After Friday night's disaster, I'd hoped that Therese and I had our bad bridge out of our system. We played today in a huge 17 table game and came in 16th out of 17 in our direction. This isn't just bad, it's shameful. I messed up a couple of hands, and we had some major mis-communications. We had a few good boards but it didn't add up. Oh, well. We're going to play in the Oklahoma City Regional in a couple of weeks and we'll have lots of time to knock off rough edges.

We don't normally play the Tuesday morning game but we played today because our friend, Susan Flick, was celebrating her recently earned Life Master status. Congratulations, Susan. People talk about how the life master status is watered down. Maybe, but it's still something that takes years of effort and considerable success to achieve. It's amazing to me how often I see the same people at tournaments and the club no matter what session I show up for. These are people seriously working on their game. The ACBL, in its wisdom, has decided to raise the number of points for future members (effective next year). I can understand this, especially with the charity games and high number of points given. Still, it seems like a rough solution. 500 points is a LOT.

I took the train up to bridge. On the way up, I finished THE TELEFAX BOX which I hope to review (along with LORD OF THE LIBRARIES) on Thursday. After bridge, I had a 3 hour break. I went to the Richardson library, read Armchair General Magazine, then got some writing done. Haven't done a page count yet. Wrote more on the way home. I think I know where the bunny book is going now. Finally.

If you're in the Dallas area, plan on stopping by the Mystery Writers of America branch meeting at the Texas Land and Cattle Co. on 75 and Spring Valley at 9:30 in the morning. Karen will be giving a 'bad' pitch and I'll try and give a 'good' pitch. I hope mine isn't worse than hers.

I'm going to make DYNAMITING DADDY'S DREAM HOUSE by Robyn Anders the www.BooksForABuck.com book of the day. Ex-mercenary Troy Garrett is used to explosions. But he didn't expect his new California house--the one he bought to raise his young daughter in--to be blown into the Pacific. Construction engineer Jill Villars is having a bad day, made worse by the frustrating man whom she owes big. It might not have been her fault, but she was responsible. Life would be so much easier if he wasn't so sexy--and if his wonderful daughter didn't make her think about family.

DYNAMITING DADDY'S DREAM HOUSE is only $2.99. It's available in HTML, Adobe PDF, eReader, and Microsoft Reader formats. Here's the cover (cover design by Jane Graves):

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