What? Three giveaways? Yes indeed. Two for my book, and one for a romance by the fantastic Vanessa Kelly.

Giveaway the First: Today, a new website contest opened. Look up and to the right—see the Contest tab? Click that, and lo and behold, you’ll see that an advance copy of Vanessa Kelly’s October historical romance, HIS MISTLETOE BRIDE, is this month’s prize. August contest + October book = a seriously early read for the contest winner.

Believe me, you’ll want to read this book. Vanessa’s written a Quaker heroine, an ex-soldier hero, and a delightful village of…no, I’m not going to tell you the villagers’ secret. But you’ll get a taste of the story soon: Vanessa will visit here on Friday, August 3, with an exclusive excerpt.

Giveaway the Second: Today, a new Goodreads giveaway opened. Ok, probably lots of them opened, but we’re talking about this one in particular.

That’s right, an advance copy of SEASON FOR SURRENDER is looking for a new home. Might it be yours? If you enter in the month of August, it just might. The giveaway will remain open until August 31.

Giveaway the Third: For another chance to win an advance copy of SFS, stop by Vanessa Kelly’s blog this Friday. You know how she’s sharing an excerpt from her October book here? I’ll do the same on her site, and Vanessa will be offering my ARC to one random commenter. Please stop by for an extra peek at Louisa and Xavier’s story.

I’ll put up a link on Friday, so just consider this some highly specific foreshadowing.

In Conclusion: Books! You can enter to win them! Also, be sure to drink something delicious if you’re in the middle of this heat wave. (That’s not technically part of the giveaways, but it’s good advice for summer anyway, right?)

Since I chucked a Spice Girls reference into this post title, here’s a picture of me dressed as Baby Spice from…oh…1998? I guess this is my atonement for not wearing a costume yesterday. (No, that is very extremely not my real hair.)

But more important than my youthful escapades are: my adult escapades. I’m visiting some fun and fascinating new sites this week, and this time Mr. R is coming with me.

First off, my dear friend Spiceaholic (not her real name), who runs the delicious food and cooking blog Spice’s Bites, is hosting me for historic food talk, recipes, and a book giveaway! Stop by today or tomorrow and share some foodie insights of your own, and be entered to win a signed copy of SEASON FOR TEMPTATION.

Today, Mr. R is accompanying me to A Writer’s Salon, the blog of “fiery tales” romance writer Lila DiPasqua. But it’s not Lila doing the interview–it’s her husband! Come see what these two romance husbands have to say to one another. I admit, I learned a few things from Mr. R’s interview. Like how he saw himself on our second date…oh, you’d better just come read it for yourself. Another copy of SEASON’s up for grabs there!

So there you have it: spicy food and spicy reads. It’s a new month, so spice up your life!

OH HAI WAIT: I know that would have been a totally smooth ending for this post, but I have to share some fantastic news. It has been a week since my last confession, and since then–SEASON FOR TEMPTATION’s gotten a sequel! My publisher, Kensington Zebra, will be publishing SEASON FOR SURRENDER (Louisa’s story) in October 2012. Hip hooray! Nice Nice!

 

All right. I’ve put this off long enough: the FINAL RECKONING on my Bucket List.

To start off with a weaselly caveat, the purpose of this list was to help me define goals and keep them in mind. So just making the list is a teensy little triumph in itself. (Right? Right????) The four-month timeline was because, well, that’s how much time was left before Season for Temptation began its eccentric yet benevolent journey through bookstores.

As of October 4, Season is journeying. So let’s see how I did on my goals.

Personal

1. Stop biting my fingernails.

Grade: B. I finally got new nail polish, since I hadn’t bought any since Mr. R and I were dating–which was significantly longer ago than the average lifespan of nail polish. I did this because if I paint my nails, I don’t bite them. Ta da!

Although: if I paint them, I get distracted by the Shiny Pretty Colors all the time. They’re currently kind of a sparkly whitish color. Shiny! Pretty! I’m really hoping the saying about forming a habit in 21 days is true, so I can go back to forgetting about my fingernails until I slam them in a car door, like normal people do.

2. Go on a date with my DH every month.

Grade: A. Kind of. My mother kept Little Miss R overnight, and Mr. R and I therefore supposedly had a date. So we went out to dinner and took as long as we wanted at the restaurant, since no one—not even Mr. R!—got all fidgety and started coloring on the table.

And then we came home, and—get ready for some serious romance-writer talk—I fell asleep. And I slept for FIFTEEN HOURS. And lo, it was good.

So I’m not sure how much of a date that really was, but I had a fantastic time. I hope to do it again soon!

3. Get all my photos into albums and my digital photos backed up onto DVD.

Grade:  C. Grumble. I had this all done, but then I went on a family trip, and now I have three camera memory cards worth of photos to go through.  I know, some people really like to sort through photos and put them in albums and make the albums pretty. Those people probably also have nicely decorated houses.

Moving on…

4. Keep our plants alive.

Grade: A. Last month, a lot of things had to be replanted. This month, we even got them to grow. How? Sprinkler system, baby. After 6 years in our house, Mr. R and I finally had a sprinkler system installed.  In our flat part of the U.S., this is the only way to keep landscaping alive in a reliable fashion. (Yes, even if you use native plants. Which I guess begs the question: are they really native plants, or are we living on land that really wants to be a desert? Probably so.)

The installation of the system was kind of fun, because it involved guys making trenches in our desolate yard and stuffing hoses into the holes. Then it looked like baby kraken were attacking our property. Cool!

Since the installation, we’ve had two valves crack, which causes Big-Time Mudification of the ground. Caused by faulty parts? Or wrackspurts? I don’t know. But the system will be shut off for the winter soon, so further drama will just have to be patient until spring.

Professional

1. Plan a blog tour.

Grade: A. Planned! Not to mention signed, sealed, delivered. You can check out the Home or News pages for the schedule. (Hint: the RomCon giveaway is still going on!) It’s amazing how often I ended up talking about food on the blog tour. Without even meaning to!

So, what’s next? I’ll be doing a few guest blog posts here and there over the next few weeks. Specifically: “here” means Spice’s Bites, and “there” means author Joan Swan.  But don’t let that stop you from buying 25 copies of Season as early holiday gifts for your relatives!

2. Read a history or research book every month.

Grade: F. I didn’t do this. I didn’t read any nonfiction this month, unless you count the annotations in the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (of which I am in volume 3: Novels). Hey, can we count those annotations? Maybe I get an A after all.

All right, that’s pushing it. Actually, this reading goal has been a weak item for me all along.  That’s kind of a surprise to me, since I’m so astoundingly scholarly and sophisticated.

WARNING WARNING WARNING EXTREME FACETIOUSNESS

See? “Facetiousness.” That’s how sophisticated people say “liar liar pants on fire.”

Anyway, I really like reading narrative nonfiction, and I need to do better at seeking it out.  Well-read writers have more fun, right? I think I saw that on a bumper sticker once.

3. Set a sustainable page/word count goal and meet it every week.

Grade: A. This is important. This is red-letter-worthy. I have author Serena Bell to thank for this one. She’s one of my dear Twitter friends (tweeps, I suppose, is what the kids call them these days). Serena’s good-natured humor is outstripped only by her amazing work ethic. To pace herself and not type until her arms fell off, she suggested: 1,000 new words or one revised scene per day. 5 days a week.

I thought that sounded great.  It allows for both 1) intrusions from that darn real life, and 2) the undeniable need to revise stories so they don’t veer into crazy-making places.

So we’ve been checking up on each other for the past few weeks.  It’s lovely having a workout buddy for writing.  (No, I don’t have a workout buddy for working out. That can go on next year’s Bucket List.)

4. Get my TBR pile from three towers down to one.

Grade: B. Last month there were 33 books in the TBR tower(s). This month, I’m down to 29…at least until the 5 books I’ve pre-ordered reach me before October’s end.

I’m glad I wrote this goal down, because now, after four months, I realize that I’ve demonstrated very little behavior change. But I also realize that my reading and buying happen at about the same rate. So, I’ll probably always have 30-35 books in the queue.  And that’s ok by me.  (Which is good, because there’s obviously nothing I can do about it. Stop buying books? Don’t be ridiculous.)

*      *      *

To quote Emperor Joseph II: “Well. There it is.” The end of the Bucket List, at least for 2011. Got any words of wisdom for me? I could sure use them. Or—have you been working toward any goals lately? Do tell!

I know, you’re all disappointed that it’s been a while since I directed you to a stack of dusty tomes with tiny print columns of excruciating minutiae.  Well, maybe next week.  This week, I’ve popped into the 21st century temporarily and have set up a public Page on Facebook.  Why?  Mainly because my fabulicious friend Ragan just redid the masthead on this site (nice, huh?) and I wanted another place on the web to have a picture of my giant pumpkin head.

Ok, not really.  It’s mainly because I started noticing the way I liked to click around online, especially on Facebook.  Usually I just want to swoop by and see if my favorite authors have news, and that’s easier to do if they’ve got everything public.  Friending someone on a private profile is a big commitment.  Often you can’t see their Wall before you do, so you don’t even know if they’re going to be a fun friend or if they’re just going to use the profile to count down the weeks until their book is out.  (Note:  I am a totally fun friend.  And the answer is 56.)

So, now you can preview me.  You can go see my Page and decide whether I seem like someone you want to virtually hang out with.  If the answer is yes, feel free to post something interesting on the Wall.  My definition of interesting is extremely broad — from cane toad purses to zombie science to morbid 19th century poems.  And, of course, books books books.

So I’m sure we can find something to talk about for the next 56 weeks. And then:  the aggressive book pimping starts!

Ok, I admit, I don’t tweet – not yet, anyway.  My supply of interesting things to say is pretty well tapped out, between my Real Job and my writing and this blog and saying “No. No. Crayons stay on the tray” 8,000 times a day when Little Miss R decides the wall is her canvas.

But I really like Twitter.  As you know if you’ve read “About Me” on this site, I love to snoop and learn weird stuff about people.  I don’t crave a prison record littered with misdemeanor offenses, and I’m not even really that bad of a Googlestalker (with the exception of old boyfriends, but hey, we’ve all done that, right?).  No, I pretty much confine my snooping to what people are willing to tell me.  That goes for history books, and it goes for our weirdest, awesomest modern public correspondence:  Twitter.

Twitter is so fun.  It really is.  You can click around forever and read posts from your favorite authors and your friends and even (if you’re a hungry new author) agents and editors.  You can get a good idea of people’s personalities.  For example, when my favorite author tweets that she ate a delicious pumpkin muffin (or whatever), that makes me feel like I know a little bit about her day.  Plus I love pumpkin muffins too, so if we ever meet, I know the first thing I’m going to say to her.**  Or when my agent tweeted that she had major computer problems – well, I tried to be a good author and lay off, because I know what an Economy Sized Headache it is to deal with a big crash.

Twitter’s language is addictive too, at least for compulsive people who love the idea of sorting their world into topics.  To me, this is what has been missing from the world all the 2357623 years I have been living in it.  There are topics related to writing, agenting, and querying.  Some are funny and helpful; some…not so much.

My favorite is #writerfail, or “WTF,” as I like to call it, in which writers admit the unwitting bonehead moves they’ve made.  This topic is definitely from the school of “close your eyes in pain as you recognize your own flaws, tweeted in hilarious 140-character bites.”  It’s a great school.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s my own personal Top 5 edition of #writerfail.  Of course, these all spring from my imagination and have no basis in reality.

5.  “Helping” your awesome friend who is designing your website by deleting chunks of html coding.

4.  Learning that you should never hassle an agent by following up to a rejection, so not even sending a thank-you note for a very thoughtful, detailed, and personalized R. (This one also gets a #headdesk.  Politeness issues gnaw at me and make me wish I could apply a Control-Z to real life.  I would follow up now if I could, if this were not hypothetical, but by this time it wouldn’t make sense to the people involved and therefore would be even more embarrassing than doing nothing.)

3.   Forgetting that brains, like fetuses, wake up at night just when you’re trying to go to sleep.  Keep some paper by your bed to jot down those random ideas, if for no other reason than that it’s hilarious to read your scribbled notes in the morning.

2.  Getting too sucked into review websites and author blogs and , oh yes, Twitter to actually write anything.

And best of all…

1.  Passing up an opportunity for ACTUAL romance to WRITE romance instead.

Ah, those relationships we make up in our heads and write into Word.  They’re so much easier than the real ones, aren’t they — and yet the real ones are the ones that make the made-up ones possible.

Ok, I am adding a special 1a. to my list for that last sentence.  That is a total #writerfail if I ever saw one.  But you know what I mean.

**Just kidding.  Don’t be a creeper.