New Digs!

I know I’ve blogged before about the hazards of having a split personality, and I’ve never made any secret of the fact that Gemma is a pen name. When I first started writing romance, other well established authors I knew said they routinely got fan mail from prisoners. In prison. While I have nothing against having a broad reader base, the idea of some guy in a cell for twenty-to-life hand addressing a note to me was a little creepy. So, I figured that being the single gal I was, safely dictated that I take a pen name for my writing. That was eight years ago, and at this point I honestly feel as much Gemma as I do my given name. However, sometimes having two names can have its interesting moments.

Lately I’ve been getting so much spam at my personal email address, that I’ve started using my Gemma Halliday address almost exclusively. Which meant that when I recently went on the apartment hunt, I used my Gemma email address to write to potential landlords off of craigslist.

A couple weeks ago I found the perfect place and emailed the landlord. While the email came from my Gemma address, I scrubbed it of any writing related signature lines and signed it with my real name. The landlord wrote back and said we could come see the apartment that day at anytime between 2 And 3. I wrote back right away and said that was perfect, we’d see him at 2:30.

I didn’t get an email back, so around 1:45 I figured I should probably call to confirm. I did, and when he picked up he apologized and said he had actually made an appointment with someone else for 2:30 already, but we could come at 2 or 3. (You savvy readers see where this is going already, doncha?) With all the people losing their houses lately in this area, the rental market has become very competitive. So, being the sly dogs we are, we decided that we’d see it at 2 and beat the other guy to the punch.

So, at 2:00 we view the place, love it, grab applications, and cross our fingers that the person seeing it at 2:30 doesn’t have better credit than us. We talk to the landlord a couple more times over the next few days, and he keeps mentioning this other interested party. However… he decided to go with first-come-first-serve (I like this guy!) and ultimately offered the place to us. Yay!

So, we go to sign the paper and he lets it slip who this other interested party was:
Gemma Halliday.

Mental forehead smack.

He got confused by my email address, and when I called him using my real name, he thought I was a different person than the one who had emailed him about the apartment. So, apparently, my competition for the place was me. On the up side, I beat myself out!

We've spent the last week moving and we're almost settled in. We have the boxes out of the living room (yay!), but we don't yet have any living room furniture (boo!). My clothes are all still in boxes (boo!), but the nursery is finally coming together (yay!). In fact, it's the only room that's done, so here is baby's fab new room:



Sorry the quality isn't great - I took this on my phone. Because my camera is still in a box somewhere. Expect more home improvement updates a la Bullet Hole as things come together. I can't wait!

~Trigger (and home improvement) Happy Halliday