Been running around all day trying to get my booth at Seaside Sisters all spiffed up for our 2nd annual SAVANNAH BREEZE weekend at Tybee. Well, it’s spiffed, but I didn’t get everything done that I’d hoped to. Oh well, the party trolley picks me up in fifteen minutes for the Margarita Meet n’ Greet–so I guess it’s as ready as it’s going to get. I hope to have a picture of the booth—Maisy’s Daisy–to post tomorrow. Supposed to rain cats n’ dawgs tomorrow, but hopefully that won’t dampen our party mood. More later!

The weatherfolk were predicting a “wintry mix”–aka sleety slush for Atlanta when I set out early afternoon for Savannah. When I got to Macon, I figured the weather stuff was for real, becuz, besides the nasty rain, I was following four DOT sand-trucks. But I made it down here by dusk, which was my plan. I’m staying at another of the wonderful Mermaid Cottages. This one is called Cheney Cottage, and it’s new to me, altho it was built in 1936. As always, this one is adorable. Nothing fancy, but bright, beachy colors, comfy beds, scrupulously clean and cheerful. And wireless access! The older I get, the more I realize what a creature of habit I’ve become. After I unloaded my suitcase, I made a beeline to the Tybee Market. There I bought what I always buy for a winter stay at Tybee. Spaghetti fixings, a big bottle of cheap chardonnay, Diet Coke, cereal, milk and bananas. The weather is perfect for writing. I can hear the rain beating against the windows, hear the wind whipping around, even the ocean–which is only four houses away here. Inside I am toasty and warm. After my nap–after all–a girl needs a nap after a four-hour-drive–I did what I always did when I stay in a new rental. I skipped around, opening all the cupboards and drawers, assessing the owner’s taste in kitchen gear, dishes, and most importantly, reading materials. Since this house is a rental I didn’t expect much in the way of personal effects. Still, I always get a thrill when the owners leave out a family picture, or some well-loved books. The books were kind of a let-down, heavy on the James Patterson and Catherine Coulter. Ah well, their house is very cute. The dishes are plain white melamine. But plenty of wine glasses, which is always a plus. I always hate drinking my cheap wine out of equally cheap plastic tumblers. And they had a stash of green Jadeite coffee mugs–major score! I’ll have my tea from one in the morning. Right now, I’m going to go wash up my dinner dish, pour another glass of wine, and prop myself up in bed with my laptop. Writing like this–alone, with the weather raging outside, is pure bliss!

Here we are–the Scribblers–posing in the library at the Weymouth Center for the Arts.
Getting away for a week to write is amazingly helpful–but coming home and catching up with all the daily stuff you ignored while you were hiding out and writing is not such fun. About the writing. I hit my goals–producing a detailed, thought-out synopsis of THE FIXER UPPER, and writing 50 kick-ass pages to get the book off to a good start. Dempsey Killebrew, my protagonist, is now a fully-formed person in my head. I know what she looks like, what she likes and dislikes. I know her parents–wait ’til you meet her mother, Lynda, who lives in L.A. and makes jewelry out of bits and pieces of the stuff she picks up off the side of the road–like broken taillights and beer can pop-tops. With the help of my writer buddies, Alex, Bren, Diane, Katy, Margaret and Sarah, I figured out what the town of Guthrie, GA. looks like. This is a huge, huge accomplishment. We are ramping up the promotion of DEEP DISH, which comes out Feb. 26, and I am going to be incredibly busy with that for the next couple months, so I really needed to have a good handle on THE FIXER UPPER. Which I do now. Tomorrow I’m off for Tybee Island, for our second annual Savannah Breeze Weekend. In the meantime, I’ve got to get together all the goodies I’m taking to Tybee to re-stock my antique booth at Seaside Sisters. In between writing stints at Weymouth Center for the Arts, I did manage to do a little junking, so I’ve got all kinds of cool stuff for Maisy’s Daisy. It’s hard to find good stuff in the winter, because this isn’t really estate sale season, and that’s usually where I find my best stock, but, after all, when the going gets junky, the junky get going.

I’m here at Panera Bread in Aberdeen, piggybacking on their free wi-fi. Ain’t technology grand? Yesterday was a very good writing day. A good day in general.
I made my 10-page quota for THE FIXER-UPPER. With all of us in attendance, we settled into our writing routine. Generally, some of us gather in the kitchen in the morning for coffee and breakfast, then we break up and go off to our corners to write. Lunch is potluck–out of the groceries we brought. We all worked more in the afternoon, and then about 7 we broke for dinner. I’d brought the black bean soup and salad stuff, and we had good crusty rolls–and wine. You can’t have a writer’s retreat without wine! Also M&Ms–plain and peanut. After dinner, we gathered in the lounge at Weymouth. It’s a very evocative space, houses the NC Literary Hall of Fame, so as we sat there sipping our wine, we had Thomas Wolfe and Louis Rubin Jr. and tons of poets and novelists gazing down at us. The best thing about the retreat is the chance to bounce ideas and questions off other published writers who understand this awful business of writing a book. We took turns talking about our work in progress, and brainstormed where needed. I came away with lots of questions answered about THE FIXER UPPER. With the hard work out of the way by 10 pm, some of the girls wandered off to bed, while the others of us stayed up to play Balderdash, a word game like Dictionary that I’d never played before. We had a blast, trying to fake each other out with definitions for words none of us had ever heard before. It was great letting our creative minds come out to play with words instead of work. This morning, I polished the synopsis some more, and now I’ve just emailed it to my editor and agent to see what they think. Now it’s back to work–I’ve got to get started on my day’s quota of pages.

I am on a six-day writer’s retreat with my writer pals from North Carolina, whose ranks include Margaret Maron, Sarah Shaber, Diane Chamberlain and Alex Sokoloff. We’re staying at the Weymouth Center for the Arts in the beautiful town of Southern Pines. Right now I’m sorta playing hookey, because we don’t really have internet access at the mansion that houses Weymouth. I’m working away at THE FIXER UPPER, but a girl’s gotta check her email, right? And blog, right? Anyway, I’m only four pages away from today’s ten-page quota, so I feel justified.
One of the wonderful things in this world of ours is a library. I wanted to print out the pages I’d written so far, so I went in search of a library where I could do that, so here I am at the teensy library in Aberdeen. It is an old block building, probably from around the turn of the century. But they have books and heat and internet, so it’s all good. And as I turn my head to the right, I see they even have my books–including HISSY FIT, LITTLE BITTY LIES, and SAVANNAH BLUES. So Aberdeen, NC rocks.
I drove up to Raleigh Tuesday and spent the night with my friend Beth, and we gossiped and drank wine and had a splendid time. And she let me shop in her antique shop in her basement, which is not the only reason I love Beth, but it is an incentive, you know?
Wednesday I visited my hair-dresser Roi, bought groceries at Harris-Teeter, then set off for Southern Pines and Weymouth. Of course, I had to stop in Cameron, which is on the way. Cameron is another wonderful teensy NC town–which basically consists of a bait shop and a bunch of antique shops. I scored lots of goodies at Cameron Antiques, many of which I’ll put in my booth at Maisy’s Daisy down at Tybee next week. There’s a great ’50s oil painting of a fishing boat, and a pair of radically retro ’50s lamps, and some other smalls. Next weekend is our second annual SAVANNAH BREEZE weekend at Tybee, so I want to have the booth all stocked up and full of goodies. One new thing I’ll have are Breeze Inn T-shirts. More about those later. Time to get back to work. I’m on a FIXER-UPPER roll, and I don’t want to lose my momentum.

Some of you have asked to see more pix. Ok. You know who you are. You just want more cute Weezie pix. Or pix of the house. That’s fine. I’m not against decorator porn or puppy porn. So here you go. The top picture is of the master bathroom. I’ve been collecting shells for several years now, a collection that started when my younger sister Patti brought me back some amazing seashells from Belize. That prompted me to decorate our master bath with the shells. The middle two pix are of Weezie, who gets feistier by the day. And the feistier she gets, the more disapproving Wyatt gets. He reminds me of Arthur Treacher–frowning in deep disapproval at a puppy version of Paris Hilton. Only, Weezie is not nearly as slutty. Or stooopid. In one of these photos, she’s pausing from her attack on my bedroom slipper. My theory is that because my slippers are white and fluffy, kinda like her, she thinks they are her brothers–she had about four in her litter, and she is rough-housing with them. But that would disprove my theory about her intelligence. Hmm. The bottom photo is of my office, decked out for Christmas with the blue aluminum trees I found at an estate sale this summer for 15 bucks. Ok. That’s all the porn for now.

Now that winter’s finally upon us, I’ve been struck with a frenzy of soup and stew making. Like my mother, I hate to waste left-overs, and soups and stews are so good for this. Last week, I made chicken tortilla soup using the frozen chicken stock I’d saved after making chicken salad for a bridesmaid’s luncheon in December. I just picked a recipe at random from Epicurious.com, and it turned out great. The nice thing about the Epicurious recipes is that you can read other cooks’ comments about what did or didn’t work with a recipe. Another night I made chili, using half ground chuck and half ground venison from Boomerang Boy’s deer-hunting efforts. Tonight’s efforts were the best of all, I thought. Black bean soup. Mmmm. I was trying to use up a lot of holiday left-overs, and I had this humongous ham-bone from Honey-Baked Ham. Did you know you can go to one of their stores and buy a ham-bone for five bucks? And it has tons of ham still on it, since they spiral cut their hams. Literally, enough for a week’s worth of sandwiches off one “ham-bone.” I started out using a recipe from Paula Deen’s cookbook, but then I switched it around so much, Paula would probably never recognize it. So here’s a rough description, but remember, soup-making isn’t so much a science as it is an art.

Coarsely chop 1 onion, 1 cup baby carrots, 2 stalks of celery, 2 cloves of garlic.
Saute these in approx. 3 Tbsp. olive oil in a thick-bottomed soup pot, until veggies are softened. Throw in your left-over ham, ham-bone, or any other random pork type products you have taking up room in the fridge. Rinse and drain 3 cans black beans, and add to pot. Yes, I know you could buy dried beans and soak overnight, but I never think that far ahead. I added two cartons of chicken broth, and brought it to a boil, then covered and turned the heat down and let it simmer for a couple hours. At that point I added a can of Ro-Tel tomatoes with chiles and lime and cilantro, and let it simmer another hour. Then I took my immersion blender and let it puree all the beans and veggies and ham bits. The soup was still a bit thin, so I let it simmer for another 45 minutes, and it reached a perfect consistency. Serve hot, with dollops of sour cream and chopped green onions. I usually put out some sherry which you can add to the soup at the last minute too, but tonight we had a big crowd, and anyway, the soup was perfect without it. We had a wonderful salad of chopped romaine, pink grapefruit sections, red onions and avocado with a vinaigrette dressing. Oh yes, and I used up the last of the left-over dinner rolls from New Year’s Day by making a bread pudding with bits of apple and dried cranberries. Not too shabby if I do say so myself.

Some random resolutions–besides the perennial one to lose weight and get organized.

1. Make the printed New York Times bestseller list with the publication of DEEP DISH. To do this, I need all my precious readers to scamper out and buy DEEP DISH the very nano-second it’s published–on Feb. 26. They only print the top 15 best-selling books, so that’s what we’re aiming for, folks. Also, the way the list works, it’s really based more on velocity than volume–so we need a lot of books sold in a very short amount of time. That’s where you all come in.

2. Hire an office assistant and get my taxes and paperwork un-snarled.

3. Keep my website constantly updated, with new pix and fascinating content.

4. Ditto for this blog.

5. Walk more, veg less.

6. Learn to use Microsoft Publisher so I can do more nifty things on my computer.

7. Be nicer.

8. Write a kick-ass new book, THE FIXER-UPPER, and hand it in on deadline.

9. Get family photographs in one place, so Katie can make me photo albums–which is what I asked for for my birthday, Christmas, anniversary.

10. Read more, especially the books chosen by my book club.

It really is a low-down dirty trick to lure readers to your blog with adorable puppy pix. That said, I’m not above it. Weezie, unlike myself, is extremely photogenic. Plus, while she’s awake, she pretty much takes constant adult supervision. Even as I type this, she’s managed to unravel the rattan binding on my office lounge chair, chew the edge of the oriental rug, and confiscate the blue fur Christmas stocking I got at a book club meeting. And we won’t go into her regrettable bathroom faux pax(s?). So here are some shots from the last few days: Weezie and Wyatt sharing a chair, Weezie peeking out the French doors to my office, and a random shot of the house fixed up for the Christmas home tour. Notice the shower curtain fashioned from an old chenille bedspread–by my very own not-so-nimble fingers. Also the tree in the bathtub. Boomerang Boy was not amused. “Why is there a friggin’ tree in the friggin’ tub?” he asked. When told it was whimsical, he could only shake his head. He doesn’t really get middle-aged whimsy. So. The Christmas is all packed away and the tree has already been carted off. My sister-in-law Jeanne and I got a little nutty while watching MIRACLE ON 34th STREET the night after Christmas, and we ended up throwing all the dried-out holiday greenery into the fire. What a merry little time we had. Now we’re preparing for our New Year’s Day open house, where we serve my fabulous grits n’ greens casserole to around a hunnerd or so folks who drop in for the roast oysters and collard greens and black-eyed peas, not to mention the big-ass ham. After the holidays I intend to stay in bed for one full day. Really. I wish the same for all of you. A day in bed where you’re not sick. Just lazy.

In light of the fact that I have totally lost my mind, I decided to add to the insanity that passes for my life by adding a puppy to the household mix. So.
Please meet Weezie. She is an eight-week-old English setter. Mr.Mary Kay has been talking off and on for some time now about getting an auxiliary dog to supplement the head dog around here, which would be Wyatt. And because Mr. Mary Kay truly is a man who has everything–as I constantly remind him–I was stumped about what to do for Christmas this year. I mean, beyond the standard sweater, fishing stuff and golf shirts. In my quest for an even more complicated life, I called the friend who’d given us Wyatt and asked his advice. One phone call later, I was looking at the website of the kennel where Wyatt’s mother had come from. I thought, for about a hot minute, about surprising Mr. Mary Kay with a puppy on Christmas morning. Thankfully, that thought passed. A puppy, after all, is not quite like a shirt that doesn’t fit, or a set of golf clubs that doesn’t pass muster. So I inquired about whether a puppy would make a nice Christmas gift. Next thing I know, we are loaded up in the Yukon–with Wyatt in one crate, and the guest crate beside it, and headed for Biscoe, North Carolina. A six hour drive. Wyatt must have sensed the gathering storm, because he was uncharacteristically fussy for the first half of the drive. When we got to the kennel, he jumped out of the Yukon, took one look at all the dogs and puppies, and decided to take a dip in the duck pond. We browsed puppies. We looked at bitty puppies, bigger puppies, and mid-sized puppies. We debated color. Wyatt is actually a Llewellen setter, and his coloration is called lemon. We’d thought about branching out to a black and white or even a tri-color. We’d agreed that we might like a girl this time around. But all the tri-color and black and whites were boys. And there was this little lemon gal who kept flirting with my husband. And so it was done. I cradled Weezie in my lap for the six-hour drive home. Wyatt snoozed in his crate. Back at the ranch,the two of them sized each other up. Weezie seemed intrigued, Wyatt seemed indifferent. We think he views her as an attractive nuisance so far. As we’d done with Wyatt when we got him as a puppy, we girded our loins and put Weezie in her crate, on the towel we’d carried her home in, and went to bed. Weezie was not a happy camper. She whined, she whimpered, she wailed. We tried to turn a deaf ear. She persisted. At 3:30 a.m. I tiptoed downstairs, took her from the kennel and settled on the living room sofa with her stretched out on my chest like a colicky infant. She settled down again, and 40 minutes later was asleep. I put her back in the kennel. You know the rest. There was not much heavenly peace around here last night. But on the bright side, she really is adorable, inquisitive, funny. So far we’ve made all the potty breaks outside. And she’s asleep at my feet in my office. I think it must be cocktail time. Oh yes, here’s one more picture–Boomerang Boy, Wyatt and Weezie.