I'm baaaaa-aaaack! And you thought you were rid of me? No sir! Now that the holidays are past, the editorial letter has been received, digested, and changes are currently underway, I am plugging myself back into the World Wide Web to see what's what in the universe outside my brain space.
*taps monitor* *looks around* Hmm. You've been up to something, haven't you? Well, that's only fair, because I have too!
Firstly, have you been following the First Annual Creepy Cake N Bake? I'm *loving* it! From Sydney Salter's Black-Bottom Witch Cupcakes to Brenna Yovanoff's uber-realistic (omigawd...) Red Velvet Cardiac Event, Tara Hudson's bleeding heart cupcakes and Karen Healey's good-to-the-last-sinful-spoonful Dark Teacup Puddings and a thankfully NOT original Witch's Cake by Robin Bridges right on up to yesterday's happy Snowball Spider by Michelle Zink! Whoo!
DUDE! Seriously, have you *seen* this?!? Brenna awes and fascinates me...from waaaaaaay over here.
These gals are bringing their A-Game on a wooden spoon and I am going to have to get cookin' (so to speak) but luckily, I had some incredible inspiration while I was away. Namely, this:
YES! I was at Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party!!! This was the culmination of a dream; not mine, oddly enough...but therein lies the story.* As Tessa Gratton was good enough to quip: "Dawn, you've gotten a two-book deal, what are you going to do next? GO TO DISNEY!" Crazy, insane, and it-must-be-done! We brought the children for their first-ever experience with the Mouse and my parents were there to witness the looks on their faces: it was an incredible time! For me, especially. I know that there are many measures of success for a writer that are deeply personal--from seeing their work on a shelf to getting their first fan letter to getting awards from their peers or making gobs of cash, but one of my personal goals that let me know that I "made it" was to earn enough money with my writing to treat my whole family to a vacation where we could make memories that would last a lifetime. And it happened. I did it!!! And I'm smiling all the way!
And now we're heading deep into Halloween territory and I'm already feeling the sugar rush. So get ready for some more scary goodies around here because dressing up and spooking is *my* kind of fun! (Although not so much being spooked, as I say in this guest post about Books That Scare Me over at Nova Ren Suma's blog (if you comment, you could be entered to win her October 31st Giveaway!) ((shudder))) I'm more into things involving me on the happy side of the chain saw and I, for one, can't wait to have a little more creeptastic creeping into my day.
So from this side of the keyboard, Boo to YOU!
* The story, super-condensed version, is that my parents brought us to Disney World when we were younger and my mother decided that this was the perfect place to celebrate a new year. Yay! She meant New Year's Eve for the Millennium. Um...Okay! Why did I hesitate? Because this was 1986 and my mother was pre-booking four rooms at Walt Disney World fourteen years in advance! (The computers couldn't even go that high due to the Y2K issue. She had to get paper contracts!) So: why four rooms? She explained calmly that it was for me and my family, my sister and her family, my brother and his family & my parents together. Fair enough, thought I, that's possible...but what really happened was that my husband and I were married October of 1999** and didn't have kids yet and neither did either of my siblings so my mother never got to bring her grandchildren all together to experience Disney for the first time. Now this was my chance to make a bit of that dream--my mother's incredible dream--come true. Hence why we went to Disney.
** Yes, this means that I just celebrated my 12th wedding anniversary with my husband while hanging with Mickey Mouse!
