-Elle Woods, upon finding out she DID get the internship

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Dear Beloveds,

First thing I want you all to do is to read my blog when you are most comfortable! Maybe you love to wear a sequin dress or your sushi pajamas or your tiara or your reading glasses and granny panties, it’s all good here. You need not have shaved your legs nor put on lipstick nor coiffed beyond a messy mom bun. Although, I am going to sit right here and wait until you have moisturized (and hopefully serumed up) that pretty skin of yours! I must insist, really. How, my gentle readers, are you going to end up Coastal Grandmother if you are looking like a topographical map of the Grand Canyon? And you buy the moisturizer with sunscreen in it! 

After years of using all kinds of fancy things (ie PRICEY) on my very dry and sensitive skin, I stumbled upon CeraVe for dry skin. First, you need to get a soft wash cloth a few times a week in the shower and do a little exfoliating, then use the face wash (the creamy kind, not the bubbly kind), the serum (either the blue bottle one or the purple bottle one) and their AM (with sunscreen in it) and PM moisturizers without scent. All worked miracles for me. Yes, I can buy my skin care routine at Publix now! And I will not be shamed for it! By the way, I am not pushing CeraVe, I don’t have any advertisers and I am not getting kickbacks, just want you to know what helped me as it may help you too! You find what works, my loves, and you stick with it, even if you buy it at Big Lots! 

Now that we are all down for comfort, I want you to know that I want this, and my author website in general, to be the most pink, sparkly, fun, loving, accepting, feel-good, and positive place on the internet to peruse when you grab a glass of champagne and wear your favorite marabou robe to hang out in! That is important to me. You are important to me! 

I grew up in a small town in east Tennessee. I read A LOT. I remember writing stories when I was eight or nine years old (in fact, my parents had kept these in a box for forty years as it turned out. We found them when they moved a couple of years ago). In my early thirties, I wrote rather prolifically but was turned down by agent after agent in New York. In fact, so much that I calculated I could wallpaper my half bath with rejection letters if desired. As I read back on some of those early works, I totally see why! I put my manuscripts in various drawers in filing cabinets in our home. I concentrated on my handsome husband and my beautiful little girl. 

Anyone who is born to do a particular THING, especially artists, knows that ignoring that THING will not make the yearning to do it go away. You can not rid yourself of the creative process. In writing, those untold characters and plots will writhe inside you and burn your soul until released onto paper. I think this is how I woke up one morning with my vampire novella, Always, completely written in my head. This story wrote itself. All I had to do was type it and I could barely keep up as it poured onto the page. 

Then I left it in a drawer for some time since I know nothing of vampires, don’t read about vampires, and had no interest in vampires. One day I was alphabetizing files and I came across the hard copy at the bottom of a drawer. I sat on my office floor and read the entire thing. When I was done, I looked up and said to no one in particular (since no one was there), this doesn’t suck! So I sent it away to an independent publisher looking for novellas. And they sent me a contract. 

I was 51. 

Never, ever stop creating because you just never know.