~~~Lara Zielin~~~

FAVE LINKEY-POO RIGHT THIS SECOND: The intro for He-Man. I recently saw a Facebook status update where someone was threatening to quote the whole thing because they had it memorized. But now I can’t remember who that was. Which is a bummer. Because probably that person is my hero.

Here’s the thing about the awesome reality show Tabitha’s Salon Takeover: Tabitha is so completely passionate about what she does, that you can’t help but be inspired. I know what you’re thinking. It’s reality television, Lara, how good can it be? Well let me tell you — it’s better than chocolate. Okay, that’s not true. But it’s still really, really good.

On a recent episode,  Tabitha said that at the end of the day, she can’t walk because she gives so much of herself to her clients. Some people might think, meh, all she does is hair. But her business is hugely successful (she has a three-month waiting list at her salon!) and shouldn’t we all get worn out, at least a little, by the things we’re passionate about?

I love how Tabitah chooses to live her life and run her business. She’s inspired me to give so much of myself to my books that I can’t walk at the end of the day.

But not so much that I can’t still apply lipgloss.

FAVE LINKEY-POO RIGHT THIS SECOND: A failed book banning from Wisconsin. And it’s not even anything crazy — just Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Despite the cheese, my home state can really make me mad sometimes. But thank goodness this story has a happy ending.

So, remember how I said all us writer folk need each other? Well, to underscore that just a bit more, I’d like to announce the wonderful, fabulous and hilarious Rhonda Stapleton will be road tripping to Ohio (glamorous Ohio!) with me in March for a writers’ retreat.

Because sometimes, when your creative juices aren’t flowing, all it takes is getting in the same room with a like-minded writer and daring the muses to come find you both. But the best part about this trip? I mean, obviously it’s being with Rhonda, but other than that is the fact the place where we’re staying … has its own railroad.

Its own railroad!!! Look!

I even asked them if the train would be up and running when we went there and they said yes. OMG, OMG, OMG. So. Excited.

In May, I am also going on a writers’ retreat with my awesome writer-lady friend Ellen Baker. We do more of a subdued Northwoods thing in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. But man, are we productive.

So whether you have trains or woods, the point is to partner with people who can help you through the creative process. Writers rock! And we all need each other so we can rock harder. So our books can go to 11, as it were.

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.

FAVE LINKEY-POO RIGHT THIS SECOND: My friend Brandon called this the Fish Death Star. I think that’s pretty much spot on.

So, when I was in Chicago with the other 2009 debutante writers (see pics below), one person in the audience asked us what we listened to when we wrote. I sort of scuffled my feet back and forth and let other writers answer first. Because my playlist? Is ridiculously simple. I usually listen to one or two songs on repeat for the duration of an entire draft. With DONUT DAYS, it was the Killers “When You Were Young.”

Right now, I’m obsessed with Coldplay’s “Life in Technicolor ii.”

But get this: When the other writers started answering, I realized it’s not just me! Shadowed Summer author Saundra Mitchell confessed she’d listened to a single song almost 200 times during the course of a draft.

Birds of a feather, I guess.

So, what’s your preference? To have a diverse playlist at your disposal, or to pick one or two songs and put them on repeat while you exercise your creative muscles?

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!

It’s not too late to pick up books by all the fab authors who were in Chicago this weekend for the Debs Holidaze Tour! Here are some pics of the fun we had in the Windy City, and a list of all the books by the women I was honored to be with on Saturday:

Cynthea Liu, PARIS PAN TAKES THE DARE and THE GREAT CALL OF CHINA

Saundra Mitchell, SHADOWED SUMMER

Aprilynne Pike, WINGS

Kristina Springer, THE ESPRESSOLOGIST

Darcy Vance and Charity Tahmaseb, THE GEEK GIRLS GUIDE TO CHEERLEADING

Look! All our covers!

Here we are at Borders in Bolingbrook.

Thanks, Borders, for carrying my book! For five seconds.

Here we are signing our books. Aren’t we all so adorable?

Our next stop was the Book Cellar.

Kristina and I are enamored of signing!

FAVE LINKEY-POO RIGHT THIS SECOND: This kitteh sure is surprised. And cute.

My friend Dan started up a website called Litsnack, the goal of which is to provide short works fiction and poetry to people living busy lives who, as Dan says, might not have time for War and Peace. But they might have time for 500 words.

I submitted a story to the site and Dan graciously accepted it. Short fiction is not my strong suit, but I welcome you to read the story, titled Penmanship, and see what you think. It won’t take long and, as the tagline to Litsnack says, “easy in, easy out, no one gets hurt.”

FAVE LINKEY-POO RIGHT THIS SECOND: For those of us sick to death of Twilight, the Harvard Lampoon has given us Nightlight, an awesome parody. I’m not sure it can match Secrets of the Sparkle (what can?), but I’m willing to give it a try.

This month is National Novel Writing Month (affectionately known as NaNoWriMo) and somehow I neglected to realize this at the beginning of November.

Every year, NaNoWriMo inspires writers to pen a 175-word novel (50,000 words) by November 30. And I’m kicking myself that I wasn’t on top of things enough to participate.

See, I’m the kind of writer who sits down at the computer in fits and starts. Some writers write every day. Me, not so much. I’ll go weeks without penning anything, then I’ll write for days on end. Then stop. It works to a degree, but an event like NaNoWriMo encourages day-to-day consistency. It’s something a person like me can really benefit from.

I’m definitely going to do it next year. And for all you writers out there who want to write a novel but are afraid to start, here’s a little encouragement straight from the NaNoWriMo website: By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

I think that sounds flat-out awesome. Who’s with me next year??

FAVE LINKEY-POO RIGHT THIS SECOND: In the spirit of Halloween, this clip makes a classic film, The Sound of Music, seem like a horror film. Creative and creepy! Thanks once again, S.E.!

While I was recently finishing up a round of edits to PROMGATE, I was thinking about the things that inspire me when I don’t feel like I’m at my creative best. One of the best things I have in my arsenal is the tiara pictured below, a gift from my wonderful friend Colleen who knows that a.) I love to sparkle and b.) tiaras with book titles on them rule. I don’t know if you guys can read the lettering on the crown, but it actually says PROMGATE on it. When I feel like I’m stuck on a chapter or section, I don this beauty and, hey, even if the words don’t pour forth right away, at least I feel fabulous and look like I can conquer the world.

Are you a writer or creative type with a piece of flair that inspires you? If so, let’s hear about it!

FAVE LINKEY-POO RIGHT THIS SECOND: Awesome author Rhonda Stapleton tweeted about this romance review yesterday and, oh lawdy, I almost peed my pants reading it.

I am just about doing the electric slide of happiness because people out there in the world are reading DONUT DAYS and super, duper digging it! Here are some of the shiny, happy reviews that have already come in:

Jamie at Totally The Bomb called DONUT DAYS “…one of those stories that I sat down to read, and didn’t get up until it was finished. I love those sorts of books!”

The reviewer at SereneHours loved DONUT DAYS combination of humor and heft. “I adored Donut Days so much. It’s a story that exudes both cuteness and profundity. If you’re on a reading crisis this will for sure be your cure. It got me hooked at first words and I just couldn’t help reading on and on.”

Kate at Read This Book was surprised by the many references to God, but she didn’t let that stop her. “Lara Zielin has crafted a story with characters so full of life and with unique voices. Her debut novel will appeal to the young adult crowd as well as adults looking for something with a little of everything. Donut Days is a truly memorable and engaging read.”

And Sharon, who Loves Books and Cats, thought the book was both hunger-inducing and entertaining. “DONUT DAYS is a very compelling and thought provoking book. With interwoven themes of religion and friendship, DONUT DAYS is so much more than a book about a girl who likes to eat donuts.”