Feedback Contest

With only a week left until Feedback comes out I am hosting a contest.  Leave a comment on this blog and enter to win a signed copy of both Feedback and Variant.  (Not open to international shipping.  Sorry).   If you tweet about this post or blog about it you will get an extra entry for a possible total of 3 entries. Just leave a link in your comment to the tweet or blog.  The contest ends October 1st at midnight. 

Reviews of Feedback

“Picking up only moments after the first book ends, this book features the same nonstop, breathless pace, adding new dimension to old characters and  new plot twists that are hard to see coming. The often violent action flows logically from the plot.
“An absorbing read that won’t let fans of the first down.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Reviews of Variant

Named one of Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year 2011

Snakes!

Actually there was only one snake.

My sister Christina and I  took the kids up the canyons to take their pictures with the leaves.  We had fun a lot of the time; groaned for a good deal of the time; and cried a small portion of the time.  Unless you count the inward sobbing that came later and lasted an hour.

These are some of the pictures.  Max wouldn't look at the camera.  So there are hardly any pictures of him that are decent.  

I took a picture in black and white.  Then I realized that duh we came for the autumn colors.

After we spent a lot of time trying to get kids to look and bribing them.  We headed back to the car.  I discovered my keys were missing but never fear I found them a minute later smiling back at me from the inside of the safely locked car.

Yay!

Holly let Christina know this is something I do all the time.  

There was no phone service so I started hiking up the side of the road to see if there was service a little further up.  Fortunately a couple of brothers pulled over to help.  They drove a little out of the canyon and called Rob who was an hour away.  Rob got the extra key and came to our rescue.

While we waited the boys wrestled on a dirt hill for an hour.  Holly moaned.  Christina and I silently contemplated and cried.

Oh and there was a snake that slithered across my foot.  My mostly bare foot (the second time that day that I thought better of my sandals).

Country living

We live in North Ogden now. This is probably not considered country living to anyone who really works and lives on a farm but to me this is the country.

 I grew up in Rose Park, a suburb of Salt Lake City. Rose Park was lovely and I have many great memories of growing up there but it is not considered "the right side" of town. My husband says I come from the hood. We did have a prostitute house across the street for a time. My mom found a beautiful plant growing in her front yard once and nurtured it until a neighbor asked her why she was growing marijuana. There were murders of people that I knew, one just around the corner and another down the street. Inner city living. Not LA but definitely not the country.

Here we have a field with cows right next to our church and there is a trout farm about ten minutes away. This is the country.

 I took my kids to pick peaches in the LDS church orchard (also in my neighborhood). The peaches get trucked to Salt Lake where volunteers can them. Then they are put on shelves in the Bishops storehouse in Salt Lake where people in need can go to get food.

 Who knew that picking peaches would be so grueling. The kids started out excited but soon discovered that there were grasshoppers. There was also dirt that sprinkled down when you picked a peach. There were weeds that attacked and clung to socks and pants. You would think that they had been attacked by snakes those weeds were so hated. The other volunteers would leave a tree as soon as we approached. Probably to escape all the whining. But an hour and a half later my kids and I had filled and emptied our peach sacks several times. We worked hard and survived the great outdoors and we will definitely go back.

We are still city soft.

(These pictures are from the website run by the North Ogden peach orchard.)