Gold Rush!

I am having a very shiny, golden birthday week. The lovely Trish Milburn phoned me at work this morning with the amazing news that I'm a Golden Heart finalist for best unpublished manuscript in the YA category. (Ahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!)

If you followed this post on my postal debacle, you'll understand how much this means to me. Without my dad backing me up, my entry might not have made it to the RWA office in time, so to be among the finalists after all that drama is surreal.

Congratulations to my fellow finalists in the YA field: Amanda Brice, Elizabeth C. Langston, Addison Fox and Shoshana Dawn Brown. I'm told we're all in for a golden ride until the awards ceremony in July. I'll be saving all my gold coins so I can make it to Washington, DC.

I'm also soooo happy that my good friends Christine Wells (Historical) and Tina Ferraro (YA) have finalled in the RITA Award for published authors. Both of these mega talents so deserve to be recognised.

What's your good news for the week?

Renovate or Detonate

Mr Authorness and I currently renovating our lovely 19th-century terrace house. Like many houses of this vintage, the ground level has a lean-to addition, built generations ago to accommodate a large family. We're systematically ripping this eyesore down. I can't wait to attack the old bathroom with a sledgehammer. It's tiled in five shades of brown, and we suspect the caramel-coloured bathtub was installed directly over a dirt floor back in the '70s. To me, it's the worst bathroom in the developed world. But I shouldn't complain, because the cliche really is true--there's always someone worse off than you: