Beautiful Creatures & Fertile Soil

I am so happy Oxford is itself. By the time I came up to visit Square Books and Rowan Oak at the age of 16 (nearly 22 years ago), I knew that Mississippi was The Fertile Soil for some of the finest writing the world has seen. I didn’t fully realize, as well as many native Mississippians, that fertile soil belongs to us all. We take it for granted, lazy strolls past Faulkner's Grave and summer afternoon drives with blues music by Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson to see Eudora’s resting place. B.B. King, Jim Henson, well, the list goes on and on.
That’s why I welcome Beautiful Creatures authors, Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl to our town, to our back yard. They will be signing at Square Books, Jr. today at 4 o’clock, so come on out and meet them. We don’t have to read about it in Southern Living – we are southern living! So grab a spoon, or a pen, or a paintbrush, or a guitar, and dig deep!

The Results Are In!

The trees are down, the decorations put away, and the crowds long gone. The holidays are over and it's time to resume business as usual.

As you may or may not know, Jill and I engaged in a little friendly competition this holiday season. Here's the deal: Jill fell head over heels in love with Berkeley Breathed's middle grade novel Flawed Dogs. And I was crazy over James Dashner's young adult novel The Maze Runner.
So we made it interesting, we decided to see which of us could sell the most copies.

Unfortunately, I lost.

Jill- 76 (this obviously does not count the 8 she sold prior to the bet, bringing her actual total to 84)
Ramona-39

Yeah. Whew, that's a lot of books.