I and my fiancé, Rachel, have been pulling things together for our wedding on July 30th. Mostly everything is pretty set, but there’s always little stuff. We’re chasing down everybody’s meal preferences, making a playlist, etc. It’s sort of tedious, but I am excited to be married. Mostly because of the healthcare! Rachel informs me that we don’t need to pay any premiums, and that I’m gonna get dental and vision coverage! Holy smokes. Right now I pay $300 a month, and I have a $4500 deductible.

There are other reasons besides healthcare for a writer to get married. But healthcare is really all the reason that you need.

I’ve read so many Westlake novels in these past two weeks. They’re kind of like candy, but they’re not mindless. Each one is very specific, and each one contains such detailed and intimate portraits. The Parker novels, in particular, have a very keen eye for psychology, which is surprising because the protagonist, Parker, seems to have very little psychology of his own. He just wants the job to go well. That’s all he cares about. I’m getting into the later Parker novels, where he displays more of a human side. He helps one of his heist buddies, Alan Grofield, out of a jam, and later on he falls in love with a woman, Claire, and brings her along with him. It’s not a terrible thing, I suppose, and Parker has always contained within himself some yearning for more humanity, but I don’t know…

Am working on revising my second YA novel (formerly called Tell Em They’re Amazing and now retitled It’s Probably Just A Phase). There’s been a (relatively amicable) parting of ways with both my publisher and my agent (yes, the passive voice was carefully chosen there), so the book will be going out in a few weeks to agents. Kind of nerve-wracking to be querying agents for the first time in four years, but this time I know a lot more about the industry and about what I want.