We Have a Winner!

A huge thank you to the millions of, um 4, people who contributed great ideas in the comments section of my recent blog.

Your names were carefully written on scraps of paper and tossed into an almost-clean Tupperware container that once held macaroni and cheese. Then the Grand Wizard of Contests (our 15-year-old son) used a very special pair of gold-plated (okay, plastic) salad tongs to extract the winning entry.

And the winner of our Great Idea Contest is . . .

BETH LEVINE. Here's the helpful idea Beth posted in the comment section:

www.helpareporter.com

If you need to find "real people" to interview for a book or article, this guy will send out your query to his list of thousands! I put in a query and had 50 responses in an hour!

Beth has generously chosen to donate her prize -- a paperback young adult novel -- to 826 Valencia. They are currently trying to stock a satellite program in a middle school. I'm sending a copy of my novel today. Click here to see how you can contribute. Scroll down to "Odd Books?"

If anyone wants to know what an agent's day is like, pick up a copy of Water Cooler Diaries: Women Across America Share Their Day at Work. My agent, Tina Wexler, has a day-in-the-life piece in the book detailing the many things she does during the day, including squeezing in reading manuscripts while riding the train to and from work.

Thanks to Elizabeth Willse for her recent review in the New Jersey Star Ledger:

The title of Donna Gephart's smart, funny novel, "As If Being 12 3/4 Isn't Bad Enough, My Mother is Running for President" (Delacorte, 240 pp., $15.99), says it all. Vanessa Rothrock has enough trouble fitting in when her Mom is the governor of Florida; but once the presidential campaign begins, Vanessa feels she can't even talk to her mother without an appointment with the press secretary. Gephart does a beautiful job blending a tense political race with Vanessa's junior high dramas.

All I want to know, Elizabeth, is: Did my family pay you to write that?

Have a great week everyone!
Donna