Wicked Lovely Day

Today I'm sick. I got approximately 1 hour of sleep last night, because my baby is also sick. Croupy, camp out with a snuggy all night on her bedroom floor to make sure she keeps breathing kind of sick. Uh to the Guh. So I am trudging around in a yucky exhausted haze, coughing, rasping like a chain smoker, hating that today was supposed to be a writing day, and it has turned out to be a delirious every-part-of-my-body-hurts day.

But hark, what news from yonder email breaks? It is my editor, and through my yucky haze I am able to glean two pieces of ASTOUNDING NEWS that makes me feel super awake in a flash.

Piece #1: They have moved the release date of Hallowed up by one week! So the new date is: January 17, 2012!  Yay! Y'all can get your Tucker-grabby hands on the book one whole week earlier!

Piece #2: MELISSA MARR has blurbed my book! Seriously, I need a pinch. For a better understanding of the utmost respect I have for this woman, see here, where a year ago I got so tongue-tied in MM's presence at the Smart Chicks tour that I totally forgot to get a picture with her. I was like, "ummmmmm, hi, I'm Cindy, please sign my. . .um, copy of Ink Exchange, I really liked it, I really like you, um. . .thank you so much, ummmmm," and that was it.

Those of you who know me well know that tongue-tied is not something that happens to me all that often. She is Just. That. Cool.

Squee!!!

(later)

(much, much later)

Wow. Note to self: don't squee with laryngitis. It hurts.

I having such a surreal moment, guys, seriously. I'm flashing back to my first days of writing Unearthly, when I said to myself, "I need to read more YA, right now!" and dashed off to the bookstore where I spotted this:

on the shelf, and I thought. Well, yeah, I gotta read that. And that night I was totally freaking over whether Aislinn would become the Summer Queen or if something terrible would happen to her. It was a magical story. I fell in love with reading all over again, reading that.

So, yeah. She rocks. I am so humbled that she would have even read Hallowed, let alone liked it enough to blurb it. I am so humbled, period.

What do you know? :) It turned out to be a wicked lovely day.