Countdown to RWA Nationals - 8 DAYS!!

And -- EEK!! -- only 28 days till the BIG MOVE. From Florida, home of the 100+ degree heat wave, to Virginia, home of ?? Virginians? Seriously, I can't WAIT to explore Virginia. I hear that it is incredibly beautiful and we will be (again) very near the beach. (One of the advantages of marrying Navy Guy - we always tend to end up near water . . .)

So today I'm finishing up my first legal thriller, BLONDES HAVE MORE FELONS, and it makes me miss practicing law a little bit. I really did have prospective clients who were every bit as . . . INTERESTING . . . as some of the clients in BLONDES. One poor man in Pensacola tried to hire me every month around the fifteenth, when the nearby Naval Air Station tuned in the frequency in the implants they'd surgically installed in his TEETH.

Eight days till Reno - I'm so excited! The RWA national conference is the biggest event of the year in the romance/women's fiction writing community, and my first novel, my BABY, AMERICAN IDLE, is nominated for TWO Ritas (Best First Book and Best Mainstream Novel with Romantic Elements)!! It's the Oscar or Emmy of RWA and it is such a HUGE HONOR to be a finalist. The other finalists are all brilliant writers and the books are incredible, so being a finalist is as far as I'll get. But I'm so thrilled to be part of the group! Especially with my very first book - the one that made my dream of becoming a published novelist come true.

AMERICAN IDLE is being re-released as a mass market sized paperback (the size that fits in the grocery store racks) on August 2nd, and I'm very pleased about that, too! If it weren't for that countdown to moving thing, life would be peachy. Now where did I put that packing tape?