What a lovely surprise--I got my first piece of "fan mail" today! It was actually from someone I know slightly, an old high school & college friend of my husband's who now lives in another state and saw my essay in Welcome Home (she must've gotten her copy before I got mine!). Anyway, that was a fun piece of mail.

I also got a certificate in the mail saying my "Mom's Chair" essay--the one that recently sold to Chocolate for Women--had won First Honorable Mention in the short nonfiction category of the San Gabriel Writers' League writing contest. The category is quite broad, so it's good to get any notice at all! I was rather nervous to read my judging sheets for the other pieces I'd entered, but they were pretty good overall. I cringed that someone had tried to edit my rhyming manuscript--messing up the rhythm that I know scanned well--so that actually made me feel better about not placing in that category! I was also pleased that a judge wrote on my YA chapter that it was a "bright spot" in their stack of manuscripts!

I was pleasantly surprised today to get 5 copies of the April issue of Welcome Home in the mail, featuring my humor essay, "By Any Other Name." I hadn't known when it would be published. The funny thing is that they published it along with a photo of two young boys who are about the same ages as my sons...and the older one has glasses, just like my older son, but of course they aren't my sons & it'll probably confuse the relatives! :-) They did change a couple of sentences slightly in ways that sound awkward to me, but oh well...it's mostly just as I wrote it, and it's always great to see something I wrote in print!

I got a frustrating rejection today on an adult fiction story... I'm quite sick today & barely managed to change out of my pajamas at 3:15 to trudge out to the mailbox, & seeing my SASE in there didn't make me feel much better! ;-) The rejection said, "too short for us," which bugged me because they say they take stories of 2,000+ words, and this one was 1,993 words, which to me is approximately 2,000 words. True, I wasn't really thinking about word count when I mailed it, or else I would have fleshed it out a bit first--this was a second sub to the magazine after my first was returned with a request that I send more, and I just sent the best story I had ready--but if I'd added 7 or 10 or 25 words before sending it, would that really have made a difference? It probably wouldn't even take up more room in the magazine if I had. (In truth, I had just cut a few hundred words from it earlier to get it short enough to enter in a contest, though I don't think I kept the wordier draft!) Oh well, whatever. Now back to resting! Being sick is no fun, especially when you have preschoolers underfoot!

I finally filed my taxes yesterday, over a month after starting them, because I was debating whether or not to call my writing a business. I eventually decided to take the plunge, which hopefully won't send up too many red flags!

I also finished two of my book projects this week and got a contract for a third. Ha...I doubt I even have to say "April Fool" for you to see through that one! I only wish any of that were true!