Website Makeover and VESSEL Excerpt

Happy Fourth of July!  (Or, to those of you outside the US, happy random Wednesday!)  Today, I did all the traditional Fourth of July things:

- Cooked hamburgers and hotdogs.  Except I cooked them on the stove instead of the barbecue grill because a squadron of yellow jackets has colonized the grill, and I chose to grant them their independence.  So sweet of me.  Or cowardly.  But let's go with sweet.

- Watched fireworks.  On TV, because it's so much calmer and simpler that way.  No parking.  No crowds.  No mosquitoes.  And total access to my fridge (which is also, incidentally, a lovely perk of being a writer).  I don't really understand why the Washington DC fireworks are always shown hidden behind a bugle corp.  Makes the fireworks look like one of those cheesy school picture backdrops.  But I adore the Manhattan fireworks with their four barges worth of fireworks in sync to the music.

- Updated my website.  Okay, maybe that's not really traditional in the, um, traditional sense of the word.  But in addition to being the birthday of our nation, it's now about two months until the pub date for my next novel, Vessel, so I gave my website (and the backdrop of this blog) a Vessel-centric makeover.  Click here to check it out!

And while I was Vessel-izing the site, I decided that today marks the official beginning of my personal countdown to Vessel (during which I will get more and more deliriously excited as we get closer to September!!!).

So I posted the first two chapters of Vessel on my site!  Hope you like it!

Here's a taste.....

On the day she was to die, Liyana walked out of her family's tent to see the dawn. She buried her toes in the sand, cold from the night, and she wrapped her father's goatskin cloak tight around her shoulders. She had only moments before everyone would wake.

She fixed her eyes on the east, where the sky was bleached yellow in anticipation. Shadows marked each ridge, rock, and sand dune. Overhead, a few stubborn stars continued to cling to the sky, and a raven, black as a splinter of night, flew into the wind before angling toward the dark peaks of the distant mountains. Liyana felt the wind caress her cheeks and stir her hair. She'd left it loose last night, and she'd counted the strands when she couldn't sleep. The wind stirred the sand at her feet, and it whistled over the dunes and rocks. She listened to it so intensely that every muscle in her body felt taut.

She had wanted to be calm today.

Click here to read through the end of chapter two.

Go ahead.  I'll wait.

*taps feet*

*tries to whistle, but fails*

*hums*

Yay, you're back!  Did you like it?!  Did ya?!?!  Did ya?!?!?!

Website Redesign and DRINK, SLAY, LOVE Excerpt

I revamped my website! (Get it? ReVAMPed. Ah, so many puns, so little time...) Check it out in all its vampirey splendor:

www.sarahbethdurst.com

What do you think???

Also, I am very excited to share with you the first chapter of my upcoming novel DRINK, SLAY, LOVE! You can access it through the Excerpts page of my website, but here's how it starts:

"One hour until dawn," Pearl said. She leaped off the roof and landed catlike on the pavement. "Oodles of time, if we steal a car."

Her boyfriend, Jadrien, stretched out on the roof of Outback Steakhouse. He was a shadow, a lovely shadow, against the green tin. "Come back up, Pearl," he said. "I'll compare your eyes to stars, your lips to rubies, and your breath to industrial-strength air freshener."

"Your charm and sincerity overwhelm me."

Rolling onto his knees, Jadrien clasped his hands to his heart. "Oh, Pearl, jewel of my heart, light in my darkness, grace me with your nearness so I might feast upon your loveliness."

Pearl laughed, even as she admired his silhouette. His silk shirt rippled in the night breeze. "I want to feast on mint chocolate chip. Or maybe Chunky Monkey."

"You can taste the difference?"

"Mint chocolate chip, sharp and clean like an ocean breeze. Black raspberry, rich and smooth as a summer night. Bubble-gum ice cream..." She faked a shudder. "Oh, the horror, the horror."

Click here to continue reading.

Enjoy!!!

Twitter, Facebook, and Winterized Website

Played online all weekend. Very fun.

Started "tweeting." Am rapidly becoming addicted. If you're on Twitter, you can follow me here.

Also created a Facebook page. Yep, I'm pretty much the last person on the planet to do so. If you're on Facebook, I hope you'll drop by and become a "fan."

And I winterized my website (as well as my blog and MySpace) in honor of the new cover art for ICE. Outside, the forsythia is blooming and robins are hopping about in a cliched spring-like manner, but online, the deep freeze begins!

Website, Blog, and MySpace Updates

My husband and I spent this weekend doing home improvements. Not the fix-the-plumbing kind of home improvements. That was last weekend.

Last weekend, a tree turned off our heat.

You wouldn't think this would be possible. But thanks to some twisted Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events, it is. You see, we have this lovely umbrella magnolia tree outside our kitchen. Its roots grew into some piping, which caused our sink to clog, which caused our dishwasher to overflow, which caused water to seep through the floor into the basement and directly onto our boiler, which caused the wiring to short-circuit, which caused our heat to shut off. Really. This actually happened. It sounds funny. It wasn't. (Okay, it was a little funny.)

We plunged. We snaked. We Drano-ed. We called a plumber. The plumber broke the pipe. We called a different plumber. The second plumber performed a sort of sewer colonoscopy in which he sent a tiny camera through the pipe, and then he bored through the tree root...

Anyway, this weekend, our home improvements were to my online home. And I am even more excited about them than I was about boring through tree roots (though, I admit, that did make a cool crunching sound -- updating my website did not, thankfully, involve a crunching sound).

Newsletter Sign-Up

See the new sign-up area over in the blog sidebar? (If you're reading this on LJ or elsewhere, you can click over here to see it.) It's also on the Contact page of my website. We were up until 3am figuring out how to set that doo-hickey up. (Okay, technically, we were up until 1am figuring out how to set it up, then until 2am watching American Idol -- we had to see the guy with the shiny cape and the white-feather hat -- and then until 3am because we both zonked out on the chair.) But armed with a combined 37 years of schooling (not counting kindergarten), a Netscape HTML instruction manual from 1997, and the power of the internets, we were victorious!

And now you can sign up to receive my newsletter!

Not that a newsletter exists yet. But once one does, you could be the proud recipient. That will be very exciting for you, for me, for your neighbor who will hear the songs of joy that you are inspired to sing... Okay, perhaps it won't inspire singing. But I still hope you'll consider signing up for my newsletter. If you don't, then I'm just going to keep signing myself up, and that will just be pathetic.

Happy Newsletter Recipient

Blog Sidebar and Header

Look up! Cover art in the header! And look to the right -- we added Out of the Wild! And cute little award buttons! Yay for cute little buttons!

MySpace

We also updated my MySpace page to include Out of the Wild. And we added a countdown to the Out of the Wild pub date -- June 19, 2008! There were three options for special effects on the countdown: glitter on the edges, glitter overlay, and glitter on the words. I said yes to all of them. I believe the end result is tasteful, understated, and non-obtrusive. After all, you can never have too much glitter.

You can never have too much glitter.

Website

New home page! And a new Excerpts page. And a page with links to all the Obscure Fairy Tales that I've babbled about (thus far) in this blog. I also added a link to Miss Erin and Traci's book trailer for Into the Wild (on the ITW book page), the blurbs for Out of the Wild (on the OOTW book page), and a bunch of other little tweaks.

What do you guys think? Am I missing anything? Are there any other features or info that I should add?

Is it a bad idea to have a tree with Swiss-cheese roots right next to my house?