Happy Birthday, Uhyesplease!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today is the birthday of my one and only Lemon Sister!!!



Uhyesplease, you are a tireless friend!!
You frequently volunteer your time
betaing the writing of others,
cheerleading more than one writer along,
writing your own works
as well as fabulous book reviews on our beloved Bewitched Bookworms
and are, in general,
an all around wonderful woman!

Uhyesplease, I'm so thankful to call you my friend and sister
and I wish you the very best of birthdays
filled with all sorts of lemony debauchery!!!

If you would like to help me celebrate Uhyesplease's birthday on Twitter,
please feel free to add the following ribbon to your twitter icon for the day!



The ribbon, designed by Danny (of course), highlights
three of the most important ways I got to know
Uhyesplease:
because of ....

her love of Twilight (because we all share this here!)...
her asking me to join her as a Lemon Sister (because twi-girls need love too!)...
and her signing up as a bookworm (because literate girls are HOT!)

So please take a moment and send uhyesplease your birthday wishes!
It will definitely make her day!

Happy Birthday, Danny!!!!

Today is one of our favorite bloggy-girl's birthday!!!



We love Danny so much,
from blog that she writes as Mrs. Vanquish
where she used to tease us with
lovely RPattz videos such as this:



to her latest work as the amazing designer of blogs such as this:



to her MANY fabulous book reviews!

She's so much fun to have around
and we're so very grateful to call her our friend!

Thank you so much
for being such a wonderful friend
and we wish you
the happiest of birthdays,
Danny!!!

If you would like to help us celebrate Danny's birthday on Twitter, please feel free to change your twitter icon to the following for the day!



Love,

Uhyesplease and Pushy

PS - The lovely erikasbuddy was thoughtful enough to pass along this scrumptious present....ENJOY!!!!

Birthday Mania!!

So as most of you know, yesterday was my birthday. Yup, this old fox turned 35. I am happy to say that I got many things I was expecting, not the least of which was my annual call from my mother telling me the story of the day I was born (which is pretty interesting, in my humble opinion, since she delivered me at home, essentially by herself, at the age of 19). But as is usually the case, it's the many things I was NOT expecting that made the day grand.

For example.....

Some of my favorite tweeple dressed up in foxy finery on twitter:



The Lemoniest Lemon Sister that there ever was wrote me a HBD post on TLS:



My beautiful Bewitched Bookworms wrote me a HBD post on BB,
noting my love of glitter text and complete with a Hendrix ode to, well, ME!



The AWESOMETASTIC Betti pimped a story I wrote for her for Christmas, prompting me to post it on FFn due to all the wonderful work she put into making this AMAZING banner for it!


Seriously I'm not worthy!!

My sweet, good morning, coffee girl, Danny,
sent me a loverly Beautiful Creatures inspired bracelet
from Mary Tippet Designs:

>

The amazing erikasbuddy wrote me a sequel to one of her fics, Broken, that I adore!!

I cannot even express how humbled and touched I am that so many of you went out of your way to make me feel special on my birthday but I can say, heartily, "Mission Accomplished!!!"

No, no, really, much better than this!
I just couldn't resist! tee-hee!

Thank you, over and over, from the cockles of my little, vixen heart!!!

Author Appreciation Week:Maggie Stiefvater

Banner provided by the lovely ladies at Novel Novice

photo courtesy of Maggie's flicker album

For today's Author's Appreciation post I wanted to shine a light on Maggie Stiefvater author of both the Books of Faerie series: Lament and Ballad and The Wolves of Mercy Falls Series: Shiver, Linger (out July 20, 2010) and Forever (planned for Summer 2011).

What I most appreciate about Maggie are her blogs. I adore reading her personal blog, Words on Words, and the one she shares with Tessa Gratton and Brenna Yovanoff, Merry Sisters of Fate.

As a struggling writer myself, I really appreciated this post Maggie wrote on plot bunnies because they stalk me like crazy and they're so hard to resist!!! I am now the proud owner of a notebook that goes everywhere with me and where my plot bunnies are firmly caged for further use. So thank you, Maggie!!!

I haven't had a chance to read any of Maggie's books yet, mostly because funds are short and there's an ENORMOUSLY LONG waiting list for them at my library! Seriously, I've been waiting on Shiver for months!!! BUT my bloggy BFF uhyesplease has read Lament and she could not be stronger in her praise for it, which is good enough for me to endorse Maggie's books.

Other things you should know about Maggie:

1) She's very active on twitter at mstiefvater. She tweets about book stuff, blog stuff and just random things too, all of which are way witty and fun! If you don't follow her already, you're seriously missing out!

2) She's going to be in a new anthology coming out, Kiss Me Deadly, which is planned to release this summer on July 27.

So if you don't follow Maggie already, you should definitely check this awesome lady out!

Beautiful CreaturesBook Discussion

Thank you Betti
of Betti.Music.Twilight
for this AWESOMETASTIC
book discussion button!!!!

I mentioned a while ago that I am participating in a book discussion on Beautiful Creatures over at afragilelittlehuman's blog.

Well this is the week that my lemon sister, uhyesplease, and I had our turn to lead the discussion. Please stop on by and show some comment love, not just for us but for all the other amazing women who are posting each week.

Thanks!!!

Beautiful CreaturesBook Discussion and Contest

Hello, lovelies!!! I hope the new year is treating everyone well. I am keeping busy, as always. And one of the things I am doing over the next few weeks is participating in Fragile's Beautiful Creatures book discussion.

Haven't read Beautiful Creatures yet????? Click on the pick to get it on Amazon.

It's only $10.52 and it's eligible for free shipping!

Haven't read the kick off or the first two discussion posts??? Click here, here and here to bask in the wonderment that is this discussion. Please join in and help make this discussion a success.

And for a SQUEE thought, the authors are aware of the discussion from fragile's tweets and I wouldn't be surprised if they popped in to see how it goes!

In the same SQUEE vein, there's a contest going on over at Caster Girls, a Beautiful Creatures fansite, where you can win 12 autographed copies of Beautiful Creatures for your very own bookclub!!! To enter, go here:

Well, good luck all and I hope to see you around fragile's site, especially on Valentine's Day, when I'll be hosting that week's discussion with the lovely uhyesplease, my Lemon Sister.

Tay-Tay's in the house!

When I entered into Mrs. V's great contest I didn't really think I'd win. I don't normally win these sorts of contests. But when I saw I was about to be the proud owner of a new Twi-figurine, I knew just who I wanted:

No, no, I'm not Team Jacob (seriously, Cutie!!!) but I do love the idea of having this great little guy around to stage epic battles with (UYP, when are you coming to town so we can cause some mischief with these little guys???????).

So thank you, once again, Mrs. V, for my new dolly, for having the contest in the first place and for just being an amazing bloggy friend. I'm so lucky to have found you!!!!

And for your enjoyment, here are the pictures of what happened when Jacob tore his way out of his nice brown box:

What the F@$%, Foxy!!!! Who the HALE is this???


URGGGG!!!!! I....AM....TAY-TAY!!! OPF is my girl now!


Jacob: Oh noes!!!!!! Edward, who is this giant!
Edward: Stay still, Jacob! These small foxes can smell fear.
They feed off it.


Edward: Please, little foxy girl, I'm begging you.
Don't make me kiss the dog.
He stinks!!!
Jacob: You're no rose yourself, leech!

Dazzling Wins!

Yesterday morning, while I was running around the house like a chicken with it's head cut off, my cell phone rang with a 319 area code. 319? Who the heck could that be? Oh, it was uhyesplease. Now I had just posted my slash post to The Lemon Sisters and my first thought was, "Oh crud, I've offended someone." Nope, that's not it. My lovely, lemony UYP just called to tell me that the winners were out in the Love for the Unloved contest and Dazzling won!!!

I squeed! I jumped up and down. Mr. Foxy gave me a big high-five and he and the little foxes sang me a victory song (along the lines of "Foxy's so awesome! Foxy's so awesome, yeah!). It was quite a moment.

And I tweeted all of this (naturally) but I just wanted to take a second to thank a couple of people who went a long way to making this possible.

First ly: uhyesplease. Girl, how I love you!!!! Who told me there was such a contest? You did. Who encouraged me to enter? Yup, that'd be you too. Who read, not only countless drafts of Dazzling but also the other crud that I worked on before Dazzling became the idea that I ran with. Uh hunh, that'd be a big YOU! Everyday you encourage me to not only write, but write better. You are made entirely of awesomesauce.

Secondly: Betti. Not only did you read my story and review it, but you made it a one-of-a-kind, button-guru original button! And wrote about it on your blog!




And since I clearly can't stop at thanking just two people, let me also thank afragilelittlehuman and Mrs. Vanquish.

Fragile, you make me smile everyday, you push me to be a better writer just so I can keep up with you and you're so supportive it makes me want to cry.

Mrs. V, whenever I'm getting the inevitable "my writing sucks" blahs, you invariably pop up and tell me how much you enjoyed the last piece.

I know that's not everyone, but it's 5 a.m. here and rather than ramble on naming ever single person I love, I'm going to get some coffee. But before I do, I just want to add one last thing.

It is amazingly flattering to be supported by so many awesome women. I adore you all!!!

Yep, I'm crazy...

So with the holidays approaching and everyone in my family (except the insanely supportive DH) pretty much in the dark regarding the extent of my twi-sanity, what should I do?

Well, first of course, I'll definitely plan to do NaNoWriMo because I do that every year. It's this super fun challenge to write a novel in a month, no problemo!! But that doesn't feel like enough. Hmmmm.....what else can I do?

Oh, yeah, launch a new blog with my twi-BFF, uhyesplease, that requires me to read TONS of fanfic. Sounds good, I'll just squeeze that in right *looks around for a free time slot* ooh, here. *shoves "clean the bathrooms" out of it's previous timeslot*. Oh yeah, that looks good. Clean bathrooms are overrated. I mean, my kids are just going to shit all over that toilet anyway, right?

Oh, and I think I have some more time left. *eyes calendar entries for other chores* Yep, I think I'll also see if I can convince fellow bloggy friend, fragilelittlehuman, to start writing a collaborative fanfic with me. Cool.

And you know what will be awesome? If I decide not to outline it, so I can pretty much fly by the seat of my pants and write without know too much about what fragile's going to be writing. That sounds smart!

Ok, smart I may not be, but crazy I am in spades. So you know I totally signed up for both.

So if you haven't seen the tweets already, go and check out the blog I started with uhyesplease, called The Lemon Sisters. You won't be disappointed.

And if you like my writing, or even if you hate my writing but LOVE fragile's writing (and who doesn't?), please head over to the blog we set up under our combined moniker fragilefoxes for our new collaborative effort, In The Blood.

And if my DH buys me a sweet new jacket for Christmas that's a pretty shade of white and has lots of fun buckles, well, you'll know where to find me at least. :)