Writer Gabriela Lessa is celebrating her birthday today--and her online birthday bash includes the chance to win a critique from agent Lora Rivera.

To enter, sign up here by noon EST today:
http://aspiringwriterworld.blogspot.com/2011/03/312-big-birthday-bash-with-critiques.html. Then, post 312 words from your WIP or completed novel, of any genre. (Why 312 words? In honor of her March 12 [3-12] birthday.)

That's it!

My entry is pasted below. Happy birthday, Gabriela! And happy weekend to each of you!

Title: All That You Can't Leave Behind
Genre: YA Contemporary
Status: WIP

There wasn’t supposed to be mistletoe.

It was July, after all, and outside, the heat was thick as cotton candy. The fake snow that Emma Kay Lazarus had sprayed from a can onto the front hedges had nearly begun to sizzle, and the icicles she’d hung from the trees looked like silver tears melting down toward her front walkway. And I fully expected the light-up Santa perched by the front door to dissolve into a pool of molten plastic by the time Emma Kay’s “Christmas in July” party was over.

Plus, you’d think, after hanging 96 pink-and-silver ornaments from the Christmas tree in Emma Kay’s family room, that I might have spotted the mistletoe hanging in the center of the room. You’d think Emma Kay herself might have clued me in, seeing as she’d already shared the history behind the 80,000 other decorations we’d dragged upstairs for the festivities. Because this was no ordinary high school band party: This was a “social ministry outreach” event (or at least, that was the part Emma Kay would be touting on her college applications that fall). For two cans of food for the pantry downtown, you, too, could escape the sweltering southern Indiana heat and enter Emma Kay’s air-conditioned winter wonderland, complete with indoor pool.

But I hadn’t brought my Christmas spirit with me to decorate that day. And maybe Emma Kay was just a little tired of my “Tell me why we’re doing this again” crap to bother pointing out the mistletoe.

“You owe me one, remember?” she said after I begged for a tube of her mother’s peppermint chapstick to soothe my lips. She tossed me a blow-up penguin.

I uncapped the plastic plug on the penguin’s butt. “You posed in a dozen outfits for my mother’s plus-size eBay line . . .”

“For free,” she reminded me. “And I’m not even plus-sized.”