Stop the Presses! (And pass the treats.)

Over the last three days I've eaten waaaaay too much of this amazing new cereal treat my friend Sherral invented. Just melt peanut butter and chocolate chips (in any denominations of your preference), combine and pour over raisin bran. Chill and eat. Oh, my, goodness! What a great way to impose my double standard of no-candy!

I love my double standard, and I'm sticking to it.


Last week? Whew! What a ride. I can't believe a lot of it happened. The Centennial Celebration was a blast. I ended up doing a ton of writing about it, and the article I wrote for the local paper featuring our delightful centenarian got some attention from a national outlet. On Monday morning I got a call from the editor and she offered me the chance to redo it for Reuters. Yeah, Reuters, the international news service.

Well, shut the front door.

I reinterviewed her and whipped something up (which had the chance to be revamped almost entirely by the very nice "real" reporter for Reuters) which then got released on Valentine's morning and went out to be published in outlets such as Yahoo News, msnbc.com, and the Chicago Tribune. (I still can't believe the "real" reporter went ahead and put my byline on it. Seriously nice.)

Holy crap. (That's the phrase that went through my head about 1400 times.)

Seriously, that was one of the more traumatic writing experiences ever. But interviewing the lovely LaVona Evans was wonderful. What an honor! She bakes 10 loaves of bread a week. Kneads it by hand. What a woman!

The other exciting wiritng thing that happened was Meridian Magazine published a couple of my essay articles. One was "Seeds Grow in Dirt" which I featured here last Mother's Day. Then on V-Day they ran an essay I wrote about love. I mean, not a love story, but how I really had bad postpartum and got all offended at something a guy said and then had to eat my words and really truly came to love and appreciate the guy.

All in all, it was a whirlwind writing week. And I didn't get a single word done on my NaNo novel, which languishes.

But I'm working on it today. I MUST finish it. I will be the Little Engine that Could. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.

Just probably not before lunch. Or before I eat another three cups of that amazing raisin bran choco-peanut butter stuff.

In Japan they call it peanuts butter. That's cute, right?