The Princess of Pain

For the love of God, if there is a solitary soul out there who cares a fig about me, help! Save me from my youngest child and her single minded determination to make me skinny. I have reached a new level of pain... my blood vessels are even sore. I feel like all those internal parts that normally rest and rub against each other comfortably are now all cringing and scrunching up against my bones screaming for their own personal space. Princess is relentless, a slave driving harpee who has forgotten that I am OLD and put my muscles out to pasture right about the time Bill Clinton took office. As if exercising isn't boring, hard and exhausting enough; you haven't really exercised until you've done it with two cats and a dog, who firmly believe you're moving around like that to entertain them. Enough whining, at least she gave me a sticker yesterday for my three days of effort!

Publishing news: Sandra Ruttan's book, Suspicious Circumstances, is in final edit. Theresa Leighton's new book, Last, is in production. Both are scheduled to release by November and that will wrap up our list for 2006. We haven't reopened the submissions list yet, we're still trying to clean up the backlog, and there are some very promising books on the second reading list. For a small house, I feel like we made a lot of progress this year, but we still have a lot to learn. I still believe strongly in our policy of judging a book by the whole book, rather than query, synopsis or sample chapters. It creates a ton of extra work, and slows the process considerably, but I think we're finding world class new authors this way. As usual we have the usual cast of skeptics, curmudgeons and overall mean people predicting our failure and maligning us on the message boards sometimes. Comes with the territory, it's a hard business.