I can scarcely believe it! Getting the Girl, the book even my publisher referred to as “an unlikely opponent” (which made me laugh quite a bit), won over Lord of the Rings! Alice would be so proud. Or upset. I can’t decide which.
Victory is bittersweet because Lord of the Rings is one of my all time favourite series and the movies gave good value in terms of minutes per dollar. But the Lord voters can comfort themselves with the fact that their candidate has sold several tens of millions more books than Sherm. So there’s that.
And now, we’re in the semi-finals. I know I said we were in the semis last week. I don’t follow sports and I’m a bit short on logic, so I got it wrong. Last week must have been the quarter finals. The important piece is that we got 62% out of 1076 votes!
The bad news is that we’re up against, gulp, Scout in To Kill a Mocking Bird! Why is this going to be a tense contest? Well, Mockingbird won a Pulitzer Prize. Getting the Girl has not. Yet. Mockingbird is one of the best-loved books in American literature. Getting is not. Yet. Worst of all, Scout is Sherm’s kind of girl. To Kill a Mockingbird is his kind of book (what with the injustice and the mystery and all). Sherm’s going to be torn up about this match. But not me. I say, Vote For Sherm! He’s short! He’s a giver of backrubs! He hates crime and cruelty! He loves girls with bangs! Plus, you’ve gone this far with him!
I hear that some of you have enlisted your friends to vote for Sherm. For that and for your effort on behalf of a most unlikely competitor, I say forever thanks. (And Sherm wants to know if you want a massage later.)
P.S. Last Thursday I got my advance hardcover of Nice Recovery. It looks great and it should be hitting the shelves any day now. Let’s keep this love going!
xoxo