallon of windshield washer fluid. Okay, so, I'll mail it first thing in the tomorrow. FOR A NEW ONE. FOR A NEW ONE."

"I was hoping I'd be able to come in with five hundred," he mused, "so they'll be happy with twice that. Listen, it's a tax break. I'll have the secretary send you a letter on firehouse letterhead so you can show the IRS."

"Great, but tell the department secretary there's no rush, I know she'll take care of it when she can."

"The secretary's your mom."

"Oh. Tell the secretary I said hi and miss her lasagna, and that her grandchildren are driving me to an early couch-fort. And tell the guys at the meeting that I wasn't gonna cough up a red cent for weirdos who are bad at retiring, and then say that I laughed mockingly to your face (via your cell), but you had something on me and blackmailed me into coughing up a thousand, which I bitterly paid while choking on my own savage defeat."

"Hey, that's a great idea!" he said cheerfully. (We both love fiction.) "Blackmail! Excellent." Off he went to chat up the committee and spread lurid rumors about the fake thing he had on me, and off I went to my checkbook. FOR A NEW ONE. FOR A NEW ONE.

Now. Tell me: does going on ambulance runs while being an ever-more valuable asset to the community due to keeping certification current while also keeping an eye toward equipment upgrade to save still more lives...does that sound like retirement to you?

Me, neither.

* * *

An addendum: when my assistant,Tracy, came in the next morning, I told her the whole story. Her verbatim response was: "Oh, you gotta blog about this! Everybody loves King Al stories." (Translation: Tracy loves King Al stories, and occasionally projects, but what the heck. She's entitled...she's got the most annoying boss ever.)

Fast forward to a couple of days later, there's a voicemail from Long Live The King. I'd gotten an e-mail over the weekend from my mom...whoops, from The Department Secretary, saying the check had arrived. But the king is old school: he was the one who called to ask for a donation, so he was damn sure gonna call again when it came, to thank me.

"Yeah, we got it and I gave it to the treasurer. And I understand Tracy thinks you should blog about it..."

I wasn't going to, of course; Dad didn't have to worry. I try to keep my personal life and my writing life separate. And I'm terrible at it, but I make a half-hearted effort now and then. Anyway, Dad was like me. We like to keep a low profile. We hate being the center of attention. Most of the time in a crowded room, people don't even know we're there. For my dad and me, it's enough to know we're doing good things. We don't need anything beyond that, which is why we're more comfortable under the radar.

"...and I agree. Definitely blog about it." What? "Then you can put in a plug for the fire department, and put in our address, and all your fans can send the department five thousand each. That would be good."

Wait, WHAT? Listen, pal, if my fans have five grand to spare, they should be FedExing it to moi, P.O. Box 193, Hastings, MN.

"Or a dollar each, we don't care," he continued cheerfully, no doubt picturing my annoyed reaction to his voicemail. "But seriously, your gift...at some point it will save someone's life. And we do appreciate it, so thank you very much." Hmm, that was something. I hardly ever hear that I will inadvertently save lives. Mostly I hear that I inadvertently (or very very vertently) ruined them.

But see? See what I put up with? Worst retirees ever. I rest my case.

I Unleash A New Danger Upon The World

2011-10-11T14:14:00.000-07:00

We are an immediate family of four, and have added a new driver to our roster of two. This new driver has, statistically speaking, a higher crash rate than my husband or me, though she's only had her license for 96 hours. Yep: my teenager passed her driver's test and, as a 16 year-old, is in a group with the dubious distinction of having the highest crash rate of any other driver of any other age. Including those 96 year-old guys who get the accelerator mixed up with the brake and plow through a farmer's market killing 28 people in 3.2 seconds. We're excited!

The whole thing, the paperwork and coughing up $$ to the DMV and the test itself...well, it was very exciting and stressful. There were times I was worried I wasn't going to get through the ordeal, but I prevailed. Because, as above, it was exciting and stressful. For ME. Hey, it was! You have no idea what I went through. This was a huge milestone for me: it marked the day when I could start dumping all my can-you-run-to-the-store-for-milk-and-Advil chores on someone I gave birth to. It's about time one of these parasitic bums started pulling their own weight. There's only room in this family for one lazy-ass parasite who puts herself before everything else.

My kid was born in August, but didn't take her test until October. This was because the state of Minnesota was closed for a few weeks this summer, also known as the state shut-down, or What A Pain In My Ass. I still remember being in Wisconsin and having people ask me, "So, Minnesota's closed, right?" "Uh...well, we're not meeting people at the border and escorting them past the state line at gunpoint, but essentially: yeah." This meant, among other things, that the DMV wasn't playing nicely with anyone. More than usual, I mean.

By the time Minnesota opened back up for business ("Come on in! We've got 10,000 lakes that are open again! Swim until you're one great big wrinkle, we don't care. Also, we can sell booze again."), the waiting list for the driver's test was months long. And I was really impressed at how my daughter took the news: very matter-of-fact, very "well, there's nothing I can do about it but practice, so let's go practice". Much, much better than I would have taken the news at that age: "Are you kidding me, DMV? What, you mean I have to wait TWO GODDAMN MONTHS before I can legally hop in a car and get the hell away from these people? Are you trying to goad me into beating you to death, DMV? Because I'm up for it, DMV! I am ABSOLUTELY UP FOR IT!"

(It's not the first time I've been grateful my daughter is, at times, her father's daughter, instead of Princess Asshat, heir to the throne of Asshat.) I felt bad for the kid, but also secretly relieved: two more months to practise! To get better, to get safer. Two more months I didn't have to acknowledge that my l'il asshat will be a legal adult in less than two years, free to call me an asshat and move out or get married or head for a war zone or start racking up credit card debt. Or just the former. Okay, technically she's free to...you know what? I'm getting off-course.

So, we practiced and practiced. Sometimes I'd try for the high road. My depth perception is lousy, so there are times when my life is like that scene in Jurassic Park, when the T-Rex is thundering down on a terrified Jeff Goldblum who sees the slavering dinosaur through the objects-are-closer-than-they-appear reflection of a car mirror. Insert a writing deadline or irked editor or annoyed husband for the T-Rex and you have my life. So I understand intellectually that sometimes while my kid is driving, it looks like a close call when it really isn't.

Intellectually. Not, you know, realistically. So the kid would endure outbursts like, "Watch out! You almost hit that semi and all those school buses and those four dogs and that weird-looking cat!" "Mom, they're on the other end of the street. Four blocks away. And those are first graders, not weird cats and dogs." Or, "Watch it! You almost clipped that pedestrian!" "Mom, you're the one driving. See? I'm in the back seat. Trying to pretend I'm an orphan. YOU almost clipped him."

Like I said, sometimes I realize what I'm doing and try to correct the behavior. A few days ago she took a corner I thought brought her dangerously close to a parked car, but told myself to shut up. As we passed the car, I saw that she was several feet away. I congratulated myself for not saying anything (it's way too easy to freak out an inexperienced driver...there's no sport to it at all).

But I never fooled the kid for half a second. "Mom, it's okay."

"What? I know."

"You didn't say anything, but you squeezed all your toes."

"What?"

"Your toes." (One of my many bad habits: I have freakishly long legs, and so rest my feet on the passenger-side dashboard.) "You've squinched them all down super-tight. They're white, mom. All your toes are dead white." (Stupid sandals.)

"Sorry. I thought you had it covered. I tried really hard not to say anything."

"And I appreciate it. Let's go home. I think you need a nap."

"I'm not tired!"

"No, no, of course not. Listen, we can go home and I can read you part of your manuscript and then you can have a cookie and then rest on the couch."

"I don't need a nap!"

"No, no," she soothed. "Just rest for half an hour. Then you can get back up."

"TWO cookies."

"Okay, Mom."

"And cocoa."

"Okay."

"Because you're not the boss of me, young lady."

"Of course not."

"Okay, then."

Fast forward to the day of her exam. We had an hour to practice, so we drove around downtown so she could work on parking and not running red lights, which I guess DMV examiners frown upon. But because the time of her test was so close, she was getting rattled, so I was getting rattled, which got her more rattled. "You better try that again...no, no, that was terrible! Look, just do it like you did yesterday. You did perfectly yesterday. You've done it perfectly every day for three wee...no, no, no! My God, if there had been a dog in that crosswalk you would have creamed him! Why would you want to bring the ASPCA down on top of you? Terrible! Terrible!"

Then my inner voice, which sounds like Satan, which sounds like Lena Olin, kicked in: "You're at least as nervous as she is. So you're over-reacting. And you're just making things worse. Shut. The hell. Up."

"I just think you're over-correcting is all," I finished meekly, followed with, "Look, you're fine. The DMV, uh, loves it when you're a foot and a half from the curb. Why don't we head over?"

So we did. And as usual, there were several confusing signs which contradicted the instructions on various forms, which we weren't sure we were supposed to fill out just then, or if we needed entirely different forms, and there was a long line just to find someone to ask...I was delighted. The quicker she learned about the hell-on-earth that is the DMV, the better.

I thought I was fine until the examiner called her name. I really did. I was saying things like, "Look, you'll be fine. You'll be astonished how low the state sets the bar for licensed drivers." And, "Listen, I'm sure you'll be great, but it's no big deal if you don't pass. We'll just practise more and you'll do fine next time. Really, it's not a big deal." And, "Do you have a cookie in your purse? I'd murder for a cookie right now. Am I talking really loud? In my head it sounds like I'm talking really loud. God, it's hot in here!"

Then he called her name, a big bluff older man who had a stern expression. I was instantly a nervous wreck for her. This guy looked like a no-bullshit kind of fellow. Was the frown a permanent expression? Was it a cramp? Or was he having a bad day? Or did he hate teenagers? Oh my God, he hates teenagers. He hates MY teenager. He's already flunked her in his mind. THEY ARE NOT EVEN IN THE CAR AND SHE'S FLUNKED. You bastard! "You can tell the DMV that MJ is coming and she's bringing hell with her!" Wait. Was that out loud?

That's when I realized I was, um, a little nervous for the kid. Weird. Normally my own needs and desires are paramount. Too bad I didn't see this coming. Why didn't SHE see this coming? Typical teenager: no thought for how difficult and stressful this was going to be for me!

I watched them walk out together, chat, then get into my filthy Escape and drive into the sunset, if the sun had been setting. Then I pulled out my book and tried to read. Which is when the lady next to me said, "So, that's your daughter?" "Yeah." "I'm sure she'll be fine." "Yeah." "My daughter did great." "Okay." "Until that guy tricked her into flunking."

"What?" I instantly lost interest in re-reading SPOCK'S WORLD. "He tricked her?"

"Well, he told her to turn here, and here, and then to take a left...except it was a one way, and by taking a left she broke the law. But I had told her to do everything the examiner said. So she did. And he flunked her."

But...I told MY daughter to do everything he said, too! "He's gonna tell you where to turn and which streets to drive down, and you just do what he says and you'll be fine." Unless he secretly hates all teenagers and has a wicked agenda to flunk them! I instantly regretted telling my kid anything. Ever. At any time.

The woman must have watched the blood drain from my face, because she added, "I'm sure it'll be okay. But my daughter was really bummed. It took three months even to get in here because of the backlog from the state shut-down. The earliest she could re-rest would have been the end of December."

"That sucks," I said, and meant it. Flunking was one thing...anybody can be nervous and make a mistake. Having to wait almost three months to re-test because the state legislature wants to play Keep Away with the budget is something else.

"So I took the day off from work, and we came here, and we've been here all day without an appointment, hoping they might be able to squeeze us in."

"That sucks, too," I said, and meant it. Ballsy move, probably doomed to failure. Showing up WITH an appointment was no guarantee. And to burn a vacation day for it? Yikes. "I hope it works out."

"When we were here before, I was talking to a mom whose daughter had flunked the test six times." When I gasped in dismay, she warmed to her topic and we gossiped for a bit.

Normally I hate that. I'm owning it: I can be unpleasantly anti-social at times, which is why I bring a book everywhere. If I'm stuck in line at the bank, or the DMV, or the Post Office, I have a plan. I've been lugging books into lines for over two decades. And I hate it when someone who didn't bring a book decides to chat me up because she's bored. Hate. It. "Do you really not see that I'm reading? What is it about my stiff, unfriendly posture and the nose in my book that projects, 'Talk to me about something I don't care about, stranger!'"

Not this time, though. Having tried to read the same paragraph about a dozen times, I gave up and shut the book and traded DMV horror stories with the mom. Her kid popped in and said to me, "Hey, he's getting out! I think something's wrong: she's parking, but he got out. He didn't get out during mine." Just when all the blood had finished pooling into the bottom of my freshly bleeding ulcer, the other mom came to my rescue with, "Yeah, but she's got an SUV. We don't. He has to get out to see how far from the curb she is. That's all it is."

"Oh, okay. It's okay." I probably looked pretty green and sickly by now, because the teen I didn't give birth to was all, "She did good, though. She's doing good. It's okay." Then she went back to the window. "Here they come! I think it's okay."

Naturally, I was too polished and mature to jockey for position at the window like some gawking bystander. So I stayed in my seat and shrilled, "Is she out? Are they out? Are they still in the car? Are they out? Huh? Are they?"

"Here they come," the teen I didn't birth announced. "I think it's okay. She's not crying. I cried."

I was gonna cry, too. Any minute. I shot to my feet (polished and mature...who did I think I was fooling, exactly?) and practically hip-checked the kid out of the way. My daughter looked...neutral. She had a completely neutral expression on her face. I've seen this kid almost every day for the last 16 years and had no idea if she'd passed or failed.

"I...can't...tell!" Squint, peer. Glare, glare.

Chris walked in, the examiner right behind her. She looked at me and gestured for me to come over, being a little surprised to see that about half a dozen people besides her mom were staring right at her. I thought, is it good news or bad that she wants me? It might be time to go if she flunked. Or time to cough up the bucks if she passed.

I rushed up. "So...so?"

"Yeah, I need my social security number." I must have stared incomprehensibly at her, because she added, "Are you okay?"

"What? Did you? What happened? What? What? Whaaaaaat?"

"I passed," she said, looking amazed I'd had any doubts. "What did you think happened?"

"I didn't knoooooooow!" I wailed, startling nearly everyone in the building. Then I ran back to the waiting room and gave the mom and assorted teens a double thumbs up. They all grinned: "She passed? She passed!"

I ran back to my kid. "I told them you passed," I panted. "What? I couldn't just leave without telling them."

She was staring at me like she'd never seen a harassed mom sweating profusely with a brand-new bleeding ulcer who talked to strangers when she had a terrific book in her purse. "What have you been doing?"

"Freaking out," I admitted. "A lot."

Forms were filled out, her picture was taken. She lost points on being a bit far from the curb, and one of her turns was a bit wide. All else was aces. My shrill nagging and desperate screaming during our many tutorials had worked! There was a new (hideously dangerous, according to every insurance company on the face of the earth) driver in our family.

On the way out, I paused and went back to the waiting room once again. "It was really nice talking to you," I said to the other mom. And, to her kid, "Good luck. I hope it works out for you."

My kid was still acting like I was somene she'd never met. "You...didn't...read?" She seemed unable to comprehend this, which was weird. I was always reading about how resilient teenagers are. Ha!

"I passed the time chatting instead."

"You...what?"

"What? SPOCK'S WORLD isn't going anywhere. Listen, that guy looked kind of grim. I was, ha-ha, a little worried." I tried another unconvincing laugh, which was more croaky than the first. "Was he nice?"

"Oh, no. In fact, he was really sarcastic. REALLY sarcastic." I was overjoyed. He spoke my daughter's mother tongue! He was fluent in her mother tongue! "Yeah, so I, like, instantly relaxed. It was a piece of cake after that." What were the chances of stumbling across a government employee fluent in sarcasm? Truly, the kid had been born under a lucky star.

"I'm so proud of you!" I hugged her so hard I nearly knocked her into my car. (Or, as she probably thinks of it now, her car.) "You did great!"

"Yeah, and..." My tall gorgeous smart sweet daughter hugged me back. "Thanks. You know. For all that stuff you do. The driving stuff, that's the least of it."

It's okay. I didn't cry or anything. Okay, a little. Maybe a little. But there were tons of McDonald's napkins squashed into the side pocket of my door. I save napkins from everywhere and keep them all over my car. You never know when your kid will reach a milestone and thank you while having no clue how deeply precious she is, and equal ignorance of all the terrible, illegal, monstrous things I would have done to the instructor who tricked her into flunking.

I Monopolize Midwest Fiction Writers

2011-09-20T14:30:00.001-07:00

In still more proof that no one learns their lesson (Kare 11, Australia, the San Diego RWA chapter, the Romantic Times Conference, etc.), I'll be giving the keynote speech at the Midwest Fiction Writers annual conference, "Fall Harvest Workshop". It's this Friday (9/23), at 7:00 p.m. at the Brooklyn Center Crowne Plaza (Minneapolis North).

Those of you already planning to attend...I'll see you there. Those of you planning to stay away...it's possible that's just as well, too. I'm gonna do a lot of over-sharing in my speech. Because that's how I roll: with the over-sharing, all the time. I...can't explain it. And don't care enough to try. Hey, come on up for no other reason than to laugh at me! (I would come on up to laugh at me...)

I'm also smuggling a few copies of WOLF AT THE DOOR to give away while I'm there...since WatD isn't out for a couple of weeks, you guys could make big bucks on eBay by selling them early. If nothing else, they make great blunt instruments!

See you Friday night!

I Talk About Werewolves and Angry Bostonians

2011-09-15T21:26:00.001-07:00

My publisher asked me to talk about WOLF AT THE DOOR for an upcoming newsletter, and ignoring her sensible suggestion of a page, I wrote six. So I'm posting the thing in its entirety below, whether you like it or not. How 'bout THAT (Um, seriously, thanks in advance for your attention.)

The characters in WATD have been trapped in my head for years, poor bums. When I wrote my first single-title werewolf novel, Derik’s Bane, I had no idea readers would be so intrigued by the idea of werewolves living on Cape Cod, and would want to read more about them.

I was intrigued, sure, but that was because I was putting my husband through Harvard with a series of wretched temp jobs, and for the first time in my life was living 1500 miles away from my family. (Irony: as an Air Force brat, I swore when I hit 18 I’d never, ever move again. Then I met someone who lived 1500 miles away. Thanks for nothing, irony, you jerk.)

Massachusetts was an eye-opener for a former Midwestern trailer-park inhabitant. Noisy, fast, fuming, and noisy. For some reason, nearly everyone I talked to out there seemed to be furious with me. I found this puzzling, since usually people needed to be with me for at least half an hour before the Hulk rage overwhelmed them.

I can hear it now, so shush: “That’s a stereotype! I live in Boston and I’m super-nice, ya vapid dumbass!” I’m sure you are super nice. I’m sure you’re super delightful. And I did meet many people from Boston and the Cape who I adored and are friends with to this day. But I also met a lot of people who seemed to be enraged by my very presence.

So there I was, trying to learn the subway system, getting trampled at Filene’s Basement sales (“Please...I—I just want to see if that shirt’s a twelve...please get off my neck...ow...”), and adjusting to a society that had little use for cars.

Of all of them, the car thing was the most amazing. When my then-fiancé told me I could sell my car before we moved to Massachusetts, I flat-out didn’t believe him. It sounded impossible and dangerous. You’d die in Minnesota or North Dakota if you tried walking to work without a car. You could die checking the mail. If the elements didn’t get you, the wolves would.

But he’d been right, and I sold my car. After some nervousness (“Is this the train to Harvard Square? Also, please don’t rape or kill me.” “Kiddo, I’m 82, and you’re not my type.”), I learned to appreciate the T...it was nice being able to let someone else drive while I read or snacked, or snacked. The trains were (relatively) clean, and I was never bothered. At worst, some poor idiot would assume I knew what I was doing (“Is this the train for the Aquarium?” “Kiddo, I gotta get ready for my 83^rd birthday pahty, whyncha leave me alone?”), and ask for directions. I went through tons of books during my commute, and listened to tons of Ace of Base on an ancient tool once called a Walkman by my people.

I was homesick for the Midwest, sure, but Boston and Cape Cod quickly grew on me. I found myself grazing at Faneuil Hall, spending hours browsing the Barnes and Noble on Park Street and the Wordsworth at Harvard Square, and being morbidly aware that the letter R was usually nowhere to be found in the mouths of the people around me.

“Anothah stereotype, ya useless hack! I’ve lived in Bawstahn my whole life, I been to Fenway Pahk, I grew up in Chahsten an’ if you do that thing, that ‘pahk the cah in Havahd yahd’ thing I’m gonna smack ya upside ya big fat head! All that’s nothin’ but hate-mongerin’, jerk!”

Like I said: surrounded by awesome food, gorgeous beaches, and people I didn’t know who were super-pissed at me. I started wondering why: something in the water? (This was before we all started carrying our own clear fluids in Aquafina bottles.) Something in the subway? Something in their...nature? Their genetics? (I actually heard the light bulb blink to life over my head: ding!). Thus, I got the idea that werewolves lurked among us, werewolves who were always fighting their natures and trying to hide in plain sight. Werewolves who would lash out when the stress got to them. And a ton of them lived on the Cape.

So Derik’s Bane was born, and it was such fun. I really liked the Cape Cod characters, because I was a born tourist and once I got over my apprehension, loved the museums, loved the parks, loved the beaches, loved the peanuts and lemon ice you could buy on the street. I loved how I could shatter the kneecap of the woman lunging for the same jeans I was at the annual Filenes sale. Best of all, I loved the sense of history. I had to walk past Benjamin Franklin’s grave every day on my way to work. I lived within walking distance of the Mount Auburn Cemetery. I sat in the Old North Church and tried to imagine “one if by hand, two here by me”, or whatever Paul Revere was supposed to have figured out.

By the time I sat down to write Chapter One, I’d come to love the Cape’s beauty, the friendly and straightforward people, the truly awful driving that gave me a new appreciation for life every time I returned safely from the grocery store...and don’t start with the stereotypes again. That one’s true and you all know it. Boston drivers are more dangerous than a baker’s dozen of serial killers.

True to my frivolous and contrary nature, I cried when it was time to move to Boston, and I cried when it was time to move back to Minnesota. In five years, I’d embraced and admired a part of the country that was wholly different from anything I’d experienced the first twenty years of my life. They could have seafood as fast food out there! They thought nothing of dropping everything and heading to a beach, sometimes without sandwiches! They fearlessly crossed the street during rush hour and lived to tell the tale!

All this to say, I was homesick and confused when I wrote Derik’s Bane, and writing that book helped me get over myself and appreciate where I was.

Fast forward a few years, I asked my editor if I could write another single-title about the Wyndham werewolves, since readers had been asking for that book for years. She agreed at once, and I got to work. By then I’d been back in Minnesota for a few years and was writing full-time. And though most of Wolf at the Door takes place in Minnesota, the few bits in Boston reminded me how afraid I’d been to move there, and what I dumbass I’d been to be afraid, and how much I wanted to see the area again.

So I finished the book, talked to my hubby/writing partner (we co-write the Jennifer Scales series), and as it turned out, this year we’ll be having Thanksgiving on the Cape. What can I say? It’s gorgeous out there, and the people are great. Anyone who says different is an idiot. A blonde, six-foot tall idiot.

Ah! One more thing, a timeline issue. The events in Wolf at the Door take place after Undead and Unstable, which will be out in June 2012. So, yes, this book comes out with information that won’t be explained for eight months. This is on purpose. Please bear with me. I really do have a plan, and it’s no fueled by booze smoothies, so I think it’ll work. Don’t be scared. It’s not like I’m asking you to leave your friends and family and move across the country. That’d be insane.

So that’s the scoop, and I thank you kindly for your attention. But I’m closing the laptop now...gotta go pahk my cah. Did you know you can actually get your point across more quickly if you omit needless consonants?

I Buy Myself at Cub

2011-09-06T21:13:00.001-07:00

This afternoon I took a break from the back-breaking slavery of setting my own hours to do one of my favorite things, and went to Cub Foods. For those of you who don't live near one, Cub is a grocery store chain, no, NOT offspring sent by Hammock to torture me.

I parked in a fake reserved pharmacy spot (the kind "reserved" for people just dashing in and out again of the pharmacy part of Cub Foods, not the pharmacy part of Cub Foods), which was legally and morally okay because I had to buy some Advil. I like the candy coating on their ibuprofen. And while I was there, I saw myself, just like that picture above.

I literally said to myself, "I think I'll check the book and magazine section; there might be something there to read." Then I saw a terrific color cover: "Me Myself and Why...? What kind of a weirdass name is that for...wait. There's something familiar about this." I pondered; then, in a flash: "I wrote it! That's why it sounds so familiar. I wrote that book. Wait. I wrote THIS book. So...to answer my original question, there isn't something over here for me to read." I literally pondered to puzzle this out: I write books. Cub Foods sells books (and occasionally food). Cub Foods has bought my book to sell to their customers. I am a customer. I am now face-to-face with that book. That is the sequence of events: I am seeing myself. Now I am buying myself.

I know it's weird. Buying my own book? It's not like I don't know how it ends. But there was something so weird and cool about seeing myself for a split-second outside of myself: this is how it feels to be an MJD reader: mildly interested in a book with a pretty cover. And can we talk about the wonderful cover? With a back list of over sixty books, I'm not only used to covers but am stupidly lucky in that I'm used to good covers. And yet the first thing that hit me when I saw the cover flat for MMY was that gorgeous dark-blue-turquoise-ey background that I instantly liked. I still like it. I should be looking at it right now, instead of writing this blog. If only there was a way I could do both. Hmm, like have the cover color be my background cover...not the picture or annoying text, just the cover? It's weird that I'm only just now thinking of this.

Done! Okay, so I pitched a book I wrote into my cart (lame). Then I whipped out my phone and took a picture of the other copies of my book on a shelf (again with the lame), which I posted above. And I just now realized I'm between Stephanie Meyer's New Moon, and Stieg Larsson's Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Which in case no one ever tells you is AWESOME. All those writers who pretend to be too cool for school when their book is on a shelf with Stephanie Meyers or John Grisham? Yeah, they're fibbing. They LOVE IT because it's AWESOME. If a couple of decades ago, if you'd cornered the kid from the trailer park and told her not only would she someday be published, but she'd be shelved beside best-sellers (and even write an occasional best-seller herself), she'd have laughed at you and called you an asshat.

Okay! Book gawked at, picture taken, book stuck in cart. Picked out food. Got in line at the register. Was intrigued enough to look into Jennifer Aston's pregnancy and then her abduction by aliens. Then the mom with the newborn talked to me.

The baby had the newborn look: all red skin and spiky black hair and pastel onesie. The mom had the look all new moms have: exhausted and starey-eyed and food on a shirt. Since my Not My Kid radar had been fully engaged; not only was I not noticing the crying baby, I hadn't even noticed her mom.The only reason I noticed her at all was because her mouth had opened and she talked.

While she was saying she was sorry about Not My Kid's crying I was taking in the pale face, and under eye circles so dark they were the color of ripe plums. Formula on her shirt. Long blond permed and (it must be said) at least one shower away from being pretty. At a guess, I'd say she had given birth two, maybe even three hours ago. I felt so bad for this woman; I knew exactly how she felt: "So tired oh boy the baby's so tired and crying a lot so tired gotta feed her so tired people will think I'm a bad mom because I'm so tired and so tired, I just can't get over there right this second because I'm so tired and jeez that's a lot of racket she's making probably because she's so tired".

While she was apologizing I noticed the mom in line behind me, a gal with four kids in the cart (apparently they were having a 2 for 1 sale on kids...I passed), and we sort of traded glances and then looked at New Mom. I thought, 'Not a big deal at all. Not My Kid isn't going to spontaneously combust if her mom doesn't rush right over and pick her up...not only does her crying not bother me, I hadn't even noticed it."

Then the mom next to me said, "Not a big deal at all. She's not gonna spontaneously combust if her mom doesn't drop everything and pick her up. Not only does her crying not bother me, I hadn't even noticed it."

I laughed and agreed, and now we were both looking at New Mom from our aisle: "Yeah, seriously, don't apologize. We really don't care even a little bit." I loved how we were all fluent in Mom. I loved how the new kid in our tribe looked so relieved and thankful, I loved that we were able to make her feel that way, even if just for half a minute. I loved that it wasn't me.

"It's uncanny, isn't it?" We chatted while we bagged our groceries. "I just do not care! Someone else's newborn crying her lungs out...it's like a white noise machine to me. Soothing, almost." The other mom nodded agreement: "Yeah, I've got four of my own. I quit noticing THEIR crying four years ago, never mind someone else's ."

Thanks, the new mom said. Nothing to be sorry about. No, really. Try to get some rest. Even--I know this sounds like an incredible unattainable Everest-like goal--but maybe even a nap. I didn't tell her it'd get much worse before it got better. "You've gotta be kind to yourself in these first few days." I didn't tell her that in some unexplainable way, looking back on this torture would seem worth it. Would seem even a bargain. Too hard to explain; just one of those parenting things. But all worth it, yep. That and more...and it's impossible to explain. Not trying to be patronizing. It just is, is all.

The mom with four kids said goodbye, and off we went in two directions. One of us saw her books rubbing shoulders, so to speak, with books that had sold in millions all around the planet. One was a sleep-deprived parent. They both had incredible, unbelievable, wonderful hard jobs, jobs they'd do whether they were paid or not. Oh, and one of us had to pick up his husband's dry cleaning. And one of us really mundane chore.

Still: worth it. That and more. I don't know why, but I'm gonna keep going with it. That seems to be working great for me; I don't know why, but I'm grateful. I don't ever want to take it for granted. It's good to be reminded by something outside yourself how very, very lucky you are.

And I am!

I Command My Monkeys

2011-08-29T13:39:00.000-07:00

My husband and I have done a Bad Thing, and rather than repent, we're gonna embrace (literally and figuratively). We're also going to ask our readers to be complicit in our wickedness. Because that's how we roll: unrepentantly.

The bad thing: writing the Jennifer Scales series together, books which we ruthlessly wrote for the fantasy genre. That means that when the new book comes out tomorrow, EVANGELINA, some readers might not be able to find it.

The Betsy books, the werewolf books (DERIK'S BANE), the anthologies (FAERIES GONE WILD; DEAD AND LOVING IT), the Alaska books (THE ROYAL TREATMENT), the Gorgeous duo (DROP DEAD GORGEOUS), the Fred-the-mermaid trilogy (SWIMMING WITH THE SHARKS)...all those and more can be found in the romance section, under D for Dork (or, I s'pose, Davidson).

JENNIFER SCALES AND THE ANCIENT FURNACE, JENNIFER SCALES AND THE MESSENGER OF LIGHT, THE SILVER MOON ELM, RISE OF THE POISON MOON, THE SERAPH OF SORROW, and now (as of Tuesday, August 30) EVANGELINA can all be found in the fantasy section.

Yep. All of my books except the Jennifer Scales ones are in the romance section; JS and her ilk lurk in fantasy. That was the Bad Thing my husband and I did (don't worry, honey, I'm not breathing a word about the Bad Thing we did with all that silly string, or the Bad Thing we did with the pumpkin innards after we carved multiple Jack O'Lanterns last Halloween, or the Bad Thing we did with the honey butter they gave us at Anton's.). And since I just had a hardcover release in July, I wouldn't expect readers to think of checking an entirely different section in the bookstore for ever more MaryJanice (and Anthony Alongi).

But it's there! EVANGELINA should be there, cooling its heels in the fantasy shelves or, even better, on a New Release table near the front. If it's not, please don't hesitate to ask your bookseller or librarian to order it. Because Betsy and Jennifer are published under different imprints, they aren't marketed together. They have different editors, different marketing budgets, etc. And often, a bookseller or librarian will order my new hardcover for the beginning of summer, and then not even think to check a catalogue to see if I've got another book coming out 9 weeks later, at the end of summer.

But I do! And there's no escape. So don't fight it. As I said, it's our own fault Jennifer lurks in the fantasy section. We didn't have to write for that genre. Actually, we didn't: the Jennifer Scales books were originally written and marketed for the young adult genre. The trouble (though I'm not sure "trouble" is the right word) started when we began receiving fan mail from readers of all ages. In the same week, we had a fan letter from a 9 year-old boy and a 90 year-old grandmother. People of all ages were rudely going into the YA section and buying Jennifer Scales. The nerve! (And by 'the nerve' we meant 'that's awesome'.)

So! Marketing slapped a bunch of new covers on the books, and now they hang out on the fantasy bookshelves. Is it any wonder our readers sometimes have trouble tracking them down? We take full responsibility. And by "full" we mean "no".

Like we said: a Bad Thing. And like we also said: rather than repent, we could really use your help. If you want EVANGELINA (or the first in the series, JENNIFER SCALES AND THE ANCIENT FURNACE, or the second, etc.), check fantasy. If it's not there, mercilessly nag the bookstore manager. (Hey, that's what we do...and not even when there's a new book to bug them about.)

Fly, my winged monkeys! Fly!

I Almost Steal a Dog and am Not Mauled by a Bear (again)

2011-08-20T00:46:00.000-07:00

We were up at our writer's retreat over the weekend, the house by the lake where bats and bears live. It's pretty quiet up there; the woods are all around. We've seen bald eagles, beavers, wild turkeys, deer, turtles, frogs, loons, and a bear we call Hammock. And this was a weird weekend, even by our standards.

I let my kid drive us into town to hit the Meat Shoppe (which is not the name of the business, but I like using the word Shoppe, so there you go). She's learning quickly; like her father and my father, she's an instinctive driver. Me, I've gotta think everything out and sometimes I still end up in the ditch. The little brat is already better at parallel parking than I am. (No Christmas presents for her this year, the lousy show-off.)

So anyway, we came out of Ye Old Meat Shoppe laden with bags of meat. The kid hopped into the driver's seat, I climbed into the passenger side. She checked mirrors, she looked behind her, and then she slowly started to back out. Then she stopped and (fluent in the local dialect we call Minnesota Nice) waved an older woman and her on-crutches husband to go ahead and cross behind her. The lady shook her head, so my kid began to reverse again...then hit the brakes. Hard.

"My smoothie!" I wailed. "Nooooo!" Then I realized: the man had fallen, and Chris had seen him disappear from her mirror. Aw, shit. Also: my smoothie!

While mourning said smoothie, I popped my seat belt and hurried out of the car. My daughter was right on my heels as she always is when she thinks someone's hurt, or that Mom's over her head. (So she's on my heels a lot.)

Turns out the poor guy had fallen...he was pretty unsteady on his crutches. His wife was trying to help him up (tricky, as he outweighed her by a good twenty pounds) with one hand while clinging to their dog's leash with the other. So I stepped forward, gently took the leash from her and said, "I'll hold him for you." And as I did that, my kid flanked me and tried to help him up from the other side.

What? Listen: the kid's got the strong legs and back. She's also, due to extensive martial arts training, much much more coordinated than I am. If she'd grabbed the leash and I'd hustled over to help the gentleman, not only would I have fallen on my ass, but the poor guy would have broken my fall. Why should we both get our hips broken?

Meanwhile, a few guys had pulled up and hopped out of their trucks to help. So while they tried to get him settled, I soothed the dog, one of those big friendly golden labs, the kind with a head like a fuzzy cinder block, and a tail three inches in diameter that numbs your shins in an instant. I think I did too good a job of soothing him, because he sure cheered up: "Ow. Ow! My shin! Uh..." I saw they were looking at me while still tending to the man. "I'm fine. Don't worry about me." Nice one, MJ. Your ass isn't the one on the pavement (for a change), so suck it up.

Someone came over with a chair, so he could sit and regain some strength and then try to get back on his crutches, and someone else brought him a bottle of water. Meanwhile, I was getting pretty enchanted with the lab...I've always loved hunting breeds, and this one was typical of labs, what with the friendly slobbering and the tail thwacking and the shin numbing.

Just as I had decided to encourage him to leap into my car (they'd never catch me! and my kid would probably be able to catch a ride home with one of the Good Samaritans in the lot), the crisis had calmed. "Thank you so much, and your daughter, too, for helping us," the wife said, reaching for the leash. I'm afraid I held onto it a little longer than was proper, and we had a brief tug of war over who got to kidnap the lab from the Meat Shoppe parking lot. She won. She was elderly, but spry and with wiry strength. So, dog-less, I slunk back to the car.

As we pulled back onto the highway, my daughter asked why I'd gotten out of the car and run over to the man on the ground so quickly. I told her, "I didn't know why he fell. I worried he'd had a heart attack. I know CPR, so..." I shrugged.

"So you would have done it? If he'd needed it? Done CPR and mouth-to-mouth and all?"

"Sure, if there wasn't an off-duty paramedic or nurse or whatever around."

"I think that's cool," she said, delighted. "You probably know CPR because Grandma taught you."

(My parents suck at retirement, and both got certified so they could go on ambulance runs at all hours of the night in the middle of the Smoky Mountains. Because that's their idea of retirement: take tons of classes and a new job and invite strangers to haul your ass out of bed at 3:00 a.m.)

As it happens, my mom didn't teach me, but she sure could have. When she was learning CPR she and her partner had to practice on a dummy (one of the creepy ones, whose eyes follow you) to get certified. The instructor is supposed to push a button after a few minutes, which makes the creepy-eyed dummy appear to regain its pulse (eeewww!).

The button was broken, but no one knew. So my mom labored over the creepy-eyed dummy for twenty minutes. By the time the instructor clued in, Mom was thinking that even Jesus couldn't pull a Lazarus on the wretched thing. Natch, she passed the course, and the instructor loved that she didn't quit after four minutes and complain. A closed-heart massage will pop a lot of calories; imagine doing it for twenty minutes! I would have complained. Actually, I probably wouldn't have gone near the dummy in the first place. Natural selection, baby. If the dummy was meant to live, it'd live. Otherwise, let it and all its creepy kind die out.

So we saved the day (not really) and home we went. We'd had our adventure for the day. There weren't any more surprises in store for us.

Enter Hammock the bear. And then, enter me.

Some background: I hate working out. Frankly, I hate leaving the house. I'm working really hard on phasing myself out of my family's lives so I can make a fort out of sofa cushions and never leave the safety of said cushion fort. I love my sedentary lifestyle and I'm looking forward to being a shut-in. But I have to admit, walks outside (as opposed to a treadmill) make me feel good. And not just the ones where I bring chocolate Zingers in my fanny pack. (I feel safe wandering around the woods knowing I'm loaded with carbs, sugar, and fat. I cannot explain this. At all.)

Back to the walks: I'd grabbed my iPod, hollered to the kids that I'd be back in half an hour, hosed myself down with bug spray, and then out the door I went. Fifteen minutes later, as I was listening to the theme from the A-Team (my iPod is an eclectic place) I mused, "This isn't bad. It's maybe fun. And by doing this, I'm being kinder to my body. Really, there's no downside to...

(At this point, I glanced to my left and observed Hammock the Bear staring at me from the ditch about seven feet away.)

...aw, shit. Being mauled by an American Black Bear is not being kinder to my body. It'd be safer if I'd taken up smoking crack. Should have stayed in the house and broken open a new pack of Zingers.

I instantly resorted to survival skills learned in high school: I dropped eye contact with the popular kid. Caaaaaasually turned around. Slooooowly started walking away. Thinking: oh shit oh shit oh shit. Thinking, they can run thirty miles an hour. Thinking, don't YOU run. Thinking, maybe I can strangle him with the cord for my ear buds. Thinking, like I need another reason to hate exercise?

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, after Hammock the Bear had been spotted in our backyard a few months back, my husband insisted that I strap a fillet knife to my hip for my walk that day. So like all loving wives, I took that as a signal to scoff and mock him. Weeks later, in the middle of trying not to be run down and devoured, I remembered the scoffing and thought: Tony's gonna be heartbroken when they find my gnawed remains, but also vindicated. But mostly heartbroken. Prob'ly. He does sort of get off on I-told-you-so, almost as much as I do. Irony, why do you hate me? Well, that's it. If I lived through this, I wasn't gonna tell him. Because being devoured by a furry omnivore is actually preferable to an I-told-you-so. Don't ask me to explain the logic. It just is.

As I passed our ironically-named bear box (the thing we keep garbage in to keep Hammock out), I risked a glance over my shoulder. Hammock had left the ditch and was standing in the middle of the road, still watching me. I reminded myself that the black bear hardly ever attacks over territory; it's more likely to try to pull your face off if you accidentally scare it. A sedentary writer with dreams of a sofa cushion fort, it must have known, was no threat. Ever.

So I risked breaking into a brisk trot...our front door was only thirty feet away, and Hammock was now a ways behind me; I couldn't even see him anymore. I trotted more briskly (brisklier?).

Inside the house, my kids were puzzled, since they could hear my sneakers slapping on the gravel. "Who's jogging?"

They looked out the window. "It's Mom!"

"What's wrong with her?"

"I don't know! Look at her, she's coming in pretty fast. Maybe it's a seizure? Some kind of weird seizure that makes her run?"

"I didn't know she even could run."

"Maybe we should call the cops. Maybe that's not Mom at all."

My kids looked at each other, beyond confused, and then heard me hurl the door open, then slam it shut. "FUCK!"

"It IS Mom!"

"Thank God. I didn't want to take on a robot or pod person or whatever. Uh...Mom? We heard you running. What's up with that?"

While wheezing, I related the tale. Then I went to my room to lie down and have a heart attack. Once my pulse had dropped, I cranked up the laptop and double-checked to make sure my Hammock knowledge had been accurate. It had been. Then I got on Amazon and ordered four cans of bear spray, which you can apparently squirt at them from ten or more feet away. Because I don't want to shiv Hammock with a fillet knife (this is the wilderness, not an episode of Oz), and strangling him with my ear buds seems iffy. But squirting something that will annoy him enough to keep him back without causing long-term effects looked like the way to go.

The funny thing is, I actually preferred the bear encounter to the whole bat thing this past winter. By a LOT. How dumb is that?

And to think: I had no idea what I was going to blog about this week. It's just been too peaceful around the joint. Thanks, Hammock.

I Reschedule Myself

2011-08-10T07:25:00.001-07:00

Kare TV did not learn their lesson! They've invited me next week, Thursday, August 18. I'm already hatching diabololical schemes and working on my nice-to-meet-you-I-promise-I'm-not-crazy handshake. When you get right down to it, I have no choice but to go back...it's the only way they'll learn.

Diana Pierce And President Obama And I Are Not On TV

2011-08-02T20:18:00.000-07:00

President Obama cut me off while I was talking vampires with Diana Pierce, which I never saw coming. I was okay with it, though...I think I even needed it. Because just when I think I've heard it all, something like that goes and happens. Which is good! It's never smart to forget the world's a weird place.

I had one of the best mornings ever, and not just because my teenager greeted me with, "I've got good news and bad; the good news is, you looked really pretty on TV." How often does a suburban mom get to hear that? And how shallow does it make me that I care? A) not more than once or twice a week, and B) really, really shallow. More than usual shallow. Bordering on Betsy shallow (yikes!); not one of my better qualities, but what can you do? Once a former Miss Congeniality, always a former Miss Congeniality.

Getting interviewed on TV is the best, unless you're the person of interest local law enforcement has been looking for. Believe me, that is not as exciting as it sounds. Don't fall for the hype! But if you're at the studio for other reasons, it's great. The place is always air conditioned (I'll admit I don't appreciate that as much in January), the green room is occasionally green, and the staff is unflappable. They can't be flapped in any way. After a while, you almost want to try and flap them, just to see them not flap. Which brings me to President Obama and how he couldn't flap them.

After the cheerful receptionist greeted me, the intern came out to bring me to the green-room-that's-actually-green. (I was always surprised when rooms that weren't green were called the green room.) Intern is an innocuous word for a job that's cooler and harder than can usually be summed up in two syllables. I wouldn't put the word up there with, say, teacher or doctor, but I'd put it up there with warden or hostage. Anyway, I've never run into one (intern, I mean) who was anything less than cheerful, professional, or harried, and today was no exception. In fact, given what they face each workday, I'm surprised interns aren't more wild-eyed, shrill, and/or tearful.

Like I said, this one was no exception; she came out to the reception area so she could bring me to the studio, and introduced herself so I could forget her name right away. I know...not too Cliched Big Shot, right? Is it worse that I instantly forgot names when I was a Cliched Little Shot, and a Cliched Nobody? That I think TV guests who don't recall proper nouns are Cliched Asshats? Because they absolutely are, and yep, I am their queen. You could donate a kidney and I'd still have to make an effort to remember your name: "I wanna say...Jenny?" "Beth." "Right! Thanks again for the gift of life, Seth." "Beth." "Right!"

Anyway, she explained that she wasn't sure when I'd be in front of the camera; apparently the president was going to make an announcement but they weren't sure when. So in addition to the crushing daily stress, the staff would have to be constantly be prepared to be interrupted on camera at any second for who knew how long, or maybe not, but be ready. Just thinking about it gave me a headache, but Her Name Escaped Me seemed to take the whole thing in stride. I always feel sorry for interns on account of their job being so horrific, and today promised to be worse than usual for her, but you'd never know it. You'll never catch an intern admitting to the horror of their job. Like retired people moving to Florid and pretending it's not hot (Mrs. Seinfeld: "Who wants hot chocolate!"), interns pretend their jobs don't entail long hours and constant stress for shit pay, or no pay. It's true! You can prompt them with lines like, "I can't imagine how stressful your job must be," and they'll smile and shrug off pressure that would give me an aneurysm.

But it was all good from where I was standing. I was square in the middle of the Kare 11 chaos because in a stroke of great good luck, one of the producers (I'm not using Christina's name, so as to protect Christina from the horrors of being blogged about) is a big Betsy fan. So this wasn't my first time at the rodeo. I'm not going to say that she schedules me to appear on an award-winning news show to find out how Betsy's going to avoid becoming the Big Bad of the future, because Christina is a thorough professional who puts the interests and needs of Kare 11's viewers ahead of her own summer reading list, but wouldn't it be the awesomest if she did? Think about how great that would be for me! A near-priceless PR opportunity practically in my own back yard, a chance not practical/foreseeable/feasible for 99 out of 100 writers, and it'd be right in my lap through no effort of my own! God, I get light-headed just thinking about it!

Anyway, back to the show. I told Her Name Escaped Me that I was camera-ready and could go on in five minutes or fifty, regardless of when Obama was coming on, or I could come back in a day or a week; however it worked for them. These things were all true, because the TV people were the ones doing me the favor; it wasn't the other way around. Her Name Escaped Me was thankful I wasn't lying on the floor drumming my heels and shrieking, "I wanna go on in the next segment I wanna go on in the next segment THE NEXT SEGMENT TELL OBAMA TO WAIT HIS DAMN TURN!" Oh, please. Like I'd ever act like such a brat if there wasn't chocolate involved.

Then Diana Pierce, the reporter, came in to meet me and talk about UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED. And I just went to pieces. Inside, where she couldn't see.

There's a reason I set most of my books in Minnesota: I've lived there the longest and I'm really, really lazy. I don't have to pop open Google to find out where 35W goes if you take the exit a few block's from Khan's. Oh, and also, I love Minnesota and think it's beautiful and feel lucky to live there, and when I wasn't living there I was homesick. When I chose to move to be with my husband, and knew I wouldn't be back for years, I cried. And because my parents had Kare 11 on all the time when we lived there, and when I visited, just hearing certain voices or names even as background would remind me of how homesick I was when I lived in Massachusetts. Even now, after living here for a decade, I'll hear a name and remember how much I missed living in Minnesota, and how happy I was when I moved back.

(Massachusetts, simmer down. You were beautiful, too, it just took me a while to appreciate you. And I love visiting you; I look forward to visiting you all year, I promise! I cried when I had to leave you, too, so don't get excited. Come to think of it, I cry a lot when I move. I guess I just really hate packing.)

Anyway, sorry to veer into the swamp of the sentimental, but there it is: certain names have deep significance to me, like Diana Pierce. Whose hand I was now shaking. I was touching Diana Pierce and she was talking to me. Two thoughts jumped into my brain as she introduced herself, and one of those thoughts was the truth and one was a lie. The lie was, "Hi, I'm not screaming inside my own head because it's so exciting to meet you because you are a symbol of all that I love about the great state of Minnesota, and I'm definitely not thinking about stealing your scarf or lipstick and keeping it hidden so I can secretly sniff it every morning after my Malt O'Meal."

I said the truth, which was, "What a pretty dress!" (It just seemed easier, and why needlessly alarm Diana Pierce?)

She said, smiling, "Thanks, I really like this dress. I got it last year and after a while some viewers asked if I had any other dresses, I was wearing it so often."

I thought: Those bitches! How dare they? HOW DARE THEY? They will rue the day, Diana Pierce! Just point them out to me, Diana Pierce, and I will kick their asses so hard their MOMS will feel it!

I said: "Well, that wasn't very nice."

I tried to get a grip on myself, and was a little successful since it's often total chaos inside my brain anyway, and this wasn't the first time I had to tell myself to just GET A GRIP already. So I told Diana Pierce that UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED had hit the New York Times list, and reminded her I'd gone to school in the area and was a Cannon Falls High School graduate, sort of a Local Girl Makes Good angle (which always sounded better than Local Girl Hears Voices).

Diana Pierce was pleased to hear it. Diana Pierce thought I was pretty great. "Also I'm the new David Hasselhoff in Germany," I added helpfully. Why? No reason. Wait...there was a reason. I had said that for a reason...the show! "They're making The Betsy Show in Germany." How great was it to bring that up?

It was exciting and cool just to be there, to have the chance to talk about my work on television, and of course it was exciting to meet Diana Pierce, but even better, it was acceptable to begin a conversation by telling Diana Pierce how terrific I was. Most times a reporter knows she's got maybe a minute and a half before the cameras come on to find out things she hopes will interest her viewers, so when I blurt "The Betsy Show in Germany", it not only makes Diana Pierce's job easier, it reminds everyone in the room (so, Diana Pierce and me) how terrific I am.

Before I knew it, Diana Pierce and I were gabbing a mile a minute, and had shifted from talking about Betsy (a fictional vampire and unemployed secretary) to Christina (a real life producer) and then incredibly, unbelievably, Diana Pierce said, "The three of us should have lunch! I think it'd be great if we could get together over lunch...we'd have so much to talk about! What do you think? Would you like to?"

What do I think, Diana Pierce? I think you've got a mean streak. I think you're playing a cruel joke. Because the obvious answer to, "Would you like to?" is yes. Would I like to see world peace in my lifetime? Yes. Would I like to crack the top ten on the NYT list? Yes. Would I like to have lunch with you and Christina? Doy, yes! (I'm trying to bring 'doy' back.) Doy, doy, a thousand times doy!

"Well, sure," I told Diana Pierce. "I mean, I'm sure I can fit you in. Go right ahead and mark me down for that one, ha ha!" My mouth has never been this dry. I have never uttered a faker laugh. My mouth is the Sahara. My laugh is the cackle of a dying parrot.

Now we're in the studio. I've been miked (and it didn't hurt a bit!). Nobody knows if Obama's going to have anything to say, or when he might say it (or not say it). The intern tells me to "go ahead and sit with Di", like Diana Pierce is a normal person another normal person could just go and sit with, like they were both normal. She's so adorable, thinking people can just sit down with Diana Pierce like that!

So I sit, I remind myself to sit up straight (I have a tendency to turtle...I can form my upper body into a perfect C without half trying). We're going live in about two minutes. We're talking like normal people. I have no idea what we're talking about. Probably vampires. Or books. Maybe both. Who knows? Like I can keep track of the voices inside my head AND Diana Pierce's voice? I'm just a woman, dammit!

We're live! Diana Pierce says something along the lines of readers being able to sink their teeth into UNDERMINED, and I cough up my strangled parrot laugh, and then Diana Pierce is asking how I came up with Betsy, and right around the phrase "plumber vampires" we get cut off. Viewers aren't seeing me anymore (or hearing my 'ha ha' dying parrot laugh), they're seeing...a bunch of suits milling around. They've interrupted our regularly scheduled program to show...nothing. They are going to tell us that President Obama is going to have an announcement for us...but not now. In fact, Obama hasn't even left his office. The network is going live to show...Obama not being there.

I burst out laughing; it never fails to crack me up when they show"LIVE at the bottom of the screen so we can see they are RIGHT THERE for the BREAKING NEWS that nothing is happening at that particular spot at that particular time, LIVE, right before our very eyes.

So Diana Pierce and I sit there, miked, watching...nothing. "If they cut back to us within two minutes, we can finish," Diana Pierce tells me, so we wait for the news to stop telling us they don't have anything to tell us, so I can go back to talking about plumber vampires. Unfortunately, they need the entire two minutes to tell us nothing. We're done; it's time for me to go.

Diana Pierce apologizes. Christina apologizes, and Her Name Escaped Me apologizes, which is really nice of them because what just happened was beyond their control. I threaten to come back. I mean, offer. I offer to come back. They pretend I'm the one doing them the favor, and agree to have me back on the show within the week. We talk for a bit longer about the UNDEAD series and my upcoming release, A WOLF AT THE DOOR, which is the first full-length werewolf book I've done since DERIK'S BANE. Right! Because this is my job and that's why I'm here, to talk about my job, which in this case is writing books. Not only do I get paid to do that, people then want me to come on television and talk about doing that. Which is why I'm here. I remember now! It's all coming back to me...

I de-mike myself and give Diana Pierce the mike. Then Diana Pierce asks for my cell number again, because the first time I couldn't hear her over all the static in my brain ("Kkksssttttt...Diana Pierce is talking to usssssskkkkkttttttt!"). Christina tells me she thinks lunch is a great idea, and we'll set something up. Of course lunch is a great idea. Of course we'll set something up. Because this sort of thing happens all the time. A TV producer wants to have lunch with Diana Pierce (no surprise) and me (gigantic shocker)! Ssssssskkkkkkkkttttttttttt!

Then I'm outside, blinking in the sunshine and clawing for my cell phone. It's so exciting! It's all so cool and exciting and this is my life and I'm lucky, lucky, in the whole world there's not one person luckier than me, so I call my assistant to tell her, and when she answers I greet her with, "Oh my God it was just too much fun and can you believe viewers can be that catty? It was a great dress. I think it's nice that Diana Pierce has good taste in clothes plus she's sensible about getting her money's worth. Plus they want me back and hopefully I'll get to come on and talk about A WOLF AT THE DOOR in addition to the next Betsy, right? I mean, I didn't even think of that, I was just jazzed to be there. Christina was really psyched about A WOLF AT THE DOOR, so maybe I can, you know? Wouldn't that be great? And the intern was really good at pretending her job wasn't a living nightmare what with all the stress, it must be just like being in Hell except everybody's great looking and has nice clothes. She never knew when Obama was going to interrupt us, none of them knew but they were super nice about it. I mean, that's what I'd expect but it's still great to see for myself, right?"

"Well, that's good," Tracy replied, because she's great at knowing what I'm talking about with no prep or hint of any kind. "Did they say when they could reschedule?"

"Reschedule?"

"Reschedule you to come back on the show."

"Why would--?" Oh. Oh! Right. Reschedule being on the show. In all the excitement of not being on the show, I'd forgotten I wasn't on the show. "Right! Reschedule. Gotcha." Of course, I'd have to check with Obama before I rescheduled a damned thing, but once we coordinated our schedules... "Sure, reschedule."

So I went home, and when I walked into the house my teenager had good and bad news. Good news: she thought I looked great on TV. Bad news: "They cut you off to show us a bunch of suits milling around because nothing was happening, and to tell us the President wasn't ready with his announcement and hadn't left his office yet. And then you never finished talking about plumber vampires because it was over."

Breaking news, bay-bee! And to think, a moment of living history, and I was there.

I Reward or Punish Libraries

2011-07-27T07:27:00.001-07:00

Today, for no good reason except to display my hatred, we're having a contest over at my Facebook page: Why I think my library should have a full set of the Undead series. Or, Why my library should be punished with a full set of the Undead series.

To be serious (not for long, I promise) I talk up libraries all the time. I do that because, as many of you know and have been bored hearing about, I was an Air Force brat. The first thing I'd do in every new town was find the nearest library. Where I'd essentially set up a cot and a pillow (near the water fountain so I'd have someplace to brush my teeth when I got up) and move in until my folks had to pick up, per the United States government, and move again. Love, love, love libraries

One of the nicest compliments I ever received was from a soft-spoken librarian. I was signing some books for her when she told me my books never seem to make it back to the library. What, they'd get lost halfway?

Kind of, she replied. Readers always stole them. "Nobody ever brings a Betsy book back," she told me, trying to hide her alarm at the way tears welled up in my cynical eyes. "They just never make it back." Like in that movie Vertical Limit! Sometimes the mountain killed the Betsy books, like it tried to kill Chris O'Donnell's sister, Robin Tunney!

"Um, no, not like that at all," Shy Librarian, who was quickly being renamed Nervous Twitchy Librarian in my head, replied. "More like...I have to go."

She dashed off (super secret librarian business, probably), but I always remembered what she told me. I should have gone into stern scolding mode upon hearing some of my readers dabbled in petty larceny, but I went into touched weeping mode instead. There was something wrong with my eyes. Probably a recurrence of pinkeye. It was an infection, not proof I'm not dead inside.

Pinkeye, dammit!

Anyhoo. Head over to my FB page to find out how you can reward, or punish, your local libe with the awesomeness that is the Betsy books.

I Talk About How I Talk About Twilight

2011-07-22T21:03:00.001-07:00

The poor bastards at Fresh Fiction gave me an open forum to blog about whatever I wanted. Naturally, I blogged about how the huge trend in all things vampire was occasionally inconvenient for me. They're giving away several copies of my new release, UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED.

The scene of the crime:

http://freshfiction.com/page.php?id=3519

Don't be too hard on them. They truly thought I'd be mature and professional from beginning to end, as opposed to shrill and hypocritical. Read it and weep, gang!

I Am Slobberingly Grateful

2011-07-13T18:46:00.000-07:00

My editor just e-mailed me; she got her hot little hands on next week's New York Times best-seller list...UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED is #26! Given the fact that I didn't do a book tour, as well as the, uh, controversial nature of the book(s), I was thrilled and grateful.

Thanks a bunch, gang! I (literally) couldn't have done it without you!

I am Bitten by Books

2011-07-10T19:19:00.000-07:00

Monday afternoon, I'll be on-line answering reader questions in real-time. The event is below, so bring your questions. Anybody who heads over there and RSVPs *before* the event will get an additional 25 entries into my contest (we're giving away tons of autographed books). So check it out, bay-bees, and I to get the chance to answer your questions.

http://www.bittenbybooks.com/?p=44329

I Deface Books

2011-07-08T17:41:00.001-07:00

Just a heads up, I'll be signing books at Uncle Hugo's bookstore in St. Paul, MN, tomorrow (Sat.) from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. Stop by and say howdy! Or, you know. Just stop by. :-)

http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/ah-davidson-maryjanice.php

They're Right About Me Sucking

2011-07-06T13:35:00.001-07:00

UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED released this week, to the anticipation of some and the dismay of others. Either suits me (though, honestly, I prefer anticipation...who wouldn't?) since it's always a relief to get a book out of my brain and onto the shelves (the voices...they never ever stop! help meeeee!). And I've been keeping half an eye on reviews, and have seen pretty much what I expected. The book is selling great, and the reviews are mostly terrible.

I was expecting this because you told me it would happen. To wit: "MJ's latest book sucks rocks, so much so that I know her next book will be really really bad and really really rock-sucky." At least, according to Anonymous. And Anonymous. And Anonymous! Anonymous is everywhere, and all-powerful, and lives to review everything everywhere on the earth. And hates a) my latest books, and b) using the name on their birth certificate. Ever.

Last summer, I got tons and tons of reader mail following UNDEAD AND UNFINISHED. It was a mixed bag: a) awesome turn for the series; I was starting to get a little stale on Betsy, so great job! b) my God, you get paid for this shit? c) not sure about the new direction, but will hang in there to see what you do next. Also, where can I get the shoes Betsy's talking about on page 97?

The ones who hate-hate-HATED the book not only explained to me in great detail how much a) it sucked, b) I sucked, c) all my future books would suck, they confidently predicted my tailspin down the best-seller lists, followed by my head blowing up, SCANNERS style.

I'll admit: it was hard not to take some of that personally. SCANNERS style? Really? But...you don't know me. You've never met me. I'm not saying you wouldn't loathe me in person, just that...you've never met me! SCANNERS style? Not something a little gentler, like FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH style?

So it was with no surprise at all that I saw the number of one and two star reviews by Anonymous and their almighty minions, the Anonymites. After all, it was explained to me many times last year how much a book you never read would suck, suck, suck. It must be terrific to have found you were right!

Right?

Also, good news! UNDEAD AND UNSTABLE will be out July 2012. So don't wait! Begin writing your reviews now, Anonymites.

I'm Everywhere

2011-07-04T15:37:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, July 5, UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED will be out. It'll be out, I tell you! It'll be in Barnes and Noble and Amazon and (some) Borders (may they rest in peace). My point: there's no getting away from me! It, I mean. So flee like a terrified villager with Godzilla snarfing up your back trail. Or, you know, don't. Either way: warned ya!

Off to blow something up,

God Bless America!,

I Teach My Kid to Drive While Covered in (Root) Beer

2011-06-21T17:51:00.000-07:00

I mentioned on Facebook last week that between the bats and the bears and my daughter's learners permit, I was sort of terrified to head up North. Which reminds me; it always cracked me up when someone from Minnesota referred to "up North", because Minnesota's pretty North, until we bought a cabin further north than our house, either longitudinally or laterally. (I can never keep those two straight. Heh, heh--straight! Get it?) Thus: up North. Now I understand! It just seemed weird before.

So I was letting my daughter drive, and my son was in the back seat with our two dogs. I was eating A&W onion rings (soooo good if you like greasy food that will kill you, which I do) and "teaching" by which I mean, I was eating onion rings. My son was sucking down his root beer float. And then...I'm still not sure how this happened, though he used the word "haunted" and the word "possessed" and the word "demon". Anyway, he spilled his float. We weren't on a rough road or taking a sharp turn or fending off motion sickness or trying to win a race or taking over the mailman's route for the day or anything like that, he just sort of simultaneously spilled. EVERYWHERE.

So he started yelling. In fact, he proved himself his mother's son with the first word out of his 12-year old mouth: "Shit!" (Given the enormous mess, I let it slide. Also: thanks to me, he knew that word by the time he was ten months old, because I have the self-control of a chimpanzee in the fruit section of Cub Foods.) So I twisted around and saw the kid covered in root beer float, and the dogs covered in root beer float and licking each other. And even though my car is a garbage dump on wheels, I was still horrified. So I started screaming incoherently: "Aggghhh, no...grrrrr! Wha--aaagggghhh! Aaagghh!" Just as when I was trying to tell them to come look at the bear in our back yard, all I could do was sort of grunt and flail around in the passenger seat without actually using verbs or nouns or adjectives or adverbs.

This alarmed my daughter, who promptly twisted around. "What? What's wrong?" This time I was a big girl and used my words: "WATCH THE ROAD, WATCH THE ROAD, WATCH THE ROOOOOOOAD!"

Sometimes you have these moments in your life where you step back and coldly observe and think: "It's time to re-evaluate my life." Also: "Watch the road!" This wasn't one of those times, because I knew exactly where it had all gone wrong.

The best part was, we were a good twenty miles away from even a gas station. And the only thing I had in the car was one of those little portable packs o'Kleenex. So I sort of blotted my son (I didn't even try to blot the dogs, who were still avidly slurping each other's fur) with my grand total total of eight Kleenexes while reminding my daughter that this wasn't England, so she was required to drive on the right side of the road.

Also, unbeknownst to me, while this was going on my body was happily incubating a flu virus or something equally vile. So although I didn't know it, I was due to start vomiting within 72 hours. Although to be fair, I really felt like getting a head start on the vomiting what with root beer spraying everywhere. I love most kinds of pop...my idea of the perfect beverage is a Coke clogged with ice on a hot summer day. But something about root beer summons my gag reflex. It's not a problem with liquid, either, because I hate those little candy root beer barrels, too. I hate everything about root beer. Root beer, you go straight to hell! You go straight to hell and you die, root beer!

The best part is, my son has always been the fastidious one in the family. Messes really bugged him, even when he was still in diapers. In fact, he would apologize if he'd gotten sick or needed a Pull-Ups change. "I'm really sorry, Mom." "You're two. Forget about it." "Yeah, but still." "You haven't been on the planet as long as some of the yogurt in our fridge. Don't worry about it." (Memo to me: clean out the fridge.) He may have only been two on the outside, but he was at least eleven on the inside. So when we made it to our cabin, he had to sort of peel himself out of the back seat, complete with "zzzzrrrrriiiipp!" sound effects. And the look on his face...let's just say that I make my living writing, and yet my powers of description were not up to it.

But all's well that ends etcetera...we emptied the car and then he hopped in the tub and got squeaky clean. Well, he's a pre-teen boy, so kind of clean. Barely clean? Semi-clean? But I've got to do something about the dogs. Bees are following them everywhere.

Like I needed another reason to hate root beer?

An Excepert from WOLF AT THE DOOR

2011-06-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

Weirdly, I have the flu. I hate buying Nyquil when it's eighty-some degrees out. I also hate the taste of Nyquil. Oh, and barfing on the hour. I hate that, too. So no blog this week, I'm taking the lazy route. Below is an excerpt from the sequel to DERIK'S BANE, a book I had way too much fun writing called WOLF AT THE DOOR. It's based on a novella I wrote ages ago and finally got a chance to go back and turn into a full-length novel. Readers will get to (or "have to" if you didn't much like DERIK'S BANE) see Michael Wyndham, Eddie Batley and Boo (from the novella "The Misadventures of Boo and the Boy Blunder"), Sinclair, Betsy, and one or two others. Never say you weren't warned.

I gotta go barf now. It has nothing to do with the quality of my work! Probably.

* * *

It was fate that led her to the Woodbury Barnes and Noble that night. Fate, and an urgent need for both a lemon scone and Newsweek. Later, Rachael was unable to remember when exactly she’d spotted Edward in the store, because she hadn’t started to pay attention until the felony assault. But she always remembered the first thing he had said to her, right there in front of the Sweet Valley Vampires display: “The undead really, really dislike being this popular.”

That was odd enough to catch her attention...and he was cute enough to keep it.

Like any werewolf, she had started sorting scents the moment she came through the door, categorizing and filing them away. She did it as automatically as people checked the rearview mirror when they backed up. And when she focused on Edward it was the way people didn’t pay attention to the color of a necktie until they were right in front of them.

So it was with Edward’s scent, a pleasing combo of clean cotton and oranges, with a sprinkling of underarm deodorant; she liked it right away. She also liked the way his light brown hair was a bit shaggy, in need of a trim, and she liked the way the ends of his hair kept trying to curl under. Best of all, she liked his shirt: Your Favorite Band Sucks.

“I suppose they would.”

He was staring at her. She wasn’t sure why; he wasn’t a werewolf. She knew this as people know who was into the Cheetos because of their orange fingertips.

She repeated herself, louder: “I suppose they would.”

“Who would?"

What was he staring at? “Would what?”

“Who would...wait. What?”

“Let’s start over.” Actually, she should just walk away...why draw out this encounter? But she didn’t want to, and she didn’t know why.

Then she did know. He was an attractive, intelligent male and he was in his sexual prime. The beast in her thought the chances with him weren’t just outstanding, they were almost a necessity. She was a creature of instinct and senses, as different from this man as the great apes he’d evolved from were different from the wolves in her old, old family tree. I suppose that means while my instinct is to bring down prey, his is to make tools!

Her civilized side thought it might be fun to go get a Frappucino with this guy. Her beast wanted to lure him to her lair and have sex all afternoon.

“I’m so sorry, I honestly wasn’t paying attention...I have no idea what I actually said. I was kind of in my own head.” He paused, then added with the air of a someone sharing a great, shameful-yet-exciting secret, “I’m in there a lot, actually.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” She extended her hand and almost gasped when he seized it and wrung it, as if he was afraid she’d change her mind about introducing herself. “I’m Rachael Velvela.”

“Vell-vay-luh? That’s neat.” Neat? He thought it was neat? No one had ever said that. People just immediately started mocking it. She’d been Rachael Velveeta from kindergarten on up. “Edward Batley. It’s really nice to meet you.” His pleasure and attraction were apparent, and increased hers. “I come here a lot, but I don’t remember seeing you before.”

“I just moved here from Massachusetts.” She never said Cape Cod. She was startled by how many people had no idea where that was. Most of them knew where Massachusetts was. “I thought I’d come in and pick up a few local guide books, to sort of look around. So I was in the travel section, and then this man told me the undead don’t like all the attention they’re getting.”

“Yeah, uh, sorry. Can’t believe that was out loud. Of course it’s all bull—it’s not true. I mean, it might be true, it would be true, if there were vampires in real life. Which there aren’t. At all. Because if there were—and there aren’t—I’d never be so careless as to wander around random bookstores telling strangers the likes and dislikes of the blood-drinking dependant.”

“The what?”

“Or the breathing-impaired...whichever you think is, you know, not offensive.”

“I can’t tell if this is the silliest conversation I’ve had all week, or the most interesting.”

“You want to get a blueberry scone, maybe sit down with an iced tea or something, try and decide?”

She smiled at him. “Well...yeah. I would, actually. Except that the taste of blueberries makes me vomit, so I will take a lemon scone.”

“Usually when I talk to a girl,” he confided, “she doesn’t use the word ‘vomit’ until we’re trying to pick out which movie we want to see.”

She laughed so hard she nearly walked into the end cap. Guidebooks to St. Paul, handsome strangers using odd pick-up lines, and baked goods produced by the Starbucks Corporation...could there be a sillier, funnier day?

I Don't Get Mauled by a Bear

2011-06-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes my family and I sleep in an old church in the middle of the Wisconsin woods. No, we don't do this because we lost a bet (though if we did, I'd love to know what we'd have gotten if we had won...would we have had to sleep in a Hilton? A Cape Cod bed and breakfast?).

Because our writer's cabin (Tony suggested 'writers retreat' while I leaned toward 'cabin way way out in the woods by a lake that's Mosquito Central', thus the compromise) is in the the woods, a lot of the local wildlife hasn't had time to adjust to the change in management. Typical. It's not like I didn't post memos all over the place. Animals are just lazy.

Three years ago, the lot was just that...a lot. So the deer and the possums and the beavers and the bears and the loons were used to the run of the place.

Enter Jim Landreth, brilliant architect. He had seen an old church (built in 1857, I think, but don't hold me to the exact date) the town was going to tear down, or blow up, or whatever Americans do when faced with a chunk of their history. (Can you imagine if Italians had blown up the Coliseum because it was old? or because they needed to put up condos?) Instead, he had the idea to take the church, haul it to a lot somewhere in the country, and completely re-do it as a vacation home. He updated it with modern conveniences like air conditioning and a microwave and running water, but kept the cool church-ey stuff...the bell tower, the wood work in the dining room, the hardwood floors.

The result was astonishing. One man's vision, and just look! Now my husband and I sleep (and occasionally defile) the room where the minister's pulpit used to be; our dining room is where the congregation sat, and the guest bathroom is...well, I think that might be new. Still: eerie! And cool.

I couldn't wait to meet this guy at the closing, to shake his hand and possibly kiss him on the mouth. I even had a plan in reserve in case I wanted to put Operation Smacker into action. First, I would distract Tony with a Subway sandwich, because the title company shared a building with Subway, so the entire time we were there signing paperwork, the yummy maddening smell of baking bread was everywhere. And then, when Tony took off to get a foot-long club, the architect would be mine, all mine. As it turned out, the good man was taken, so I was forced to abort Operation Smacker. Tony bought that sandwich for nothing!

So all the i's were dotted and all the t's crossed, and now the former church was our writers cabin. We love it there, despite the admitted weirdness that comes with country living. I've lived as long in cities as I have in the country, so I think I've got perspective someone who only lived in the city or only lived in the country wouldn't have. And by "perspective" I mean "damaging psychological scars".

For example. Road kill. Country road kill is very, very different from seeing the occasional squashed squirrel or smacked pigeons. I never in my life saw a road kill beaver until we came here, and felt real, real bad: "Aw, beaver! Why are you crossing streets? Stay in your lake, beaver, your LAKE!" Nor had I ever seen a dead baby deer being eaten...by a bald eagle. I couldn't decide if I was enchanted or appalled. "Oooh, kids, look at the...um, I mean look away from...well, it IS a bald eagle...eating a...uh..." To which my husband replied, "How about enchanted AND appalled?" Which seemed pretty sound.

Oh, and the bear, Hammock. My husband named him because the first time we saw him was Father's Day weekend last year, and we'd given Tony a hammock, and guess where he was when he spotted Hammock the bear? Yep, his hammock. From which he spied Hammock. Didn't see that one coming, didja? Hammock. Hammock. Hammock. (I really like saying Hammock.)

We knew about Hammock and his brethren before we ever saw him. Our neighbor came over while we were moving in and told us that a bear cub had gotten trapped in our gazebo and spent several minutes yowling and bawling for help. None of the builders were there, so this incredibly ballsy woman in her sixties walked through our house, up the walk to the gazebo, and then held the screen door open so the cub could rush outside. As the cub did so (without so much as a thank you, I might add...these darned cubs today), she spotted his mother. So she carefully and slowly backed up until she was in the house, then watched the bear corral her wayward, gazebo-lovin' cub and beat feet out of there. The builders then fixed the screen doors so they could be open from the inside. Because nothing says "welcome to my gazebo where you will surely meet your doom" better than screen doors that swing both ways.

It's one thing to know you live in the woods and that in some places, bears also live in the woods. It's something else to glance out your kitchen window and see a bear unfettered by fences, or tranquilizers. My husband, also known as City Boy, was enchanted. Me, less so. You'd think I'd be happy to see another omnivore like me roaming the woods, and yet, I was not. As the size of my ass will attest, I'm not used to competing for food.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago...the kids and the dogs and I had come up to hang out; Tony wasn't going to be there until after dark. So I was relaxing and slurping pudding pops (mmmm...pudding pops...) when our two dogs lost their MINDS.

Those of you who have dogs know that they can be snoring one second, then on their feet unleashing deafening volleys of barking the next. Their sudden burst of activity startled the shit out of me; no pudding pop was made to be jammed that far into my mouth. And I was super pissed (while coughing up pudding). "You guys! Quiet!" Cough. Gag. Spit up more pudding. "Knock it off!" Oh, man, was I pissed at those two.

Then I stepped closer, brandishing the now-empty popsicle stick, and got ready to really let them have the full measure of my scorn and hatred. Then I looked up and saw Hammock. In our yard. About eight feet from where I was standing. He was just as cool as a cuke, too: "What? I'm just passin' through. Back off, bitch, unless you want me to use your ribs as a xylophone."

So I screamed for the kids. I wanted them to see this before he waddled back into the underbrush; talk about once in a lifetime! Okay, this time made it twice in a lifetime. Still: pretty cool. Unfortunately, I was so excited and on an adrenaline high, and couldn't articulate. So what the kids heard was this.

1) Furious barking from dogs.

2) Furious yelling from Mom.

3) Furious yelling at the kids: "Kids! You guys! Hammock, it's Hammock, COME QUICK! It's, oh man he's in the yard HURRY UP YOU GUYS IT'S HAMMOCK THE BEAR!"

Both kids were pretty confused. Chris in particular thought I meant that the bear was *after* me, so she went lunging for her bow and arrows (she's a dead shot, by the way, thanks to my superior genetic addition to the family gene pool). To protect me!

So once Hammock had lumbered off to his lair, I told my daughter that her first impulse, to grab for a weapon to protect her mother, was incredibly brave. And I meant it! I doubt at 15 I'd have had the presence of mind to do anything but dive and cower under the bed. Also: it was incredibly stupid. And I meant that, too.

"If I was in trouble," I told the kids, "you are to run as fast as you can THE OTHER WAY."

"But Mom--"

"THE OTHER WAY." "Because if you don't, and I survive the encounter, I'm going to visit upon you the grisly death you were trying to save me from. Repeat after me: Mom's in trouble? Run away. Mom's arm got somehow stuck in a bear's jaws? Run away. Mom starts hitting the red wine and wants to show you her impersonation of Madonna during her breast-cone years? Run away. Mom wants to show you her impersonation of Madonna during her hairy-armpit modeling days? Run away."

So my son looked at Chris and said, "Gee, maybe I should have gotten my BB gun." NO, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE GOTTEN YOUR GUN. DID YOU HEAR A WORD I JUST SAID? I've raised kids with healthy self-esteem and, apparently, no protective coloring of any kind. Hmm, yes, an arrow through Hammock's shoulder followed by him being peppered in the snout with teeny tiny BBs...I can't think of a faster way to piss off something big enough to suck down our satellite dish in one hairy bite.

Hammock looked *good*, too, and I was happy to see it. We had a long, miserable winter this year and until then, all the wildlife I'd seen that spring was pretty scrawny, in particular the yearling deer (the ones born last spring who don't have much experience foraging in wintertime). Not Hammock, though. The fat bastard was sporting a sleek black coat, not hugely fat but not winter-skinny either, and thoroughly aware that he could cross the yard with impunity as we were all cowering inside. At first I was surprised at how small he was, then remembered the Black Bear is not the Grizzly, and then it made sense.

I thought how small he was, how un-scary, then felt bad because he was so few--two hundred years ago, what is now our back yard was probably crawling with bears. Then I reminded myself WHY...he was minding his own business, shitting in the woods like all the jokes say, when some dicks hauled up an old church and plunked it in the middle of his woods, and then they hammered and sawed and made messes and bad smells and a weird cage to trap his cub, all so some asshat writers and their noisy jerky offspring could mysteriously show up and stink up the place and have loud dogs that were even more annoying than the racket loons made in the spring, and more startling than that mean old eagle who liked to eat baby deer roadkill.

So then I was annoyed, pissed, guilty, thrilled, excited, sad, and then again with the guilty. But I won't denyit was a huge thrill, followed by a huge pain in my ass. Because when I wanted to go for a walk that evening, Tony nagged me into taking a knife with me. "I'll be on the road," I protested. "I'm way more likely to get run over than mauled by a bear." (Weirdly, this did not comfort him.) "Plus, what am I, Daniel Boone? What do I do with a knife, let him get REALLY close and stick it in his eye? Fillet him? What?" But City Boy would not be denied, so I stuck a huge fillet knife in my pocket and went for my walk, feeling like an ass.

The good news: Hammock wasn't lying in wait for me. The bad news: a lot of people are now wondering why the writer who lives down the road likes to roam around at night carrying a razor-sharp fillet knife. "What, this? Nothing, nothing at all. Say, do you want to come to my place to get murdered? I mean, get cocoa? Want to? Hmm? And apropos of nothing going on right now, would anybody notice if you went missing? Oh, and could you let me walk behind you? Great, thanks."

I swear, I've got the most skittish neighbors.

I Deny Being Taylor Swift

2011-05-31T11:51:00.001-07:00

VERY MINOR SPOILERS

I'm stupidly fortunate in many things, one being how often readers take time out of their lives to give me feedback on my books. It's always a kick to hear from readers, even if (the epilogue for UNDEAD AND UNFINISHED) they occasionally (the epilogue for UNDEAD AND UNFINISHED) get in touch (the epilogue for UNDEAD AND UNFINISHED) to register (the epilogue for UNDEAD AND UNFINISHED) their (the epilogue for UNDEAD AND UNFINISHED) displeasure.

Also in the category "Things MJ Is Stupidly Fortunate In", my assistant Tracy, who is my first line of offense. Yeah, that's right, I didn't mean defense; I pretty much like to hit the ground running. Anyway, Tracy sees virtually all of my fan mail and does her best to reply to all of it.

Now, I would have written "always replies to all of it all the time because she's weirdly interested in helping me come off as a professional instead of the drooling psycho I am occasionally taken for", but Tracy herself would have forbidden it. "I don't, though! I try to answer all your mail and all the FaceBook posts, but sometimes I miss a few," she admitted to me with the air of someone confessing she had spent her weekend painting her house with cat feces. You know, shameful yet crazily proud? So a happy medium would be "Tracy responds to 98% of my fan mail and FB posts".

All this to say that when the torrent of reader mail started coming in for UNDEAD AND UNFINISHED, she saw the letters from readers who were ecstatic, thrilled, shocked-yet-impressed ("your book caught me by total surprise; what an exciting turn the series took and I'm gonna raid the kid's college fund so I can buy the next one, UNDEAD AND UNSTABLE, the day it comes out instead of waiting for the paperback which isn't as big a ripoff for the consumer".

She also saw feedback that was not as giddy: "Why do you hate America, you stupid thieving whorish jerky hack beeyatch? Sinclair rules, MJ drools!" "Tracy, would you tell her nobody says beeyatch anymore? Thanks."

So far, my favorite not-as-giddy feedback has been the reader who tried to extort me. I'm paraphrasing our written exchange so as to protect the innocent, who in this case is me, from needless prosecution. And I might have exaggerated here and there for humorous effect. Naw! Okay, yeah, I did...but surprisingly little, that's the weird part.

"Dear Shitty Writer: Your latest abortion ruined the entire series for me. It was so awful it tainted all the good things you wrote in all the other books. Not only do I want my money back for UNFINISHED, I want you to pay me back for ALL the Betsy books, since they've been tainted forever by what you did in UNFINISHED, you awful awful awful writer. Send me a check for $92.64 to..." and she listed her address. She finished with, "If you don't send me a check by the 12th, I'm going on every blog I can find, every chat room, every online bookstore, every reviewer site, I'm going everywhere to tell everyone what a bad writer you are and how shitty UNFINISHED was."

Yep! She added up the damages, gave me a street address, gave me a time limit to tremble and obey, and then threatened a...a...I dunno, what would it be called? A smear campaign if I was a politician, I s'pose. "A desperate man at the end of his pitiful rope," as Jim Carey described himself in Liar Liar?

My response to the sobering demand was...okay, I kind of laughed until I gave myself the hiccups, and then spent the morning holding my breath for long periods of time and trying to drink water upside down. I hate the hiccups! Curse you, extortionist thug, already I rue the day. I'd never been extorted before, so it was interesting if nothing else, and I told Tracy I'd write the extortionist back myself. Tracy then made an admirable attempt to hide her relief, but my hiccups sometimes give me the power to cloud assistant's minds, and I wasn't fooled.

Dear Extortionist Thug: My assistant passed your demands on to me and I'd like to address them. First, thank you very much for your feedback. I'm always happy to hear from readers, even the bitchy entitled ones.

Second, your extortion demand was way off. If you bought the hardcovers when they were hardcovers, that would mean I owed you around $160 or so because the first three were released direct-to-paperback. So you should definitely check your math. Maybe you forgot to carry the remainder? I do that all the time, so don't feel bad.

Third, I'm not sure the relationship you and I have (had, now that I think about it...yep, definitely sounds like past tense) qualified as a legal contract, wherein if I failed to meet your specifications I would be liable for financial damages. No, my job was to write a book. I double-checked my contract, and nowhere in there does it say it has to be a book you liked. In fact, you're not mentioned anywhere in my contract. Now, Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Borders (may they rest in peace) might have a sort of 'satisfaction guaranteed' thing going on with their customers, but you'd have to ask them. Not me. Them. Not the writer. The supplier. Me, no. Amazon, yes. They might very well be willing to refund you money for a book you bought and read and loved six years ago, and one you bought five years ago, and one you bought four years ago...like that. I dunno. Like I said above, you'll have to ask them. Not me. I assume you kept the receipt every time you bought one of my books and can back up your demands with years of a paper trail?

Finally, all jokes aside, I am sorry you didn't care for the book. I try to write the best book I can, every time, and that's all I can do. Sometimes readers agree I did; sometimes they do not. If you ever do feel like taking another chance on Betsy and the gang, I hope you'll think it was an improvement, or that it at least laid your fears about Betsy's future to rest. May I suggest the library, so you won't be out any expenses? If you end up hating that book as well, keep track of your expenses (driving to an from the library, two or three dollars for late fees, etc.) so if you decide to try the extortion thing again, you'll have a paper trail to threaten the librarians with.

Finally (wait, that's another finally, which makes the earlier one the opposite of finally), you were not alone in your loathing for the book. If you go to my Facebook page, you'll see plenty of annoyed readers more than willing to share with you how much they thought UNFINISHED sucked, too. There's also a discussion tab wherein readers have registered their displeasure and I've laid a few fears to rest with my postings. It's not a fangirl site at all; you won't be shouted down if you don't PTL (an acronym I just now made up for Post The Love). If nothing else, it might make you feel better to vent in a more public forum. Because I took from your extortion demand that you're itching to do just that.

Thank you again for your feedback, sincerely, etc., etc.

Hilariously, the reader wrote back (more annoyed than ever, what were the odds?), "I don't have time to go traipsing all over the web to find your stupid website and Facebook page; I'm a real person with a LIFE unlike writers like you who ruin their own books, hiss, rant, spew, etc., etc."

This is where our correspondence broke down, mostly because I had the hiccups again from another giggle fit. I adored the way she first promised to unleash hell on me via blogs and forums and review sites all over the Internet, sites she would tirelessly track down and research and then post my suckiness on, but did not have the time to click on the link to my FB page. Other than writing back, "Bwaaaaah-hah-hah, hee-hee, ohmigod, hic that is so...bwaaaaaa! Hic. Aw, hic, dammit," there didn't seem to be much point in any more needling (on both our parts).

All this to get back to the name of my blog posting: I deny being Taylor Swift. The latest e-mail from a reader who wasn't too cool with the ending for UNFINISHED wanted to know if I'd been having boyfriend trouble or marital problems or something which made me hostile to Sinclair, a male (imaginary, but still male), thus resulting in Sinclair's (maybe) fate.

This, too, made me crack up. I've been married for ages (we've been together twenty-three years and married for seventeen), and the teenage boyfriend dumping trauma crap is well behind me, but I still found the question to be hilarious.

So! My official answer is this: Thank you for your feedback. No, I didn't just break up with my fry-cook teenage boyfriend days before writing the epilogue. In fact, everything in my life was okeley-dokely (as Ned Flanders would say). It's just, that is where those characters needed to be at that point in the series for me to keep on with the series, which is not even close to being finished. And since it's paranormal romance, emphasis on romance, it's a safe bet that Betsy and Sinclair will have their HEA.

In other words: I am not Taylor Swift. I did not get dumped by a douchebag and then compelled to write about it so millions (okay, thousands...hundreds?) will know how badly I was treated.

Also on the list of people I am not: Alanis Morrissett. Though I loved "You Oughta Know" because my daughter was born that summer, and when she'd need a 2:00 a.m. feeding I'd often flip on MTV (this was waaaay back in olden days, when MTV did this weird ancient thing my generation called 'playing music videos') and there would be Alanis, wailing and shrieking away.

So even now when I hear the song about heartbreak and betrayal and revenge, I get sentimental and remember how it was. My daughter's plump little body (she's about 5'9" now...so far) and the sweet baby smell, and how sometimes I'd doze off to Alanis's soothing angry lyrics ("And every time I scratch my nails down someone else's back I hope ya feel it...WELL CAN YA FEEL IT?????") as the milk-sated contented baby in my arms dozed off, too.

Heck, to this day when my daughter hears "An older version of me, is she perverted like me?" she gets reeeeally sleepy. I started to explain why, and needed a nap myself. "A mysterious creature is man", and all that.

I Don't Get Mauled by a Bear

2011-05-29T15:39:00.001-07:00

Three years ago, the lot was just that...a lot. So the deer and the possums and the beavers and the bears and the loons were used to the run of the place.

1) Furious barking from dogs.

2) Furious yelling from Mom.

3) Furious yelling at the kids: "Kids! You guys! Hammock, it's Hammock, COME QUICK! It's, oh man he's in the yard HURRY UP YOU GUYS IT'S HAMMOCK THE BEAR!"

"If I was in trouble," I told the kids, "you are to run as fast as you can THE OTHER WAY."

"But Mom--"

So then I was annoyed, pissed, guilty, thrilled, excited, sad, and then again with the guilty. But I won't deny it was a huge thrill, followed by a huge pain in my ass. Because when I wanted to go for a walk that evening, Tony nagged me into taking a knife with me. "I'll be on the road," I protested. "I'm way more likely to get run over than mauled by a bear." (Weirdly, this did not comfort him.) "Plus, what am I, Daniel Boone? What do I do with a knife, let him get REALLY close and stick it in his eye? Fillet him? What?" But City Boy would not be denied, so I stuck a huge fillet knife in my pocket and went for my walk, feeling like an ass.

I swear, I've got the most skittish neighbors.

I cough up a random post from UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED

2011-05-24T12:01:00.000-07:00

I'm fried, for no good reason...haven't thought up something to blog about since Mother's Day. Below, the cop-out I don't have to think about. From early on in UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED. Minor spoilers, so beware. Actually, beware anyway.

* * *

“Okay. I have to bring you up to speed. Okay? Sinclair?”

The king of the vampires was lying face-down on our bare mattress. Bare because in our doin’-it-like-monkeys frenzy, the sheets had been yanked and tattered, the pillows were in the bathtub, and at least two of the west windows were broken. The window guys downtown absolutely loved us. They’ve started giving us discounts.

“Hey! Are you listening?”

“Gummff ummf uhnn gunh.” My husband was as loose and relaxed as I’ve ever seen him; I had, fairly effortlessly, marital-relationed him to death. (Almost.) He turned his head. “Allow me to enjoy the last of my post-coital coma, please.”

“No time!”

“Why?” he mewled. Note the date and time, please, and not because of all the time traveling. I didn’t think Sinclair could mewl. Kittens did that. Whiney-ex-wives. (Or whiney current wives.) Kids not getting their own way did that, grown women did that and ouch, when they made that shrill extended meeeeeewwwllll it felt like that icky ear worm from Wrath of Kahn drillin’ down there.

Ech, I can hear Ricardo “Welcome to Fantasy Island” Montalban now from one of the least lame Star Trek movies: “Their young enter through the ears and wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex; this has the yucky effect of rendering the poor things big-time susceptible to yucky suggestion and as they grow, yuckier and yuckier, madness and death are waiting for them in all their yuckiness, gross.”

Anyway. I hate that noise and didn’t think my husband could make it. But he could. The things I learn when I return from time travel and Hell.

Huh. He was still talking.

“You are back, you are alive, you are beautiful (and sated, at least I hope), you know all—“

“All? You think I know all? Clearly I came back in time and found the wrong Sink Lair. I’m trapped in a weird parallel universe where you still talk all the time.” Seemed like I spent half my afterlife waiting for him to take a breath so I could jump in. Also, vampires? Never need to take a breath. So you see what I’ve been dealing with.

“Phaugh, do not babble, due to your jaunts you know how we all came together in the recent past, because of the far past, and...” He trailed off. I waited. Knowing my husband, itd’b be profound and life-changing. It’d help me see a disaster as a not-so-terrible disaster, probably. It’d convince me I wasn’t alone in a cruel world. It’d... “...mmzzzzz.”

“Hey! Wake up!” I jabbed him in the bicep with my toe. Okay, I kicked him in the arm. He flopped bonelessly off the bed.

“I’ve missed your tender love play, Elizabeth,” he groaned from the (ripped) carpet.

“We got stuff to do!” I was looming over him without looking right at him, which is quite a trick. I didn’t want to gaze into those dark dark eyes, or eyeball his ‘day-amn, that’s a nice ab-pack’ or play follow-the-treasure-trail, or anything else that would lead to another forty-five minutes of bringing down the re-sale value of the entire wing.

“We’ve got things to explain!” I explained. Loudly. “So you need to focus. And also stop being naked. At least we don’t have to deal with gross ear worms from space—“

He blinked up at me. “Ah...what?”

“...but we’ve got other crap to wade through. Jessica wasn’t pregnant when I left and I didn’t know what a horse trough smelled like in Massachusetts and Minnesota. Whole planets have evolved between my ears!”

“What?” He sat up stiffly, like Frankenstein, a big gorgeous well-hung Frankenstein with big black eyes that were wide with alarm.

“Exactly. Shit. To. Do. Are you on board now, Frank—uh, Sinclair? House meeting, stat! To the smoothie machine, Robin!” I darted off the bed, sheets trailing like a cape. I was Wonder Woman, I was Power Girl, I was—

Sinclairenstein reached out, flash-quick, and whipped the sheets away. It was like an evil, sexy magic trick. “Darling, is it your intention to show the household the color of your nipples? And that you have not one, but two dimples on your—“

“Shut up. I’ll get dressed. Never mind my dimples.”

“Oh, I never do,” he said, surging to his feet so quickly, if I’d blinked I’d have missed it. “I don’t mind this one—“

“Hey!”

“—or this one.”

“Yeeek!”

Addendum to Mom Kicking Ass

2011-05-02T16:41:00.000-07:00

My dad read my blog a couple of days ago and called to remind me...not only did Mom win the turkey shoot (my fave line from one of the observers: "Where are the turkeys?") with her devastating bull's eye, but she out-shot all the firemen. And all the sheriff's deputies.

What's hilarious to me is that I knew that. I just completely forgot to put it in the blog. Kind of like my son was surprised I expected him to be surprised when I showed him his grandmother's 10-X. The moral of this touching, gunpowder-riddled story can be summed up thusly: in our family, get the shit done, or go home.

King Al's Consort Kicks Ass

2011-04-29T20:44:00.001-07:00

So here comes my dry-eyed, non-sentimental Mother's Day blog.

The picture on my FaceBook page (posted on the Wall as well as on a Discussions tab) is a bullseye. It's a shot straight through the center ring of a target, what is sometimes referred to as the ten spot, or 10-X. Or, in our family, business as usual. The weapon used was a Smith & Wesson .22 target semi-auto. The distance was 25 yards. The shooter was my 64 year-old mom.

This is nothing new in our family. At all. And you'll notice my mom didn't dick around with a headshot, or a 5-spot. Nope. Straight between the eyes. I found this awesome. But it's okay if you find it terrifying. Sometimes they're the same!

I've told many fans that the characters from my parallel-universe Alaska series (The Royal Treatment, The Royal Pain, The Royal Mess) that the main characters from the House of Baranov aren't "based on" family members. They ARE my family members. Queen Daria died before the events of the first book (and no, I don't harbor a secret desire for my mom to succumb to a fiery, controversial death) but her presence is felt throughout the trilogy.

So is the patriarch's, King Alexander Baranov II, who rules the princes and princesses with an iron fist. Okay, a paper maiche fist. He's kind of a softy. But a fun character, and easy (bordering on effortless) to write about.

I can still remember watching my dad floss his teeth (we were in a museum or a library or a funeral or some weirdly inappropriate place), then groan as he carefully put the (used) floss in his shirt pocket.

"Jeez, Dad!" (It's amazing how many of my sentences start like that.) "Will you please throw that thing away?"

"Hell, no," he protested. "It's still good. And now it's right here in my pocket for when I need it."

"I'll buy you a new one," I begged. "I will buy you a carton of dental floss. I will buy stock in your name in Glide or Oral-B! Lots of stock! Lots of cartons! But please throw that away!"

"Your problem is, you think everybody's made of money."

"I DO NOT THINK EVERYONE'S MADE OF MONEY! I think everyone is entitled to a fresh, clean length of dental floss. That's what I think." Etc., etc. Although it was a short time in real life, in my head it lasted about three days. Actually, in my head, it's still going on.

So I had a new tic for King Al, and promptly put it in the book. What I wasn't prepared for was the fan mail: "Hey, that's a good idea! Dental floss always within arm's reach! Thanks, MJ."

Nooooooooooooooooooo! (No.)

Which brings me to my Mother's Day theme, in which I've included my dad so as not to have to do this again in June. My parents are bad at lots of things. To wit:

1) Throwing away used dental floss.

2) Missing targets while wielding a .22 pistol.

3) Retirement.

4) Normality.

5) Being bad at fishing.

6) Being bad at hunting.

7) Not breaking world records for sharp-shoot.

8) Not being super, strutting proud of my mom for same.

I'll cover the rest of the list some other time, but for this blog I'm only touching on a couple of them. You'll just have to wait to find out why my parents suck at retirement. And believe me, they do suck at it. Who retires and moves down south and then gets their EMT certification and go on ambulance runs at all hours of the day or night when they aren't running training sessions for the local fire department? THIS IS NOT RETIREMENT. I'm pretty sure it's the polar opposite. Ah, and here I said I wasn't going to go into it, yet I did. I'm such a liar...even to myself!

Flashback to when I was six. It was the weekend, so naturally we were at a silhouette tournament. Silhouettes are big heavy targets shaped like animals and made of iron, or something else that's super heavy (I forget, and I'm too lazy to look it up). People sign up for these tournaments from all over the state (and, when we'd go to Canadian tourneys, all over the country) and then plink away at the silhouettes until everybody decides they've sprayed enough ammo and hangs it up for the day. The person who knocks over the most silhouettes wins.

My parents were/are excellent shots and fishermen/women. They loved being outside shooting at heavy metal things or hooking trout for dinner or hollering "Git the little red son of a bitch!" while riding to the hounds. Okay, I made up that last one. Anyway, because we didn't have much money for baby-sitters (to this day I can count on two hands how often we had a sitter), my folks always brought my sister and I along to the local watering hole or up a tree stand or to tournaments. I can also count on two hands (okay, one hand) how often my folks left one of these tournaments empty-handed.

Which brings me to angry men and the world record for silhouette shooting. And my mom, of course. At one point in the tourney, one of the officials told my folks that my mother was only so many points away from breaking the world record. Sure, way to alleviate the pressure and help my mom to keep cool under relentless, soul-shriveling pressure. Thanks tons, Un-named Official.

So my mom bangs away (I can't tell you how much it disturbs me to have "mom" and "bangs" in the same sentence) and lo and behold, good-bye old world record, here's your hat and what's your hurry? Also: suck it, old record!

My second favorite part of the story is how my dad was easily ten times more excited than my mom was. For months: "Hey, Jim, how's your wife? Never mind, I only brought up yours to talk about mine. She broke a world record! Hey, June, glad I caught you before you went on medical leave: my wife broke a world record! I see you sneaking out, Dave. You're not going anywhere until I tell you about my wife, I don't care how close you are to insulin shock." He was thrilled. He told everybody. EVERYBODY. ("I know I was speeding, Officer, but did you know my wife broke a world record?") I literally believe he wouldn't have been any happier if he'd nailed the record himself. In fact, I'm sure of it. It's not nearly as fun, or socially acceptable, to brag about yourself as it is to brag about someone you love.

My favorite part of the story is this: two Grumpy Old Men (though since I was six, they could have been in their mid-twenties) stomped past my mom and grumbled, "Goddamned women should stay home where they belong."

Oh, blow me, Grumpy Old Men. Also: sticks and stones may break my bones but my mom TOTALLY KICKED YOUR ASS TODAY. (Technically, the world's ass.)

Which brings me to another parallel between the Baranovs and the real deal: as far as my sister and I were concerned, it was just another trophy. It went up on the wall with their zillions of other trophies. It was something else to be dusted. We were way more interested in the garter snake that chased us into the river (I can still see the hate in its tiny beady black eyes). Certainly mom's coup was nothing to dwell on, because there was always something new to tackle. Next weekend: fishing opener! Never mind world records; we've got to re-rig all these fishing poles! Yippee!

So when I saw the bullseye on my mom's FB page, I couldn't help think that the more things change, the more they kick ass. And I seem to be accidentally raising my kids to think the same way I do, because when I called their attention to the 10-X, they were puzzled, especially my son: "But, Mom, it's Grandma. What did you think would happen?"

All right, fine, but at least pretend to be awed and amazed, you little jerk. This is my dreadful legacy: kids who assume if their grandmother didn't nail the X, she was probably having a stroke at the time.

Hmm. On second thought, that's kind of cool. There are worse things than having children who assume a person can reach world record excellence if they just got down to it.

So, in summation: my mom shoots better than yourrrrr mom, nyah-nyah-nyah!

On the off chance one or both of those two Grumpy Old Men from way back are reading this blog and recognize themselves...I never forgot about you. But I bet you forgot about me. And that's okay. Because we all know who YOU'LL never forget if you live to be a thousand.

My mom.

So there.