I asked my mother this week if she wanted to write a guest blog post for me, mostly because I didn't feel like writing one. Her response was "Gaah!*"
My mother doesn't feel she can write spur-of-the-moment, witty blog posts. A retired science teacher, she actually has nightmares about substitute teaching for English writing classes**. So instead, I decided to write a post on what I think my mother would say if so inclined. Here goes:

Dear Reader,

Thank you for reading my daughter's weekly blog posts. While I have always known that she is brilliant and funny, it's nice to know that the rest of you have caught on to that fact as well. Personally, I think she should focus more on humor and less on writing horror, but I also know that she's actually getting paid to write horror, so that's okay, too. 

I want you to know that she had a perfectly normal childhood. Where she gets these ideas to kill people off and turn them into zombies, I have no idea. She did once throw a tap shoe at her sister when she was about six; let me assure you that she was properly punished and grounded for a week with no TV privileges after this incident. What inspired her to throw that tap shoe in the first place is a mystery. She must get those aberrant tendencies from her father's side of the family.

Stacey has always been the cut-up in the family. I remember one time how she made a loud burping noise in church, right when the priest was saying the holy blessing for communion. Oh, how she and her sister laughed! They were both grounded for a week after that little incident. Also, I stopped letting her watch Carol Burnett & Friends after that, in case that's where she got the idea that burps were funny. Boy, that Carol Burnett sure is a card. I love those old re-runs when she and Harvey Korman would struggle to keep a straight face during the skits! Now that I think of it, I don't recall any excessive burping on the show. Again, I'll blame Stacey's father's side of the family for that kind of juvenile humor.

As she got older, I'm happy to say that Stacey's sense of humor became more developed and sophisticated. She graduated from jokes about bodily noises to jokes about her teachers, classmates, and friends. While she was often right on the money and showed a natural gift for mimicry, it did result in both a lack of close friends and the occasional detention. I can't even blame her father for this. Who wants to be friends with someone who makes fun of you? That's when I put her in therapy. Oh, how she'd have us roaring at the dinner table when she would imitate her psychiatrist. A true card, that's my daughter.

Now that she's grown up, she is less inclined to pick on others and more likely to write about things like dieting, hairballs, and gardening. I find her to be insightful, funny, and charming ... as should you. She often has me laughing so hard I have tears running down my face. Finally, she's developed a sense of inspired witticism and natural wisdom ... clearly inherited from my side of the family. 

So thank you again for reading my daughter's blog faithfully every week. Should you decide to stop, please let me know. I will then hunt you down and slap you with a tap shoe.

Sincerely,

Stacey's Mom

*Actual sound effect Mom made.
**Totally true. She told me this today. Of course, after today, she may never confide in me again.

Thursday night, Jason and I went to spend the evening with Stephen King at the Bushnell in Hartford. My expectations for this event were a little different from what really happened. For instance, when I got the notification that King was coming to the Bushnell, I mistakenly thought I was the only person who got it, and that it would just be me, Jason, Stephen, and his wife Tabitha (I like to call her "Tabby") hanging out and visiting. Imagine my surprise when about 6000 other people were there, too! So much for one-on-one conversation.
I was not daunted, however. Even though King was on stage participating in a Q & A with Colin McEnroe (not, to my disappointment, John McEnroe -- I've really got to stop skimming these emails from the Bushnell when I get them) I felt certain King would notice me. Probably he'd recognize me from the pictures on my website. I have hundreds of readers who visit my blog every week; I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that one of them is Stephen King. We had really good seats, and I was able to stand up and wave "yoo-hoo" four or five times before the usher threatened to kick me out, so I'm certain he saw me. Sitting back down under threat of eviction, I waited. Now it would come: King would tell all the people in the auditorium who I was, how funny my blog is, and how he's admired my writing ever since he read my short story "Private Beach" in the Epitaphs anthology. (I'd mailed him seventeen copies of it when it came out, so he ought to have read it by now. Particularly since the guy who wrote the introduction referred to "Private Beach" as "a direct, blatant rip-off of Stephen King's 'The Raft'. Mr. King's lawyers should be verrrrry interested in this book.") I waited. King continued to talk about his youth, growing up in a Republican household. What the heck was going on?
Time to pull out the big guns. I stood up again and held up a giant poster of myself with King's son, Joe Hill. (I met him three years ago -- the picture is located on the photos page of my website. Hill looks so completely enamored and gaga over me in the photo that it's a little embarrassing.) 
"Hello, Mr. King? Could you please talk a little about how if your son had his way, I'd be your daughter-in-law? Helloooo?"
Finally, he acknowledged me. Specifically, he signaled to security to have me removed immediately. I figured he wanted to spirit me off to a secure location so we could chat about writing without interruption.
Unfortunately, the police were too good at their job, and hid me too well. They secured me in a urine-soaked cell in downtown Hartford with the words "eat me" written in feces on the wall. Much to my shock, it was not Stephen King, but my husband Jason who finally arrived to bail me out.
"I'm not letting you out in public anymore," Jason muttered. I can empathize. He's probably embarrassed by all of the attention I get from fans and fellow writers.
Next week: my evening with Judge Joe Brown, when he hears the state's case against me on stalking charges.

I am a Facebook lurker. I don't comment much, and I schedule my own posts a week in advance in case I forget to log on to the site for a week. I just don't enjoy Facebook much. Sure, it's a great source if you want to find out who died on any particular day, but besides being my personal online obituary resource, I find it mostly annoying. It's because of these people:

Usually, I go a little nuts planting the vegetable garden. We till up half the lawn and plant potatoes, corn, watermelon, gourds, cucumbers, onions, peppers, cauliflower, broccoli, tomatoes, zucchini, pumpkins, yellow squash, carrots, and radishes. Every year, our garden yields two gourds and forty thousand zucchini. I hate zucchini. But it grows, so I plant it.
This year, due to not having as much time and not feeling particularly ambitious, I decided to do a lazy garden. We tilled up a square patch of dirt next to the shed. I found some old green bean seeds from three years ago, so I dug a couple of holes and dropped them in. My mother had some potatoes that had grown eyes long enough for the potato to get up and crawl away on, so I cut those up and dumped them in, too. Our neighbor gave us some wilted pepper plants, so I made room for those. To finish it up, I took a cucumber that I'd purchased in April and promptly forgot about in the vegetable crisper, and gave it a proper burial in the yard. Voila! My vegetable garden was ready to go.
The idea of weeding didn't really appeal to me, so I found some old black plastic garbage bags and staked them to the ground. After a week, I finally remembered to cut some holes in the plastic to let the seeds grow through. I haven't bothered to weed since, and Mother Nature has been kind enough to dump a bunch of rain over the past month, so I haven't had to water, either.
I'm feeling a little smug and self-satisfied, I must admit. This has turned out to be the easiest garden I've ever planted! Nothing's come up yet, so I haven't had to chase any rabbits or woodchucks out of the yard. The bugs have left the black plastic alone (with the exception of the earwigs, who apparently find it the perfect breeding ground) and the birds haven't bothered the seeds. Occasionally I like to take a bowl of ice cream and sit outside within eyesight of the garden, which is my way of tending to it. This is the best gardening experience I've ever had!
Next week, I'll be discussing the exorbitant price of produce at the grocery store. Why have I never noticed how expensive green peppers are in summers past? It's a puzzler!