"Anti-Stalking Services" Now Available

Ha!  I am cracking up.  My dear friend Pam e-mailed me that she had posted a review of Lessons In Stalking on Amazon, so I went to check it out.  The reivew is charming--thank you, Pam.  But I had to laugh at what else popped up.  Under the "Customers Interested In This Title May Also be Interested In..." heading, Amazon has listed "Free Hunting Gear" and "Anti-Stalking Services - Services offered from the UK's leading authority in stalking cases." 

How quickly I fell from "cat author" to "potential menance to society."

Anyway, you can check out Pam's nice review of my book here. 

And just to demonstrate the complete uselessness of numbers, check this out.  It's my book's rating copied off Amazon.  Somehow I moved in 1 day from being over the million mark (the higher the number, the worse the score) to book number 137,016 today.  All that with only 2 books sold off Amazon.  Maybe all those anti-stalking people in the UK are checking out my site.

Amazon.com Sales Rank:

Today: #137,016 in Books
Yesterday: #1,014,564 in Books

Decorating Diaries - The "Before" Bathroom Pics

My evenings for the next week will more than likely be spent scraping wallpaper glue from our master bathroom walls.  For those who've been following along, we are finally--after 10 years--letting go of the blue nightmare and gutting the bathroom.

The problem (one of the many) is that the wallpaper has been up there for about 30 years and is resisting removal.  We can tear the front layer off, but then must wet the walls down and scrape the glue, one inch at a time. 

We've also run into trouble with the floor.  The people we wanted to install our heated floor can't order in the tile that we want.  Since they can't order the tile, they won't do the tile work.  If they're not doing the tile work, they recommend they not be the ones to do the heated floor. 

My contractor hasn't worked with anyone who has installed heated floors so a new search must begin.  I've put a call into our cabinet woman--since she designs bathrooms I'm hoping she'll have a name for us.

Meanwhile, the scraping continues.

Here are a few more "before" shots of the bathroom: How sad it will be to lose the lovely baby blue toilet, shower, and carpet.  (What were the people before us who installed these things thinking?  It was the 70's, so maybe it was the drugs talking...)

CWA Awards

Just opened my mail and found out 2 of the stories that appear in Lessons In Stalking have been awarded "Certificates Of Excellence" by the International Cat Writers Association (CWA) through their 2005 Communications Contest/Humor Division.  The stories are "Yoga Cat" and "Morning Revelry."  This puts both stories in line (and competing against one another) to win the CWA Muse Medallion. The Muse Medallion is the highest honor awarded by CWA.  I'll learn in November, at our annual conference, if I've won or not.  But I'm extremely pleased to have been awarded the Certificates of Excellence.  There were 3 judges in my category and each story had to average at least a rating of 90 to win.

Lessons In Stalking: Now in Borders

I met with the GM of the Greensboro Borders store today.  She couldn't have been nicer.  They took 5 of my books and, assuming those sell, will order more as needed.  More importantly, having the books in this store will enter me in their system.  So if someone in another state orders my book, they can see that one store already carries it.

The GM did say that the "trick" to being successful in their stores is to have people come in and order the book through the store. They pay attention when they keep getting requests for the same book time and again.  So even though I lose 40% of the top by having my book bought in the store vs. through my website, that's what I'm going to encourage people to do.  I'd rather have the book out and about at bookstores than make an extra $4.

I'll call Barnes & Nobles this week and see if I can get a meeting with their GM as well.

One Fun Thing

Here's a fun tidbit for the day.  My meeting with the GM took place in the Borders Cafe.  The GM was momentarily called away to handle an employee crisis, and some business men at the table next to me motioned to the copies of my book on the table and asked if I'd wrote it.  When I said yes, another man sitting at a different table perked up and said he would like to buy a copy.  So I sold a copy of the book and the two business men took a stack of my bookmarks and said they had places where they could hand them out.  Selling the book on the spot like that really made my day (Thanks, Reginald!).

I sent e-mails out to friends/family yesterday, letting everyone know the book was here.  One of the people I sent the e-mail to is the "class coordinator" for my high school, and she forwarded the e-mail to everyone in my graduating class that she had e-mail addresses for.  I've been getting a few e-mails here and there from people I haven't seen or heard from in 17 years.  (AACK!  17 years.  No way am I that old!)  I love hearing from them.  I've even heard from a few people that I really had little to no connection with, but they just wrote to say they thought it was great about the book.

People are wonderful.  I am so lucky to have crossed paths with so many exceptional people in my life.