Saturday, March 26, 2011

golden state

So, I have good news - my latest book is a finalist for the 2011 Golden Heart award**! I knew that the announcements were coming today, and I didn't sleep well last night as a result. I had dozed off again sometime before eight a.m., even though I expected that calls would start around eight a.m. in each time zone, and was awoken by my voicemail tone. This surprised me, since my phone had never rang. Even though the person didn't leave a voicemail, I called back (which I never, ever do), left them a voicemail -- and got a call ten minutes later saying that I had finaled. Much rejoicing ensued, of course; even though I went through this before, it's still super exciting to be recognized and feel like I'm on the right track, etc.

Luckily, I had someone around to celebrate with; Walter was on my couch in the living room, and so he got the honor of hanging out with me this morning while I was sublimely happy and not particularly interested in talking about anything else. We both eventually showered and then went into Palo Alto for lunch, where we oddly settled on Pasta? -- mostly because we were able to get from the car to that particular block on University without getting rained on, and I didn't want to take the chance of going another block (which proved to be prophetic, as we just missed a downpour). So we had lunch, came back to my place and enjoyed a cup of tea, and then Walter left to go to southern California. It was v. good to see him, and I'm sad that we don't live closer to each other since we both seem to be constitutionally incapable of keeping in touch over long distances.

After Walter left, I caught up on the online romance world (since this was a big day in that community, obviously), took a nap, and caught up on this week's "Top Chef: All Stars" while continuing to practice my knitting, since I needed a little downtime before getting to work. After that was over, I started thinking about my next book. I need to figure it out this week, so my little vacation is over and productivity begins immediately. I took a break to eat some leftover boeuf bourguignon (yum), then spread out a whole bunch of materials on my kitchen table, archived all the notes and detritus from Madeleine and Ferguson's story, and made new binders for Ellie and Nick. This may seem like procrastination, but I can't work without notebooks, and so this was an important first step. So, everything's now organized, and I have all the little notes I made to myself with ideas about Ellie's story gathered in one place, so I can get started.

Now, though, I think I'll go to bed; after the euphoria of finaling and the joy of Walter's visit wore off, I was left with a raging headache, and I'd like to get some sleep. Goodnight!



** For those of you who pay only casual attention to anything I say about the romance world, the Golden Heart is the award that I won in 2009 for my first book. They narrow down ~1000-1200 entries and come up with 6-8 finalists per category, and then those finalists are judged in a second round before the winner is announced at the annual romance conference in the summer. While I was still polishing my book for the past couple of months, the first round is based on the first fifty pages, which were apparently strong enough to get to the finals. Yay.

1 comment:

Matthew Lewis said...

Congratulations Sara!