~~~Lara Zielin~~~

I am so completely floored and overwhelmed by the awesome outpouring of Bluggie love on the interwebs. Thanks to all who RT’d the link and posted comments on larawrites.com. I’m sorry there could only be two winners — one for the Bluggie and one for the badass needles — but that’s how we roll living the Snug Life.

I am so happy to announce that Robin is the winner of the personalized Bluggie (it is going to be awesome, let me tell you!) and @LadyHawkins is the winner of the badass needles!

Robin, please promise me you will take a picture once you get your personalized Bluggie. I can’t wait to see you in it. Please allow two weeks for construction. This bedazzling could take a while, you know?

Thanks again for all who helped make Bluggie so popular last week. You guys rule!

Did you get a Snuggie for Christmas? Are you a white girl? Do you love YA novels?

Then check out Bluggie: the blanket with sleeves … with bling!

FAVE LINKEY-POO RIGHT THIS SECOND: A kitteh on a Roomba makes for much funny. But add a friendly pit bull into the mix plus a Ludacris song, and you get this hilarious scene. (Also, I’ll say this is the first time I’ve seen a kitteh and a Ludacris song paired harmoniously. Or, actually, ever.)

So. 2009 happened.

Apart from Amos eating our advent calendar, it was pretty freaking awesome.

I’m looking ahead to 2010 and thinking about what goals I’ll set for myself. This helpful blog post from Colleen put goal-setting and resolutions into an awesome perspective, and I recommend it for anyone who’s saying “I want to do X in 2010.”

Well, I want to do X in 2010. And how do I personally solve for X? In a few ways, of which I’ll share two:

1.) I want to compete in a duathlon, a run-bike-run race. It’s sort of like a triathlon without the swimming part. There is one in Sylvania, Ohio, on August 8, which is a 5k run, a 40k bike, and then a 10k run. Now that I spin and run regularly at the greatest gym of all time, Ypsi Studio, I want to keep it up and train for what would be the most challenging physical activity I’ve ever engaged in.

2.) I want to write more regularly, with the goal of completing two novels this year. Well, two and a half if you count the edits I have to do on PROMGATE. As some followers of this blog know, I write in fits and starts. I’ll go weeks without penning anything, then I’ll sit down and pound out 20,000 words. I’d like to be a bit more balanced in the time I take for writing.

Now that I’ve made mine public I suppose I’m super accountable to what I’ve posted. Which is cool by me. I think.

So … anyone else feel like sharing their 2010 resolutions? I promise, you can just share: we won’t hold you to them. Much.

We have a winner! Er, actually two winners from the Starlight & Superfish video contest!

Congratulations Cathy, you won a signed copy of DONUT DAYS!

And Kristen, you’ve won a $10 Dunkin’ Donuts gift card!

Thanks, everyone, for commenting and playing!  Hooray for awesome movies and awesome movie promo videos!

I am very fortunate to share a home and a heart and a life with one of the most creative forces on the planet: my hubby, Rob [cue *awwwww* sound].

He has a new film, Starlight & Superfish, which is on submission to a number of film festivals as we speak. (Exciting, right?). There is also a way cute, fun short music number they created to help promote the film. It’s funny! It’s quick! It’s awesome!

AND IF YOU WATCH IT, YOU CAN WIN A FREE, SIGNED COPY OF DONUT DAYS OR A $10 DUNKIN’ DONUTS GIFT CARD ZOMG I’M NOT EVEN KIDDING RIGHT NOW!!1!

I will be giving away one book and one gift card just for watching the video. You know you want them.

So here’s how you get them.

1.) Watch the video (embedded below for your convenience!).

2.) Leave a comment on this page so I know you watched it, and please tell me how many views the video had when you watched it.

3.)  Please also leave a comment on the YouTube site if you feel like it, and/or become a fan of Starlight & Superfish on Facebook.

That’s it! Three easy steps to fabulous prizes. The contest will be open through midnight on December 19th, winner announced on the 20th.

Happy video watching, and good luck!!

This past weekend at a book event in Chicago, I made the joke that I’d gained 20 pounds writing DONUT DAYS because I called eating pastries “research.” Which, okay, that’s only partly true: I have gained 20 pounds, but it’s not from donuts; it’s more likely from cheese.

These days, I’m losing some of my excess by waking up early three days a week and spinning my butt off. It’s a good thing, and on the recent Chicago tour I felt good. I liked how I looked in the event pictures—generally.

But this past summer, I was neither spinning nor feeling fabulous, and I still had to go on a book tour.

Where I was slated to see people from high school. And college.

And multiple photos were going to be taken.

Um, that’s pretty much my definition of hell.

Before the trip, I cried a lot. I was petrified. I was so worried that these high school women would chatter among themselves and say, “Oh, man, can you believe how fat Lara’s gotten?” My grade-school nickname would come back with a vengeance: Lara Tubbalarda.**

(** It’s totally okay to laugh. It’s pretty dang funny. )

Dude, if you’ve never struggled with your weight, you’re probably scratching your head right now and thinking I sound pretty insecure. Which, I probably am that to a degree. But if you’ve ever had to organize your closet into various sizes to accommodate your fluctuations—or hell, just had a hard time buttoning your pants—I’m going to guess that you’re empathizing with what I’m saying, at least a little.

Gaining weight sucks. The thing is, in my mind, it was one thing to gain weight and live my quiet life and not really see anyone. But a public book tour where I was going to see people from my past (who had last seen me at my 10-year high school reunion, where I was probably at my skinniest ever) was brutal.

Did I mention I cried?

Okay, but here’s the thing. The book tour was really awesome. And the women from high school and college were just lovely. I highly, highly doubt they snarked about my excess behind my back. Why? Because they were focused on the fact that I’d written a book. That was published. That I was on tour. That it was good to see each other after so long.

Sure, maybe they saw I’d gotten a bit bigger, but they didn’t focus on it. Because there was so much other good stuff to focus on.

They saw the things about me that I couldn’t even see at the time: that on my tour, I was more than the sum of my scale numbers.

In all honesty, I still cringe when I look at some of those book tour pictures. But I’m working on focusing on how much was totally awesome about that tour—how I reconnected with so many people, how I met so many new people, how I was able to sign and sell so many books.

A while ago, I read about an author who didn’t want to get her author photo taken until she’d shed a few pounds. She kept postponing it and postponing it until finally her publisher was like, we need this now or your book goes to press without an image.

At the time I thought, that’s so sad. Here this author was, with a published book (at the time I read that story, I didn’t have an agent or a book under my belt and would have given my left arm for either) and yet she was plagued by her weight.

Well. Sad it may have been but my recent book tour showed me I have more in common with that author than I’d realized.

My goal moving forward is this: to continue to focus on my successes and not my weight; to focus on my talent, which doesn’t wane just because my weight waxes; to focus on writing as much and as well as I can because it keeps opening door after door of opportunity.

A book tour is still a book tour, after all.

And that’s worth celebrating, no matter what the scale says.

This is me and author Charity Tahmaseb at the Red Balloon bookstore in Minneapolis this past summer. Um, yeah, not my fave picture, but I still count the tour a great success.

Here I am this past weekend in Chicago. Thanks to spinning, I feel like I look lot a lot better (and I flat-out feel a lot better!) though I’m trying not to let the scale dictate my emotions.

Here’s a full-body shot. Not that different from this past summer, but I’ve shed a lot of mental weight too!

I hide my weakness well. I’m functional. I have a loving husband. A beautiful home. Fabulous hair and makeup if I do say so myself. But I confess I have a fountain pop addiction. It bubbles up inside me almost constantly.

It started off innocently enough. My husband and I would get Big Gulps at 7-Eleven and giggle at the sheer volume of beverage in our hands. We’d carry our plastic cups past the Funyons and Bud Light, tickled that we could have this much fun with something that made us pee almost constantly.

Right away I wanted another. Then another. I’d sneak back to 7-Eleven, watch the brown syrup foam out of the dispenser next to the crystal carbonation and I’d think, this is it. I don’t need anything else. That sweet, sweet Aspartame would hit my throat and I’d close my eyes and know what chemical heaven tasted like.

Soon, I was asking my husband to run out and get Big Gulps for me at all hours, day or night. I started craving them at work. I’d lose focus in meetings. The end of the fiscal Big Gulp? You need your carbonated beverage collated?

At work, I started wandering out over my lunch hour in search of the biggest super-sized drink I could find, and I’d come back to my office in a carbonated stupor. It wasn’t a Big Gulp, but it did the job. Crack is whack, but you still use it if you gots to.

I tried to wean myself by drinking diet soda from a can, but it was like swigging mountain- goat gin. I don’t even know what mountain-goat gin is, but I swear to god that’s what it was like.

This month, instead of buying the book for book club, I bought a fountain drink. I sucked on it at Borders while I sat in their cafe and read the book I was supposed to have bought. I sucked on my pop teat until the straw made noises and the manager came over and asked me to please buy a coffee or something from the cafe if I was going to sit there and read their books for free and not pay for them, this wasn’t a library after all. I just looked at him. I couldn’t afford a coffee. I had spent all my money on fountain pop.

7-Eleven used to take only cash, but they recently had a credit card machine installed. There is no minimum amount required for purchase. That means that when my husband opens this month’s MasterCard statement, he will see 196 instances of $2.33. All from 7-Eleven. Oh, and there’s one for $4.67 because one time I really wanted a jumbo sized Tootsie Roll to go with my soda.

My teeth hurt.

Please don’t judge me. I can’t help what I am. I am no monster. I’m just someone who is choosing to spend their free time and money with their best friend who happens to be carbonated. And delicious.

I can’t type for much longer. The tunnel vision is setting in, and my hands are startinggg to sshake. I nnnneed the next fiix. I hope I fiind it soon.

**  Names and places have been changed to protect the identity of people who may or may not have a problem with pop. This is a work of fiction. Mostly.

FAVE LINKEY-POO RIGHT THIS SECOND: Okay, this one is really good. Who’s the first person you call when you get locked up in jail? Why Jesus Christ, of course. As in Jesus Christ bail bonds.

As I noted on Facebook, I will be dressing up as a writer this Halloween. A writer wearing jammies, eating cheese, and probably drinking wine.

My friend and colleague Matthew has little people in his house that he can dress up. Here are his two sons, who stopped by my office today. It’s so cute it hurts. But good hurt.

The best costume I heard about this year was a woman who said she was going to dress as a pirate, then put speakers on her body and an antenna on her head. She was pirate radio. Pretty brilliant, I gotta say. What are some awesome costumes you’ve heard about or seen?

Okay, so these were just too good not to share. And both come from Minnesota.

The first is a picture my friend Val put on her Facebook wall showing a Duluth, Minnesota Hardees sign. Can I just say — this is simultaneously brilliant and ridiculous.

And the second thing is this article my friend Karl sent about a man who drove his motorized La-Z-Boy chair home … drunk.

I love the Land of 10,000 Lakes right now. Yes, I do.

FAVE LINKEY-POO RIGHT THIS SECOND: My office is awesome but, seriously, I want to work here and sing Backstreet with hipster colleague friends.

A friend and I were chatting the other day about the right level of scary we crave in a movie. You see, we’re both cowards a little bit, but we both still really love to be scared. We agreed that Signs was a good scary/suspense movie that was freaky-deaky, but didn’t keep sleep at bay for days. Another was Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp (mmmmm…Johnny). I love that you don’t find out if the horseman is real or not until about halfway into the movie. Anything more than that — liiiike, The Exorcist, Saw, or Friday the 13th — is a little to much for me. And by much I mean I cry I’m so, so scared.

But even so, right now there are two Scareville temptations out there that are calling my name, but which might make me sleep with the nightlight on for days afterwards. One is the Paranormal Activity movie that everyone is talking about. The other is this creeptastic alien flick called The Fourth Kind. Here’s a trailer of the latter if you’re interested in seeing it but, I warn you, it’s crazy scary.

What is your threshold for scary? Are you a scare addict or is Monsters vs Aliens as far as you’ll go?