Here’s my favorite excerpt (it was tough to pick just one excerpt. I really just wanted to copy/paste the whole darn thing):

Mitchell never stoops to justifying criminal actions, but she does remind the reader that people who commit horrific crimes are still people. I suppose it’s a case of “there but for the grace of God…,” and in my opinion it’s a good reminder. (After all, dehumanizing people is never the correct response to violent crime from those people.)

Head on over to read the whole review for yourself. It’s humbling and exhilarating and I love it so much I want to wallpaper my house with it!

(This review was part of a book tour organized by TLC Book Tours, an outstanding organization every author should use.)

My favorite quote from her review:

“Typically, books involving espionage and terrorism are just not my thing, but this book really captured me from the start.  I think these types of books hit a little close to home, and make readers think about all the hidden terrorist cells around the world; it is a little scary.  But this book is well written.  I particularly enjoyed the character of Azzam.  I liked that the “good guy” is a Muslim born in Iraq.  It makes the reader really think about how there are good people as well as bad people in all religions and ethnicities.”

Her whole review is great, and well worth a read!

Yay me!

How did I do it? Personal training (Thanks, Fitness Together!) and eating less. I counted my calories using a nifty phone app, exercised more in six months than in the preceding 27 years of my life, and listened to my personal trainers. If they told me to do something, you could consider something done.

Then, alas, I broke a bone in my foot, wore a boot for two months, got pregnant, had a complicated pregnancy (that it was complicated because the boot threw my spine and hips out of alignment I wouldn’t find out until too late), had a c-section, and then tragically tore the meniscus in my knee when I tried to go back to the gym four months after my daughter was born.

Sad me.

Now that my daughter is weaned, I’m ready to try to make lightning strike again. The good folks at Fitness Together (in Issaquah, if you’re interested) are taking me on again to teach me how to exercise with my bum knee, I’ve got a new calorie counting app on my phone, and I’m ready to recognize myself again.

You know that feeling where you think you look okay in the mirror but then you see yourself in a picture and you’re aghast? I’m tired of that feeling.

This time, there are Zumba classes at the personal training studio. I’ve never done Zumba but it sounds like a blast! Get ready Issaquah, it’s about to get a whole lot flailier in your city on Monday nights…

Wish me luck, won’t you? Losing baby weight is hard work. It’s a thousand decisions not to dive into a bag of chocolate chips whenever your kids are driving you crazy and throwing out the remains of their luscious  grilled cheese sandwiches rather than eating them. It’s repealing the lies you’ve told yourself, such as, “I was good at lunch today so I can have a big dinner AND dessert” or “I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that chocolate chip pancakes will make me live longer.”

As of this morning I’m 235 pounds and can’t really climb a staircase without feeling winded. Here’s hoping that by next Christmas I’ll be out of the 200′s and able to keep up whenever my son decides to sprint across the park.

For those writers (like me) who cut their writing teeth via blogging, this poses a problem. Basically, we’re told that our natural writing style, in which we are proficient and comfortable, will all but scream THIS PERSON DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING to anyone who reads it.

Having written books in both third person and first person, and read successful NYT bestselling books in both styles, I’ve decided it doesn’t really matter. Maybe some people will always think first person is lame, but whatever. Someone will always find something wrong with your writing, and that’s a bummer for them because they’re dismissing so many wonderful books out of hand just because they use “I” instead of “he” or “she.”

I think it really depends on the story you’re telling. When I wrote Blood Money, I told it in third person because I was writing it from multiple perspectives and my main character, Azzam, was always a bit of a mystery to me. He’s a closed book, so to speak, and I felt like writing him from the outside looking in was the most natural way to write him.

My most recent draft, Bai Tide, however, is written from first person because I’m in Bai’s head. I know him really well, so I felt comfortable letting him run the whole show.

I guess this all goes to show you that adverbs, first person point of view, prologues, epilogues, and starting books with dialogue (these are all considered No No’s for the most part) be darned. You either tell the story you have to tell, in the way that seems most natural to you, or you falter with awkwardness because you’re trying to write like a cat walking on its hind legs.

That’s not to say that you can’t ever try to grow as a writer and try new things. That would be terrible advice. What I’m trying to say is, write what makes you happy. Fix it later if you must. Trust that if the story and storytelling are strong enough, your readers will enjoy just about anything you can think up.

Even, yes, first person.

Then, it won me over. Bit by bit, the characters wriggled into my brain and now I’m really enjoying myself.

One fly in the ointment though: I am now terrified of the inevitable teenage daughter years.

Oh my gosh. OH MY GOSH. The sass, the rolled eyes, the defiance. Just thinking about it makes me want to wrap myself in a soft blanket and hide from my own child.

For now, though, she’s sweet and cuddly and smells like baby, so I’ll dwell in intentional denial and pretend she’ll never be mean to me when she grows up.

While we’re at it, I’ll pretend Aidan will never date a girl who doesn’t like me, I won’t ever get wrinkles, and someone will announce a new diet any day now that’ll allow me to lose vast sums of weight subsisting on chocolate and wine alone.

Mmmmmm, denial tastes goooooood.

Surprisingly, I was okay with it. I mean, you know, it would have been great if people had shown up, but I figured no one would. I mean, no one knows who I am. My book just came out a few months ago and few people have read it. It is entirely realistic that no one will come to meet me yet.

There was one person who came to the event, though; a good friend of mine I took out for drinks afterward. She does wildlife photography and is well familiar with the travails of the obscure artist.

Anyway, we sat in the sunshine and enjoyed some wine and it ended up being a lovely evening. Just goes to show you that a good friend can turn almost anything into something positive.

Alas. Not a genius. It’s May now, and that means I actually have to do one of those author events tonight.

To say I’m nervous is an understatement.

When you’re a new author, you have to resign yourself to the fact that no one knows who you are. No one is going to pre-order your book, you will not have lines out the door at your book signings, and if you manage to sell enough books to cover the cost of your advertising and overhead, you should call it a day and pat yourself on the back.

You will not be Stephen King. You will not buy a fancy Manhattan penthouse with your advances. You are obscure. So obscure, in fact, that the hipsters don’t even know who you are yet.

This means that, unless you have a lot of really longsuffering friends and family, your book events might be a tad…lonely.

I’ve acknowledged this. I’ve prepared myself for it.

Still, I’d be lying if I said that the prospect of sitting in a library by myself on Monday night didn’t bum me out.

Oh, well. This is me paying my dues. I’ll chin up, maybe bring some Bailey’s in a flask, and have a good evening. If I have to, I’ll just play Scrabble on my iPad all night. That, and maybe indulge in a little Tobias Funke-style crying in the shower afterward.

Just like that.

All silliness and pessimism aside, I’m really looking forward to it. If even one person shows up and wants to talk about my book, I’m gonna call that a success. If there’s one thing I can talk about forever, it’s writing.

So, if you care to hang out with me and you’re in the Eastside area of Washington tonight, please come to my Meet the Author thing. I’d love to see you there. I’ll be at the Issaquah Library at 7 PM tonight.

Wish me luck :)

Now my blood pressure is going up. Someone grab a paper bag.

You might be wondering why I put myself in that position, knowing in advance how I felt about it. The reason is, I hoped it would be helpful for the girls I was speaking to. My testimony (fancy Christian term for ‘the circumstances surrounding your journey to Christ’) involves lots of issues that people that age are either going through or have friends who are going through, and it was my hope that sharing my story would bring them hope.

It went spectacularly well. There were quite a few people praying for me and, according to the group leaders I spoke with afterward, my story touched a chord with the people it needed to.

As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time thinking about my story in the week leading up to Saturday. It got me thinking about the term “Born Again Christian.”

I’d always thought this term sounded fuzzy and nice, but now that I think about it for a moment I realize it’s anything but. Birth is difficult for everybody. As a mother who’s been fortunate enough to give birth to two children, I can attest to this. It was tough both times. But not just for me.

If you do any research into birth at all, you’ll find that babies have a lot of work to do when they’re born. Taking that first breath, figuring out how to operate in a world that is the polar opposite of everything they’ve ever known. Poor buggers are tired after just a few minutes of that.

I realized it’s kind of the same when you accept Christ, especially if you’ve spent a good portion of your life not believing. There’s nothing fuzzy about it. Up is down, left is right. It’s hard work.

So that was my big revelation this weekend. I think it’s funny that the talk I gave was supposed to be for the benefit of the girls and instead I’m the one who walked away with a new realization. Oops.

Wes, bless his heart, knows and loves this about me. He knew it before we had kids, and he really knows it now as I keep taking on more and more projects that keep me busy and slightly stressed out and sometimes make it hard for me to sleep at night.

It’s possible I’d be a better mother if I didn’t have so much going on. I don’t write when the kids are awake, but I have been known to be preoccupied if I’m puzzling through a predicament or more annoyed than usual if I’m interrupted when the kids are supposed to be napping but, for whatever reason, aren’t.

Then again, if I ignored this drive to write write write and focused all this ambition instead on my kids, I doubt very much whether that would be a good thing either. I’m not sure my kids deserve the brunt of my ambition before they’ve even had a chance to develop their own.

I asked Wes the other night if he regretted encouraging me to quit my job so I could pursue writing. Writing is an expensive hobby, and I’d probably be a little easier to live with if I wasn’t constantly tackling bigger, more complex projects.

He looked surprised and replied that no, he didn’t regret it. “You’re a writer,” he said. “That’s what you are. I could never regret encouraging you to be who you are.”

And that, ladies and gentleman, is what love looks like.

He’d say, “Relax.”

And I’d be like, “That sounds great! So what does that look like?”

He’d usually give me a confused look and say, “Like relaxing. Doing nothing. Taking it easy. You know, relaxing.”

At which point we’d both realize we were in no way speaking the same language.

The reason I bring this up is that I’m supposed to be relaxing right now. I finished the first draft of my next novel a couple weeks ago, an accomplishment brought about by much stress and hard work. It was two months of harrowing suspense and the whole point of the next few weeks was supposed to be me taking it easy and bringing my blood pressure down a few points.

But you know what happens when I relax? I get bored. And then I eat. All the things.

Lucky for me, a friend of mine who has spent the past six years battling cancer in the most heroic way I’ve ever seen asked for help putting a book together the other day. He’s been blogging for eleven years and wants to put his posts together into a book that will tell his story. He asked for some help on Facebook yesterday and before you can say, “But hey, aren’t you supposed to be taking a break?” I volunteered to help.

Insert obligatory “Friends” joke here.

He did me the very great honor of letting me help him, so that’s what I’ll be working on for the next few weeks. I’ve never put an anthology together before, but this will be a labor of love and I can’t wait to dig in.

This is a biiiiiig project though. We’re talking 1,900 pages of content that I’ll be sifting through, organizing, and putting together in such a way that tells his story as best it can.

Wish me luck!