Dear Amazon Customer Service,

First, just want to say, love you guys. I bought myself an Amazon Prime membership for my birthday this year and it’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever done for my wallet. I added the Amazon iPhone app and boom! It’s UPS delivery city over here. Not that I’m complaining, but I will say my husband has begun to look ( Read more... )

Last weekend, P and I went on a little trip to Madison, a belated anniversary celebration. The twist, though, (there’s always a twist!) was that I didn’t tell him where we were going. For two weeks, I made him guess what we were going to do.

Unfortunately for that big old corner of my soul that loves pranks, P could care less about anticipation ( Read more... )

I read this entry on Editorial Anonymous the other day, about whether unpublished writers should do things like create Twitter accounts for their characters as a pre-emptive publicity strike. The blog post and comments have varying opinions on that tactic, but what I found most curious were comments from people that said that unpublished writers ( Read more... )

In the fiction writing program I attend, there’s an assignment in Advanced Fiction classes called the Steeplechase. The Steeplechase is dangled over students as something terrifying, a rite of passage that only the strong will survive.* In fact, the Steeplechase is a twelve step writing exercise, that, as it turns out, is excellent for building ( Read more... )

The winners of personalized copies of According to Jane are #3 heather and #7 Ann Victor.

Thanks for all the great comments, everyone! I hope to have another giveaway soon.

(originally posted at elizawrites.com)

I am so excited about tomorrow! Why? Because my dear friend Marilyn Brant’s DEBUT novel According to Jane is hitting stores! Marilyn is an avowed Jane Austen fan - she even got me to read Pride and Prejudice. (As she assured me would happen, I loved it.) I got a chance to ask Marilyn a few questions about her book and other topics.


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I kind of have a thing for teensy little birds. I like real birds, too, but tiny bird sculptures are much easier to care for. It’s funny - I was talking with my mom how I got some new ones in the mail and she told me that my grandmother loved to collect bird figurines, too, which I had either never known or totally forgotten. It’s unfortunate ( Read more... )

Earlier this week, my husband and I were driving home from the city after my class. Our respective commutes went a little crazy once I went back to school, and I had to go and complicate things this summer by deciding to drive in to my classes from the suburbs after trying and failing to make the Metra work for me most of the last school year.

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Baby announcement? Or the lamentations of a real baseball fan?
Regional American hamburgers and cheeseburgers. I gasped when I saw the green chile entry.
Average cats. Heh.
Cat and Girl go to the Costume Shop.
Dan Brown’s Twenty Worst Sentences.
Sexual Assault Prevention Tips, Guaranteed to Work!
How I need this bag.
Great Ask Metafilter question ( Read more... )

I’ve never been a very good journal keeper, as much as I want to be. I’ve had trouble since kindergarten, when my gifted and talented teacher wanted me to write a full notebook page for a journal entry and I wrote “I lost a tooth,” followed by, like, forty lines of exclamation points. With a pencil, even, so the page got all greasy after a while.
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