It's been a while since I've poked my head in here.  In fact, last time, I was part of the "author in progress" crew.

Just wanted to let you know that my first book, A Devil in the Details will published by Roc in July of 2010!

Last night, I got a partial request from an agent I've queried on my finished novel.  It's my second partial request, but the first agent passed after reading.

St. Joe is my home town!  I'm in KC now, though.

(South End rules!) 

Edited to add:  Your board looks great!  Am I allowed to participate as a former Joe-towner?

And word from my best-friend-the-doctor:

Okay well, to start with if the author wants to crush his charecter's spleen she would need to be hit on the left side.  The liver is on the right side however, the hit would have to be lower on the rib cage to hit the liver, or angled down from the armpit.  other structures you can hit are the aorta, which does lie more to the right (but would kill her pretty quickly, the inferior vena cava (main vein that feeds into the heart) he could hit pretty easily.  As for the ribs, yes you can remove part of a rib and be okay, I've seen 2 in a row removed before but in think more than that would be pushing it.  That area would be more vunerable to damage, and repeat collapsing of
the lungs.   You can use bone grafting to fill the hole.  A graft from the
charecter herself can be taken, usually from the hip bone (illiac crest) depending on the size, or a cadaver doner can be used as well.

Ooh, I like Sapiens.

Titles are the bane of my existence.  Both of my current works have "working titles" but I hope that someone cooler than I can come up with a title for publishing, when/if the day comes.

Though, I did think up a REALLY great title the other day.  Now I just need a story to go with it.

Lucky!  Wish I knew some people with connections.

Hey, Richelle... Wanna hook a sistah up? 

I actually went on Amazon.com and looked up all of the Dresden Files books. They have a nifty little feature that lets you see word count.

Storm Front was somewhere around 80,000 words.
They didn't have White Night available for stats at that time, but Proven Guilty came in just over 150K

I guess, as you get more popular, they let you write longer books.