When the baby has a baby...

So, it's little known fact that Laura and I actually have a younger sister who is far more talented than the two of us combined. Stacey is an artist/interior designer/photographer and has always been my parent's favorite. (As evidenced by the above picture where she is the only sister to have escaped the dreaded matching pink sweater vests/white turtleneck combo. Well played, Stacey. Well played.)

She could do no wrong. When Stacey started swimming my parents were convinced she was an Olympic hopeful. When she played piano they were astounded by her ability to play things by ear (they were probably planning on sending the above picture to Star Search or something). And when she started playing tennis it was clear that she could have been the best player out of their 3 daughters, if only she would have applied herself.

Yeah, we heard the "If Stacey just would have tried harder we know she'd have [gone to Harvard on a swimming scholarship/attended Julliard/played tennis at Wimbledon.]"



Stacey was always the angel and Laura and I have spent much of our lives consumed with jealousy for her. (And yes, I was dressed as Punky Brewster in the above pic. She was just really spunky, ok? And please note that is the SAME pink sweater vest as the earlier pic. Turns out that thing came in handy around all hallow's eve.) The truth is Stacey is adorable and probably the nicest, kindest, most generous person on the planet, and for that we hated her. Could we be more bitter?

Thankfully, we got over our inadequacies a long time ago and we were SO excited when Stacey and her hubby announced that they were expecting this Spring. Although, this announcement inevitably lead to more and more favoritism from my parents. My favorite line, courtesy of my mom (aka The Regulator), "Stacey is just such a happy pregnant person. She never complains. She's just really good at being pregnant...not like you." Ouch.

And today, the most fabulous pregnant woman in the world gave birth to the most perfect baby boy on the planet.



Welcome William Michael!

We're so excited that you're part of the craziness that is the Roecker clan. I'm sure you'll probably walk and talk before Lydia and the chances are pretty good that you'll be riding a bike before Jack. And knowing your grandparents we'll be hearing ALL about it.

Winners of LiLa's Epic 500 Follower Contest

Go Team Laura!!!

Congratulations to everyone who bet on the blonde Roecker. You've prevailed. This time.

And now the lucky winners....

Charity Bradford is the winner of The Reader Package including:

• STUPID CUPID (signed copy!! hoorah!) by Rhonda Stapleton
• HOW TO TEACH FILTHY RICH GIRLS by Zoey Dean
• THE HOLLOW by Jessica Verday
• JERK CALIFORNIA by Jonathen Friesen
• UGLIES and PRETTIES by Scott Westerfeld
• Lots and lots of chocolate
• A fabulously warm blanket to curl up in while you're reading and chowing down on delicious chocolate.

Courtney Barr - The Southern Princess is the winner of The LIAR SOCIETY Package including:

• Two Starbucks Gift Cards (So you can buy Kate's favorite drink: a full-fat Frappacino with extra whipped cream.
• A fabulous pearl necklace (Um, just don't ask us if it's real okay? If it makes you feel any better, Kate's pearls are fake too.)
• A DIY Pineapple Pizza Kit (Kate's favorite dinner! All you'll need to do is add cheese. Trust us, it's better this way.)
• A bike bell (Kate's sole methods of transportation are her trusty 10-speed and the school bus.)
• A 10 page critique of your manuscript or WIP.

And the winner of the Grand Prize Roecker Extravaganza Package is....

Marsha Sigman!!!

The Grand Prize Roecker Extravaganza Package:

• Glee Soundtrack Volume 1 and Volume 2
• A variety pack of every Twizzler known to man, aside from the rainbow kind because those don't count.
• A bottle of Prosecco (sparkling juice if you're an underage/on-the-wagon winner).
• A t-shirt that will officially christen you as The Fourth Roecker Sister (or Sibling if one of our three male followers wins).
• Business Cards or Stationary Designed especially for you by the ultra-talented third Roecker sister, Stacey owner of PoochiePrints.

Congratulations to the winners and thanks so much for playing along with us! Please send us an e-mail at lisa-laura(at)live(dot)com to claim your prizes.

As you can probably tell we find this kind of thing VERY entertaining, so look forward to more random contests in the future. We're already busy thinking of our next big idea. Get excited.

Bitch Please...

Ok, so it's virtually impossible for me to post anything on the blog without thinking about this sketch on SNL. This is totally what Laura and I are like in real life.



P.S.
I really, really wish that our blog was called Bitch, please. Seriously, how funny would that be? I'm officially petitioning Laura for a name change.

Lisa and Laura's (not so) Infinite Playlist

Yeah, we really need to get a life. I think all of these edits have addled our already feeble brains. The Book (note the capital letters) is pretty much the focus of our entire life these days, which is not necessarily a bad thing since we're knee-deep in revisions.

Honestly, they're coming along really, really well. We've already added around 10,000 words (holy crap!) and we're hoping that it's all good stuff that makes the story more engaging for readers. We can't wait to see what Major Agent thinks of our shiny new version, but it will be a while before we're ready to send it to her, so we'll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime we're doing goofy things like creating theme songs for our characters and playlists for the book. Behold!

Feel free to encourage us to get a life in the comments section. I just can't promise that we'll take your advice.

You like us, you really like us!

I'd just like to go on record as saying that Laura and I have never won anything in our entire life. Well, that's not entirely true, Laura was homecoming queen and I...well, maybe I should have said that I've never won anything in my entire life.

Anyways, in the past week we've received two awards for our blog! We're so honored and want to thank Elana and Sara for awarding the blog that is made of random. It means a lot to us both.

Well, probably more to me since I wasn't homecoming queen and all that, but I'm sure Laura is really grateful too. Do you know that she sometimes writes in her tiara?

So...now we get to award 8 of our favorite blogs. Good times!

1. Little Ms J (If you've noticed a big uptick in Cleveland hits it's probably because my entire family now follows your blog. My mom will totally make you home-made spaghetti if you ever come to Cleveland.)

2. Plot This (You never know what you might find over here. Some days it's extracting poop from animals, others it's meeting John Green and Judy Bloom.)

3. Market My Words (So much great information about how to market yourself in the publishing world.)

4. Becca Fitzpatrick (Becca's blog is pretty much writer-porn for us because she's about 10 steps ahead of us in the publication process and gets to do all sorts of glamorous things like meet her editor in NYC and discuss cover art for her book. If she wasn't so nice we'd totally hate her.)

5. The Road to Publication (More writer porn. Kimberly's book is coming out in March 2010 and her blog is hilarious. Plus she claims to have a 22-year-old daughter and looks about 25, so we're pretty much convinced she has some sort of deal with the devil and we want in.)

6. Pop Culture Junkie (I'm sure Alea has a ton of these awards, but her blog is just too fantastic not to recognize. So many book reviews. She's single-handedly doubled my monthly Amazon bill.)

7. Purple Clover (She's hilarious, an aspiring writer and a mom. Oh and she's Little Ms J's sister. Sometimes they fight in the comments section just like Laura and me. It's fantastic. Seriously.)

8. Tara Maya's Tales (Tons of info and writerly discussion on Tara's blog. Definitely a good one to follow if you're trying to crank out a book.)

Ok, so technically we're giving you guys two awards and you're supposed to pass them along to 8 other bloggers. I'm sure it's against the rules to do two at once, but we're rebels like that.

Happy blogging everyone!

The 10 Commandments of Sister-Writers*

Not sure who's been Keeping Up with the Kardashians, but there seems to be a bit of turbulence in the world of K. I think we can all learn a very important lesson in regards to mixing business and family, hence the 10 commandments below.

1. We started writing books together because we thought it would be fun, not because we wanted to be the next J.K. Rowling (or J.K. Howling if you're talking to my father-in-law). And let's face it, if that happens there really won't be anything to fight about, right?

2. We're sisters first. The reason we work so well together is because we're best friends, if we stop getting along the books will almost certainly stop working.

3. We write to make each other laugh. If we hated each other we wouldn't be half as funny.

4. It would suck to go through this alone. I know I would have given up a long time ago after all of the almosts and the flat-out rejections. Imagine reading a bad review ALONE? Brutal.

5. If one of us ever wants to write their own book, all by their lonesome, the other will be the best beta-reader ever and uber supportive every step of the way.

6. Writing is the great escape from husbands and kids--something we'll always have with each other (for better or worse). Now we won't have to spend our free time trying to think of great entrepreneurial ideas because we have the book.

7. We started this because we wanted a job that was flexible. Writing is super-flexible and judgement-free. We can write at all hours wearing whatever we want. I personally enjoy wearing a business suit and heels when I write because it makes me feel like a NY Times best-selling author. Just kidding, I wear the same pajamas I slept in the previous night. But see, no one cares!

8. We wanted to avoid monkey work. I might be mistaken, but I don't think a monkey could be as creative as we are. Well, unless they were a genetically engineered mutant monkey and that would just be weird and more than a little scary.

9. No matter how annoyed you get with my incessant questions and no matter how annoyed I get with your inevitable deadlines (they don't really annoy me that much, I just couldn't think of anything else), we have to either talk to each other about them, or suck it up. I prefer sucking it up because I try to avoid confrontation at all costs, but whatever works.

10. Let's never lose the drive, but try to maintain a balance. Coming out of this whole adventure with a book deal and divorce-free sounds good to me.

Bonus #11. Look at how cute we were! Hey, at least we'll always have that going for us...

*Elana initially coined the term sister-writers for us and it definitely does sound like sister-wives, but I still sort of like it.

It's Monday and I'm feeling mean...

SO slow on every celebrity website. I swear if I see the picture of Gisele in a string bikini holding Tom Brady’s baby one more time, I’m gonna lose it. I’ve decided to take my anger out on unsuspecting, innocent celebrities. This is not very nice. I apologize.

Oh! J Lo, Oh! J Lo, your hammer pants really blow.
You’re a walking, talking unflattering fashion no-no.

Blah, blah, blah, I’m a giant waste of space,
Blah, blah, blah, the fact that girls look up to me is a massive disgrace. (Harsh for a Monday, I know).

Oh how you annoy me J Love with your ghost whispering and guitar signing,
why are you even signing a guitar? Or are you (pretty, pretty please) resigning?

Sorry LC, not a big fan of the black, one-piece bathing suit you decided on today,
no wonder your line was pulled, plus, aren’t you supposed to be writing a book, typing away?

Everything about this pic leaves me ill at ease,
two of them are sisters, and Hef is eating peas!

Sigh, being a celebrity is exhausting, especially with a baby on board,
I wonder if I’ll ever tire of being so adored?

Hey, yeah, like, I know, no he didn’t, OMG,
if I ever have to sit through Hannah Montana anything, just kill me!

The multi-layered art of procrastination...

Hmmm...how can I procrastinate today? I'm about 30 pages into my edits and I really need to figure out how to put a stop to all this productive insanity.

Oh, I know. I'll share the funniest skit from Saturday Night Live with you.



Hilarious, right? Ok, back to editing before Laura disowns me.

Payback is a bitch...

Quite a few interesting things happened over the past couple of days to lead me to this particular post. Here's a little timeline for you.


4/1/09 10:32 AM: I needed to take my laptop over to Laura's house, so I had to dig up my old laptop bag.


4/1/09 1:45 PM: When I was at Laura's I finished critiquing the first 50 pages of an MS, but I couldn't access the interwebs, so I had to transfer it onto Laura's computer. Remarkably, in my old laptop bag there was one of those fancy little jump drives, so I plugged it in to transfer the file.


4/1/09 1:47 PM: Somehow every single one of our old family pictures was on this drive. I didn't think much of it at the time, but made a mental note, I'm just wily like that.

4/2/09 1:23 PM - 8:57 PM: I actually finished all of my work during the day, caught up on all my TiVo'd shows and forgot to tape The Office and 30 Rock (damn!).


4/2/09 8:59 PM: I'm supposed to be revising, but I'm procrastinating. I'm sending my edits on the first 50 to Laura tomorrow so I've got tons of time to meet my deadline...ha!

4/2/09 9:55 PM: To pass the time I decided to set-up a Twitter account for Laura and I because, you know, we don't have enough stupid ways to suck up time on the computer. Oh and also I wanted to post something about the season finale of Damages. SO good and I felt stupid blogging about it because I always blog about TV and pretty soon people are going to start thinking I have no life. That sound you hear is all of the readers of this lame blog laughing their asses off.

4/2/09 10:07 PM: That lead me to searching a picture for our profile and because I'm lazy I thought maybe I'd just cut and paste the blog profile pic, but then I remembered my little lap top bag sitting right next to me with the gold mine of family photos.


4/2/09 10:09 PM: I start paging through the pics to find something fun for our Twitter profile and find a couple of cute pics. Nice.


4/2/09 10:20 PM: I stumble across some older, more awkward pics of us. And then finally strike gold with this picture of Laura.


Now some of you may not remember this, but Laura posted a pretty unfortunate picture of me all decked out Indecent Proposal style, so she really had this coming.


In case one of you mistakes this pic as something out of the Joy Book on Big Love, let me please correct you. If I remember correctly this is actually a little snapshot that Laura was planning on using to break into the modeling business.

Ah yes, at 5'3 we all thought she was destined for a career in modeling. And really, with fashion sense like that, how could they ever turn her down? She looks more like she's interviewing to be a substitute teacher, but nothing a couple weeks on America's Next Top Model couldn't fix.

Now I have to admit, that I totally thought she was going to make it, I mean she was cute and skinny, what more does a model need? The really sad thing is that my parents sort of bought it too and my dad took this picture in preparation of one of those model recruiting things they do at the Holiday Inn. Fancy!


Now the best part of this whole situation is that I'm sitting on a virtual hot bed of humiliating pictures from every stage of our life. Good. Times.

Tonight was pretty much my perfect storm of procrastination. Enjoy!

Let the edits begin!

I'm sitting here with our previously final manuscript up in a word document and pages of editorial notes that Laura and I wrote out for our revisions and I just can't bring myself to get started.

This must be what a surgeon feels like right before they're forced to operate on their child.

Mostly I'm hoping that I don't do any irreparable damage. And it sure would be nice if our edits actually fixed some of the problems Major Agent* pointed out.

Guess it's time for me to start hacking away...wish us luck!

*Please note I've decided to start referring to our agent as Major Agent, and Major should be said with your best Victoria Beckham accent.

I <3 NYC

OK, so I'm a little embarrassed to admit this on a public forum (but really when has that stopped me in the past? Just take a look at the other fascinating tidbits I've posted today), but this was my very first trip to New York City.


I've lived in Chicago, travelled throughout Europe, visited LA (and met Richard Simmons three times, well not in one trip, but still THREE TIMES, that's one time for each decade I've been alive for those of you who aren't that good at math), and yet this is my first actual visit to the Big Apple. This momentous occasion obviously calls for one of our patented Top 5 Lists. So....


THE TOP 5 MOMENTS of Lisa and Laura's Fabulous NYC Adventure!


5. Central Park. Ok, truth is we were really annoying tourists and forced our gracious host to cart us around to places like Central Park. It was so Gossip Girl and Sex in the City, I loved it. Oh and plus it's one of the very few pictures we took on the trip.

4. Meeting Lars. A little background for you. Laura's college roommate Sarah and her fabulous live-in-lover Lars (damn that's some killer alliteration!) graciously let us stay with them for a couple days. Sarah is one of the top 10 funniest people we know. Whether she's telling you about how she single-handedly destroyed a wedding or about how she met and got pictures with Bobby Zarin (and yes, he was wearing his patented shaded glasses), she's always entertaining. So when Laura told me that Lars was the perfect match for Sarah, I just knew I'd love him. Keep in mind that he's got two random girls plopped on the couch when he comes back from the gym and instead of being annoyed or awkward he shakes my hand, looks me right in the eye and said "So tell me about this book." Yeah, he had me at hello...er...book.

No picture of Lars, but we do have this fabulous picture of Sarah showing off her cube and we think Lars is probably ok with that.

3. Meeting Sam (and her sister!). Sam is the founder of our critique group and one of our very first beta readers for our book. When we first found out that she was going to be in NYC the exact same time that we were, we considered getting a restraining order, but it turns out she's not stalking us. We were actually kind of sad because everyone knows you haven't really arrived until you have an actual stalker, right? Oh well, maybe next year. As it turns out she was coincidentally going to be in the city to celebrate her sister's b-day, so we all met up for some Mojitos. So fun!

Please note we had been walking around the city all day in misty conditions, so we're all a bit of a mess.

2. Dinner with Emily. My roomie from college also lives in the city and she ended up meeting us for dinner. It was one of those great nights when we effortlessly killed a couple of bottles of wine and managed to cover everything from old friends with bad haircuts to the emaciated cast of 90210. My kind of dinner.

Again, we got a little tipsy and forgot to take a group pic. BUT I do have this fabulous picture of Emily from Luxembourg involving way too much cheap wine and Nutella. Damn, I wish I had a scanner.

1. Meeting our agent! I'll never forget when Laura and I were in the cab on the way to InkWell and we passed Trump Tower and Laura looked at me with tears in her eyes and said she just couldn't believe this was actually happening. It was completely surreal. If it's even possible, meeting Catherine has made us want to succeed even more. She's just one of those rare people who make you want to do your best work. Edits commence immediately, and we want them to be perfect, so wish us luck.