What Price Beauty

I'm ranting about plastic surgery over at The PopCultureDivas today. Come join the party!

The Week in Review

"The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest, for he has not earned it." ~ John Lubbock

It’s difficult to come up with a scintillating blog entry when you’ve only slept a few hours, so I’m going to forgo the linguistic gymnastics and just give a brief update on what’s been going on.

The past week has been a busy one prepping for the upcoming release of The Outlaw Bride scheduled for April 18th. (Like that little plug? That’s as subtle as I get while sleep deprived.) But here’s what I’ve been up to. I ordered my bookmarks and ad design from Croco Designs and just received word from GotPrint that they are on the way. I also ordered business cards from VistaPrint and they too are en-route. I sent in my first sale information to the RWR and that will show up in May’s edition, and then I reserved space in the June issue of RWR for my ad.

I have a few blogs I’ll be appearing on (in?) the week of April as well and received a list of review sites my book will be available to through Net Galley.

Then, in the midst of all this, my author’s copy of the book came in (which I had totally forgot about!) and I loaded that onto my kobo, ooh’d and ahh’d over it for a few minutes and then realized I needed to come up with some contest ideas for book giveaways.

There’s a lot of stuff that comes along with releasing a book. It’s true what they say about the real work starting after you sign the contract.

I’m also putting the finishing touches on Salvation Falls, cleaning up a few things, before doing the final revision on Invitation to Scandal in time for conference. I’m hoping to get a little time before conference to work on The Widow Bride as well, but we’ll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided to take 2 hours each Sunday to hunker down at the local Starbucks and write whatever I want. Yesterday was my first stab at this. I just sat down and wrote whatever came to mind and I realized halfway through the first page, what I was writing was the opening scene to a contemporary fiction story, Talking to Winston, that I’ve been kicking around.

Training for the 10K is coming along. My friend, Christine, took me hill training the other day and after 6.2K and a hill that I swore was never going to end, I crawled back to the office and questioned my sanity. Then I went out on Saturday and ran another 3K.

I’ve also been trying to squeeze in some knitting time to replenish items on my Etsy shop, At Knit’s End. I sold 3 items in the past week and a half and now I need to restock.

I’ve come to the conclusion, there are just not enough hours in the day, and not enough days in the week.

The Things I Do…

"Most people run a race to see who is fastest. I run a race to see who has the most guts." ~ Steve Prefontaine

This one I blame my sister-in-law for. She started running last year and we batted around the idea of doing a 10K together. We had both run 5Ks before (she this past summer, me a few years ago), but she wanted to up the ante. Unfortunately a bad chest cold and injuries thwarted our plans.

But the other day, while I was at my nephew’s birthday party (and while she was waving a cheesie in front of my face), my SIL suggested we both sign up for the Bluenose Marathon 10K. The early bird sign up ended the next day, so if we wanted to get the cheaper rate, we had to act fast.

Now this suggestion was made on Feb 27th. The race is on May 22nd. And unless I’ve lost my ability to count properly, that means I have a whopping 2.5 months to go from not running for about a year, to running 10K.

I blame the mesmerizing power of the cheesie that made me nod and mumble something that sounded like, ‘sure…sounds like a plan…you gonna eat that cheesie?’

So here I am, in training mode. My friend, Christine, took me out running on my lunch hour the other day indicating she had a great route in mind. Christine is a runner. That should have been my first clue that this was not going to be an easy little jaunt. By the 4K mark I was starting to feel it. By the 5K mark I wasn’t sure I could lift my legs much longer. Thankfully, the route ended at 5.13K.

I hobbled back to the office wondering what the criteria for a lung transplant was.

Still, I had done it. After not running, I managed to live through a 5K run. Sure I felt it the next day (or three), but I was already half way to my goal, and still had a little over two months to build on that.

Am I crazy? Maybe. But every time I think I’ve completely lost my mind, I remind myself that summer is right around the corner. The time of shorts and skirts and bathing suits, and suddenly, running 10K seems like a really good idea…

Vanity. The world’s greatest motivator.