Next week is my daughter Laurel’s last week of eighth grade, her last week of middle school…which leads me to recall her first week of middle school: We had just moved and knew not a soul at the middle school. Laurel was a little nervous. I was more than a little nervous for her. I… Continue Reading
Category Archives: blog
Livin’ the Dream
If you read my blog regularly, then you know that after precisely fifty-four bazillion rewrites, my second middle grade novel, Lula Bell on Geekdom, Freakdom & the Challenges of Bad Hair, FINALLY found a publishing home – yippeeee! What you probably don’t know is that more than one publishing house offered Lula Bell…a home –… Continue Reading
A Heaping Helping of Thanks
My second middle-grade novel, Lula Bell on Geekdom, Freakdom & the Challenges of Bad Hair, has been sold and will be published by Marshall Cavendish (http://www.marshallcavendish.com/) in 2012! Hallelujah! It’s been a long, uphill climb – sometimes crawl – and although a great many people pushed, pulled, and otherwise helped me up the hill (Hi,… Continue Reading
Kitchen Dancing
This is what we, in the Payne family, call “kitchen dancing”. It happens some nights, after dinner. (Yes, I know: Our neighbors just don’t know how lucky they are that we have invested in window coverings! Please keep this in mind, neighbors, when our grass is a little too long, or we haven’t watered as… Continue Reading
Give ’em some love, y’all.
A call came in from my daughter’s school a couple of weeks ago while my daughter was at school. No, my daughter wasn’t sick. No, she wasn’t in any sort of trouble. No, there was no problem whatsoever. So, basically, I was tricked into answering the phone. After The Phone Incident, I called my husband,… Continue Reading
This is why writers aren’t exactly known for their mental health.
I need to vent, so here I am. This is not what I’m supposed to be doing right now. I’m supposed to be working through my fifth revision of a novel – my fifth! – but I keep getting distracted. I keep thinking, Revise? Or stab myself in the neck with a pen? And I… Continue Reading
I Don’t Do Windows
I don’t do windows. Scary, right? Happy Halloween! (Relax, Mom. This window isn’t actually mine. I took this photo at Waverly Hills Sanitorium — one of the top ten most haunted places in America. And I’d just like to point out that by comparison, all my windows are sparkly clean. Yeah, by comparison, I’m practically… Continue Reading
Remembering Mama Joy
You probably shouldn’t read this. I’m not feeling very fun or funny or even slightly entertaining these days. I’d pretty much decided not to blog, but then I thought my parents – and perhaps a few prison inmates – might worry and wonder what had become of me. (Thank you for your concern, parents and… Continue Reading
Are We Still Doing This?
Today is my daughter’s first day of eighth grade. At this very moment, I’m picturing her sitting in a classroom, writing an essay entitled “What I Did This Summer”. Actually, now I’m picturing kids all over the country, all over the world, bent over their desks, hard at work on their “What I Did This… Continue Reading
Were You at WalMart Last Night?
Were you, by chance, at WalMart last night? Because I was, and it seemed to me that everybody else in the world was there, too. Of course, we were all there for the same reason: to buy school supplies. But since I hate all shopping and put it off as long as possible – until… Continue Reading