It would be fair to say that I did not have the most luxurious vacation. We did a staycation, where I basically got a taste of what Kinsey has to do every single day as a stay at home mommy. She used the opportunity to get herself all set up with Style Me Kinsey, even had a sale. Stressful? Yes. But manageable.

During this time, I decided to pick the whole reading thing back up. Normally, I buy a book, and read it when we fly out-of-town for work. It gives me something more productive to do, instead of playing apps the whole time. Only this time, the book got me hooked. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So every time I had a few minutes here and there, I would find myself reading it. Well, all those minutes added up, and I ended up finishing the book. It’s the first part of a trilogy, so it means that it should leave you wanting more… and it did. Big time. I can officially say that I am hooked on Red Rising. I even looked up the release date for the next installment. I HAVE TO WAIT TIL JANUARY!!!!! I was so sad that I was done with the book, that I read it again. In case I missed somethings here and there.

Good news: I jumped on the bandwagon early. Bad news: I have to wait. I hate waiting. I started researching what was going on, and found out that they will be making a movie, so I started trying to find who the casting agency is… because I ended up fantasizing about being in the movie. This then led to learning about the author, Pierce Brown, who happens to look younger than I expected. To me, this means he must be around my age. Right?!

So I found his twitter, and I struggled over what to write him for an entire day. Seriously. I had 140 characters to catch his attention. Kinsey got annoyed with me after asking her what she thought of my 134th draft, and she hit send. I don’t even know if I was ready! But she hit the button and said, “there!” This could have ruined it. He could look at my message, and just pass it up. I even threw in a word he uses in the book, you know, to let him know I am huge nerd.

Within 10 minutes, he had written back!!!! Pierce Freaking Brown wrote me back! To make things better, he returned the word right back! I felt like the main character was the one who wrote me back! All it took was a nice swift “goodman” thrown in there! It took every ounce of my being not to write him again, because I don’t want him to place me in the super fan zone… but I really, really, really, want to work my way up to asking him what character he thinks fits me the best!

Yup, highlight of my vacation was getting a tweet from an author…