I love to hear from my readers. But I have to say, it's nervewracking to hear from people I've interviewed to research my story.

If I had a single muse for GIRL OVERBOARD, it was Sam. He spent a ton of time with me--and opened up his life and read the manuscript for technical accuracy. He was the one who told me the difference between passion (he loved to snowboard) and calling (his purpose in life is to help others, not to snowboard fulltime).

Anyway, Sam just emailed this to me: "I want you to know that my mom loved the book and keeps it on one of her coffee tables as a must read for guests!"

How cute is that? Aren't moms great? Aren't MUSES great?

Ni hao! So...after a year of living abroad where I'd never faced quite so much racism in my life, I told myself, NEVER AGAIN. Hello? Did I really need to hear strangers tell me to "go home, insert racial ephithet here"?

So how did I find myself 10 weeks away from uprooting myself yet again, this time to China? And what do I do instead of packing up my house? Practice one of the language tapes forever queued up in my car? Uhhh...no. Instead, I'm baby step blogging. You can tell how badly I'm procrastinating when I--she who promised never to blog again--think to myself, I shall listen to my bloggity friends and blog.

Those first two words on this post? Well, that "hello" just about sums up my entire vocabulary in Mandarin. Let's just say that I'm still waiting for those half-hour language tapes to deliver on its promise that I will be "conversant in 30 easy lessons." Mmmm hmmm. Perhaps I need to learn the universal language for NEVER AGAIN.