Baby dragon or dragon shit...

I don't know--but Dreamspinner has the manuscript, they still don't seem to hate me although I tend to just stumble into protoc-walls left and right... (I'm trying that one for a laugh again--if I don't get it, I'll assume it's a bad idea, just in general...) and I've been accused of having a "very pretty submission letter". That last one made me raise my eyebrows because I always feel ENORMOUSLY awkward when writing a submission letter--I tend to be unassuming and dry, and hope that whoever is getting the letter has a sense of humor. Lucky me, I think I may have stumbled upon the only editing team in history to actually live up to that one!

Some of you will be very happy to know that, in anticipation of SOMEDAY having the money to publish it, in the absence of an active WIP (and a burning need to sleep and to yank my head out of the dragon's cave and spend some time with my children and cleaning the house) I have moved on to the final edit of 'Rampant'. I'm not sure how much distance I have from it--I still think it doesn't suck, so I'm thinking not enough distance than I should have. It doesn't help that Roxie and Needletart sprinkled the manuscript liberally w/ 'LOL', and 'Nice!'-- it does turn a girl's head, I do have to admit.

Some of you will also be very happy to know that once Rampant is edited, I'm moving on to the next Jack & Teague adventure--the fifth one and the last one to be posted on line. Once that's done I'm writing the sixth one, the one that will ONLY be printed in the book, because someday I'll be able to publish that one too--notice the whole 'working on faith' thing? It's working for the moment!

And even others of you will be pleased to hear that once J&T are finished, I'm moving on to the 5th Little Goddess book, to be broken up with the occasional Green's Hill adventure, and, if Promise Rock gets picked up, the random insane disappearance into the dragon's cave to pull a sequel to Deacon and Dek's story out of my ass.

*sigh* alas--many of these grand plans depend on shit getting published... so. very. frustrating. And, I'm sure, boring to hear about.

Let me thrill you with some other things that may not be so boring--

In the "my colleagues need a their colon scoped to find their human decency" department, Mr. Trick has started a new hobby. He waits until he sees me run into the staff room (since the bathroom is attached) and then he sticks his head into the bathroom to call out my name. The second (or was it third?) time he did this, there was another teacher in the room. I came out of the bathroom drying my hands the other teacher looked at me in sympathy. "This is a VERY tough crowd to work with, isn't it?" *sigh* Yeah--he has no idea.

In the "other school's curriculum has gone too far" department, Big T gave mate and I a 'mental health' survey for his health classes. "Do, how many bad relationships did you two have before getting together?" OI! And that was US--mostly what we did was go out on bad dates! I can't imagine answering that one for my kid if we'd had any sort of normal sexual history before we'd met. I would have made something up--there's just no way I'd be confessing to my kid that the sixth time I woke up after a wesson oil party and had to pick up my clothes off the street in my walk of shame home I finally decided to have a relationship instead of random hook-ups with hot guys working the concession stand of the tractor pull. (And really, as long as condoms were involved, doesn't every growing young person deserve to have a couple of those stories floating around in their history? But not Mate and me... noooooo... with the exception of getting busted having sex in a crapload of parked cars, (and let me say, the Mustang was NOT comfortable) we really have nothing to report. (Okay, looking aback at that paragraph, I'm going to say that I AM very tired, but it keeps giving me the giggles so I'm going to let it stand. Please keep in mind though that I'm being very sarcastic and very facetious and that Wesson oil parties as a whole do not really sound like a good, healthy, or dermatologically sound sort of activity.)

In the "My five year old is cuter than a rabbit's butt" category, Bone Daddy keeps singing the October Song for us--something about Chicken soup with rice, but really, I'm just so charmed by him getting all excited about singing it, I could care less what the words are. Damn, he's cute.

In the "Weirdness during the weekend" department, I've got a couple of things to report. A--when we were at Torrid, getting Chicken's dress, we signed up for a raffle by donating to Breast Cancer research. We, uhm, won. A whole crapload of REALLY expensive skin care products. I felt bad. My skin care regime is pretty basic... scrub it and slather it and that's the end. I felt like that lovely raffle gift was wasted on heathens, but it smells good, so I took it. When I went to go get it I was waylaid by random hot Israeli (no shit) hot guy who wanted to sell me a 'reasonably priced' hair straightener for $100. Poor guy--he probably knew he was doomed when he asked me what I did with my hair in the morning and I replied "get it wet and brush it." He said, "This will only take you ten minutes." I said, "That's nine minutes longer than what I do now. I don't really have that kind of time."

In the "Best New Game EVER" department--we got together to celebrate birthdays w/Alexa (my mom) and my grandma and aunt--they were lovely and we had cake and pizza (a big deal for my grandma) and our b-day present from my aunt was a game called 'Bananagrams'--it's like free-form jumble with a timer, and we had a BLAST. Bone Daddy wants me to play it all the time now--he makes nonsense words, but he's so damned cute. Have I mentioned the cuteness? We get the uber-cuteness from Ladybug, but i gotta tell you, sometimes Bone Daddy is just so pretty, the cuteness burns.

And with that, I'm back to Rampant... I'll keep you posted on the Dragon Shit--not exciting to anyone but me, I am well aware.