You can’t imagine how grateful  I am to have a 14-year-old daughter who’s an avid reader of YA novels. She’s one of those who can read a 6-book series in a week or less.

Jerricah has been extremely curious about my newest YA novel, The Mayfair Moon (title subject to change) and finally after seventeen chapters, I decided to let her read it.

She did more than read it. For two days, she read it aloud to me and we edited it. I knew she was intelligent, but I never thought to put her intelligence and love for reading to work like that. It was a wise decision, I must say. She found a lot of errors, bad sentences, places were I was ‘telling’ rather  than ‘showing’ – she found a lot! And what was also great was her inability to be biased because I’m her mom. She wasn’t afraid to tell me what she didn’t like, what made no sense, what SUCKED.

Of course, what I say next will likely be interpreted as writer blindness to family opinions, but that’s OK. I’m not ‘one of those’ writer’s, I can assure you. So, with that said, I  can tell you Jerricah loves The Mayfair Moon, despite the errors (because ALL first drafts have errors!) and she kept trying to read ahead to find out what happened to this and that character. She truly loves the story and has easily connected with the characters.

I never thought to get a young adult to read and help edit a young adult novel, but I think it’s a vital advantage to have.

She’s anxious to read the rest and this has helped inspire me to finish it.

On a side note, I have dumped my cable! I have officially dragged out the crappy converter box and hooked it up so I can get used to limited TV entertainment in a few days when Comcast shuts me off. I did do it because I’m sick of trying to pay $65 a month for basic cable, but also because too much TV=less writing! I know that without the TV on to distract me for hours and hours every week, I’ll have much more time to write.

And that’s what matters.

I’m actually offended by this, taken from Neil Gaiman’s latest blog:

“The strange thing is that, as an author, there are places publishers never send you, and the American South (if you don’t count Atlanta) is one of those places. When I’d ask, I’d be told it was because people didn’t really buy books there, or there wasn’t a demand, or something.”

Of course, I’m not offended by Neil at all (don’t shoot the messenger?) but I’m a bit disgusted by ‘publishers’.

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but that actually hurts my feelings! :-S

Well, speaking for the ‘American South’, who are quite intelligent despite the stereotype, WE LOVE BOOKS!

I wasn’t going to bother with taking a picture of my little fortune cookie paper I got today, even though it was really strange, but now I kinda have to. First of all, I need to mention that I got an email from a friend yesterday from my childhood. I haven’t seen her in twenty-something years (hi Debbie!). I used to spend the night at her house and we’d watch horror movies (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street). We were even scared away from a fishing bridge by a bear at my grandparents in Greer’s Ferry Lake once. Anyway, lots of great memories with one of my very first childhood friends.

Today while out with my mom trolling flea markets, we stopped at New China for the buffet. And here’s what my fortune cookie said:

Ok, so a few minutes ago I was on my Yahoo! page and decided to check out my horoscope for today.

Is that not weird, or what?

Maybe I should use those numbers from my fortune cookie and buy a lottery ticket. Oh, wait…Arkansas doesn’t have such things as  lotteries. :-S

P.S. Texas Chainsaw Massacre scares the crap out of me. To this day I can’t watch it.

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Update 10/23/09 – Wow, talk about fitting titles and such. Less than 2 months ago I posted this blog and now…Arkansas has a lottery. Amazing.

Brian sent this stuff to me a while ago and I never did forget it, finding myself thinking about it quite often because it really is mind-blowing.  We were talking about it again tonight and so I wanted to blog about it because I think more people should appreciate the Universe, grasp the true infinite power of it and realize that we really are nothing. All of our stupid little problems as we live out our meaningless little lives are absolutely nothing.

Click on the images for a better view.

(Not my words below – from an anonymous email.)

ANTARES IS THE 15TH BRIGHTEST STAR IN THE SKY.
IT IS MORE THAN 1000 LIGHT YEARS AWAY.
Now how big are you?

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NOW TRY TO WRAP YOUR MIND AROUND THIS………

THIS IS A HUBBLE TELESCOPE ULTRA DEEP FIELD INFRARED VIEW OF COUNTLESS
‘ENTIRE’ GALAXIES BILLIONS OF LIGHT-YEARS AWAY.

BELOW IS A CLOSE UP OF ONE OF THE DARKEST REGIONS.

So, (it’s me again) there you have it. Stuff like this always blows my mind. It makes me take a step back and realize that…well, all the things I said before.

Now I think I want to watch Contact.