Now I'm getting paranoid about the Vegas trip because the universe is making it impossible for me to book it!

My parents gave me a $100 off travel coupon through Sam's Club. Did you know you could buy a vacation at Sam's Club? Apparently you can. As you may know, I boycot Wal-Mart, so I was reluctant to buy anything from Sam's. Then I realized how expensive this cheap weekend vacation was going to be, so I figured I could trade my morals for $100.

So I went on the website and did all the pricing (and discovered that it is CHEAPER to fly out Thursday night and stay four nights than it is to fly out on Friday morning and stay three nights). Then I entered the coupon code and it deducted...one dollar. One freaking dollar.

I held the coupon up close to my face and tried to find the tiny decimal point, but upon further investigation I discovered that you can't use the coupon codes online anymore. You have to call an 800 number. Okay, that's annoying, but I called the number. The conversation went something like this:

Woman: Thank you for calling Sam's Club. How can I help you?
Holly: Yeah, I'm trying to book a trip online and it won't let me use my coupon code.
Woman: Thank you for calling Sam's Club. How can I help you?
Holly: Hi. I'm trying to book this trip--
Woman: Hello, thank you for calling Sam's Club.
Holly: YOU CAN'T HEAR ME, CAN YOU?

I tried calling back and the same thing happened, so I went downstairs and spent five minutes trying to figure out how to plug in our land line. After all my phone issues were sorted out, I finally spoke to someone. And he told me that since the Sam's Club membership is in my father's name, he won't help me or tell me anything at all. Awesome! If I have my father call to book this trip for me, and they give him any trouble...well, they're going to be sorry. He is not nearly as pleasant as I am.

I suppose this is what I get for trying to give my money to Sam's Club.

From rkcharron: Have you had writers' block? If so, how did you deal with it?

Sometimes I get lazy and/or bored with my writing, but I'm not sure I would call that writer's block. When I feel like that, I deal with it the easiest way possible. If I don't want to write for awhile, I don't write. If I'm sick of my current project I'll work on something else. Clearly I have an excellent work ethic. I haven't written anything under contract, so I haven't yet experienced any deadline that wasn't self-imposed. Writer's block, laziness, and boredom will probably become more serious problems in the future.

When I'm stuck on a particular scene and don't know how to resolve something, it's best to get up and do something else. Seems counterproductive, but it always works. Running helps. Washing the dishes helps. Taking a shower helps. When you're busy doing something that requires you to be physically active but not really mentally active, good ideas have a way of just popping into your head.

And from winner Steph Su: Where do you think that trends in YA will go? Right now vampires are the big thing, of course, but what next?

I'm terrible at this. Zombies seem to be hot now, which I NEVER would have guessed. A few months ago Brian suggested that I could write a zombie romance which I thought was a ludicrous idea, then I found out there are three or four zombie romances being published this year and next year.

I hope the next big YA trend is quiet novels about introspective teen girls with boyfriend problems and family issues. Then I'll be all set.


In other news, my mother called me this morning. EARLY this morning. My heart started racing because I was sure she had bad news--that someone died, that she had to take one of my siblings to the hospital, etc. But no, she just wanted to tell me that Stephen King will be signing books at my hometown Wal-Mart today. All of this information is coming from my mother, so I'm not sure how true it is, but she says Stephen King hasn't done a book signing in eighteen years. People were lining up at 7 AM for his 7 PM appearance. While I would quite enjoy meeting Stephen King, I just can't fit a 12+ hour event into my schedule today. First, I have to work (lame excuse, I know). Second, I don't have a car. Third, there are few things that could entice me to enter a Wal-Mart building (let alone spend half a day there), and I'm not sure if Stephen King is one of them.

The best part, though, is the reason why my mother wants me to go see Stephen King. It's not because she knows I've been a big fan since I was eleven years old. It's because she thinks I should take MY book and tell him about it. I'm sure he would LOVE that. Too bad I don't have a car.

A question from one of the ARC contest winners, stephanieburgis: I'd love to read about your favorite books (because I am a total book geek).

Here's my current top ten list, which is shockingly lacking in YA titles. Most of these books have been on this list for years before I started writing/reading YA.


High Fidelity by Nick Hornby: My all-time favorite book, which I actually read for my first literature class in college. I know it's allegedly a "guy book," but I strongly identify with Rob and I think everything about this novel is spot on perfect. Perfect. I loved the movie version too (hello, Joan Cusack). I read every new Hornby novel with great anticipation but so far none of his other books have hit me so intensely.

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg: My favorite non-fiction book on writing. My high school literary arts teacher was quite fond of this book and liked to use it during class, so I became quite fond of it too. I like to open to a random chapter whenever I'm in a rut.

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen: Picked at random to read for my summer reading assignment in AP 12th grade English, and it was the basis for my senior thesis on innocence vs experience in British literature. Every character in this novel is so vivid and tragic, and it has one of my favorite closing paragraphs ever.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien: I wouldn't have thought I would love a book of war stories, but O'Brien's writing is so amazing. The last chapter broke my heart. I read this in bed with my current boyfriend while he watched Saving Private Ryan, which I refused to watch because...I don't like war movies.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: Read during the Dark Days of 2007, this unconventional love story really got me. Even though the details of their relationship are pretty extraordinary, it all felt very real.

The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst: Another book from the Dark Days. It was so sad and dark, and it fit into a little place in my heart.

The Stand by Stephen King: I was a Stephen King fiend at age 11, and this remained my favorite book for years. It's also one of the few books to make my cry. Someone once said that Stephen King is too popular and prolific to be taken seriously in his lifetime, and I completely agree. He's a brilliant writer.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera: Another of those "right book at the right time" sort of experiences, read back in '03 or '04 when I was in a sad codependent relationship.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges: The cast of characters was incredible, and I loved the small town setting. Pretty much hated the movie, though.

(I'm tragically bumping Hemingway off the list to make room for one YA)

The Possibility of Fireflies by Dominique Paul: The ending was a little too neat for me, but otherwise I loved loved loved this book about a young teen girl growing up in the 80s with divorced parents, a wild older sister, and a mysteriously alluring neighbor boy.

From popobot5000: "I'm sure I was hardly alone in wondering what went on in the quiet girl's head in high school; not only did you hardly ever speak, you rarely showed any hint of emotion. Nothing seemed to phase you or catch your interest. Even all these years later (including the ones where I got to know you), I still wonder what high school was like through your eyes. Tell us about someone or something from Carver that caught your attention back then."

For background purposes, popobot5000 is my friend Tom. We went to high school together and probably took half of the same classes, but never talked. Later, during college, I found his livejournal and creepily stalked him for a bit, and then eventually revealed myself and we've been good friends ever since.

So...I went to elementary and middle school in the lower middle class town where I had lived all my life, and I was basically the silent freak every year. I did not talk to anyone, except sometimes on direct questioning. No one (not even me) knew what was wrong with me. This made me weird, and sometimes a target. For example, I was assigned a broken locker in sixth grade but I never told anyone about it. Someone noticed that my locker didn't actually lock and he started stealing my drink out of my lunch every day. I knew who it was because I caught him shutting my locker one day, but he knew I wouldn't tell on him. I never did tell, or even get a new locker. I just started carrying my lunch with me to all my morning classes.

High school, on the other hand, was wonderful because I felt completely invisible (although I evidently didn't escape Tom's notice). Instead of my local high school, I attended a magnet school for the arts where I studied writing. I didn't know a single person my first day there, but everyone was weird. There were people running around dressed as vampires. No one cared that I did not talk. Or if they did, they left me alone. I appreciated that. It didn't bother me that I didn't have any friends. I just wanted to be ignored.

Okay, there was ONE guy who was a jerk and made me feel self-conscious a few times, but in retrospect it wasn't anything terrible. For example, one time in ninth grade English class we had to break up into groups, so I quietly joined the group closest to me (Tom, you might have even been in this group). Most people didn't mind, but this guy (Rob, I think?) made a big deal about how our group had too many people and pointed out that I had just joined without asking. It was painfully obvious that I was socially awkward, so why did he feel the need to draw attention to my ineptitude?

Throughout high school I had a serious boyfriend who was older and did not attend my school, and I really wasn't concerned with forming any other friendships. Despite the long term boyfriend, I had a few crushes at school, just for fun. Two of them were girls, Sara and Amy, who were both a year or two ahead of me and impossibly pretty (although completely different, oddly enough). One was a guy in my gym class freshman year who was sort of the basis for the love interest in my first (unpublished) novel. I think his name was Sean? He hugged me sometimes during class and told me I should get on Prozac. Then there was a guy named Scott, who reminded me of Jordan Catalano and had the same name as a famous Wiccan writer, which somehow made him even cooler to me (even though it wasn't an unusual name, and I wasn't Wiccan). I never exchanged a single word with him, and I didn't want to. I just liked to look at him. But the whole crush was ruined senior year when he started dating the stereotypical perky blond cheerleader in my math class. It wasn't that I was disappointed or jealous that he would date her (I really didn't care), but because I sat behind her and her perky blond friend, I was privy to some of the more intimate details of their relationship. That really knocked him down a few notches and he lost all of his mysterious allure.

Tom, I think it's funny that you say nothing seemed to catch my interest, because I think it was actually the opposite. Despite the stoic appearance, I was interested in everything, even the mundane details like how often a certain girl in our English class repeated her outfits. Then, like now, I just preferred to quietly observe. This makes me incredibly dull at social gatherings, but it does have its benefits. I overheard plenty of scandalous conversations throughout high school because no one feared I would repeat the details of their private life to anyone else.

From tezmillertm: "Since you're a medical transcribe, would love to know what weird medical stuff you've learnt from your work over the years."

I retain very little, actually! The most important thing I've learned from being a medical transcriber is that google is freaking amazing. Whenever I encounter a word that I have no idea how to spell (...or I've forgotten how to spell), I type my best guess into google and 99% of the time, google knows what I mean, even if my guess was atrocious.

The downside of using google as my dictionary is the "google images" feature. Sometimes I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to spell the name of a disgusting medical condition...and then google shows me GROSS PICTURES of the disgusting medical condition. I do not need that.

Today I learned that "esotropia" is the technical term for being cross-eyed. I will forget that before the end of the day.


And from adamant_turtle: "What do you foresee happening in this country in 2010? Do you think the economy will get better or worse? Will the sudden Obama-hate settle down? Will we all be stricken with H1N1 or is this all overblown? etc."

2010 is going to be a pretty big year for me personally. Since age 8, all I've really wanted to do with my life was publish a book, then get married and have babies, then travel. My book comes out in March, then I have my wedding/honeymoon in May, and hopefully I'll have a bun in my oven before the end of the year. So of course I'm really hoping the economy gets better. But I think that people who are smarter than I am predict it will take awhile before things really turn around? I don't know. I still have my job, and everyone in my family does too, so I'm pretty much living in a bubble over here.

I doubt the Obama-hate will settle down. I mean, half the country hated Bush for eight years, so I guess it's to be expected that the other half will now hate Obama. It's hard for me to understand how half of the country can hate our president at any given time. Really, I don't understand politics at all.

I think the H1N1 fear is definitely overblown...although I'm feeling sick today so I'm probably going to spend the rest of the afternoon googling "swine flu symptoms" and slowly convince myself that I'm dying.

From newport2newport: "I'd love to know more about your writing journey, Holly. Do you have a critique group, and when do you let other people see your pages?"

I've never been part of a formal group (unless you count my college workshops), but there are people I can always count on to give me a critique, like my friend Tom who I've known since ninth grade, and my LJ friend Joanna who I've known for about seven years or so, among others. Normally when I'm in need of help, I send out a distress call, and people respond as they're available. I like to finish two or three drafts of a novel before I let anyone read it. At least. I think the novel my critique partners have now went through about five different versions. I was having trouble nailing the beginning and ending. And I still haven't nailed them, ugh.

From volleypop: "I'd love to hear about plot points/your plotting techniques."

I get ideas constantly, but when I realize I have an idea that might have Novel Potential, I start a Word document and write out everything I know. Who are the characters, what happens to them, what are the themes. Some of my ideas at this stage are very detailed and concrete. Some of them are more like, "Maybe there's a barista."

At the beginning stages of "plotting" an idea, I don't try very hard. I don't think about it too much and I let ideas come to me organically. In fact, a few months ago when I had a new idea for a novel, I actually dreamed some of the plot points. Like, at night. In my sleep. I felt awesomely productive.

At some point I look at the Word document and realize I have enough ideas to form the plot. Then I take all my scenes and notes and questions and rearrange them into an outline. Then I write a pitch, like I would write if I had to send a query letter (which I don't have to do anymore, thank God). I like to write a pitch because it really solidifies the heart of the novel for me. Sometimes while writing the summary I realize I'm not focusing on what I should be focusing on, and it really helps to figure that out at the beginning instead of after I've written 100 pages.

I can't start writing until I have my outline, although the outline is completely subject to change. I don't always use all of the ideas I jotted down, but at the beginning stages it's impossible to know what will end up being massively important and what will be forgotten. It's funny, after the novel is written, to look back at my initial outline and wonder, "Why the heck did I think this story needed a barista?

I'm finally getting around to writing about some of those topic suggestions I begged for during my latest ARC giveaway!

The first suggestion comes from Lauren: "I would love to read about your road to publication, since I always find those kind of stories interesting."


I started my first "real" novel, Waiting for Tom Corey, during my first year of college. The year was 2001 and I was a mere 17 years old. I wanted to apply for the English department's honors program, and that required writing a book-length manuscript. I figured writing a book would be HARD so I wanted to get a head start.

Well, the honors program ultimately REJECTED ME so I never had to actually finish that book-length manuscript. I took the rejection hard, got pissed off, and graduated college a year early. So then I was a 19-year-old college graduate with no job prospects and no finished book. I had an awesome summer full of long writing sessions, Big Gulps from 7-Eleven, lots of snowballs, and endless laps around the high school track. Then I started working full time and the next few years went by in a blur. I worked on the novel in spurts, but then I would neglect it for months at a time. In the fall of 2006 my friend Kristen gave me an encouraging pep talk that really fired me up. I always "knew" that I would be published, but for the first time I started actually taking steps toward making that happen. I whipped the novel into decent shape and started querying agents.

I received some rejections and I received some requests for pages but no offers of representation. I kept querying Waiting for Tom Corey during the first half of 2007 and I started to get more and more nervous that no agent would take it on, that it wouldn't sell, and that it would take me five more years to write my second novel.

I have never been so terrified of failure in my entire life.

Then one day in May I had a weird dream and woke up with an idea for a new novel. I thought it over for a few weeks and then I wrote the first draft of The Snowball Effect in sixteen days. I edited it for the rest of the summer and then sent it out to agents in the fall.

I had an offer of representation from Sara Crowe a few days before Christmas. After the holidays, we did some revising and then she submitted it to editors in February. We had an offer from HarperCollins by June. So the entire process--from initial idea to book deal--took a little over a year.

Fear of failure can be incredibly motivating!

I didn't have any more sophisticated ideas, so I just wrote all the names on slips of paper, balled them up, and let Bailey and Sam sniff out the winners.

After much deliberation, the cats decided on:

Stephanie Burgis

and

Steph Su

Congrats!

I am shocked and appalled that it's already the first day of fall! But the change of seasons means it's time for another ARC giveaway. Without the YA Book Carnival going on, the competition should be significantly less fierce this time. So, enter! You'll probably win!

To enter, leave a comment asking me a question or giving me a blog topic to write about. I'm feeling pretty dull and uninspired lately, so help a girl out.

So the kids are back in school, and my sister Kim had a homework assignment today to write down the name of her favorite book. She wrote, "The Snowball Effect by Holly Nicole Hoxter--comes out March 23rd" Of course, she hasn't even READ the book, but how sweet is that? I wish I'd known back in 2007 that 10-year-old Kim would lead my marketing campaign, and I would have written something more appropriate for her age group.

Now if I could only get my 18-year-old sister this excited about my book....

August is flying by. Which means that summer is flying by. I do not
like this, but what can you do?

The wedding is 253 days away. I bought my dress, and it is absolutely
nothing like I pictured it would be. There aren't any pictures of it
floating around on the internet, because I don't want Brian to see it.
As I tried on dresses at David's Bridal, I kept waiting for that moment
where I would Just Know. I never had that moment. A lot of the dresses
were pretty, and I even looked good in some of them, but I never had
any sort of moment where I realized THIS IS THE DRESS. So I didn't buy
a dress at David's Bridal.

My mom was not pleased, so she insisted we go to another bridal shop a
few days later. She described to the woman what we were looking for,
and the woman brought out a $300 sample dress on clearance that fit my
mom's specifications. I tried it on...and my mother had that moment
where she Just Knew that This Was The Dress. That was good enough for
me, so we bought it. And seriously, $300 for a wedding dress? That's
pretty darn cheap. So it's not what I imagined, but it will do.

We also decided on a caterer and a menu. If you're coming to the
wedding, I hope you like lasagna and/or crabcakes. We also ironed out
the details for the rehearsal dinner which Brian's parents are hosting.
I think we are making excellent progress.

My wedding checklist on theknot.com tells me I am long overdue
to "Think about how you might want to wear your hair." This sounds
incredibly boring, but I guess I will look at some pictures of wedding
hair just so I can check it off.

When I was about 5 or 6 and my brother was a toddler, one day I came
home from school to find that he had taken apart my entire kitchen play
set with a screwdriver. Instead of being outraged and punishing him, my
mother was so proud. At the time I could not understand why this act of
destruction was impressive. He couldn't PUT IT BACK TOGETHER, now could
he?

Now that I'm much older and a mother (to four awesome cats), I
understand why my mom was so impressed that my baby brother could use a
screwdriver for its intended purpose. It's exciting when your babies do
something that proves they're somewhat intelligent.

When I'm dogsitting, I love it when I yell "WHO WANTS A GOODIE?" and
the dogs freak out and come running. So I'm trying to train my cats to
do the same thing. I head down to the kitchen every afternoon around
lunch time and yell for them, and they're starting to catch on and come
swaggering in. It'd be great if they could really work themselves into
a frenzy like the dogs do, but I guess I'll take what I can get.

Yesterday I was super busy and worked until 3 o'clock, then I got
wrapped up watching John Green on blogtv and didn't end up going
downstairs until 5 or so. I'd completely forgotten about goodie time.
So I cracked up laughing when I saw, lying in the middle of the kitchen
floor, the bag of cat treats.

This bag had been up on a high shelf in the pantry which is packed with
food, including at least three other bags of cat treats. This means
that one of my cats was smart enough to realize that Mommy had
forgotten about goodie time, and he knew which exact bag of goodies
they were currently eating, AND he had the dexterity to knock ONLY that
bag of goodies out of the pantry without disturbing anything else. And
I keep saying "he" because I'm nearly 100% positive it wasn't my fat
girl cat.

Sure, they couldn't figure out how to OPEN the bag of treats. But I was
still so incredibly impressed.

I was heading out to my mother's house to have yet another thrilling
conversation about wedding caterers, so I told her the story. I'm not
sure what reaction I expected her to have, but she was completely not
interested in my cat's ability to tell time and scale the pantry. Well,
whatever. I still think it's more impressive than my brother and that
screwdriver.

Sara from The Hiding Spot has posted the first ever review of The Snowball Effect!

Most reviews won't come in until early next year, so when Sara received a review copy from HarperCollins and asked me if it'd be okay to post her review early, I told her, sure! I thought it couldn't hurt to have one review out there. So then I immediately became terrified that she would HATE it and that my only review on the internet for the next seven months would be negative. But fortunately for me, she loved it!

And now I really have to get to work, blah.

My mother does not like it when I make fun of her on the internet. But
she makes it SO EASY.

She called a few minutes ago and asked me to give her the numbers of a
few caterers because she wanted to make some calls this afternoon but
their "computer is upside down" so she can't get on the internet. I'm
sure there's an interesting story there, but I didn't even bother
asking.

So I gave her some numbers and then she asked for my email address
again, because caterers like to email menus and price lists. My parents
have an email address but my mother can't be bothered to remember what
it is, or check it, so she just gives them mine.

"Holly dot Nicole dot--" I start to tell her. I don't go slowly because
my email address is just my name (separated by periods) and who knows
my name better than my own mother?

"Wait. N-i-c-o-l-e?" she asks.

"Yes, Mommy. Just like you spelled it on my birth certificate."

Apparently I am a smartass.

I'm glad she called because we actually have an appointment with a
caterer tonight that I'd forgotten all about until she asked me, "So
are we still leaving at 6?" and it took me at least thirty seconds to
figure out what she was talking about.

So I'm updating over on blogger now because I figured out how to send the entries directly to my website. No, they're not actually up on my website yet. I also figured out how to send the entries to LJ, so you'll be seeing things titled [Holly's Blog] because they're coming from the blogger blog. Maybe one day I will have a title more creative than [Holly's Blog], but we'll see about that.

That also explains why the margins are screwy. I do not like that. Hopefully I can fix it.

If I drop a penny and it lands on tails, I will not pick it up. That's
bad luck.

When my beloved Sony laptop started to shut down erratically, I decided
that my Dell desktop was sabotaging it as punishment for me talking bad
about Dell computers.

Whenever anything bad happens to me, I wonder what I did to deserve it.

So of course when I went to the bank last Wednesday and came home with
a sore throat, I thought the mean bank teller hexed me.

Call me crazy. Superstitious. Ridiculous, unreasonable, irrational.
Whatever you want to call me, it's probably true.

I don't get sick very often, so I expected the sudden illness to
disappear within a day or two. Instead, the sore throat raged for two
days and then turned into a full blown cold. Then two days ago I
unexpectedly developed a tooth ache for the first time in years. It's
been so long since I had a tooth ache, I'd forgotten what it felt like
and I didn't know what was happening. The pain radiated from my left
upper teeth all the way up to my eye ball. So my first thought was that
all the cold medicine I'd been taking had somehow damaged my eye. I
generally don't take any medicine (I'm too paranoid about side
effects), but not being able to breathe is where I draw the line. When
I can't breathe, I'm going to chug some NyQuil and go to sleep.
Eventually, though, I realized I had a toothache and took care of it
the best way I know how--numbing my gums with brandy and holding a
baggie of ice to my eye ball.

It's now been an entire week since my trip to the bank. The toothache
has numbed to a dull throb and my throat is full of phlegm and
grossness, but I can mostly breathe again and I even returned to the
gym yesterday. But I'm still wondering WHAT IN THE WORLD I did to piss
off the bank teller and make him hex me.

My best guess is that he takes his job WAY too seriously, so he hated
me on sight for overdrafting my checking account. He clearly hated me,
because he pretended that he would refund all of my fees and gave me a
long lecture about how I better not do it again. Then he called two
days later to tell me he was only refunding HALF. This caused me to
incur additional overdraft fees! What a jerk!

I've had nothing but trouble with my bank since they were bought out by
another bank, so I went to the bank on Monday to settle my fees and
close my freaking account. When Brian and I got engaged, we opened a
joint checking account at his bank to pay all the bills, so that's
where most of my money has been going anyway. So I handed the bank
teller (not the hexer, but a different guy) a check from my other bank
account to cover the fees, and told him that I wanted to close my
accounts. He told me I'd have to come back in two days to close the
account. Because I have to wait for the check from myself to clear. I
KNOW they can enter the check as cash to avoid the waiting period, so
for whatever reason this guy just wanted to give me a hard time.

So now it's Wednesday and I'll be heading to the bank to finally close
the account. I'm not sure if it will make things better or worse, since
I still don't really understand what I did to deserve the bank teller's
wrath. Or maybe I'm just being punished so I can learn a lesson about
financial responsibility? Although I'm not sure how a cold is just
punishment for not being adept at handling my money.

Or...maybe I just got sick from spending so much time last week at my
parents' house with their sick children? I mean, I guess anything's
possible.

test test test

I feel like I have three jobs these days...transcribing, writing, and planning my wedding.

Food:

I found a cateter that I really liked. They were vegetarian-friendly, emphasized local in-season food, all that good stuff. Of course that means they were expensive, but I figured we could make it work for our budget. I talked to the chef/owner guy on the phone and really liked him. So my mom called to set up a tasting, and apparently they have two upcoming tasting scheduled that we could attend. The first is on August 8th and it costs $85. The second is on August 16th and it costs $30. Both are at least a 30-60 minute drive from my house. Brian will be out of town on the 8th, and I have plans on the 16th, so we can't do either one. But even if we could, there is no freaking way I am paying that much money to sample food! What the heck are they going to give ME to eat that would be worth $85??? Of course if we went with them, the cost of the tasting would be taken out of our total cost. But still. No freaking way. So, the only cateter I liked is basically off the list. We have a meeting scheduled next week at Squires, but it's not a tasting, just a meeting. Squires is an Italian restaurant in Dundalk (my hometown) which my mom says we went to all the time when I was growing up, but I only remember going there after every funeral we've ever attended. So Squires makes me think of death. Awesome.

Officiant:
I found one! Her name is Laura Cannon. I found her recommended on theknot.com and then I really liked her website, so we booked her. Easy enough. I was worried we would have trouble finding someone we liked, so I'm very relieved. I say "we" like Brian had any say. He came out of the bedroom on Saturday morning and I told him, "I found an officiant!" and he said, "Cool."

Harpist:
My mom wanted someone to play the harp during the ceremony and cocktail hour. The original plan was to find a student, but then I got in touch with two professional to check their prices. One wouldn't book us until 4-6 months before the wedding, and the other was within our budget, so we're going with her. My mother is thrilled that this will add "a touch of class" to my wedding. Ha!

Last night I dreamed that my cousin's friend hacked into my twitter account...so I kidnapped Verne Troyer and made him tell me how he'd done it.



Where does this stuff come from?

I'm still in a nostalgic mood, so today I picked a journal at random and started reading through it. It was from the spring of 10th grade and the summer after. I was 15. I was dating my first boyfriend and saving up my money for his birthday. At 15, I did not have a job. My allowance was $10 per week, if I remembered to do my chores. My boyfriend was a few years older and had a real grownup job. He made $10 in less than an hour.

So in order to match the nice gifts that he bought me for my birthday and holidays, I would save up my allowance. For this particular birthday, I wanted to buy him a Gameboy which cost $78. This meant I had to save up my allowance for eight weeks. I also used mypoints.com to earn restaurant gift certificates to take him out to dinner. It was one of those incentive websites where you earned points for signing up for various free trials. So anyway, I had missed my chores for a few days and I was writing about how I'd have to do my foster sister's chores in order to make up the money I'd lost so I could still buy his present.

Now in the middle of this, I won honorable mention in a writing contest. It was the first time I'd won anything, and the judge for the contest was freaking Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Tyler, so I was pretty pleased with myself. The prize money for honorable mention was $25, which hardly seems like anything now, but back then it was the equivalent of 2.5 weeks of income.

I was so proud of my 15 year old self, as I read back on these old journal entries, when I realized that I NEVER considered using the prize money to fund my boyfriend's birthday present. I bought myself books and then hoarded the remaining $7 until I thought of a good way to spend it. Later I would fall into a terrible pattern of doing too much (financially and otherwise) for people who didn't deserve it so it was nice to see me put myself first. And honestly, I'm not so sure I should have been saving up my allowance for months in order to buy presents for my grownup boyfriend who could have easily bought them himself with little sacrifice. Fifteen year old Holly didn't seem to have much sense in most aspects of her life, so I just liked that she realized the importance of earning her first $25 as a writer.

(I know I make myself out to be the martyr here, but I feel compelled to admit that I wasn't a very good girlfriend. At the end of this particular journal, I met another guy. And in the fall, it developed into trouble. I bought the boyfriend a blender for Christmas that year and it made him mad because he thought I was being cheap and that I'd spent all my money on the other guy. Which I hadn't. I honestly thought he wanted a blender for his new apartment. But that's another story entirely.)