A few updates, plus!

1. In all the madness of the last few weeks, I forgot to call your attention to this interview I did with Karen Walrond--photographer, blogger, author of The Beauty of Different.

You have her book, right? If you don't own her book, you must rectify that situation immediately. Go on. I'll wait.

Karen is one of those magical people who makes you feel like you're gorgeous and witty and fascinating. The downside to that is, it's only later that you realize that you've said the word "funny" way too many times, you're not making all that much sense, and p.s. there are bed-sheet lines on your face (it was 8 am! I had just woken up!) and soon you're going to feel compelled to tell the world you don't normally look like a nonagenarian.

 But hey, I got to spend some glorious quality time with Karen. Just listen to her voice in that video. WORTH IT.

2. Eden and I started a "Let's Panic About Babies" Flickr contest --take a humorous-type photo with a copy of our book, submit it to the pool, and you could win your choice of Subversive Cross Stitch kits! But hurry--you only have until April 14th. HURRY!

3. I added an extra category to my site: Books. (Which is hilarious, as I have only one.) (FOR NOW.) I've put all our upcoming tour dates on there, so if you live in Portland (Oregon), Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, or Minneapolis, all the information on when and where we'll be is there. And yes, we hope to visit more cities in the coming months.

4. Finally, here's a blog post I keep pointing people to whenever they ask how they can help us with our book. This is great advice for anyone who's friends with an author, plus it explains why we all go a little insane, the first few weeks (and months) after our books come out. And why I keep staring at the Amazon rank. Because staring at it keeps it aloft! That's just common sense.



Back home

Wow. Okay, so. So! Our book came out! Which you know already, I'm guessing.

Eden and I traveled to Philadelphia and Atlanta to promote the book (you can see information and photos on the "Let's Panic" Facebook page, if this is the sort of thing you enjoy doing), and then we came back to New York for a signing on Tuesday and a book party--which, by the way, was generously sponsored by Blogher. Blogher is also sponsoring our tour of the Pacific Northwest/Bay area during the first two weeks of April. Truly, their generosity is boggling to me/us. (More on that in a later post.) Then we head off to Chicago and Minneapolis and finally to the Mom 2.0 conference in New Orleans. (The dates of all these tour stops is also on our Facebook page. This is our way of forcing you to "like" our page. "Like" it, damn you! "Like" it in quotes!)

Now I'm home, and the hubbub has died down, and I feel, honestly, blaauuuugh. (That's a word.) Maybe it's the natural consequence all the excitement; maybe it's just from eating terribly and not sleeping well and drinking just a little too much every night for the past two weeks--whatever it is, I have been growling and snapping at my family all day and I really wish my husband would stop giving me searching looks and why must my dog smackity-smack at his private parts and I never realized my son's voice was so very peppy. Everyone just needs to shush for a while. Just shush for a few months! Then I'll be okay.

But I started writing this post to talk about was Japan, oh, God. JAPAN. Let's forget about my complaining, up there. Shut up, me. Whenever I wake up from one of my multiple naps I find myself drifting back to my laptop and there's another one, more footage of a slow tide of cars and boats rolling in a wall of black foam, covering an entire village, the whole scene looking like a miniature set, because there's no way that could all actually have happened. Again and again, all over Japan. So much devastation.

This is the third or fourth or more-th time in the lifetime of my blog that something huge and catastrophic has occurred (that fact is horrifying unto itself--I'm pretty sure record-breaking devastation didn't used to occur on almost yearly basis), something that would be unthinkable not to bring up. And yet I struggle with that, because after all, you're all getting coverage of the tragedies in Japan, well, everywhere else. I'm not a journalist, after all, and I like to imagine that I provide some comic or other relief from the tragedies of the day, mostly. Who am I to talk about such things?

But oh, if I had to wait to come up with a post that would make you laugh, I'd have to wait at least a week or two to write anything here. I couldn't do that. I wanted to check in, and make sure you're all okay (you will let me know, won't you?). And I want to thank you. For everything. Again. And I wanted to say that I hope you are safe, wherever you are. I would really like us all to be safe from now on. (If any of you know how we can swing that, please advise.) I wish you all higher ground, and warm blankets, and partners that give you searching looks even when it drives you batty.

 

It's here!

Our book is out in the world, as of yesterday. Our baby! Be gentle with it, friends and strangers!

I'm overwhelmed by all the positive feedback we've received so far. First of all, check out the glowing review in Kirkus Reviews. If there was one review I was anticipating with teensy morsel of dread, it was Kirkus. They don't pull any punches over there. And with humor, who knows? We could have caught a reviewer on a bad day. I've already written every scathing review in my mind. I could have handed one over for them to publish. But they liked it! They really liked it!

As nice as that was, it's the congratulations and kind words from fellow bloggers and Twitter friends that really mean a lot to both of us. Here's a rundown of some of the nice mentions we've received so far, and I'm sure I'm leaving someone out, so please forgive me, whoever you are, and know that this is just because I've had three cups of coffee and if you were to peer inside my brain you'd see a chipmunk riding a little stationery bike that's hooked up to a motor that's powering an electronic monkey playing a harpsichord. It's amazing I managed to dress myself this morning, much less string words together all sensible-like.

Maggie at Mighty Girl
Melissa at Suburban Bliss
Zan at A Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny
Angela at Fluid Pudding
Angella at Dutch Blitz
Mir at Want Not
Megan at Not Martha
Amber at The Amber Show
Danielle at Knotty Yarn
Aimee at Greeblemonkey
Roxana at Everyday Treats
Liz and Kristen at Cool Mom Picks

And I didn't even list all of our tireless cheerleaders on Twitter and Facebook. I can't thank you all enough.

A bunch of the above bloggers are hosting giveaways (I believe Megan even has a gift basket to give away!), and I encourage you to visit their sites, but between you (my beloved reader) and me, if I had my heart's desire, all of you would buy a copy. Today, if possible. We want to generate as much excitement and buzz for the book as we can, and nothing raises the heart rates of our publisher like healthy initial sales.

I won't try to give you the hard sell, here, but I do want to say that this is a humor book, not a pregnancy or parenting guide, and therefore is appropriate for any adult with an appreciation of our kind of humor. It's great for a shower gift, but it's not only for pregnant women. No more so than the Daily Show would only be appropriate for pundits to watch.

The list price is $14.99, and it's available for much less at several sites. Where can you buy it, you may ask? Why, here! And here! And also here! And don't forget here! (The destination for that first link, incidentally, is selling our book at half the list price. I am just saying. For informational purposes.)

I'll be updating this site with more information, including our upcoming tour dates, very soon. (And I will also be updating it with non-book things, when my life resumes something approaching normalcy. Or, at least, you know, what it was.)

Communication breakdown

The Universe is, apparently, telling me to be quiet. If I believed in astrology I'd observe that Articulus, the Star that Controls Verbiage, is in retrograde, which explains the problems I'm having. Then I'd do those flying-yogi jumps out of the room, and you and all your buddies would roll your eyes at each other, like you always do. Boy are you guys judgmental. Like you've never read your horoscope! I've seen your dog-eared copy of Linda Goodman's Love Signs in your bathroom. Sure you were reading it ironically. I believe that. Guess who's rolling her eyes now? WRONG IT'S ME.

As I was saying. So first my computer broke, AGAIN, which should not have come as a surprise because for weeks it's been making alarming noises, the kinds of sounds that computers have not made since the '80s, when our hard drives were 32K big and made out of squirrel meat. My fancy computer of the present was going chickety-chickety and tch-tch-tch and I ignored it. And then over the weekend it lapsed into a coma, and Scott took it and lectured me AGAIN about eating while I worked, as if the few (okay, many) crumbs on the keyboard caused its innards to fail, and now he's at the Apple Store with my computer and I'm here with his. But his settings are all weird and wrong and also none of my stuff is on his computer, which is also weird, plus wrong. And okay I bought myself an iPad (I needed it for travel! Something something else rationalization!) but none of my files are on it and it's weird to transition the iPad from cool movie-watching fun-having-on to serious work technology. So that's communication problem #1.

#2 is that my jaw hurts and I can't talk. Yesterday I found it increasingly difficult to eat dinner. I was enjoying the slow-cooked pot roast I had made but was alarmed at how painful eating it was. With each bite, I found it harder to open my mouth. I was forcing the tines between my teeth and crying out piteously. But it was so delicious! I had to soldier on! By the end of the night I was talking like someone with lockjaw. (Have you guys ever heard of Locust Valley Lockjaw? (You can Wikipedia that yourself, right? Must I provide a URL for you?) Which I believe was written about in the Preppy handbook? Listen, I went to high school in Locust Valley, and I'm here to tell you it's real. I had friends whose parents talked like Thurston Howell. And I'm talking like them, clenched jaw and all. I feel like complaining about Muffy's poor behavior at the Creek Club, and how her husband Chip--you know Chip from Yale, I suspect--WELL, he was mortified, simply mortified and he swore he'd never let her have a second Tanqueray and tonic no matter how she begged.)

My jaw's had a disturbing tendency to go off the rails ever since I got into a car accident in college and suffered a mild concussion (for weeks afterward I couldn't remember which number came after 5) and also my jaw got knocked out of place. So now it complains whenever I eat bagels or salad, and it opens at a weird angle, which I thought you couldn't really see but watching several Momversation episodes has convinced me otherwise. I am betting you have never noticed because you haven't studied my jaw movements. Not yet, anyway.

This post is going nowhere. I don't care, I'm putting it up. This is the best I've got. Our book comes out MONDAY TUESDAY and my jaw's gone funny and I'm afraid I lost valuable documents and I had to turn my shrimp and red pepper curry into SOUP in order to eat it. SOUP!

Okay, the soup turned out pretty delicious.