DROUGHT's book birthday thoroughly celebrated

As DROUGHT's release date neared, everybody had one question:

"What are you going to do that day?"

I did not have a good answer. While I knew I could spend the day wandering bookstores, looking for it, I also knew that stores might not have even taken it out of the box yet. And that would make a happy day just a plain old depressing day. So how else DO you celebrate? 

Here are the awesome things that I, and my wonderful family and friends, came up with!

--Tweets, Facebook posts and blogs: thanks to EVERYONE who announced DROUGHT's release yesterday! Special credit to my sister, who announced that she had no water in her apartment yesterday and completely had me worried for her until she reminded me that it was "DROUGHT Day". Ahhhhhhh yes.

--An old-school steak lunch at Capital Grille with my Patron of the Arts, aka my husband.

--Flowers! My lovely mother, sister and husband all treated me to flowers. The house looks so pretty today. I warned the house not to get used to being so fancy all the time. :)

--Happy hour out with friends, one of whom spent the day tracking and finally chasing down the DC Cupcake truck so I could try their cupcakes. And may I say they were spectacular. I will be posting more soon in a DC Cupcake round-up blog entry!

--Gifties!! I've got a bottle of bubbly stuff for celebrating, thanks to a lovely friend, AND check out this very cool item, at right. It's a vase made from a spoon. Which is absolutely perfect for DROUGHT, since the enslaved Congregation has to harvest water from living leaves with... spoons!

--And finally, we had a marathon viewing of Showtime's new series, EPISODES. It's about two screenwriters, so that seemed tangentially appropriate. I. Loved. It. 

DROUGHT has been warmly welcomed into the world and I feel like the luckiest author around, today.