When I was a little kid, my teachers liked to reward good grades on tests with little sticky stars. Now, every time I see a pack of them in the store I get all kinds of nostalgic. Sometimes they’d peel off my tests until just the little residue in the shape of a star was left. I didn’t care. I knew that the star meant I’d done well. Being a kid is fraught with awkwardness and confusion and I was willing to take any kind of praise I could get.

Being an adult is surprisingly full of a great deal of awkwardness and confusion, too. No one tells you this when you’re a kid, but it’s true. At one of my jobs (yes, a real grownup job in an office in Manhattan, I kid you not) there was a group of women who actively disliked me (actually, dislike is too mild a term for how they felt). Sometimes they’d throw trash over the cubicle walls onto my desk. They bitched about me in the bathroom: “She’s so unprofessional! And her frizzy hair! Did you see who she ate lunch with the other day?” Part of the reason they hated me was because a few of my outfits were a bit, ahem, colorful (rainbow striped tights—whatever, I was CHIC).

Anyway, AWKWARD is a situation with which I am intimately familiar. So when my boss told me I was doing a great job, I gave myself a little mental silver star and got on with my day. If I could have I would’ve pasted stars all over myself and paraded in front of those women, happily giving them a mental eff you as I walked past, but the damn things are notoriously difficult to stick onto fabric. So, whatever. I wore STRIPED TIGHTS instead. I wore those tights a LOT. Every time one of those women grimaced at me I laughed inside (every grimace = a wrinkle later on).

Today I woke up and found a brand new silver star stuck onto the page of Kiss Is A Four-Letter Word at All Romance ebooks (ARe). This means that my book is a bestseller! The little girl in my head jumped up and down and freaked out because she got an STAR!!! on her novel. A star! I haven’t received a star for anything since second grade ended about a zillion years ago. Stars are cool.

Over on BookStrand, I was thrilled to see that Kiss Is A Four-Letter Word is one of the featured bestsellers. It’s like I got a double star! DOUBLE-STARS! Double-stars are seriously awesome. Not everyone gets those stuck on their books.

Double stars are cool, yo.

After that, I clicked on Amazon and found A FIVE STAR REVIEW for Kiss Is A Four-Letter Word. Yes, I can’t emphasize it enough. FIVE. STARS. Dear reviewer: I love you. No, really. I have some stars for you, because you are awesome and now I have extras. *throws some sticky stars at Lisa O*. My favorite part of the review: “…she manages to write with a humor that had me chuckling aloud.”

Honestly, that comment is worth more than five stars. It’s a freaking star cluster. Why? Because the point of writing is to communicate with a reader. With this book I wanted to make my readers laugh and spend an enjoyable few hours with my characters. That comment told me that I’d actually managed to accomplish what I’d wanted. That right there is a GIANT star in the life of a writer. I’m going to have to dig out my rainbow tights and wear them in celebration.