I found my class ring. Apparently we can learn from this when I graduated, what my school colors were, that I was a cheerleader and into academics. Not much about who I WAS in high school.

I felt a lot of feelings this week. I'm on the cusp of 40, I had a novel out this year for the first time, my daughter is suddenly looking 15 instead of nine, I started training in July for a half-marathon next April and have had subsequent body changes, my colitis finally got diagnosed, I had a lump in my breast that turned out to be harmless, my husband is a full year distanced from unemployment. These are all good things, but this week I've cried more than I did all year, and whether they are tears of fear or relief -- I can't tell. My husband says I have a chronic case of What Have You Done for Me Lately with my accomplishments. He's right. I've already started trying to deflect that with the little angel by trying not to describe her to people by what activity she's in. My parents didn't do that to me, but I've always had trouble not measuring myself against some nonexistent doorframe where the marks are just lines to everyone but me. I'm always checking to see if I've grown, and I'm devastated if I haven't.

I am not what I do. I am who I am. Why am I still having so much trouble with that truth?

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be testing some book marketing services for THE OBVIOUS GAME. It came out in February, and I'm reaching the end of the period when I can do Goodsreads giveaways, which I found were great for boosting the number of people who added my book to their "to read" lists, but it's impossible to tell if it had an impact on sales as there is no direct clickthrough information. 

I'm going to be pretty transparent about my marketing methods, because it's tough out there for a gangsta with a small traditional publisher. So far, I've spent hundreds of dollars buying and mailing my books to book bloggers and reviewers, which resulted in 25 authentic reviews on Amazon and 32 reviews and 68 ratings on Goodreads. In 2013, I attended ALA Midwinter to meet librarians and tell them about my book and RT Booklovers when it came to Kansas City. I also went to the Less Than Three conference in St. Louis. I met readers there, handed out signed bookplates and business cards and met other young adult authors. Meeting the other authors was my favorite part of any of the conferences. I've always found other authors to be approachable and supportive, even Veronica Roth, whose DIVERGENT series took off like a Dauntless train right from the get-go.

I noticed that many of the books that made this year's best-of lists were both well written and well marketed. I started seeing the covers in my industry newsletters over and over and over, to the extent that even though I don't read vampire books, I know THE COLDEST GIRL IN COLD TOWN's cover on sight. That marketing is huge -- I wish I had it. I'd be lying if I said it doesn't make me jealous. But I don't, at least for this book, so I'm doing what I can to break out of the echo chamber of people who know me/of me and into the world of people who just like to read young adult novels. I'm hoping some of the email marketing services I'm trying will help with that. That's the positive thing about jealousy -- you can use it to get the energy you need to get off your ass and do something about it. And also to get you to write your next book, because everything might be easier with the next book. You just never know.

My first experiment with paid online book marketing is BookGorilla. My book will be included in their newsletter on Sunday, December 29, 2013 (in two days). On that day, the price of THE OBVIOUS GAME's ebook will drop from $4.99 to $1.99 for 24 hours everywhere it is sold to coordinate with the deal. You can already get the ebook version for $1.99 if you've bought the paperback version on Amazon as part of their matching service. 

Buying advertising isn't cheap for the average jane like me, an author who is just a normal person with a day job and a mortgage and a kid who needed Christmas presents and still needs new jeans that fit. Since it isn't affordable or easy, it's important to figure out if this advertising is worth it or not. With thousands of books coming out every single day, breaking through the noise and out of your own echo chamber is harder than ever. We'll see if this helps. I've seen a lot of other authors offering a prize if you buy their books, but that doesn't feel right for me, at least not with this book. 

Next month, I'll be doing a similar paid advertising deal with Riffle Select.

---

In other news, you have to check out what my sister gave me for Christmas. It's devine. I'll have pics of Esther the llama in her new series here on Surrender, Dorothy as soon as the little angel and I figure out what to call it.

Watch my friend and co-worker Momo Fali sing O Holy Night as Celine Dion. Stay with it and wait for the high notes. I dare you to be pissed off or sad after that. 

Carry on.

It's been a while since I had a hobby that required anything but myself. I've been focusing on my novels for so long that I haven't created anything but words in years. Words don't require tools, not real ones. If I run out of paper, I get some more. It's plentiful and cheap. If I run out of ink, there's always another pen nearby. Pens are like bunnies or subway rats, especially the kind with a company name on them. 

The older I get, the more I find myself wanting to master the arts tying me to Iowa, to my mother and grandmother and aunts. It wasn't conscious when I started gardening. I thought I was just trying to make my yard look better, but the more I explored it and discussed it with my family, I realized it was a bridge carrying me back home to the farm. Last year, I asked for a sewing machine for Christmas. It wasn't until I started using it this fall to try to make placemats for my mom's Christmas present that I realized how familiar the sound of the foot raising and lowering and the pedal humming actually was to me. My mom must've sewed more than I realized, or I was right there when she was doing it, because that sound, raising, lowering, humming, is really comforting to me.

Until the sewing machine breaks.

Placemats aren't that hard. I bought the material. I washed it. I dried it. I ironed it. I traced templates. I cut them out. I sewed them together inside out. I turned them right-side out. I finished one of six. Then my needle broke for inexplicable reasons, and I am such a novice it took me a few minutes to figure out what had happened. So I changed the needle. Then I had to reload the bobbin, which took the concentration of an architect figuring out load-bearing walls. Then everything got jammed. Then I cried and stopped for the night.

I went back to it twice before I stuffed the whole machine in my car and went to a cookie exchange party at my friend Average Jane's. I asked Cagey what was wrong with it. She thought the bobbin. On the way home, I stopped at JoAnne and the sweet woman there who threaded my machine without even looking at the little hook that befuddles me every time told me it was jammed and needed to be sent away. And the guy who takes it just came the day before so I wouldn't get it back until after the new year. And, like a car, it would cost $100 just to open it up and look at it.

I handed over my basically brand-new but over-its-warranty sewing machine and shuffled back to the parking lot with the little angel in tow. We still had to go get Beloved's Christmas present and go to Costco and a million other holiday-related errands, and I felt so low. I was so close to being done. So I called my mom and admitted what happened and asked if I could use her sewing machine to finish the final edging. Of course she said I could. She even offered to finish her own Christmas present for me, but no, it's so important to me that I learn to do this, that I do this by myself.

I'm not used to having to stop a project for external reasons. It's maddening. When I get hung up writing, I know how to work the kinks out and keep going, but this, there's nothing I can do about this but wait. It's humbling.

A week ago, my fourth-grader asked me about getting an Instagram account. I demanded she produce other fourth-graders who had one so I could ask their mothers about it. That ended the conversation.

Today, school was cancelled due to ice. She mused as I ignored her while working that she wished she could text with her friends.

I told her she's too young then went back to ignoring her while working. 

Then I sort of felt bad, so I started to suggest she call them and had to hold my tongue. Of course the friends she wants to talk to moved here from Iowa and their mother has a long-distance cell phone number, and our home phone doesn't get long distance, and I refuse to let her use my cell because I need it for work. So she can't call them. They live within walking distance and she can't call them. She could probably Skype with them, but that is now making my head hurt.

The world of 2013 is so complicated. 

She's not getting a cell phone. Not yet. She's not. 

Or Instagram. 

Or, OMG, SnapChat, that devil's tool all the kids like.

So far I've muddled along whistling in the dark about my daughter and technology. She has an iPod Touch and has had one for about a year now, but so far she only uses it to play games and FaceTime with relatives.

She's not getting a phone.

She's not texting.

She's going to talk. Or for God's sake, pass a note. Or be bored.

*headdesk*

(I just peeked. She found a new app and is now writing a story. THANK YOU, JESUS. Back to work.)

When she got on the bus, I could see the angry bright red skin between her nose and upper lip from twenty feet away. As she changed into her leotard and tights for ballet, I realized her lips were so chapped they were hours away from splitting. Over a week of rubbing tissues against her little face over and over had taken its toll.

I smeared a little nasal gel on her nose, and immediately she begain shrieking that it burned. I searched all over the house for the good lip stuff and couldn't find anything. Beloved came home early from work and offered to take her to ballet for me, and I nearly jumped up and down at the anticipation of not having to go out in the freezing cold for three hours between the commute and the getting of dinners for the little ballerinas and the sitting on the hard bench in the parent waiting area for ballet. I didn't mind it when I was using the time to work on PARKER CLEAVES revisions, but now that it's out with beta readers, I don't want the benches anymore. She only has two weeks left of ballet, and even though she's danced since she was two, I'm ready for that chapter of our lives to be over, maybe as much as she is.

He left with her still howling about her nose. I drove to the grocery store and bought two tubs of Vaseline and two tubes of medicated Blistex. I drove back home and made myself a huge salad and a tuna sandwich and a tube of biscuits for her so she'd have breakfast in the morning. I burned the homemade croutons. I set off the smoke detector. 

I sat on the couch and finished one book and immediately opened another. Chain reading, binge reading, because sometimes I just can't get enough of someone else's stories, and television has actors who can be bad actors and commercials and a million things that slow down the story. Sometimes reading is the only way to get the story directly in the IV and coursing through my body fast enough. 

She came home and grabbed the purring cat off my lap. I looked at how tall she's grown and how old she looks except for the fiery patch under her nose. She took a shower and washed her hair, then I gave her the Vaseline and the Blistex and told her to put them on. 

She came out of the bathroom to where I was sitting, still reading, propped on a pillow against the linen closet in the hall where I sit when she wants me near but I don't want to be in the bathroom with its heat and humidity and tile floors, and she kissed the tub of Vaseline.

"This is my new best friend," she said.

I laughed. "Why?"

"Because my nose hurt so bad and that other stuff just stung and I was worried about putting this on and I did, and it felt like a nice, warm blanket, and now my nose is comfy."

"Did you put the stuff on your lips?"

"Yes."

"Does it hurt?"

"No. It feels good, too."

Then she took her cough syrup with pretzel chasers and we read our books in her bed, and then she laid her wet head in the crook of my arm and the cat wound himself into the valley between our legs and we turned out the lights. I lay there reminding myself to be grateful that we are not as sick as we were, that the lump in my breast from last month turned out to be just a harmless cyst, that my husband is not traveling this week so it's not so hard to take care of myself, that this ballet business is almost over, that the truck that needs new struts and is over 200,000 miles has not died yet and will perhaps make it through the holidays into the new year when replacing it would be easier for us, that we made it so long before it really got cold. 

I went over the list in my head as I listened to her breathing grow more even, though still snuffly. I reached the point when I have to decide if I'm going to get out of her bed and have an adult evening (which I always do) or just close my eyes and go to sleep hours earlier than I usually do and in the wrong bed.

I got up. I nearly always get up. And I felt almost deliriously happy about how well the Vaseline worked. There is real joy in helping to relieve someone's pain. It makes you feel less stuck.

I'm still emerging from the grip of the worst cold I've had in years. The little angel told me this one this morning.

What starts with a "t" and ends with a "t" and has t in it?

A teapot.

Ba dum, ching!

Though I had a cold, I was going strong on Monday. I did seven loads of laundry and accomplished a ton on my work to-do list. On Monday night, the little angel ended up in my bed coughing in my ear from 3-6 am. On Tuesday, her cold peaked, and I kept her home from school. On Tuesday night, I finished the second draft of PARKER CLEAVES despite the onset of a sinus headache. On Wednesday, I was sick but not too sick to go for a jog at lunchtime. I thought I might be able to ride out this cold like I have the last few.

On Wednesday night, I took a turn for the worse.

Yesterday was rotten. I worked from the couch. 

This morning, I got the little angel on the bus, emailed my co-workers, and went back to bed. 

My house is filthy. We didn't clean last weekend because of Thanksgiving travel, and then we put up the Christmas tree and scattered glitter and fake pine needles all over everything. Then Beloved went on a business trip on Monday and between being sick and being alone with a cat determined to knock everything off the counters and a kid trailing snotty kleenexes in her wake, I was in survival mode. 

Today, I'm having to admit defeat. I can't clean. I can't work out. I can barely function. I'm in my pajamas hammering away at my to-do list as best I can.

In the past, I might've forced myself to rally and do what I'd planned to do, anyway. That just keeps me sick longer, though. I really want to kick this cold and get on with my life. So I'm going to stay in my pajamas looking like death warmed over and move back to the couch and shut my eyes to the grime and the running shoes and the ironing piled on the dining room table. Sometimes taking care of yourself can be really hard to prioritize, but I'm really going to try, and then maybe next week I can take the world by storm.

I looked down at the manuscript on my lap, shuffled among the multiplication flashcards and the book on surviving any disaster. We'd just read about how to defend oneself against lowland gorillas, which I doubt we'll ever see in Missouri.

"Mama, do you ever feel like you should be doing something that you aren't?" she asked.

I laughed. Isn't that the question of the human condition?

"Yeah. I feel like I should finish this novel."

"Mama? I think when this one is done, you should take a break before starting another."

I paused. I don't have a good reason for writing stories. Except I like to.

"I am struck by the mediocrity of my finest hour," wrote Ani DiFranco. I first heard it when I was barely twenty, and now twenty years later, it still gets to me.

I want to write a sentence like that before I'm done.