Helen Scott Taylor’s paranormal, The Magic Knot, is the American Title IV winner, and Dorchester is putting her book out in February 2009! (Wow, did they move fast on that one!)

AND

Kris Kennedy, historical finalist, just received the coveted 2-book offer from Kensington!

Way to go, ladies!

AND bumped to add:

Lavinia Klein (no web site yet, since she anticipates a pseudonym in her future), regency historical finalist, also has the coveted 2-book offer from Avon!

!!!!!!!!!

Come on, people, I got plenty more exclamation points where these came from! Keep the good news coming!

If I were not so indispensable at work (AKA hospitalization and incarceration are the only reasons I can get time off approved because nobody else will do all the crap I do), had a source of childcare, and had spare funds for travel, food, and accommodations… uh, I’d be going to Lollapalooza that weekend.

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Alas, I will be going no further than the interwebs, as my homies intend to torment me keep me posted with blow-by-blow accounts from both San Fran and Chicago.

“Why Lollapalooza instead of RWA?”

Testosterone.

I’ve always been “one of the guys,” and the idea of that many women in one place scares the bejesus out of me. (Please see any report regarding any gathering consisting of greater than 3 women for further information.)

Not necessarily in order of importance:

• Peer pressure. Specifically, I was threatened with bodily harm by someone from whom such threats must be taken seriously if I didn’t enter.
• To get some mileage out my RWA membership. The primary benefit of RWA membership seems to me to be the opportunity to join your local, online, and specialty chapters. I’m not much of a joiner, so that doesn’t do me a lot of good. However, members do get a cheaper GH entry fee and I happened to have a finished manuscript, so I could and did make use of that benefit.
• To see what would happen. What does a randomly selected group of strangers think of my first 50 pages? (Apparently they didn’t unanimously hate it.) If my story finals, will that make any difference in terms of queries? (Yes, “Golden Heart finalist” has proven a magical phrase which I probably should bandy about much more widely.) Something happened I didn’t even consider: I received a good bit of e-mail from some fairly impressive people who didn’t know I existed before March 26 (and certainly don’t remember me now, so I have no delusions about my mad “networking” hookups), and it’s really, really cool to open up your inbox and see congrats from Ms.-OMG-I-love-her-books!!1!!! nestled between the pnile nhansement spam.

I didn’t expect to final, and it’s nice to have done so. That’s all. I didn’t cure cancer. I didn’t bring peace to the Middle East. (And I don’t recall ever behaving as if I had, so that good bit of the other kind of e-mail is totally uncalled for.) I don’t expect the GH to serve as the yellow brick road to certain publication, but there must be some small advantage in bringing my name and my writing to people’s attention in this fashion, so I’m glad I was bullied into entering.

Now, off to write about something completely unrelated to my GH story so all my eggs aren’t getting stale in that basket…

I haven’t talked a whole lot about Wish List because it felt weird to me to tell you more than you ever wanted to know about a story that may never be available for your reading (dis)pleasure, but one of the people who has taken it upon herself to apply a cattle prod to my posterior assures me NOW IS THE TIME to start talking it up.

The beginning seemed the logical place to start, and since there was a specific event that spawned the story, I actually have an answer to that old “Where do you get your ideas?” question.

I was having an outing with some girlfriends, and as often happens when women gather, talk turned to that other gender and the collective dismay they had caused our group over the years. One finicky friend defended her finickiness, stating she simply wanted a man who would give her everything she wanted, whenever she wanted it, no questions and no complaints, and was that so much to ask? Another friend said, “Ah. You don’t want a man. You want a genie.”

There was the idea, and I jumped on it like a starving wolverine. What would it be like to have a man give you everything you want, whenever you want it, no questions and no complaints? I saw all kinds of comedic possibilities arising from poorly worded wishes combined with a deliberately obtuse genie. I cranked out the story. There was a lot of “be careful what you wish for” and a lot of tug-of-war between the heroine and the villainess because “possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

Everybody who read it laughed, but I was becoming increasingly depressed. I felt bad for the genie. The poor guy’s a piece of property. He has no free will. He has no rights. His existence is defined by what his master allows him to be. He has to do any horrible thing he’s commanded to do. That isn’t funny. It’s horrifying!

There’s a good reason there’s not a whole lot of slave comedy. It takes a special kind of insensitivity to laugh at the abuse and exploitation of others.

I scrapped that story, but since I had become emotionally invested in the cast of characters, they were spared from execution. I started over with the backdrop that being a djinn (note the switch from “genie,” which is a much less cool word) is, for the most part, the opposite of fun. They’ve been used and abused and forced to commit atrocities. They’re damaged to the core.

And I’ve taken it upon myself to make it all better for them, starting with Revelan, who—at the tender age of ten—was denied the frailty of emotion after pity interfered with carrying out his master’s command.

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Okay, that’s it for “Where did you get your idea?” Maybe next I’ll talk about how that lovable (in most cases) cast of characters has evolved from their first incarnation, since in most cases the then-and-now resemblance is minimal.

Or maybe not. Requests? Whaddya wanna know?

(The only thing I won’t do is dispense writing advice. The very idea is laughable.)

Behold my celebratory GH Finalist gift basket:

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I needed only a foundation refill, but Sephora is almost as seductive to me as a book or office supply store. Muchas gracias to Leslie Blodgett for expanding the Bare Escentuals skin care line. I have long felt the therapeutic value of my Bare Minerals usage was being undermined by washing and moisturizing with drugstore crap. My skin shall surely be flawless—unblemished, supple, shine-free, and sans pores big enough to park a van in—within a fortnight.

There goes my backup career plan to open a parking garage on my face.

I won’t get to the books until I grind my way through WL revisions, but they are all short-listed, joining Marjorie Liu in the living room rather than being consigned to the TBR shelf in the hall.

Trolls may rob me of my enthusiasm, but they’ll get my Commemorative 2008 Golden Heart® Finalist: Paranormal PSP (Rabid Gamer Friend is making me a custom skin) when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Sephiroth, prepare to be pwned as you have never been pwned before… by Angelic Daughter, because I’m not allowed to have any fun until April 16. But then… then I will be on you like a chocobo on gysahl greens.

The answering machine took the call at 6 p.m., which was fortunate, as I made a complete dork of myself as soon as I heard “Romance Writers of America®.” There was jumping involved, and also squealing and bawling.

I am so not a jumper and squealer and bawler. After nearly six months of fatalism (see my epic poem of doom for details), I guess I just snapped.

Here is the official RWA GH Finalist page to confirm I’m not hallucinating.

Also, the partial in my judging packet that I fiercely wanted to finish reading also finaled (wish I could give it a better rah-rah, but I’m askeert of violating the “thou shalt not speaketh of it” part of the judge’s creed), so it’s been a sweet day all around.

Kerry’s Golden Heart Montage: