Laura’s amazing web guy figured out how to get a photo onto her brant, so scroll down (way way down) to the end of the long gingerbread-house-making piece and see what it looked like when Laura was finished. The only problem is, the photo makes the gingerbread house look short and stocky and pudgy and kind of goofy — completely different from what it looked like in real life which was tall and elegant and truly impressive.

In fact, it was so impressive that when she brought it in to her son’s preschool for Halloween some of the other mothers were kind of, well, jealous, which surprised Laura since several of these women had master’s degrees and Ph.D.s and were quite impressive themselves. This bizarre occurrence — baking something that would incite such jealousy and admiration — jealousy and admiration that her three published novels didn’t seem to incite!!! — became kind of a thing and prompted Laura to write a fake blog to four of her preschool mom friends (in the form of an email a few times a week) about how “great” she was (it was kind of like this brant except it was way more braggy and written in the first person). This in turn lead to Laura and the four fake-blog recipients to refer to themselves as the Blog Moms and it was a very fun year because the Blog Moms were always begging Laura to blog, which she did as much as she could and which gave Laura a huge ego boost when she most needed it (it had been a tough year in the Rejected-Writer department).

Sometimes, when their demands became overwhelming, Laura would call them Blog Hogs but that would just make them want her to blog more, and so she would, but it seemed the more she blogged the more blog they wanted and the supply and demand issue became somewhat of a vicious circle. Needless to say, this was pretty heady stuff for Laura — her three published novels had never created such excitement and desire for more of her writing! — and in time Laura realized that making her fake-blog extra-exclusive would continue to keep demand for her blogging very high. For example, one Blog Mom husband, Billy W., became obsessed with Laura’s fake blog and wanted to be put on the recipient list. This request was overruled (naturally — he was of the wrong gender and Blog Dad just didn’t have the same ring to it). Billy begged so incessantly for blog that he quickly acquired the nickname Billy the Blog Hog which only made him want blog more. He was so desperate, in fact, to be part of the Blog Moms that he offered to blog himself! But Laura turned down that request, too, and only allowed him to be a one-time fake-blog contributor, or, as they’re called in actual journalism, a “stringer.” His assignment: to cover a princess-themed birthday party of the child of a preschool mom who was obsessed with and always talking about scrapbooking. Billy the Blog Hog’s fake-blog was so brilliantly observed and well-written that Laura was tempted to allow him to be an honorary Blog Mom but in the end a vote was taken and the Blog Moms decided against allowing Billy to officially be part of the group.

That was two years ago and even though Laura stopped the fake blog long ago and now has an actual blog and even though their kids are no longer in preschool but are in first grade they still call each other Blog Mom and they probably always will.

Anyway, Laura doesn’t want to obsess or anything, but she’s going to try to upload a better picture of the gingerbread haunted house later today so that the whole Blog Mom phenomenon will make more sense.

For those interested in seeing a photograph of the Haunted Gingerbread Mansion that Laura baked — wait, that’s an understatement — created, built, erected — my amazing web guy is figuring out how to upload photos onto my brant so that soon I will be able to visually enhance any and all postings. As always, Laura thanks you for your patience!

Laura wishes to thank Jefferson Rabb, her amazing web guy, for getting her brant back to normal. She promises not to touch any of the weird buttons with HTML on them ever again.

If you’re an avid reader of Laura’s brant, you were probably shocked and dismayed to see that the formatting of her brant — the style and design, in other words — is different. This was accidental. Laura was messing around with some of the controls, trying to figure out how to add a blogroll for links to some of her favorite people and sites, and all of a sudden she got into something she couldn’t get out of and before she knew what was happening, she’d unwittingly selected a new “theme” for her brant.

Laura has an email into her amazing web-guy to fix the problem and she’s hoping he’s able to change it back to the way it was before she’d started messing around with things she had no business messing around with.

For those of you (besides Laura) who are counting the days before “Piece of Work” is published, there are only ten more days between now, September 15, and the official publication date of September 25. Laura thinks she’s done the math right (25 minus 15 = 10), but just in case she hasn’t she’s showing her work (maybe if she hadn’t gotten an 11 on her math final in her junior year of high school she would have more faith in her ability to do math, if you can even call simple addition, or subtraction, math). If she’s made a mistake in her calculation, please bring the error to her attention by leaving a comment here on her brant (just make sure you sign it “Smarty-Pants”).

Not to get bogged down in more figures and numbers (this is the most math Laura has done in years), but in the 15 days since her first brant entries Laura got pretty busy. She meant to keep her brant current with interesting and entertaining entries to satisfy her rabid readers (although from what she can tell about them so far, she’s not sure satisfying her readers is possible because they are SO incredibly rabid), but she was kind of swamped (inundated, actually) with enthusiastic responses to her website. Yes, okay, so a lot of the praise was for the site designer’s (Jefferson Rabb’s) actual design of the site (”cool”, “hip”, and “modern” are three words Laura got really sick of hearing this week), but she, too, received her share of comments regarding the content. While most people (allegedly) enjoyed the faux-narcissistic voice of the third-person narrator (also known as “Laura The Branter”), one or two people (buzz-killers) doubted the fact that Laura is really as insecure as she makes herself out to be. In other words, they wonder if her self-deprecation is an act. This struck Laura as incredibly funny (in fact, she would have started laughing hysterically if she wasn’t already crying hysterically because of how wounded she felt having her credibility called into question like that). All Laura can say is that these doubters (buzz-killers) must not know her very well. In fact, Laura wants to reassure everyone that she is even more insecure in real life than she makes herself out to be on her website!

(OK, well obviously that’s a lie, but you know what she means.)

Laura also wants to call attention to the fact that her theories about celebrity narcissism (featured in “Piece of Work”) are actually based in sound scientific research. To prove that she does her homework before shooting her mouth off (even though, technically, she shot her mouth off long before this bit of supporting research was released), she’d like you to read this September 13th article from the Los Angeles Times — “Celebrities Are Their Own Biggest Fans.” (Again, she’s providing the link even though she doesn’t know how to get the link to light up and do it’s linking-thing.)

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/cl-et-narcissism12sep12,1,5835330.story?track=crosspromo&coll=la-headlines-entnews&ctrack=1&cset=true