Random Wednesday updates. (It is Wednesday, right?)

1.  This is the last day of the March Madness Writing Challenge.  My goal was to write 25 scenes before the end of March.  I made that goal!  I actually wrote 26 scene and did some development work, too.  Thanks,  , for organizing and motivating!

2.  My ARCs are coming!  My ARCs are coming!  I'm only getting two, so I won't be able to share.  But, yes, bound galleys for FREEFALL do exist and I'll be gazing at them in person.  I'll post pics as soon as they arrive.  :-)

3.  I had a dream last night that I fainted while in the freezer aisle at Safeway.  As I was falling to the ground, I had just enough time to wrap my purse strap around my arm a few times so that no one could steal it while I was unconscious.  Ever since my hot pink/turquoise hearts purse containing one, two, and five dollar bills as well as half-dollar and silver-dollar coins was stolen from Chuck E. Cheese when I was around ten, I've had a lot of concern that it will happen again.  Even in my dreams, as you can see.

4.  A few minutes ago, I was staring out the window at clouds.  I saw one that looked JUST LIKE a poodle glancing over its shoulder.  In the fifteen seconds it took for me to grab my camera and take a picture, the wind had already blown its head off its body.  It was very disappointing.   See?

5.  All right.  In reference to #1 here.  The truth is, I'm kind of petrified now that March is over.  I have all these rough scenes and I want to do something amazing with them.  But I tried to open a Word doc to start typing, and had a jolt of panic and could hardly breathe.  I'm going to need to set some very specific April goals to work toward.  The sooner I can write this book, the sooner cool things can happen with it, of course.  It's all up to me here.  I'm doing this.  Yes.

Contest on the blogosphere!

The Book Scout is doing a YA Author/Pets contest.  There are pictures of animals posted as well as a list of YA authors.  Whoever matches the most pets with their YA author will win some really great prizes!

Check it out here.  There are lots of little cuties on there, including one of the animals who lives with me!

TV DUB: Mr. and Mrs. Smith

This is what they said when broadcast on cable TV, but didn't really say at all:

Brad Pitt: Chicken twit!

Angelina Jolie: Pansy!

First pass pages.

I received my first pass pages on Tuesday.  I let Dwayne read the acknowledgments for the first time and I cried a little and he cried a little and then we went out to dinner because what else were we going to do on First Pass Page Day?

For those of you who don't know, the pass pages are unbound, but they show exactly what the printing will look like on the pages of the final book.  I've been reading books for all but the first four years of my life (and even then I was always looking at picture books), but it never occurred to me that so much work went into this.  Books actually have interior designers!   Who knew?

So one really fun thing the designer did for FREEFALL is have the time stamps for the start of each new scene in Seth's handwriting.  (Or, at least, I think it's supposed to be Seth's since it isn't mine!)  See?  See?

Also, the running heads (that's my name and the title, I've learned) are on the sides of the pages as are the page numbers.  Like so:

   

(This doesn't look quite right since I took the pictures at different distances.  But in real life, the text is the same size on both pages and the running heads match up exactly.)

And the best part of all is that it's set up so that the running heads are printed near the top of the page at the beginning, but gradually move down so that when you get to the end of the book, they are near the bottom of the page.  So if you flip the pages quickly from the start to the end (you know, like those little flip books where you can make stick-figure drawings into live-action stick-figure drawings?), you can watch the title as it FALLS DOWN the page! 

My job for this part of the process is to read through everything on the pass pages and look for errors.  (And Pulse will have a proofreader doing the same.)  So it isn't all fun and games here.  But it's still pretty exciting!

AUTHOR EVENTS: Kimberly Derting's launch and Carrie Ryan's signing.

I had a pretty busy day yesterday.  I visited family out of town and spent time with my niece, Ella:

Later in Tacoma, Ella and I had lunch with my husband, sister, mom, and grandma.   Then a few of us headed to Borders for Kimberly Derting's THE BODY FINDER launch party.  She did a short talk and reading, and there was a great turnout!  Mandy Hubbard and Phoebe Kitanidis (author of the forthcoming WHISPER) were there as well. 

Here's Phoebe and me waiting in line to get our books signed:

And here's me with Kimberly:

  

Later, my sister and I headed to Third Place Books where Carrie Ryan had a reading/signing.  This was my first time meeting Carrie.  I'm pretty sure I follow her on Twitter and FB, but I don't think we'd ever communicated directly.  Anyway, we have the same agent, which was my conversation lead in.  Carrie was SO TOTALLY NICE and even gave me a hug and posed for this picture:

I also got to meet book blogger Sarah of Sarah's Random Musings at Carrie's signing.  I don't have photographic evidence, but I think she might!  It was funny because Sarah and I had both been at Kimberly's event earlier in the day but didn't run into each other there because there were so many other people milling around.

After that, I saw my husband's band, Alabaster, play.  They had a great turnout, too!  (No pictures because I was tired of dragging my camera around by then.)

So all in all, a pretty eventful day, yeah?  Yeah!