and usually more than a few dollars short. That’s me, the definition of a “late adopter.”

You’ve heard of “early adopters,” right? The folks who jump on the newest technology the minute it’s announced? The people who had cell phones and TiVo before anyone else? Well, I’m the opposite. I still don’t have TiVo, more’s the pity, and I only recently got a cell phone with all the bells and whistles, and then only because it was a gift.

So, yeah, I can be…cautious. Or maybe just oblivious, when it comes to what the rest of the world is doing. TV is a great example. Take Charmed, for instance. I just started watching it.

But it’s over, you say! The series finale was last year! Well, yeah, I know. But thanks to the reruns on TNT, I am now completely hooked, and loving the fact that I can almost mainline whole seasons within a matter of days. (Not to mention that I’m loving Julian McMahon as Cole. Whoa, is he smokin’, whether he’s evil, good, or some combination of the two. He’s particularly yummy when he’s a little unhinged over Phoebe and angsting all over the place, actually, with his stubble and his uncombed hair. And see? Now I want to watch Nip/Tuck, even though it’s several seasons in already.)

Then there are comics. I was too busy reading my Little House books and Paul Zindel and Paula Danziger as a kid to pick up a comic book. So I just bought my very first comic ever, at the ripe old age of ::coughmuttercough::, a few weeks ago. And I loved it! Of course, it’s Joss Whedon’s long-promised Season Eight of Buffy, so it was kind of a no-brainer, but still! A comic book! It took me a few minutes to get the hang of how to read it, actually.

Are you ever late to the party? What haven’t you tried yet? Have you never tried a Regency romance? Gone to a horror movie? Tried (ugh) tofu? Share!

Yup, it’s that time of year. Everywhere you turn, someone is wrapping up the events of 2006. Pick a focus, any focus–-the year in romance novels, the year in politics, the year in fashion, the year in off-color desk toys, whatever you want, you can find it. But Time Magazine thoughtfully chose a very special individual for it’s Person of the Year–-me! (Well, okay, us – all of us, via the Internet, where everyone has a voice – or so the story goes.)

And I could certainly give you a very professional list of my writing achievements and failures this year–-my year in writing, let’s say. But life is a lot more than that, and sometimes the smallest moments are the most important.

Thus, I give you Amy’s 2006:

• I discovered that I am really, really not cut out to live where it often snows for days on end, sometimes accumulating in feet instead of inches. I don’t think Florida is necessarily for me, either, but I have begun to discover what all those old-time authors meant by chilblains.
• Planning a child’s birthday party takes a kind of patience and dedication usually attributed only to … I don’t know, Benedictine monks maybe. What began as a simple outing to an indoor mini golf place turned into a labyrinthine issue of RSVPs, goodie bags, and missing cakes—saved by Mr. Sunshine’s happiness when all was said and done.
• A fourteen-year-old’s broken nose costs a lot of money to fix properly. That is all.
• My own birthday doesn’t require an elaborate party, but a bakery cake and a few phone calls and cards from friends are really appreciated when I’m wondering where the hell my thirties went.
• A Little League game in which your child is pitching for the first time—and giving up walk after walk after walk—is a good place to perfect the art of biting every last one of your nails down to the quick.
• Bathing suit shopping never gets any easier. Period.
• Summer is not the same without a new Harry Potter novel to read. Do you hear me, J.K. Rowling?!
• Traveling 640 miles in a car with three children—one way—deserves a medal. Or possibly a Nobel Peace Prize.
• School starting up again really is the most wonderful time of the year.
• Halloween just isn’t the same if someone doesn’t puke up too many mini candy bars after trick-or-treating.
• A three-year-old who’s just had a nightmare will get in bed with you, even if it means climbing Everest and swimming the English Channel to do so.
• Rereading the opening chapter of Little Women is still the best way to start the Christmas season.

So that’s my year in epiphanies and lessons learned and moments savored. What was the best—or worst—part of 2006 for you?

It’s surely a sign of the apocalypse—over the long weekend I actually got to see a movie in the theater. And not an animated one!

With the grandparents watching the kids for free, I wanted to see a true big-screen picture, and I knew it had to be Casino Royale. I’ve seen almost all of the Bond movies over the years, and the chance to find out how Daniel Craig would do as 007 was irresistible.

Be still my heart. I hope all the naysayers who booed the idea of Craig taking the role are eating nasty, undercooked crow, because he rocked the part so hard, the theater nearly shook. This is not your grandfather’s Bond. And that’s a good thing, if you ask me.

I know Bond may not be for everyone. The eye-popping gadgets, the cartoon villains, the improbable escapes from certain death—Bond has always been over the top, unstoppable, and unbelievably suave at the same time. But Casino Royale is the first step in reinventing the franchise, and I was absolutely won over.

Yeah, yeah, there’s no denying that Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan are hotter than the surface of the sun. (Roger Moore? Not so much. And let us never speak of George Lazenby. Or Timothy Dalton, to be honest.) They had that smooth, predatory sexiness down pat. But there was something a little unreal about them, not to mention the villains they were chasing.

Craig’s Bond is—gasp—a real man. A smoking hot, absolutely buff man, yes, but one with a brain. One who actually gets hurt. One who doesn’t have to depend on disappearing cars or shoe phones to beat the bad guy, but who uses his head, and only the technology available to any one of us. (With one little exception, but it is a Bond movie, after all.)

What’s more, this Bond is determined to stop the bad guy because it’s the right thing to do, not only because it’s his job, or because it makes for a string of exciting action sequences. This Bond has a moral compass! Again I say, be still my heart.

Is Bond a hero, though? The kind of hero we’d find in a romance? I don’t know about that. His cumulative body count is pretty high, and he’s not above lying, cheating, and stealing to get the job done. Historically, he’s not exactly a one-woman man, either. That’s a pretty tall order when it comes to redemption.

The thing is, Daniel Craig’s Bond makes me believe he’s open to it. This Bond has a heart, as well as a soul. This Bond had me on the edge of my seat, because I knew he wouldn’t pull a cartoon gadget out of his back pocket. This Bond made me care about what happened to him. And that’s the kind of (anti) hero I can really fall for.

I love bookstores. Who here doesn’t? If I find myself with unexpected free time, I’m there, wandering the nicely hushed store, paging through books by new authors, running my finger over all the lovely spines, and usually wishing I had much more money to spend. And so many bookstores are so thoughtful now! With cafes right inside, and the chance to relax and explore a new book with a nice big hot tea and a decadent muffin, bookstores are definitely one of my favorite places on earth.

But libraries were my first love. As a kid, they were the places where the books lived, and I visited our public library as often as I could. It was nothing special, architecturally—just a big old brick building dating back to the forties, with two floors and a large separate room for the children’s books. There was nothing particularly interesting or helpful about the layout or the events they hosted, either—it was simply your basic library, complete with those plain and sturdy oak library tables and chairs for study, a water fountain on each floor, and plenty of signs admonishing one and all to be quiet and respectful of others.

I adored it. I knew the children’s section backwards and forwards, and kept a mental tally of when “my” books had been checked out by others. I discovered books my mother had read, books that weren’t available in the bookstores in the 1970s—the Beany Malone novels, the Cherry Ames mysteries. I read about an Amish girl and a girl who woke up to find she was a princess in a castle two hundred years before her time. And then I wandered into the adult stacks. So many more books! It was overwhelming, in the most delicious way. My little paper library card was dog-eared and threadbare with use.

I still love libraries. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always buy books (usually way too many, if the size of my to-be-read stack is any indication), but there’s something really wonderful about finding out-of-print books in the library, authors who no longer warrant shelf space in the stores. And you get to read them for free! (Well, if you remember to return them on time, at least.)

So, to celebrate libraries, I give you library porn. Make sure you scroll all the way down to my favorite, the Trinity College Library in Dublin. And then tell me about your favorite library!

Okay, I’ve said it already—I love Halloween, and adore being scared (I just put five more horror movies in my NetFlix queue). But I think it’s time we all faced up to true horror out there. The really frightening stuff.

Zombies? Gross, but usually slow-moving. I don’t care how they behave in the new movies, when you’re dead and hungry for brains, you’re not running like an antelope.

Ghosts? Poltergeist notwithstanding, this is a live and let live scenario. Grab a sweater for those pesky cold spots and buy earplugs for the moans and rattling chains.

Vampires? I don’t know, some days eternal life looks pretty good. And vampires are sexy. At least the ones I like.

No, there’s way more horrifying stuff out there. I’ll prove it, with a list so scary it goes to eleven.

1) Gauchos. They were awful the first time. I don’t care if you call it a split skirt—it’s still awful.
2) Deep-fried Coke. This could be an urban legend along the lines of Bigfoot, but if it’s not, it’s terrifying. How do you fry a liquid anyway? A food product that defies the laws of physics is a major terror, if you ask me.
3) TV shows multiplying. They’re breeding! They’re dressing up their pixels and getting it on! I mean, how many versions of Law and Order are there now? Seventeen? And CSI is right behind it. Stop the madness!
4) Lima beans. There’s just no explanation.
5) Paris Hilton’s CD. Just the mention of it makes me scream in terror.
6) Laundry. Now there’s terrifying. It’s like the blob—it keeps growing, and nothing you ever do keeps it at bay.
7) The day the dishwasher breaks–which is inevitably the day your three children have decided to use every glass in the house for a science experiment requiring flour, water, grape juice, and dog hair.
Target. It’s a big, black shiny hole full of way too much appealing stuff. You go in—and you come out only when you’ve spent five times as much money as you meant to.
9) The TomKat baby. I mean, come on, in the first pictures of that kid, was she wearing a toupee or what? Dude.
10) Appliances hooked up to the Internet. Not that I have (and I never will!) because we all know that machines are already way too smart. Imagine the chaos if they started emailing each other.

And the scariest thing of all?

11) The day you wake up and find you’re all out of your preferred caffeine-delivery system. There are no words for the horror.

Hold me. I’m trembling.

The countdown has begun. As of today, there are only twenty-one days (exactly three weeks) until Halloween. Time for my annual costume freak-out.

I adore Halloween. I love everything about it – haunted houses, bats and witches and vampires and mummies, ghost stories, cemeteries, a full yellow moon. I’ve already started my annual October tradition of reading scary books and watching horror movies—the weekend before Halloween will be a total frightfest of all my favorites, like the original version of The Haunting, Lost Boys, Halloween, and whatever else I can get my long-suffering husband to sit through.

But my favorite thing about Halloween is the costumes. I mean, come on, it’s dress-up day. It’s a chance to be someone completely different—as outrageous or creative or spooky as you want. I can’t tell you one detail from the birthday party I had when I turned five, but I can describe my Halloween costume in detail.

My ultimate costume, the one I’ve wanted to make for years, is a Victorian corpse. Goth all the way, lace petticoats and corset and upswept hair, but, you know, dead. Grayish skin beginning to rot away, my dress tattered, a few leaves in my hair. (Yeah, okay, I have a dark side. Or at least a slightly morbid one. It’s a thing.) I can see it in my head—the perfect combination of elaborate dress-up costume and fright factor.

And what will I go as this year? Probably a clown. Or possibly a cheerleader. I know there’s a pair of pompoms kicking around this house somewhere.

I mean, hello? Deadlines, dishes, dirty laundry—I have time to make this costume like I have time to tat lace by hand, and make all of my own bread. Then there’s the small matter of my kids’ costumes, because yeah, Halloween is actually a kid’s holiday, isn’t it? That’s the thing, though. The eight-year-old (a slightly creepy eight-year-old, I’ll admit) inside of me is chomping at the bit to dress up and play.

I’ve always said that kid is one of the reasons I love to read, and love to write even more. Reading a good book can be exactly like trying on a new identity for a little while—if I identify with the main character, I can live vicariously as a schoolteacher in the 1950s, or a rancher’s wife in the Old West, or a duke’s daughter in Regency England. And when I write, I can create an identity, someone completely unlike me who gets to experience all sorts of things I never will.

Now if I could only interest someone other than Tim Burton in the story of a Victorian corpse…

Have you heard the term? I heard it first in relation to fanfic (shhh!), but it essentially means a kink you love no matter what. Secret babies stories make you bounce up and down? Tortured heroes with scars? Bulletproof kinks.

Mine is … well, not really a kink, actually. And it’s not usually a romance thing, either, although I wish it were. But the other day I realized that one of my bulletproof kinks, for lack of a better term, is ballet.

I am a complete sucker for a toe shoe. For the music and the romance, the costumes, the sweat, the whole “otherness” of that life. (Yes, I read Gelsey Kirkland’s autobiography way too young, and no, it didn’t have quite the intended effect.) If there’s ballet in a movie or a book, I’m there. I watched (with great pleasure, I might add) the incredible cheesiness of Center Stage the other night on Oxygen. (Peter Gallagher as the ballet troupe’s director and choreographer! I ask you!) And when I say with great pleasure, I mean I watched every minute, bad dialogue, lame characterization, unbearably predictable plot, and all. I’ve seen The Turning Point and The Company and Save the Last Dance, and I still own a much loved copy of a quintessential ballet novel, Ballerina, that came out in the late 1970s.

It’s a sickness, what can I say? In fact, one of my heroines in I Love You to Death is a former ballet dancer. (I’ll grant you that a male ballet dancer is not quite my idea of the perfect hero, but I’ll also say that in Center Stage, the scene with the male principal dancing to non-classical music in an exercise class was hotter than the surface of the sun, I swear.)

So, no, I don’t find much of this particular obsession interest of mine in romance, but there are plenty of romances that I will read even if I don’t know the author. Stuck in a cabin together? I’m there. Brooding historical hero with a big secret (or, even better, some kind of truly sympathetic vengeance thing going on)? I must have it. A romance where the either the heroine or the hero has to be nursed back to health by the other? Ohmigod, am I ever there.

What about you? What’s the thing (or things!) you can’t resist when it comes to romance?

Today is the fifth anniversary of the tragedy of 9/11. I know you don’t need me to remind you of that. For too many of us, someone we know personally was affected, and for all of us the senseless loss of life is something that will never be easy to understand or accept.

I don’t want to rehash that day, or the days following it – we all have our own “where were you when…?” memories. But as the anniversary of the attacks approached this year, I found myself thinking about how I get through hard times like that – even the hard times that are nothing more than my checkbook refusing to be wrestled into submission, or my toddler creating yet another crayon masterpiece on the living room wall.

By Friday of the week of 9/11, I was empty. Scraped out, no more tears to cry, and a little bit numb by how long I was sitting in front of the TV each day watching as the rescue teams searched for survivors. There was nothing on TV but the coverage of Ground Zero, and there didn’t seem to be any way to escape it. I felt more than a little guilty for wanting to in the first place.

Even the local channels – the ones that air reruns of favorite syndicated shows late at night – had given up their airtime to news feeds all week. I was too emotionally drained to concentrate on reading anything. But when I got into bed, I think it was that following Monday, and turned on the TV, out of habit I flipped to the WB, and there they were – Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe.

I had never been so glad to see anyone, fictional or not, in my life.

Nothing was going to change what had happened that horrible week, but man, for that half an hour, there was nothing I wanted to think about more than Joey’s favorite sandwich, or Monica’s right to have eleven classifications of towels (“Fancy. Guest. Fancy guest…”).

I’ve seen them all a million times. I can quote most of the dialogue from most of the episodes. (I’m not bragging, believe me. Even I think this is a sad, sad little function of my brain.) And yet on a bad day? There I am, flipping frantically to TBS or one of our local stations, looking for a rerun. If I happen to catch the episode where Monica bets the apartment – “Ms. Chanandler Bong.” – I’m golden. Automatic stress relief, and bonus laughs stored up for the next deep blue funk.

I’m a re-reader, too. When a TV’s not handy (although we try to make sure that never happens in our house), I’ve got a dozen favorite funny reads on standby. Jennifer Crusie, Janet Evanovich, Rachel Gibson, and MaryJanice Davidson, for instance. (And, okay, anthologies of Calvin and Hobbes. And The Far Side.) If I don’t have time to reread the whole book, I’ll pick out the funniest scenes. It’s like a chocolate chip cookie, or a handful of Cheetos, without the calories (or the orange fingers). Excellent for a flash of pure happy.

I always know that whatever’s bugging me – whether it’s big and grim and serious, or little and frustrating and only mildly annoying – isn’t going to disappear by reading the meet-in-the-closet scene from Faking It, or catching Ross in his Leather Pants of Doom, but for a few minutes at least, nothing matters but the sound of my own laughter.

What do you do to get through the bad days?

Is it just me, or will September forever be back-to-school time? Even before I had kids, Labor Day weekend made me itchy to go buy notebooks and new pencils. (Now, of course, I buy them for the boys, but I usually manage to squeeze in a beand-new notebook for me, too.)

It’s a different way of marking the year, I guess. For me, Janury 1 is just the day I have to jog my brain to remember to write a new year on my checks and correspondence. The real start of the new year is the beginning of September.

So I usually make … well, not resolutions exactly, but new goals this time of year. (All those new notebooks and fresh pencils help.) And this year, I want to work on a couple of things. Meeting my deadlines in a more timely manner, for one. But I want to try some new things, too. New recipes, since dinner around here has gotten more boring than watching paint dry. I want to take more pictures, and get a new digital camera. And I want to read more, in some new genres.

Anyone else treating September as a kind of new year? Anything you want to learn, or do, in the coming months?