It Will Be Even More Depressing After It's Splatted

Once again, I've made some changes to the left of the blog.

For starters, my upcoming appearances is down one. I visited the Cornwall, NY library last week, and had a terrific time. My friend Linda runs the book discussion groups there, and obviously is superb at her job.

I've also added a whole new category to the list. For lack of a better term, I'm calling it Media. Thanks to my editor who taught me how, I put a couple of links there, and having tested both of them several dozen times, I can report they actually work.

The first of the links is to an interview with me on The World in the Satin Bag blog. For those of you who just can't get enough of me (a list so short I don't even think my mother is on it anymore), you can now get more of me. The questions were very intelligent, and I enjoyed answering them.

The second link is to a new award nomination. Well, sort of.

I got an e-mail last week from Scholastic, telling me that Life As We Knew It will be one of the nominees in the Simply the Book category of the 2008 Coventry Inspiration Book Award. That's Coventry, England, a whole other country, further away even than Nevada.

Thrilled though I am to have LAWKI nominated, the Coventry Inspiration Book Award has a humiliation quotient that puts it in a league all its own. Each week, anyone who wants can vote over the internet for one of the books that's been nominated, with the two books getting the fewest number of votes being eliminated, until the last book standing wins.

And how can you tell a book's been eliminated? The kind folk in Coventry paint a splatted tomato on the rejectees. If you don't believe me, follow the link and see for yourselves.

When the time comes to vote, I'll be begging everyone I know to do so, in a desperate effort to keep the tomato at bay for as long as possible. Actually, since pride ain't my strong suit, I'll beg people I don't know to vote also.

Be prepared.

Meanwhile, over at Amazon, LAWKI is up to 35 reviews (poor old War And Peace remains stuck at 276). The most recent of the reviews gives LAWKI four stars and says it is, "possibly one of the most depressing books of all time..."

Drat. If I had just left out that jolly Christmas scene, it would have been probably one of the most depressing books of all time, and it might have gotten five stars.

Oh well. As Leo Tolstoy once told me, "Better four stars than five tomatoes."