Day 217

Listening to: Enchanted, "True Love's Kiss." There's a reason why, really. See below.

I'm completely jewelry-less. Well, except the earrings of course. But I don't have any rings, necklaces, or bracelets on. The only piece I've been wearing the last couple of weeks fell down the shower drain yesterday. I gave a half hearted attempt to rescue the thumb ring after it went swirling away but decided that it wasn't worth more than an "aw shucks." Plus, I had just watched the Caves episode of Planet Earth and there was no way I was sticking any unprotected fingers down dark holes. Planet Earth is pretty ridiculous on Blu-Ray and Caves might be the sleeper best episode of the lot. The beginning is just insane. It takes a lot to make me un-favorite ocean and big cat episodes but Caves showed me things I'd never seen before.

Our week in SD has been spent mainly at the Hotel, camped out and watching DVDs. Hong has no cable, which means we've rewatched quite a few movies. For example, today we watched Enchanted roughly three times. Ameer watched it early in the morning since he's always up before anyone else. I insisted we watch the beginning when I woke up around noon. And then Des came over and she just had to watch it right? Amy Adams is high on my list of favorite actresses and she's pitch perfect as a fairy tale princess in the real world. And James Marsden is kind of amazing too. It's kind of terrible how much he's underused in the X-Men movies. But in Enchanted he's both over the top hilarious and doing a great subtle performance. "Thank you for taking care of my bride, peasants!"

Nowadays, whenever I watch any well done teen/romantic kind of movie, I feel this need to rewatch it over and over to study it. And the more I do that the more I'm like "this shit is amazing!" It is not easy to take the classic beginning-middle-happy ending arc and do something entertaining and even slightly original with it. And especially with Enchanted, it's doing the double duty of paying homage and poking fun at all of Disney's princess movies. Not an easy task.

After our final showing, I made Des do promo videos for the book. If I could send Des out on interviews and signings, the book would go huge, I'm sure of it. Who would you rather have your daughter go visit at the bookstore? Me or Des? Exactly. Des would be the perfect Chloe-Grace too. I gave her some vague instructions like, "Say something about the book, say it's out the fourteenth of May, and be excited and cute." I sucked as a director; luckily she's great.

We ended up having her give mini-performances as a few of the side characters, as well as a few straight "EC is coming out soon!" spots. I'm thinking maybe I should be coercing more of my friends to do promos. Here's a preview of her as "Henry/Hong." There's a few more I need to edit and piece together. Should be fun.

I spent the better part of Friday night answering comments and emails. I'm trying to leap into the YA book blogosphere and it's teeming with writers and readers. I feel like I don't have much time and everyone else has been doing their online publicity for awhile now so I have to pound the virtual pavement. I went to everyone's websites to scout them out before leaving perfect two sentence comments/replies that would indicate I'd looked at more than just their front page. I read the bios, I looked for things we had in common, I tried to be approachable and interested. Twenty of these in and my eyes were bugging out. It's good to know that my Internet stalking skills could be used for good though.

Over the course of the week, we got to see Gene's daughter a few times. She's quickly moving up the list of my favorite children. Fine, whatever, she's number one. I'll play me some favorites. Sage is not only quite cute but she's an unbelievable mimic. Helen and Gene have her trained super well and she's got tons of tricks -- this sounds vaguely circus-like but I assure you it's not. And when you put on something with a beat she starts bopping up and down immediately. She's also so well behaved that she takes verbal commands. What a delight this child is.

Not to speak for them but it seems like Gene and Helen's child rearing philosophy is centered around letting Sage just be who she is. She's a little neat freak, she's got some OCD, she's by nature this way or that way and the two of them just roll with it. It's a very laissez faire attitude but it's produced amazing results. Sage is just delightful. Oh wait, did I say that already?