Vampires and Robots

My apologies for the long absence from updating. I just did something that I don't do very often. I went on vacation. Last Saturday, my husband and I boarded a Virgin America flight to San Francisco. What happened next was pure magic. Not once did I worry about work, the books, or anything else that would in any way be stressful. And it was amazing. We ate like we weren't worried about calories and in fact, we weren't! Considering that I brought my trusty Fitbit with me, I was able to keep track of the many miles of steep hills we walked for the sheer joy of it. In one day, we managed to hit 15 miles, rendering the banana and Nutella crêpes that we had for breakfast null and void. I promise, I'm not just writing this to gloat about my vacation. No, I'm posting this to tell you that taking vacation is great and you really should take one too. A real vacation that is, where regardless of where you go or what you do, you enjoy it. Don't think about work, don'

I'm finding an annoying trend in young adult fiction: A book introduces us to the young female protagonist. She meets a dreamy dude and you are led to believe that the universe aligned in such a way that they were made for each other. Then in the second book, the young female protagonist meets some other dude. Maybe he's a badboy, maybe he's the quiet introvert, maybe he's just a normal dude (this never happens). Girl gets squishy feelings and suddenly she's torn between two hunky love machines (bonus points if she describes herself as plain). It would be easy to point the finger at Twilight, but this trend is older than Jane Austen. What's up with that? Is it too much to think that a young female protagonist can be happy with her contrived soulmate and blissfully ignore every other guy who rips his shirt off in her presence? Am I missing something? Tell me reader, if you're out there, does this appeal to you? Am I just a prude? I admit, I've been in

A few years ago, I tried an experiment. I had written a blog to record my travels in Europe. At the time, I didn't intend to take it any further than that. I just figured it was an easy way to share my pictures and experiences with family and friends because I didn't have a Facebook or Myspace or whatever people were doing back then. But the funny thing was, no one actually ever read it. At least, no one who I had intended to share with bothered to look at it, or if they did, they never told me. When I finished recounting our trip, I started posting pictures of our pets. After that I wrote whatever came to mind, which admittedly, wasn't very interesting. But then one day someone posted a comment AND began following my blog. I wasn't sure what made this one person think I was interesting, but it was enough to make me hatch a plan. I started a second blog. This one was called, Your Blog Is Awesome, and the intention was to find other folks who had interesting things to