Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Happy Published Author Day to Me!

Hello Darlings,
Just a note to say thank you thank you for all the phone calls, e-mails, letters; the limos, the champagne! As for the paparazzi, well, I even like you, but I'm gonna get pretty damn sick of you soon, I can tell you that! But for now, snap away! My hair is washed, my underwear is clean, and I'm looking oh so sparkly on this - my special day!

OK. Really it's just the day after a holiday weekend during which I fled town for the mountains, returned late at night, and am now underslept, overtired, and the only person who's called is my mom.

I'm about to take a bus - not a limo - to work and I will probably have to work until such time as I am old and can't wear miniskirts and uncomfortable boots anymore but instead will be dressed in polyster pastels and beige orthopedic shoes.

Nonetheless, today represents the culmination of my biggest childhood dream. The dream I was no doubt dreaming when I demanded to sleep with a sharpened pencil in my bed as child. Perhaps even the dream that my parents were dreaming when they subjected themself to allegations of child abuse by sharpening that pencil for me and letting me embrace it as I slept.

I am a published author! I don't need champagne or flowers (I mean, if you insist!), I don't need adulation or million-dollar sales - though of course I won't turn them down! - all I need is the knowledge that I did it. And I did it.

Finally.

Now go buy it!

xo
BB

Saturday, May 27, 2006

I heart my readers. The positive reviews are flowing in! Who cares what the New York Times says, when reader Amy says this?

"OK so I was up wayyyy too late reading Breakup babe and I LOVE IT!!! Of course, with my recent Great Unpleastness, I can totally relate."

(Capital letters not put in by me).

In other news, I am strung out and underslept and generally riding a rollercoaster in all sorts of ways but my life is a damn fun (if exhausting) adventure right now.

xo
BB

Friday, May 26, 2006

Good Lord, forgive me for abandoning you. I have started two entries in the last week, only to discard them. Just like I have started a zillion books in the last few months and not finished them.

I am, shall we say, distracted. I am not sure how to approach the upcoming book launch. Just another day? The greatest day of my life? A reason to go back on the little pink pills?

Meanwhile, life plows forward in all sorts of ways, including - a birthday and a brand-spanking-new job in a swank office tower in downtown Seattle. Words cannot express my relief at escaping the clutches of that gentle giant, ye olde mighty Geeksofte. Oh the joy at not having to drive to sterile Redmond every day, but to jump on the bus with the smelly, hallucinating masses! The ecstasy of having a job where I write and think about BOOKS - beautiful, wondrous, hardcover, mass market, trade paperback BOOKS and not PROGRAMMER DOCUMENTATION! Hallelejuah!

My birthday was a brief affair, filled with too much tequila in a short amount of time, lots of boys, (Girls, listen, I know a lot of single guys if you want one! I can't vouch for their 1)sanity 2)emotional availabilty or 3)sexual prowess but they are cute and ready to roll so please e-mail me if you want one!) and a delicious German chocolate cake. The next day I was thoroughly hungover and miserable but isn't life too short not to be hung over and miserable?

It has been a bit of a shock having to get to work at a "normal" hour after years of rolling in to the mothership in the 11 to noon timeframe.It's hard, specifically, to get up and "write" before getting in to work, and even though I might not be actively "writing" right now (although that next novel is in the works I SWEAR), but I still reserve the morning for writing-related activities such as preparing my Academy Awards speech, etc.

Oh wait, that's acting. Did I ever tell you about the time I dreamed I won an award for Best Supporting Actress but was super stressed because I was at the Oscars in only a bathrobe, only then I decided to go onstage anyway beause Elijah Wood was also there in his robe and just as I was about to give my speech my teeth started falling out?

Yeah. Anyway.

Can I just say, on a parting note, that 1)THERE ARE STILL BOOKS AVAILABLE IN THAT DAMN CONTEST BECAUSE REALLY NO ONE EXCEPT A FEW DIEHARDS READ THIS BLOG ANYMORE BECAUSE IT IS SO NOT JUICY SO DAMN IT, JUST SEE THE PREVIOUS TWO POSTS AND THEN POST A LINK AND WIN A BOOK! AND 2)I so dearly appreciate comments like the one dear Jennifer posted yesterday, and also the e-mail I received from Anthony the day before telling me how they love my book.

I tell you, their is nothing more a writer craves than to hear how an individual person loved/related to/got off on your writing. The world can be damned. Personal praise is the best thing ever.

From the front lines of hysteria,
xo,
BB

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Sooo. I am no longer scared about my book coming out.

Ha ha.

That's a big fat lie. I'm living in abject terror. Of what I'm not sure. Bad reviews? The remainder table? The ultimate antixclimax of living out your life's greatest dream?

All of the above probably. But that terror has ceded somewhat to be replaced by a new one. I have to let my boyfriend read the thing. I mean if anyone else reads the book (and people, please read it!) and is boggled by the comic desperation of poor Rachel and wonders, "Is Rebecca, the seemingly glamorous and well-adjusted author of BreakupBabe as much of a neurotic, boy-obsessed, pathetic yet oh-so-lovable mess as Rachel," well, let them wonder.

The truth is, this book is me and it isn't. It is a comic and highly exaggerated fiction about me during a particularly brutal period of my life.

But what if he can't separate the fact from the ficiton? What if it scares him so bad he runs off on those long, lean legs of his? I have been on my best behavior in this relationship, and he has made it so easy to be that way. Breakup Babe has not been too much in evidence. Now, however, as she is about to be revealed in all her flawed glory, I am freaking the hell out, just like, ahem Breakup Babe would.

What if what if what if. Medication, please!

Right. Whatever. What if you just took a deep breath and had confidence in yourself. After all, the book f*cking rocks. At least for a first novel by someone who didn't know what the hell they were doing. Here's what a family friend with absolutely no bias whatsoever had to say about it!

"I thought it was very good, and I'm not kidding. It was funny, and real, and sad, and made me remember the stunning assortment of creative lunatics I dated and cried over (or dumped) before I met my husband.

Better yet, why not trust, for once, that things will work out like they're supposed to. To remember that you can't control things just by being anxious about them. To know that in order to be close to someone, they need to know your dark side as well as your light.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

When I was a kid, my greatest joy in life was to pretend. When I was little, and playing with my sister, we’d play the usual kid games like “Restaurant” and “School.” We’d also weave melodramatic scenarios for our Fischer Price people and Barbies, that included but was not limited to, love, betrayal, revenge, and murder. (Of course sometimes it was just about Barbie needing a new outfit for an awards show).

The height of my pretend-o-mania came at about age 12. Then I was hanging out constantly with my best friend, and certified creative genius, Jill – who, we all knew, was going to be a famous actress (when I first met her, every time we’d go out in public she’d ask people if they were talent scouts, and if they werent’ – because of course nobody was – she’d break into the song “There’s no business like show business.” )

We no longer played with Barbies or Fisher Price people but acted out stories of great drama with props and costumes. We had several favorites (which I believe we subjected numerous people to): the one where a young woman is informed she has terminal lung cancer by her doctor, and one we called “Pedro and Maria,” the hot-blooded Latin husband Pedro finds his hot-blooded Latin wife Maria cheating on him with some other hot-blooded Latin guy, and murders them both. We took turns acting out all the starring roles as well as the minor characters , though I often ceded the toughest roles to Jill. She was way more talented and could do accents a lot better.

Often our scenarios had to do with our futures. We would pretend we were twenty – the height of glamorous adulthood – and living together in a swank apartment in a big city somewhere. We would be either famous writers/singers/actresses/models with a variety of gorgeous, equally successful beaux, one of whom we would fall madly, passionately in love with and marry – Jill in a ceremony on the back of a humpback whale, me in Paris.

(When we did finally move to the big city together, in our early 20s, Jill had a semi-glamorous job in publishing and a boyfriend who played in a band; I, however, had no boyfriend and no job and hardly ever saw her. lasted all of a summer).

As we moved into our teenage years, we didn’t pretend quite as much, but we did it was bigger, bolder. It was performance art that we took out and imposed upon the world. There was an entire day, for example, that we spent tormenting a poor 14-year old guy whose only mistake was to have a crush on me and be sort of dumb. The day was elaborately plotted out and included inviting him over for lunch, serving him cold Chef Boyardee ravioli (on a long table set with a dead vase of flowers in the middle) and some kind of “mixed” drink with a random and heinous assortment of alcohol in it. The dramatic highlight came when Jill convinced him that I would say yes if he asked me to “go,” after which he and I preceded to to the living room and tape recorded the whole asking-me-to-go incident with a tape recorder stashed under the couch cushions. (Only I said “no.”)

Perhaps my years as Breakup Babe have been karmic payback for that incident, who knows.

In any case, the point I’m trying to get to here is that I still love nothing more than to pretend. If I could do it all day, I would. Nowadays though, it’s limited to an hour or two a day – that is, when I’m writing. The rest of it is spent doing all the things that adults do. Some of which is very fun, mind you, and some of it which is dull as all f*ck (measuring my windows for blinds and going to Home Depot – hello, where is my personal assistant?!)

Another thing that’s hard about getting older is that there are no longer infinite stories you can tell yourself about what might happen in your own life. That was one thing I loved about being a kid generally, was that –for me, anyway, in my privileged, sun-dappled, suburban world – anything was possible.

Lots of things are still possible for me, which I’m happy about, but not as many things are as possible as they once were. Probably one of the reasons I’ve never settled down is because I’m too addicted to that feeling of possibility – that sense that anything could happen. I always want new stories in my life.

And probably one reason I’m so terrified of this book being published is that it brings to fruition my biggest childhood dream. This, on the one hand, is terribly exciting, course, but on the other hand, I also expect it to be the world’s biggest anticlimax. The problem with being such a dreamer is that your fantasies almost never live up to reality.

The best thing about it, probably, is that it will give me more opportunities to pretend in the future. I also hope it will make people happy and give them pleasure, just like I’m happy when I read a book I like (that’s another time I get to pretend: when I’m reading and I immerse myself in someone else’s world).

Sunday, May 14, 2006

I still hear things from this like readers and it makes me happysad:

"I can't wait to read [your book] because I'm going through BreakupBabe withdrawal now that you don't write the witty tales of your love life."

I've been focused a lot on the negative side of the blog because I'm working on this article about how I got addicted to blogging about my love life and got over the addiction. I spend a lot of ink in the current (19-millionth) draft of the article talking about how the blog turned me into such an awful person and how I "stomped all over unsuspecting men."

This is true to some degree, but I couldn't have been all that bad, right? I must have written stuff that was funny and relatable and true or you wouldn't have liked me. It's been easier to make it all black and white - to talk melodramatically about how blogging brought out my most selfish qualities and drove me to rock bottom until I had to stop before I destroyed my life and the life of anyone who might mistakenly get involved with me. The truth, as usual, is more grey than that. So, on to the 20 millionth draft of the article!

In other news, even if I were writing a dating blog right now it would be boring. These days, for the first time in forever, my love life is going well. And I have never been a good writer when I'm happy. I write uninteresting sentences with lots of exclamation points. Through most of the year that I wrote my novel, I was on the lonelysad side. Especially during the summer. There were days last July when I'd drag myself feeling to the coffee shop like the takeout that time forgot, and writing was the only thing that could make me feel halfway better. And the blog, as you recall, was born out of utter heartbreak and despair.

Of course, I'm always a bit on the lonelysad side even when I'm happy. So I think (hope) that's why I'll be able to keep writing even if by some miracle, love manages to lodge itself in my life again.

So what was my point? Oh yeah. I'm happysad now. Happy that I don't have any drama to blog about, happy that I have an amazing boyfriend, sad that I don't keep you all entertained the way I used to, happy that the book is coming out so you can get your fix, sad that we all die and turn to dust and get our hearts broken one way or the other in the end. Happy that's not right this second.

By the way, you can still win free books! See the last two posts for more info!

XO,
BB

Friday, May 12, 2006

Ho hum, 18 more days until my book comes out.

YOU CAN STILL WIN A FREE COPY.

Either host this nifty banner ad or post a link to my Amazon page with a little blurb about the book.

Preferably you would do this on your sidebar or at the top of your page where it will *stick around* for a while.

SO GO AHEAD. JUST BE ONE OF THE FIRST 50 TO SHAMELESSLY PROMOTE MY BOOK, THEN E-MAIL ME TO TELL ME ABOUT IT AT breakupbabe@msn.com.

Love,
BB

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

So! The moment you've all been waiting for - the chance to win free books!

Here's how it works: All you have to do to win a free copy is be one of the first fifty people to host a banner ad for my novel and/or a link to my Amazon page with with a little blurb about the book.

You can get the banner here and it is guaranteed to look super cool on your site.

Once you've put the banner and/or the link up, e-mail me at breakupbabe@msn.com to let me know and I will check out your site toute de suite. Include your name and address so I can forward the information to my publisher and they can send you your *free book* - if you are one of the first fifty, that is.

Ready. Set. Go!

Wednesday, May 3, 2006

So. This is the month my book comes out. I am going to go crawl under a rock somewhere. Because just how to do you handle having your biggest dream come true? It's gotta be some major kind of anticlimax, right?

Yeah. So I think I'll just avoid it. Meanwhile, forward all royalty checks to my mother, who bless her little soul, works in non-profits, unlike my sister and me - the high-tech sellouts - and needs the money. Bad reviews you can keep. Good reviews, well...my agent will hold on to those until such time as I feel it safe to emerge from underneath the rock.

This is probably a good time to introduce you to my author web site. It is still not completely ready, but hey, it's good for now! 'Tis there you will find an excerpt from my first chapter.

I'm going to try to blog here and there as much as I can between now and the book launch because under the rock there won't be any Internet access.

Love,
BB