I may be on deadline, but Real Life carries on in its various forms. Behold:

At a friend’s cookout:
Little Miss R:  I picked you some flowers! *holds out bunch of puff-headed dandelions*
Me: Why, thank you.
Friend’s dog: *runs up and sniffs LMR’s handful of dandelions*
LMR: Do dogs eat dandelions?
Me: No. That would be silly.
Dog: *eats dandelions out of LMR’s hand*
Me: Huh.
LMR: I’m gonna go pick some more and feed them to the dog!

(Note: She didn’t really. And the dog was fine. He also ate some mulch, not fed to him by LMR.)

When I didn’t feel like making lunch:
Me: How many times can a person eat cereal in one day before it becomes a problem?
Mr. R: *considers* One is normal. Two is acceptable. Three is excessive.
Me: *pours self a bowl of cereal* Ok. I’m still acceptable.
Mr. R: Good to know.

When I tried to grab a coaster:
Stack of 4 coasters: *are stuck together*
Me: What’s with these coasters?
LMR: Are they stuck together?
Me: Yes. Did you do something to them?
LMR: No. I don’t know. I don’t think I remember.
Me: Did you play with glue?
LMR: I don’t think so. Are you mad at me?

My family has a tradition of producing dramatic childhood tales. There’s my brother’s physics-defying football anecdote, plus my own stories about gluttonous birds and vanishing cats.

So I’m proud to announce that there’s another author in the family: Little Miss R wrote her first story this week.

If I had to categorize it, I’d call it an action-adventure fantasy. Maybe a romance, too. Here, see what you think:

If you’re not fluent in Little Miss R-ese, the text translates to: “The little boy who [sic] got stuck in the mud and the princess helped him.”

The gold person in the brown bit at center, is, of course, the boy stuck in the mud. The taller gold person is the princess. The blue thingies are the rain that fell from a cloud (that red and green creation), and the orange shape at right is, Little Miss R informed me, “the sun going away.” The purple at the bottom is “just for decoration.”

I won’t analyze her story the same way I did my own childhood literary efforts. (She can do that when she grows up, if she wants to.) But let me say this: isn’t it cool that the princess does the saving?

1. Little Miss R is equally motivated by to-do lists as I am. This can be put to parental advantage. (Lesson learned: little kids like to dust. Whee!)

2. Mr. R still thinks I am the sort of person who, knowing there are five Cadbury eggs in the house, can manage to eat only one per day.

3. I still think I am the sort of person who can watch a Paranormal Activity movie alone at night without going on Ultimate Nuclear Red Alert.

4. 21 inches is a lot of snow. WHICH CAN BE MADE INTO ICE CREAM, one delicious half-gallon at a time.

5. I’m never going to conquer that TBR pile. But in a moment of insight, I realized that I don’t want to. And then I drew a cartoon about it. (Warning: this likeness is not strictly accurate. I rarely wear dresses.)

Quite unwittingly, I missed my third blog anniversary this past Sunday. On January 27, 2010, I posted for the first time. You can check it out in the archives if you want to see that first post, which was mainly a promise to post something better soon. Clearly I wasn’t thinking in terms of posterity.

Anyway, the third anniversary gift is supposed to be leather or crystal, depending on your level of traditionality or fanciness. Crystal tends to get broken around Maison Romain, and Little Miss R lost my favorite leather bookmark (it was from Norway and had drawings of different types of sleds on it). But if you’d like to celebrate the blogoversary from afar by raising a goblet of wine—or by buying yourself a fine leatherbound volume—you have my heartiest support.

Enough nostalgia, though; on to the entertainment portion of our post. Little Miss R has recently discovered knock-knock jokes (yay), so dinner a few nights ago turned into a homespun comedy routine:

Little Miss R: Knock knock!
Me: Who’s there?
LMR: Ding dong!
Mr. R: Uh…ding dong who?
LMR: Hello. My name is Jimmy. I live in a butterfly. *uproarious laughter*
Mr. R and me: *mystified glances*

Mr. R: Knock knock.
LMR: Who’s there?
Mr. R: Sunts.
LMR: Sunts who?
Mr. R: Sun Tzu, teach me the art of war! *uproarious laughter*
LMR: *uproarious laughter*
Me: LMR, do you get the joke?
LMR: Yeah, Daddy’s so funny.

Me: Knock knock.
LMR: Who’s there?
Me: Cthul.
LMR: Cthul who?
Mr. R: *uproarious laughter*
Me: Glad you liked that, because I didn’t have an ending for the joke.
LMR: *uproarious laughter*

There you have it, with my apologies. Thanks for sticking with me–not just today, but for three years. And please come back tomorrow, because I’ll be opening an excellent new contest with a truly fabulous author! #tease

This past weekend, Mr. R and Little Miss R and I helped my parents trim their Christmas tree. This was partly a selfless act, because my mom broke her arm the day before Thanksgiving and needed some extra decorating hands on deck.* But it was also partly a selfish hunt for amusement, because it’s so fun to look through the mumblemumble years of ornaments I remember from my childhood.

There are the fancy ones, like the stained-glass ornament my parents were given the year they were married. There are the odd ones, like the giant collection of mouse ornaments (my dad used to be a zoologist) and the ceramic crawfish (we used to live in Louisiana).

And then there are the homemade ones. You know what I mean, right? The apples with names painted on them. The reindeer made out of felt and googly eyes. I’m not sure if this is a Thing anymore, but when my siblings and I were kids, every year we made ornaments at school during those last slow days before winter break.

My sister is very crafty (in a hands-on sense as well as a secret-plot sense), and even as a kid, she managed to make her ornaments look pretty. My brother and me? Not so much.

I could blame part of it on the fact that we’re left-handed, or that we both have terrible eyesight. But the real problem is probably just that we’re awful at crafts. When I was made to cross-stitch a picture of a Christmas bow, I wound up with glue all over the fabric. (In case you’re not familiar with cross-stitch, glue is not a traditional element of that type of needlework. Or, as far as I am aware, any other.)

Granted, not all ornament ideas have a lot of potential to start with. Here’s one my brother came home with at around age 5. It’s his picture stuck to an apple. And the frame? Why, it’s the cap of a milk carton.

Good stuff. Be festive and get your calcium.

Here’s another gem: it appears to be a paper bird with a sneeze-y splatter of glitter on it. It comes with a hidden message: its butt, when unrolled (probably the first time I’ve ever typed that phrase), reads, “My gift to the world is FRIENDSHIP.”

If you’re wondering why my parents saved these things, it’s because we didn’t give them anything better to work with.

But here’s the best ornament of all. The pièce de résistance, which is French for “I can’t even make this up.” Here, I’ll just show it to you.

If you’re thinking, “That looks like a dirty Dixie Cup with a pipe cleaner jammed through it and another glitter-sneeze on it,” you are totally wrong. It is a CHRISTMAS BELL, bringing JOY and CHEER this time of YEAR.

Ok, yeah. It sucks. It actually sucks so much that—if you’ll notice—we hung it not from the tree, but from an unused plant hook in the ceiling. That was about five years ago, and it’s remained there ever since, because…well, look at it.. Pièce de résistance, friends. It really does bring joy and cheer every time we see it (and snortlaugh all over again).

Besides, it’s not like our ornament-making skills have improved since then.

How about all of you? Got any favorite or notorious ornaments in your family?

*          *          *

*It happened ice skating, which is a pretty cool way to break your arm if you absolutely must. Still, we’re trying to get her to kick the story up a notch. Something like “steeplechase accident” or “defeating ivory poachers.”

Folks, hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving last week. (If you’re from the US, that is. If you’re Canadian, sub in “last month,” and if you’re from another country, just roll around in thoughts of your favorite holiday.) We had some out-of-town visitors, and we ate well, played lots of games, and ate well some more. Lots to be thankful for.

I was in charge of making the pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, which is risky, because:

1. I make a terrible pie crust, and
2. See #1.

Here’s what we wound up with: a glorious pumpkin pie, custardy-creamy and full of sweet spices–and no crust whatsoever. If you’re crust-impaired like me, give this a shot for your next pumpkin pie, because it holds its shape really well on its own.

I don’t know if that cheat clever trick works with any other sort of pie. So for our next round of visitors (this week!), I decided to turn the job over to the pros. Viz:

Me: I’m going to order a few bakery pies for the upcoming week. For a fruit pie, do you want apricot?
Mr. R: That’s ok with me.
Me: Or peach?
Mom R: That’s fine too.
Mr. R: Either one. Any kind of fruit is good.
Mom R: Right.
Me: Ok, how about strawberry or blueberry, then?
Mr. R and Mom R, in unison: No.

Ahem. Fine. Apricot it is.

Now that the uber-important question of pie is settled: we’ve got a couple fabulous events to look forward to this week!

Tonight, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books is hosting the Sizzling Book Club chat about SEASON FOR SURRENDER. It’ll be a text chat in a special window on the SBTB home page; just stop by at 9 ET and you should be able to join in. I’ll join the chat at 10 ET, so if you’ve got any questions for me, fire ‘em my way. (And if you haven’t gotten a copy of the book yet, the Kindle edition is on sale for $1.99. Holy moley.)

Coming up this Friday, November 30: the Romancing the Holidays gala! Victoria Alexander, Vanessa Kelly, Grace Burrowes, and I will be posting all day at The Romance Dish. There will be reader prizes galore–you can check out the list on The Romance Dish–and some donated-book bundles for libraries of women’s shelters. But we need your help to give all this excellent stuff away. Stop by holiday-gala.com by Friday to sign up for your own chance to win, and you can nominate your favorite library or shelter too.

Whew. Lots of fun stuff going on. I wish you the pie of your dreams this week, and I hope to see you at the chat tonight and the gala on Friday!

I’ve had a lot of irons in the fire lately, which is just Fancy Blacksmith Talk for: whoa, nelly. Soon I’ll be able to talk to you about the irons. But for now, I’ll talk about Freckle Face.

This is Freckle Face:

Little Miss R chose this plant to replace a daisy plant that dried up and died this summer. Supposedly, daisies love sun. Plant them in full sun, and they’ll be happy. The one problem? If they have to live through the hottest July ever. Plants after plant dried up and had to be replaced. Our poor daisies were practically Mogwai, shrinking away from the bright light. (Just to be safe, we never watered them after midnight.)

In a bold move that reveals how little suited I am to gardening, I recently decided to replant our dead daisies again. Little Miss R came with me to the plant nursery, and when we found the daisy pots she made the following excellent points:

*we haven’t been able to get daisies to grow, so
*let’s plant something different.

“Ok,” I said. “Here’s another daisy-looking-thing. It’s red, though. Red is different.”

“No,” she said. “Something REALLY different.”

For a moment I thought she was going to seize upon a chunk of decorative rock (which, hey, at least we wouldn’t be able to kill). But then she found the lilies instead. This particular lily was her favorite; “Freckle Face” really is the strain’s nickname, according to the tag stuffed into the flowerpot.

Usually the toddler doesn’t make the household decisions. But in this case—why not? She was right that daisies hadn’t done well. And this kind of lily is supposed to be tolerant of sun and drought. So Freckle Face came home with us, and so far it’s aliiiiive.

Will Freckle Face grow any better than the daisies? I have no idea. But for now, it’s doing well in the space we’ve given it to grow. Every morning when the sun hits those little spotted blooms, they open right up.

Fun though it is to discuss my ignorance of flowers, I’m going somewhere with this. (You knew that.) In this case, we’d been trying and trying to get the same type of plant to grow in the same place. When it didn’t work, we replanted, because it was supposed to work, dang it! Maybe we needed to water them more often! Or cover them during the hottest hours! Or something! It took a bored toddler to remind me: it’s ok to try something new.

So. I’m also trying something new with the book I’m working on now. My usual method is to draft straight through from beginning to end, but this time I kept getting ideas for scenes and bits of dialogue that could work in later parts of the book. Instead of filing those away for later, I’ve started allowing myself to hop to different parts of the story.

By writing whatever’s giving me the freshest ideas, I’m able to write more quickly and it seems more fun. Ok, yes, the work in progress is a patchwork of random scenes with missing pieces. But when it’s time to stitch that patchwork together, I’ll have a finished book in sight. So I think it’ll work. I hope so, anyway. For now, it fits into the space I’ve given it to grow.

Have you tried something new lately—or approached a project in a new way? Or, most mysterious of all, have you gotten daisies to survive this summer? Either way, please do tell.

This recent article, in which a six-year-old looked at classic novels’ cover art to guess at their plots, inspired me to do the same. So yesterday I plunked Little Miss R down with an ARC of Season for Surrender and asked her what she thought the story was about.

Little Miss R: (turns book over) There are some berries on the back of this book. They’re not for eating.
TR: Very true. When you look at the picture on the front of this book, what do you think it’s about?
LMR: (studies cover thoughtfully for 30 seconds) It’s about a girl who opens a box.
TR: What’s in the box?
LMR: Some chocolates!
TR: (approving noise) And why is she dressed like that?
LMR: She is going to a ball. She will dance.

So–not bad guesses, actually. There aren’t any chocolates (too early in time) or any balls (the story’s set in the country) in Season for Surrender. But there *are* some berries that aren’t for eating. And the heroine of the story? She certainly gets a few surprises.

Thanks for your help, LMR!

If you see my posts on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll know that I just took a long weekend trip with Mr. R, Little Miss R, and my mother. Over the course of four days, we drove for about 28 hours. I wish it had been 30, because that would sound more impressive, but I am nothing if not scrupulously honest. Besides, 28 hours is still a significant amount of time to spend in a rental car with a toddler and not nearly enough coffee.

I’m pleased to say that we had a wonderful visit with family. We got there and back again safely. But in a weekend trip, of course, there is very little downtime. As our final day of driving (a mere 10 hours) began, even the extroverts in our merry band—that is, my mom and Little Miss R—were pretty tired.

It seems fitting that, on that drive home, I finished reading Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. It’s a thoughtful, nuanced book about the gifts of differing personality styles, and how the quieter contributions of introverts may be overlooked—not just in business, but in schools and romantic/family relationships.

I really liked this book. I kept reading bits out loud to my mother—a counselor—until she finally requested that I reread the title. (Like I said: we were all tired. Though she liked the snippets I read and plans to order it for herself.)

Anyway, Cain’s book got me thinking about the importance of quiet as I shuffled through a bog of returning-home chores this morning. As adults, we usually get to pick our own path, and my path—and that of many writers—is pretty solitary. We like it that way. Story ideas and turns of conversation float into our heads most frequently when there’s nothing to distract us. The book Quiet discussed at some length how an extroverted parent can respect the needs of an introverted child, but in our household we have the reverse. Mr. R and I could play the Quiet Game for days; Little Miss R once asked me 18 questions in 7 minutes. (I planned to count for 10 minutes, but she wandered off early.)

What, you ask, am I getting at? And more importantly, did I bring back any souvenirs from the trip?

To answer the first question: well, I know I haven’t been blogging a lot lately. As Real Life gets clamorous, I don’t have many words left in me for the blog. Yet one of an introvert’s greatest loves is interesting conversation, and the Internet makes it easy to find fellow book-lovers such as you good people. Fortunately, in this modern age, there are lots of ways we can keep in touch. And I think I’ll be blogging more this summer, as workwork deadlines relax a bit.

To answer the second question: Souvenirs? Heavens, yes. I have not been bitten by a fire ant for years, but I was able to remedy that situation over the weekend. I expect to retain those souvenirs for the remainder of the week, at least. Oh! And we also brought back a bag of fresh-picked ears of corn. I might teach Little Miss R how to shuck it.

Think she’ll ask any questions about that?

Overheard recently.

Little Miss R: Daddy, there are two things you have to have for dance class. A leotard and ballet shoes. And tap shoes.

Mr. R: So there are three things.

Little Miss R: Right. Three things. A leotard and a tutu and tap shoes.

Mr. R: And ballet shoes?

Little Miss R: Right. Four things. And tights.

Mr. R: So there are five things.

Little Miss R: Right. Five things.

Three Guys from Monty Python, dressed in Nice Red Uniforms: You should come in again.