The Best Present Ever

Every September, I embark on a grand quest to find a birthday present for my brother John that could win the title of Best Present My Brother Has Ever Gotten. Current record holder (purchased by our mother) has held the title for the last twenty-one years.

It was a box of cereal.

Specifically, it was the sugariest cereal ever sold (or at least that our local grocery store sold). We had a strict no-sugar-as-the-first-ingredient policy in our house, and this gift skyrocketed to the number one spot with ease.

For twenty-one years, no one has beaten the sugar cereal. Until now. (I dare to hope.)

I had dedicated Drink, Slay, Love to John. (Drink, Slay, Love is my latest novel. It's about vampires and were-unicorns.) So for this year, since his actual birthday was the same week as my book birthday, I sent him a signed copy of Drink, Slay, Love, as well as a plush vampire doll that makes slurping sounds when you press it against someone's neck...


... and also a can of unicorn meat that has a dismembered unicorn doll inside.


I am crossing my fingers that this entry FINALLY beats the cereal. But I'm having second thoughts. Perhaps I should have also tossed in a set of Uni-Corn-on-the-Cob holders:


Or a taxidermy unicorn:


Or perhaps an Edward Cullen manllow (half-man, half-pillow -- it watches you while you sleep):


Or maybe what I REALLY should have given him is this:


What's the best birthday gift you've ever gotten/given?

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my birthday. (Well, technically yesterday, since it's after midnight... but I digress...)

I love birthdays. And not just because I can wear a "birthday princess" crown (which I totally put on this morning and then pretended to forget that I was still wearing it for the rest of the day -- "oh, silly me, is this still on?").

And not just because I can eat Carvel ice cream cake. (No birthday is complete without Carvel ice cream cake -- this is actually a tradition to the point of being a superstition with me. I am half convinced that I will not age if I don't eat the cake, which come to think of it may not be such a terrible thing... hmm...)

I love birthdays because it means lots of hugs and kisses and phone calls from the people that I love.

And I won't deny it: birthdays also mean presents. To be clear, it's not that I care about getting stuff. I don't. What I like is the thought behind a clever present. "It's the thought that counts" is not a cliche. Well, yes, it's a total cliche, but it's TRUE.

Awesome Gift #1

It started with a box.

Husband said, "Don't look in the box in the closet."

I didn't.

But I did open the closet door just to see what kind of box I wasn't looking in. (This was totally legit because looking "at" a box is not the same as looking "in" the box, right?) Well, I was looking at a BIG box. Way too big to hold a book. Way too big to be wrapped. He'd cleverly covered it with a bed sheet.

Predictably, this became all I could think about for the last two days, leading to many reenactments of the classic DUNE moment:

"What's in the box?"

"Pain."

I failed to guess what was in the box. Unicorn? No. Dragon? No. Griffin? No. Gryphon-spelled-fancy? No. But as it turns out, I was pretty close. It was a magical present.

This morning (my birthday morning), out came the box. Here's what it held:


And here, after a few hours of assembly that included (oddly enough) a sledgehammer, this is what it transformed into:


My very own wishing well! How perfect is that? For one thing... INTO THE WILD! For another... my husband knows how much I love to make wishes. During our vacation in Disney World, I made a point of visiting the wishing well next to Cinderella's castle just so I could make a few wishes at the well.

Anyway, we placed this wishing well next to our very own Wild (a completely overgrown hill), and I'm planning to plant lots of flowers all around it. Also, I'm planning to make lots of wishes. Already started, in fact.

First wish in the well: 100 unicorns.

Second wish in the well: enough food for 100 unicorns.

Third wish... can't tell you that or it might not come true. (I'm okay with jinxing the unicorn wish. I have no idea where I'd put a herd that size. Things are already crowded enough around here with all the gryphons.)

Awesome Gift #2

Okay, this next gift wasn't a birthday present. It was a thank-you present, but I'm going to tell you about it anyway because it was awesome (and the timing was close enough to pass for a birthday present)...

Last March, I did a virtual school visit to Randall Middle School in Lithia, Florida. It turned out to be one of my all-time favorite visits. When the video conference kicked in, I saw the best sight: 65+ kids all wearing golden crowns and waving magic wands at me.

All the kids had fantastic questions, and the hour flew by so fast that I think I made them late for their next class. I closed out the video conference thinking, "Wow, really cool."

I'd now like to amend that to say, "WOW, REALLY COOL!" Randall Middle School students (led by their fabulous media specialist Darlene Meginnis) deserve all caps. This week, a giant box arrived for me. In it was a T-shirt from their book club, three of my very own magic wands (which I promptly used to turn my husband into a frog -- don't worry; he got better), and a wonderful collage that included the cover art from Into the Wild, a picture of their library, and a poem written by one of the students. On the frame's matte, all the students had added notes in gold ink. I absolutely treasure it.


How awesome is that? So awesome. Thank you to Darlene and the students at RMS! You guys rock!

Best Birthday Present Ever

12:00am: Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear me, happy birthday to me! I am now 33 years old (which is, my husband points out, a third of the way to 99). I think that's a lovely number. It's so symmetrical. And it is the year in which my dream will come true... in a little less than one month, INTO THE WILD hits the shelves! Eeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

12:30am: As my first birthday present, we are going to sleep before 2am. It's been a long, long time since I've gone to sleep before 2am. We always have way more to do (emails to send, chapters to revise, errands to run, work to do, laundry to ignore, etc.) that can fit into a normal waking day. I have never been so busy in my entire life. Never.

8:00am: It's my birthday morning! Yay! My husband gave me one of my book jackets, framed. I cannot begin to describe the awesomeness that is my husband. Check it out:

Gift from Husband

8:30am: Still staring at the framed book jacket.

8:44am: It's soooooo pretty. The silver frame matches the shiny silver stripe.

8:53am: I like shiny.

8:54am to 11:45am: Incessant checking of emails (otherwise known as "my day job").

11:45am: Husband calls to invite me to lunch. I agree to leave home in two minutes. Suddenly have brainstorm for how to fix a fussy paragraph in chapter fourteen of Super Secret Book Two (not its real title). Type out the new paragraph, put on my shoes, check my email again, tell my day job that I'm going out to lunch, fix a sentence in chapter eight, and head out the door.

11:47am: Drive to lunch.

12:00pm: Cheesesteaks are greasy.

12:30pm: 33-year-olds shouldn't eat cheesesteaks.

12:35pm: 33-year-olds REALLY shouldn't eat cheesesteaks.

1:00pm: Swing by super-special comfy shoe store to look for super-special comfy shoes to wear at Book Expo America. (My publisher is sending me to BEA next week -- yay! Since it's my first time at BEA, I've been asking everyone I've met what to expect and how to make the most of it. They all say, "Wear comfortable shoes." And then they get this really serious expression on their face, take a deep breath, and say, "And bring a big bag. No, I mean a BIG bag. There are FREE BOOKS there. Bring a BIG BAG." Anyway, I think I'm going to bring my Class of 2k7 tote bag, but I don't know about the shoes.)

1:07pm: Found the perfect shoes! (This is a rather big deal for me. I am a horrible shoe shopper. I own one pair of sneakers, one pair of boots, one pair of black shoes, and one pair of white shoes that I wore at my wedding nine years ago.)

1:10pm: Discover they don't have my size. Leave in sadness.

1:20pm: Return home. As I'm walking in my front door, the FedEx truck pulls up. He (the FedEx guy, not the truck itself) is holding a book-sized package. It's addressed to me. The return address is Razorbill. MY BOOK IS INSIDE. The very first hardcover copy of INTO THE WILD that I will ever see is inside this package. I know it is. I can feel it. I can practically smell it. I won't try to taste it because that would be weird.

1:21pm: Place package with book on chair. Step away slowly.

1:23pm: Resume checking email. Why haven't any of my MySpace friends wished me a happy birthday? Don't they love me? I thought we had such deep, meaningful relationships. I'm crushed.

1:24pm: I think the package is looking at me... It's whispering, "Open me, open me, open me!" But I won't. I'm waiting for my husband to come home at 6pm. I can wait until 6pm.

It whispers, "Open me!"

1:33pm: Discover site selling the perfect shoes online. Order them. Huzzah! Internet victory!

1:34pm: Is it 6pm yet?

5:16pm: I'm being very, very strong. I hope husband appreciates my self-restraint. Package is still whispering seductively.

5:17pm: Almost 6pm. I can't believe my actual, real, live (okay, maybe not live, but real) book is sitting right over there in that envelope. At least I think it's my book. What if it's not? What if they accidentally sent someone else's book? What if it's someone else's book dressed up as my book?

5:20pm: If I had the sun set in chapter thirteen, shouldn't it be darker in chapter fourteen? Must fix. Also, what's the past tense of "weave"? Is it "wove" or "weaved"? What if something went horribly wrong after copyedits and all punctuation has been changed to question marks? What if every instance of the letter "a" has been changed to letter "e"?

5:58pm: Almost 6pm!!!

6:00pm: I hear the key in the door! Wow, he's punctual.

6:03pm: Open package.

Okay, I thought my morning present was my bestest present ever. But this... this is the bestest of all bestests. (Yes, "bestest" is a perfectly cromulent word.) Look! Just look!

My very first finished copy of INTO THE WILD!

6:10pm: Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's real, it's real, it's really really real!

Love at first sight!

6:23pm: Snoopy Dance of Joy!!!!!

Ooh, and the coolest part: the book itself is PURPLE. How awesome is that. And if you remove the cover... Most people will probably never see this because most people don't remove the covers of books, but if you do... I squealed. I totally squealed. Boots is on the spine! So cool!!! And he and the writing on the spine are a shiny silver. Shiny! Silver! Boots with his boots and spurs!

Secret Kitty!

11:00pm: I reminisce. Last year for my birthday (well, the day before), I got The Call from my agent, the first offer to publish INTO THE WILD. This year for my birthday, I am holding the actual book. Wow.

11:13pm: How will next year's birthday ever measure up? Clearly, if this trend continues, next year I'm getting a unicorn. Better start working on that stable...

11:29pm: Or maybe all my good birthday karma is used up now. Yep, next year I'm getting a zombie. Better start working on that moat...