Last Monday I finished this ‘second pass’ of my second novel. I haven’t looked at it in almost a week (and it’s such a weird feeling)–it’s out, being read by someone who’s never seen it, and for that matter, never seen me either. She’s a fellow blogger whom I asked if she might consider reading, and she agreed! With my critique partner having fallen off the earth–I seriously don’t know what happened to her–and my family really rather adverse to reading things more than once, I didn’t really know who to ask. But then I thought of someone whose opinion I respect immensely, someone I thought could offer useful advice without trampling my spirit. So…I’m waiting to hear. And in the mean time, I’ve made a list of all those things I want to get accomplished before the boys are out for the summer. I’m using this nail-biting, anxious, nervous-wreck time to tackle it.

In other news, I’m debating whether to make The Best Chocolate Sheet Cake Ever for Mother’s Day. It looks absolutely scrumptious, and I never make cakes from scratch, but…as far as I can tell, cake and frosting combined have three and three-quarters sticks of butter!! That’s a LOT of butter. I’m certainly not dessert shy, and I much prefer buttercream frosting to that Cool Whip style stuff, but 3 3/4 sticks! I’m going to have to think long and hard on this. And what happens if I love it, if it’s as swoon-worthy as implied? Then I’ll want to keep making it. But how can I justify 3 3/4 sticks of butter??? I’m torn…

I am no longer the only blogger in my family. My older son has taken to blogging with great enthusiasm and gusto, and if I didn’t stop him, he’d post several times a day. (He’s already told me that on the weekend he’ll have plenty of time for blogging, because there’s no school.)

My sister-in-law has created a ‘network’ of sorts for her family and friends (probably while she should have been working on her dissertation), and she is obsessed with it. She’s constantly trying to get us to add pictures, post events, chat, blog, and just generally ‘hang out’ in this network forum. I’ve resisted for several months, but finally, this weekend, I posted some pictures to the network and jazzed up the look of our ‘page’, etc.

Well my son loved being able to post pictures and type silly captions for them, and since I didn’t want the network to get overloaded with pictures of my family (particularly any goofy ones of me), I suggested he write a blog post instead.

He loved it. His first post consisted only of a couple of sentences (he is in second grade after all), but at the end, he posed a ‘getcha talkin’ question for everyone. ‘Do you like books too?’ I notified my mom and mother-in-law (both sucked into the network) that he would be blogging daily, and would like to see comments from them, and they’ve complied, although with not quite as much attentiveness as he would like. In their defense though, who has time to check a blog and comment and recomment and then comment again on a daily basis? Maybe grandmas should–maybe I should get on them about slacking with regard to this thrilling new blog. This morning’s topic was ‘Our Backpacks’, and yesterday he posted about ‘New Underwear’.

I expect very good things.

I was lucky enough to be offered an early reader’s copy of Trish Ryan’s book, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: A Memoir of Finding Faith, Hope, and Happily Ever After. I rarely–rarely–read non-fiction, and I’ve never read a memoir, but I was enthusiastic about reading this one. Trish was one of the first commenters on my blog and always has something funny and even insightful to say. It’s probably no surprise that I’m a devoted reader of her blog, which I highly recommend to anyone who might be reading this blog who hasn’t stumbled over there already. (Hopefully there’re some of you, because I’d like to think I’m helping Trish’s viral marketing (i.e. Blogging Book Tour) through this post.

Go out and get this book.

Even as the happy-go-lucky fiction reader that I am (I don’t even read much literary fiction), I highly recommend this book. It was funny, but serious–really it was seriously funny. And even though I already knew about Trish’s eventual happily-ever-after, I couldn’t help but be moved to shock and empathy at all she went through. I was impressed with her resilience, her determination, her faith, and her attitude. He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not is an extremely readable story of how life and love can take some painfully difficult turns and still end up on the right track. Perhaps we could even say The Highway to Heaven….