IT'S HERE!! WHISTLIN' DIXIE IS IN STORES TUESDAY!

Well, it's hard to believe. Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter will be released tomorrow! It's quite an emotional moment for me, to say the least. I have been dreaming of this day for 14 years. Waiting on that was worse than an August drive across the United States in a beat-up pick-up truck with no air conditioning. But pushing all that old angst aside, we're no longer worrying about the past . . . the book will be IN THE STORES ON TUESDAY!!



I'm beside myself, really. And not just because of the book release. I'm the one who thought of this crazy topic, "The Craziest Thing We've Ever Done" and now I'm realizing sharing the details with the whole world about 99 percent of my crazy antics is impossible. Plus, the odds are you wouldn't believe me anyway! I could talk about the time a dear friend of mine and I climbed over Lucile Ball's wall, but even if you did believe me the details are just too incriminating.

Then there was another college escapade, this time at summer school at the University of Hawaii when another friend and I dressed in black and tried to sneak up to a teacher's office in the middle of the night to slide a slightly overdue paper under her door. Or the time I walked into the Sugar Bowl without a ticket, simply by acting like I knew what I was doing. Or backed my way into the exit line that was coming out of Pat O'Brien's in New Orleans to be able to have a rip-roaring New Year's Eve.

I suppose it's safe to share a crazy thing that my girlfriends from college and I used to do in the wee hours of the morn. I'm going to go ahead and admit right now, I stole it and used it in my book that releases tomorrow, Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter.

It goes like this. Like any college kids, we'd decide to go out for food around one or two o'clock in the morning. Usually this was after a fun evening, a pledge swap or a frat party. At this point in my life, I'm not sure who dreamed up this crazy prank in the first place but that's inconsequential to the story. The night it all started we were in my friend Alice's car. As usual, we'd pull in through the drive-through and snicker at all the people inside with their books propped in front of them. (I'm not proud of that now, but such is life.) As we exited the drive-through line at the local Krystal fast-food restaurant, we'd decide to wake up the students inside. We'd dip a Tampax in whatever liquid happened to be in the car and the person seated in the back seat - driver's side would hurl it though the air toward the huge plate glass window in the front of the store. Then we'd watch it slam into the window. The best part was when it slid down the glass. We'd be laughing so hard at the reactions on the faces of the folks inside that we'd inevitably forget to hurry off. This meant we'd have to screech out of the parking lot and hurry back to the dorm.

We called that "pooning." And there's a similar pooning scene in my novel. Crazy, crazy, right?

We've got an entire week left to celebrate the Novel Girl Blogoversary. I hope that you all enter by continuing your posts this week. I'd love to send the winner a signed copy of my book! Thank you all for the wonderful posts over the last month and mostly for following us. It's because of you that we're here and we love hearing from you. Tell us about some of your own crazy stories. And don't forget everyone is eligible to win the $100.00 gift certificate from Amazon. See you next week!!