Posts for category ‘NFL’

• In the Once Was Lost department, many thanks to BookBrowse.com for naming it Editor’s Choice, to VOYA for saying “Zarr’s fans will not be disappointed by this beautifully crafted novel about a teen coping with a loss of faith,” and (I don’t think I’ve linked to this yet – if I have, forgive me, oh merciful Internet!) Forever Young Adult’s great review, including this, “when it comes to the mysteries of the teenage heart, zarr knows how to create the Real Deal: the sweet awkwardness, the angst of uncertainty, the shimmering highs and the crushing lows.” Awwwyeah. Crushing lows, baby! You can’t have the shimmering highs without ‘em.

• How about them Saints? I thought it was a pretty great game, as Super Bowls go. Of course the best part of the S-Bowl is that it’s an excuse to re-arrange the furniture for maximum TV viewage, have people over, and eat the kind of crap food one normally denies oneself, such as kettle chips with classic onion dip. A veritable bomb of salt and fat. Until next February, my sweet!

• Over the weekend I read Richard Yates’ The Easter Parade. While I’ve always admired Yates’ prose and Revolutionary Road is a favorite (if you’ve only seen the movie, read the book!), it was pretty bleak (as is RR but this felt more so). Characters trying to transition from post-WWII times to pre-Vietnam, going from cocktail to cocktail and lover to lover, children neglected hither and yon…basically it’s Mad Men without the laughs. Okay, a couple of laughs, but it really could have used an in-office John Deere mishap. It was a fast read, about the same length as your average YA. For Sara the Slow, that is a plus. But now I want to read something happy. I’ve been peeking at G.’s library copy of Douglas Coupland’s Generation A, which looks promising if not happy.

I have my tickets to see The Happening on opening day. Will it be good? With M. Night, it’s a crap shoot. But let me tell you what’s not a crap shoot: Zooey Deschanel will be awesome, and more importantly, will have fantastic hair. I have major ZD hair envy. So much so that…well…I cut my own bangs today. I can’t instantly grow my hair to ZD’s length, but I can get the bang effect going and then wait oh-so-patiently while my hair grows, except at some point—soon—I know I’m not going to be able to stand to feel it on my neck and that will be that. For now, though, a girl can dream.

Along with letting my hair grow for like the next four years, I just need to lose 30 more pounds, bleach the ’stache, and procure an airbrush, then I’m pretty much there. Having an amazing singing voice and being 9 years younger would also help.

You know, it’s not that hard to cut your own bangs. The hard part is to stop cutting them at the right moment.

I hope I don’t forget to wake up at 5:30 tomorrow to take my friend to the airport for her flight to a very important medical project in Africa. That would be bad. Maybe by blogging about it I will for sure remember. After that, I’m taking the DVR back to Comcast so that we’re not paying for the 8 weeks we’re gone. But that means six whole days without cable between tomorrow and when we leave. ::nailbiting:: And when we get back? Perhaps DirecTV. Perhaps DirecTV with the NFL Sunday ticket. (Oh yeah, now you wanna be my friend! Nice try.) Does anyone have any good or bad experiences with DirecTV? The Comcast people like to scare you into thinking that with satellite, you’re going to lose your signal every time the wind blows.

I’m kind of pretending this is Monday morning, because I have a lot to do tomorrow and need to preserve my precious and few morning brain cells for some business items. Fortunately, I see I’m not the only one who does this, because over at The Well-Read Child, Monday morning’s post is already up and it’s an interview with yours truly. Find out why I write about outcasts, my favorite scene in the book, and super-secret info on where I write. Thanks for having me, Jill!

On Saturday the recovery from my mountain driving experience and book launch ended up involving a four-in-a-row Lifetime Moviethon, in the following order: Too Young to Marry, My Daughter’s Secret, Queen Sized, and Girl’s Best Friend. Very, very satisfying in a way that only four Lifetime Movies can be. I’m not proud.

The Superbowl. (Super Bowl?) Well, wow. Kinda boring for the first three quarters, then…drama! This is what editors and crit group people mean when they say that something in a story has to be at stake. The game was just kind of going along more or less as expected—not a bad game, but no drama, nothing to really care about other than how the Pats would take what everyone felt they were entitled to. It had a sense of inevitability that stories can get, too. When the Giants scored in the fourth quarter, suddenly everything was at stake and you couldn’t take your eyes off the game. Every character seemed key, every play crucial. Everything mattered!

If you are in the San Francisco area, please do come see me at Not Your Mother’s Book Club on Tuesday night! At Books Inc., Opera Plaza – 7 p.m.  I’ve got a lot of friends and family in the area, so it should be a lively crowd. Their presence might even get me to REVEAL IMPORTANT SECRETS. (I don’t know what those might be, but I’m ready for anything.)

I actually took a whole day off of the computer and the Internet yesterday, huzzah! Except for using it to listen to the Niners/Vikings game. Sigh. For a minute there, when third-string quarterback Shaun Hill—who had never played in a regular season game in his six years in the NFL—had to step in near the end, and then proceeded to get four first downs and a touchdown in a total Friday Night Lights moment, I thought maybe we’d get a miracle win. It was not to be. But at least Hill’s performance was a tiny glimmer of hope. Maybe.

So…the church shootings in Colorado. Frankly, I am surprised this has not happened sooner. I worked in a big, downtown church for three years and there were a lot of angry, hurting, and mentally ill people coming and going. Whenever there was a school or workplace shooting I’d think, “It could happen here, easily.” A lot of people are angry at churches, church people, or God…some of them with good reason. And we sit there in open buildings every week with our backs to the door, and the majority of normal (non-mega) churches don’t have security guards like the one in CO did. So, I don’t know, it doesn’t surprise me at all. It will be interesting to see if/how churches across the country react or change policies and habits due to this incident. I hope they don’t. I wouldn’t want what’s happened to the country at large (old ladies at airports having to take their shoes and belts off, “if you see something, say something,” paranoia about liquids and gels, etc.) to happen to places of worship. Not because of the inconvenience of that or the sadness of it, but because that stuff is all about fear, and if there’s one thing Christians are told over and over again in the New Testament we’re supposed to be free of, it’s fear. Not because the world is safe—Christians, contrary to what you might sometimes hear from some pulpits—don’t get some special blessing of safety and freedom from harm. But our faith is supposed to be in stuff not of this world, and physical and material safety is of this world. I’m not saying I’m not afraid, or don’t want to be safe. I am a normal, frightened human, after all, but the idea is try to not let that fear rule you.

On that cheery note, time to get to work!

While I was in NY, I met with the lovely ladies of Mixed Breed Films! Mixed Breed (Kyra Sedgwick and Emily Lansbury) holds the rights to turn Story of a Girl into a movie. And you know what? It is on track to really happen. I mean, as much as anything can “really happen” at this stage of the game when it comes to making movies. As they explained, it’s not like they are acquiring a whole bunch of material and hoping something sticks. This is what they’re working on now and things are going forward. The big news I learned is that there is a writer/director on board. I’m not sure if I can talk in public about who it is at the moment, but it’s someone whose last movie I loved, and it was nominated for awards and stuff. So I kind of wanted to fall out of my chair when I found out for sure it was this person. (This is starting to sound like a Post Blind Item…sorry!) The coolest thing was talking about the book with them and answering some questions and talking about the soundtrack of my writing process, and of course, comparing planned Thanksgiving menus. I am unbelievably lucky that these two women have the book and I am just excited to see what happens. When they said, “We hope you’ll be happy,” I said, “I already am.”

I am also happy that I bought my NFL.com Field Pass this season and could listen to the Niners/Cardinals game yesterday. SF had a dramatic and emotional win in overtime and there’s something even more exciting about listening to the home-team radio broadcast than watching it on TV. If you’re a fan of a consistently-losing team and you don’t live in that team’s state, you have to find a way to get the radio broadcast if you want to catch every game. Of course, I enjoyed the webcast even more back when it was free. Anyway, yesterday’s game was great. As was the Utah/BYU game on Saturday. I love a good, close, dramatic game! And since I’m not from or of Utah, I can enjoy the Holy War without sinking into a depression afterwards.

Okay, NY is over and Thanksgiving is over and I’ve got an essay to cut in half and a bunch of reading to do and a house to organize and thank-you notes to write. We had a great and restful holiday weekend. I hope you did, too.

I slept on my neck funny, or something, on Sunday night and it was killin’ me all day yesterday. Which resulted in major headache, and my day culminated with me sort of writhing in pain while watching Monday Night Football. The fact that the Niners had to fight so hard for the win over an even worse team does not bode well for the season, but I guess a win is a win.

Is it pathetic/immature of me to laugh every time I see that Carl’s Jr. flat buns commercial? Yeah. It is.

In other TV news, I have to agree with Sarah about the premiere of Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style. With Stacy and Clinton it’s like your girlfriends are over ragging on you and helping you go through your closet. With Tim and Veronica it was more like the Duke and Duchess of the Upper East Side came down from high tea to make horrified expressions at the commoner’s wardrobe. I mean, the makeover was still a success, but it lacked the fun factor I’d hoped for. I love Tim Gunn but think maybe he’s a better foil for the Project Runway format than for this. Not that I would turn him away if he came knockin’ on my front door.