We’re gearing up for another school year here at Casa de Rhonda and I gotta tell ya, I’m not looking forward to it. My baby will be in high school.

Sniff, sniff.

My boy will be a junior and has been driving since February, so I’m not making the double run to school every day–this is a HUGE perk–but just knowing that my baby’s high school career is about to commence somehow makes me sad. I remember watching her run into Kindergarten in her little vintage Dick and Jane print dress. (No doubt the outfit she wears the first day of school this year will be very different.)

Speaking of clothes, my son has finally discovered designer brands. We’ve avoided it for a very long time, but now that it’s hit, it’s hit with a vengeance. (He’s asking for a pair of $160 sunglasses. Er…no.) This year we’ve decided to give the kids money and let them do their own shopping, the reasoning being that if the money is their own instead of ours, they’ll treat it with more respect. (This could backfire, we know, but… )

So what’s happening on the back to school front with ya’ll? Are you still shopping for paste and crayons, or like us, have you graduated to scientific calculators, jump drives and ridiculously expensive sunglasses?

We’re traveling today–one last hurrah before school’s back in. Hope everyone has a wonderful day.

Ya’ll, I have had WAYYYYY too much to eat this weekend. We kicked off our Fourth of July celebration on Friday with my husband’s family and wrapped things up last night at my brother’s house. Here’s what I had to eat over the weekend:

Pork loin, mashed potatoes, fried squash, baked beans, fresh corn, corn salad, cole slaw, potato salad, steak, grilled chicken, baked potatoes, salad, cheese ball and crackers (not the whole thing, lol) homemade banana ice cream, lemon icebox pie, mudslide brownies, peach cake and pecan pie. I know there is more, but considering the hours I’m going to have to log in on the treadmill this week, I’m probably blocking it from my memory. The food, as always, was divine, largely in part of the fact that I didn’t have to cook it. (Although I did bring the cheese ball and made the banana ice cream.)

I have a wonderful tan from hours playing volleyball in the pool and floating mindlessly on a raft. My kids are equally as brown and were so tired at the end of the night they went straight to bed without incident. Interestingly, this morning I found a cell phone in my purse that didn’t belong to me and can only assume that my twenty-month-old neice helpfully put it in there for me. All in all, our weekend was utterly fabulous. Tell me about yours. What did you do? Any Fourth family traditions? What’s the best thing you ate over the weekend?

I have just spent seven hours–SEVEN–at the ball-field watching my son and his team play baseball.

A double header.

For practice.

He’s going to have many more of these over the summer, as well as two-hour summer work-outs the entire month of June from 7-9am, and various batting practices and the like until school starts.

Because we aren’t a “ball” family and he’s only played once for his high school team, I don’t know precisely when actual practices start and the season commences, but I remember alternately freezing and frying at the games so I’m thinking it’s like March through May.

I don’t remember all these scrimmage games and I have a vague recollection of the workouts, but…is this normal? Do all high school teams do this? I played tennis in high school, but we didn’t do any of this. We practiced a little after school, then went to the games. There was very little pressure. It was a laid back, win-some lose-some kind of attitude. We didn’t prepare like these kids do. Again, normal?

What does this have to do with writing? Other than the fact that I’m not getting any done, nothing. But I was curious about your response. Do any of you out there have any experience with this baseball thing? Tips and pointers? (Like how to get the white pants clean? )

These are things I need to know, and I’ll send a copy of my June release LETTERS FROM HOME for the best advice.

Twice a year my Soapbox Queen cohorts–Vicki Lewis Thompson and Jennifer LaBrecque–and I get together to plot books, career plan, catch up, eat great food, build fires and watch British comedies. Sometimes we go to Arizona, other times we go to our little cabin in the woods in the North Georgia Mountains. We’ve been at the cabin for the past four days and I miss them terribly already. Jen is already back in Atlanta and Vicki is winging her way back to Tucson. I came home to a clean house and very little laundry. I almost wondered if I’d walked into the wrong house.

Though I’ve got a network of great friends, writing itself is a solitary job and I can’t tell you how important these retreats are. We pack everything into the cabin and hunker down. We’ve got food and wine, movies, comfy pj’s and notebooks are always at the ready. Though we have fabulous time–and have documented some of it with video evidence we intend to post on our blog in the coming weeks –it really is work. We all come prepared with what we’ve got to work on and then we hammer away until it’s all done. Sounding things out, looking for ways to make a book better, to layer in those special things that make a character more compelling, is so crucial to my writing process now I don’t know how I ever managed without it. We don’t critique–the only person who is looking at my stuff is Brenda–but it’s getting those little details in, those things that make for a richer read is just indespensible to me now.

We’ll do it all again in November and will email and talk on the phone in between, but it’s not the same as that face time. I’ll miss hearing Jen’s laugh and watching Vicki tend the fire. (We call her Keeper of the Flame because she’s our official fire-tender. )

So what about you? Do you have a special group of girlfriends who you make a point to spend some time with? To travel with? Authors, what about you? (Ahem, Plotmonkeys, lol) If so, what makes your group so special? Why does it work?

When Brenda bought my first Blaze, that was absolutely a dream come true. I’d been a huge fan of the Temptation line, an instant fan of Blaze, and I’d been trying to work with her for a number of years before everything finally fell into place. Right book, right time, right editor. Ecstatic didn’t begin to cover it. I floated through those first few weeks after the sale. Twenty-five books on the shelf later–with many more in the pipeline (ahead of schedule, wonder of wonders)–and I have to tell you the thing that astonishes me more than the books that we’ve done together, is the influence and impact that call has had on my life. Though the economical benefit has been a huge blessing to my family, it’s the relationships that I have formed out of that sale that is the ultimate takeaway.

It goes without saying that I adore Brenda and, much to her chagrin and horror, have nicknamed her Precious. She has a knack for getting me to do things waaaayyyyy out of my comfort zone. I’ve been sea-kayaking, regular old kayaking (though I am not sure that’s what bystanders would have called it) white-water rafting (terrifying) and have taken a canopy tour. (Incidentally, all of these things have required a helmet.) But I have loved every single minute of it. I like knowing what I’m made of and if I get into trouble, I know I can count on Brenda to help me. This friendship mirrors the working relationship perfectly, because she has talked me off the ledge and out of corners with many a book as well.

Brenda also introduced me to Jennifer LaBrecque and Vicki Lewis Thompson, my Soapbox Queens pals, and they are my dearest friends and go-to girls for everything. (I know I smiled stupidly through the introduction to Vicki because I’d been such a huge fan.) Jen, Vicki and I get together a couple of times a year–usually in May and November–to plot, plan, gossip and laugh and I look forward to those retreats more than I do anything else throughout the year.

To illustrate how much they impact my life, let me tell you a little story. Last November we travelled to Vicki’s for our retreat. Vicki walks every day and, though I am not in any way a lesbian, will tell you that she has a wonderful ass. You could bounce a quarter off that sucker, seriously. She’s fit, she’s trim, she’s inspiring. Jen had borrowed Vicki’s yoga mat and was doing some sort of exercise-y things. Jen is a health food guru. Ninety-nine percent of the time she’s eating stuff that I wouldn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole. She’d dropped some weight since the last time I’d seen her and I was sitting there, thinking about that at the breakfast table while I watched her fiddle with her iPod, then contort her body in strange and painful-looking positions. It occurred to me–while I was eating a petite four I’d hauled all the way from Alabama–that if we were being chased by a bear, I would be the one to die. I was the weakest of the herd.

That epiphany has resulted in an exercise program, which includes running, a complete change in diet–I actually eat oatmeal now and have removed all the Crisco and real butter from my kitchen–and the loss of twenty-two pounds. (So far. Still have fourteen more to go.) Isn’t it incredible how one thing can change your path? How a single phone call put my life on a whole new track? One that includes writing for Blaze (the best line) for the best editor (she’s a rock star in the publishing world) and a couple of friends whose commitment to good health have, by example, helped me become a much smaller person. (One who is no longer on diabetes medication. Woot!)

So what about you? Who or what have impacted your life lately? Have you been particularly inspired? If so, how?

These are things we need to know…