this ain't a scene, it's an arms race

I was brutally tired all day, which is why I'm considering going to sleep at ten p.m. (also known as eight p.m. in my usual time zone). I slept eight hours last night, but I still barely made it out of bed in time for my ten a.m. call with the publicist I'm hiring. I got up just in time to put on some clothes (so I didn't feel utterly slovenly) and grab some tea, and then we chatted for an hour about where I should focus on my publicity and marketing efforts and how we should move forward. I thought she was great, so hopefully she'll be able to help me get my book sales going when the book is released.

And the first book will be released on January 23; we're likely going to release the second one at the end of February, and the third one at the end of April. My agent gathered all the necessary data and sent the first book off to an ebook formatter today, so yay for that. More details to come, but it's all quite exciting, even if I'm too tired to sound particularly excited about it right now.

I spent some quality time this afternoon hanging out upstairs with my mother. We had a rather unplanned chili cookoff; her chili is good, but it has a much bigger quantity of tomato juice than the chilis of California (which is true of the other chilis I've had in Iowa; the ones at church suppers and school lunches had a lot of tomato juice). Since it's so juicy, it tends to be best with a lot of crushed saltines or a grilled cheese sandwich, neither of which work with my gluten experiment. I had bought ingredients for my black bean chili yesterday, so decided to make it in addition to hers. That chili has no juice at all, and the 'liquid' comes solely from a puree of diced tomatoes and black beans, so it's substantially thicker than what the family was used to. They all made fun of it when they saw it, as per usual (see: my attempt to introduce them to risotto), but they also all finished their helpings and mom went back for seconds, so I'll consider it a success. Or perhaps not a success, since I intended to eat it as leftovers for the next few days and may not have a ton left.

After dinner, I came downstairs and lost myself in a wikipedia hole until now. I'm too tired to write, and while I have a book (or fifty) that I'd like to read, I think I'll go to bed and attempt to regain my energy levels so that I can write like mad tomorrow before Thursday's Thanksgiving festivities. Goodnight!