Yup...these are our readers....

It has come to our attention that a certain someone from Aachen, Nordrhein-Westfalen (seriously, you can't make this stuff up) came across our blog by searching for "baby bump" -porn.

Apparently, German perverts are following our boards like my kids follow ice cream trucks (and if you know my kids, you KNOW that's saying something). Yeah, that's just our luck. Can't keep the German pervs away, but the agents are nowhere to be found.

No news is good news?--We think alike Lisa.

So we haven't heard anything since early yesterday, which is better than getting rejected. Considering there is no news to pass along to our devoted readers, I have nothing left to do but upload a video clip of Lydia. She is a pretty mellow baby, so making her laugh is extra hard. She felt like laughing a little this morning when I was tickling her.

A very special post..

In honor of our very first official blog follower, Sarah! You are hilarious and we are looking forward to the many entertaining comments you will be posting in the future. And I'd also like to add that your blog picture is far more flattering than ours. Well done! Also as a prize for being our first blog follower you will receive a complimentary advance copy of The North Shore: First Impressions, if and when it is published.

We have some other honorable mentions as blog followers, including Tara and Casie, but they haven't taken that final leap and signed up to be an official follower yet. Perhaps this post will put them over the edge...

So, a big shout out to all 3 of you reading this blog. When our book is published we'll definitely be thanking you in our acknowledgements page.

P.S.
Another request for the first 3 chapters today! Whoo hooo!!

How is this even possible?

I don't want to make it sound like we are totally obsessed with celebrity's post-baby bodies, but we kind of are. Perhaps it has something to do with our own post-baby bodies, but whatever. How is it possible for Jessica Alba to look this good less than four months after giving birth? And, she's not hiding anything--it's all out there. I just don't understand it.

As I was trying to figure out the answer to the above question, I clicked into a helpful slideshow that re-visited Alba's baby bump days and I stumbled across two equally confounding pictures. The image below was supposedly taken on February 13th.

And this last picture was taken on February 24th. She sure did pop in 11 days. Possible, but still a little suspect.

Now I'm not trying to accuse Jessica of anything crazy like not actually having the baby, I'm just saying she looks remarkably good after giving birth a few months ago. Thanks to Jessica, Nicole, J.Lo, Halle, and the list goes on, the post-baby body bar has been set ridiculously high for celebrities. I wonder if they ever wish they could be compared to someone a little bit more average. If so, they can always check out BabyCenter's birthboards where moms have so generously uploaded pictures of their own, usually average, post-baby bellies.

Not that I'm obsessing...

But in case anyone is wondering it's officially 1:13 PM in Australia right now and a certain agent is possibly finishing up her lunch and possibly reading the first 50 pages of our book, and then possibly thinking that she absolutely has to finish the rest or she'll expire from the suspense of wondering what happens to Elle and her gorgeous sister Jane.

So that totally explains why I'm sitting here catching up on TiVo'd shows and refreshing our hotmail every 2 seconds. It's totally rational, right?

Our cheeks are burning...

from smiling! This morning we sent another round of queries and this evening we received a request for a FULL! Not a partial, THE ENTIRE BOOK! We couldn't be more excited. I'm not even sure what to compare this feeling to, but it feels damn good. So now all we have to do is keep our fingers crossed that the agent likes the entire book. But really, how could she not? :) Oh, and I guess agents do work on the weekends!

Queries...

Well, I've just finished sending off the last of our queries and now the only thing I have left to do is sit around and wait for responses. Something about sending queries literally gives me the shakes. It's so scary to send something that you've worked so hard on to complete strangers with the hope that they'll love it enough to want to take it on as their own and help you get it published.

Anyways, my husband is sick of hearing about it, Laura and I have already analyzed every possible aspect of this and the only thing left for me to do is blog about it, so here I am. We'll keep you posted on how things are going.

In the meantime, we're starting book #2 to keep us from going crazy and so we stop driving everyone else crazy while we're waiting to hear back from agents. Time to start outlining and developing our new characters! A week ago we weren't ready to start the process all over again, but now that the queries are out we both agree that The North Shore: First Impressions is truly finished. Time to start The North Shore: Second Chances...wish us luck.

Teddy and Moonglow

Tonight I got to thinking what exactly inspired Lisa and I to write this book. I could list a bunch of things--celebrities/fashion, our love of reading/writing, being a teacher and wishing for great YA books, hoping to land a job that we LOVE, etc. But I got to thinking about my childhood and the nights when we would all pile onto Lisa's bed and our dad would tell us the story of Teddy and his dog Moonglow. Teddy built a spaceship in his garage and he and Moonglow would travel to outerspace and partake in different adventures. Every story was different and we loved all of them. So maybe the seed was planted on those nights. Maybe because of our dad's stories, we were destined to write a book of our own. So, here we are dreaming big thanks to Teddy and Moonglow and our dad who thought them up.

Do agents work on the weekend?

We have about 25 queries outstanding and have only heard back from 7 people so far. Some requests, some rejections...it's killing me not knowing what the rest of the agents think of our book. I'm sitting here refreshing our e-mail account over and over and over again hoping that there is some really hardworking agent out there reading queries over the weekend.

Have you ever heard the song "Annie Waits" by Ben Folds 5? It's one of my favorite songs and it has been playing on repeat in my head for the past 4 days. Yes, for the record, it has only been 4 days since we sent out our queries. Impatient much?

It's definitely time to start the next book Laura, because I'm going crazy over here.

Requests...

So, having had our share of rejections and requests at this stage in the process I can definitely say that I infinitely prefer the requests. It's so hard not to get carried away when you hear back from one of your dream agents that they're interested in reading more of the book that you wrote.

Of course, then you have to wait. And wait. And wait some more. I knew the waiting part would be difficult, I just didn't realize how difficult. I'm so proud of our book and I just know that if it gets published that it will do well, so it's so hard to wait. And it's even more difficult to have people tell us that it's just not for them.

And so we wait. Wait for the perfect agent who is going to love our book as much as we do and help us make our dreams come true. Ok, the rhyming was totally unintentional and sounds really cheesy, but whatever, you get my point.

Off to go check my e-mail...I'm like a woman obsessed.

In case anyone is wondering what I'm doing tonight...

• Doing actual work for my actual job (30 minutes)
• Hitting refresh on our joint e-mail account approximately 100 times (5 minutes)
• Watching the Office (which is hilarious, by the way, Andy wanting 6-pack abs before Angela sees him naked, I almost peed my pants) (47 minutes - I fast forward thru commercials)
• Hitting refresh on our joint e-mail account approximately 100 times (5 minutes)
• Talking to Laura about how amazing our book is and how any agent will be lucky to have us as clients because it's going to be a best-seller (41 minutes)
• Researching our potential next book (60 minutes)
• Hitting refresh on our joint e-mail account approximately 100 times (5 minutes)
• Talking to Laura about how amazing our NEXT book is going to be and discussing how lucky an agent will be to sign us because we're not only super-fun, we're also literary geniuses (42 minutes)
• Hitting refresh on our joint e-mail account approximately 100 times (5 minutes)