This One Goes Out to All You Dora Fans: I Did It! I Did It! I Did It! Hooray!

So, you may have noticed it's been a little quiet around here lately. What? You didn't notice? Hm. Well, trust me on this one: it's been quiet. Why, you ask? Because I've been busy writing the suckiest rough draft of a YA novel ever written. But, it's done. It's 200 pages (around 70,000 words) of pure crap, but it's 200 pages! A lot of you believed I could write a YA novel, but I'm not sure I believed it ... until now. Whether or not it's even worthy of evolving into a first draft remains to be seen. Still, I'm proud of myself for getting this story out of my head and onto the computer. I'm also excited to let it sit while I put the rest of my life back together. In a month, I'll read it through and decide what to do with it. For now, though, I'm just going to keep grinning and patting myself on the back.

Or, heck, maybe I'll just let someone else do it for me. You may have missed this comment from michemily but it totally made my day, my month, my year:

Referring to my review of If I Stay by Gayle Forman, she said: After I read this book, I thought, "How did this book make it onto my list? I really don't think that Bloggin' 'bout Books would have suggested it." So I searched for it on my Google Reader and found that it was NPR that suggested it, not you. Thank you for being more insightful about books than NPR.

Take that, Nancy Pearl! (Just kidding, Nancy, you know I love you.) Thanks so much for that, Michemily! I'm still smiling :)

After a fun evening of finishing my rough draft, playing in the park with the kids, and eating Thrifty ice cream at my favorite sub shop, I'm euphoric, but so very tired. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming sometime soon ...

(Apparently, I haven't blogged in so long that I forgot how to do it and published this post before I finished it. Duh.)