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Virginia Ironside is our guest blogger during the week of March 17th. If you have any questions for Virginia Ironside, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about No! I Don't Want To Join A Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year:

Marie Sharp is heading toward sixty and is just fine with it. She's already had plenty of excitement in her life: sex and drugs in the freewheeling sixties, career and children, marriage and divorce. Now she's ready to settle into a quiet, blissfully boring routine. No Italian classes or gym memberships or bicycle trips across Europe, thank you very much! Marie just wants to put her feet up and "start doing old things."

She's even sworn off men! But as it turns out, life still has some surprises in store, the biggest of which is a new grandson on the way. What's more, Archie, her old childhood crush, suddenly reenters her life, and her closest friend falls seriously ill. Armed with a biting sense of humor, Marie wrestles with a life that refuses to follow her plans-and may still offer more possibilities than she realizes.

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Congratulations to the Top 10 finalists, who have been chosen from a pool of nearly 5,000 qualified writers in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA), a contest in search of the next popular novel, sponsored by Amazon.com, Penguin Group (USA), and HP. From now through March 31, the public can go to www.amazon.com/abna and vote for their favorite work by reading, rating and reviewing excerpts of the Top 10 finalists' submissions. The winner of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award will be unveiled in New York City on Monday, April 7, 2008 and will be awarded a publishing contract with Penguin Group (USA).

Now, in the final phase of the contest, a prestigious panel of top publishing industry professionals including: Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love; literary critic John Freeman, President of the National Book Critics' Circle (NBCC); literary agent Eric Simonoff, Co-Director of Janklow & Nesbit Associates; and Publisher Amy Einhorn, of Amy Einhorn Books, have read all ten manuscripts, and have posted expert insight and feedback on each of the 10 finalists' work. To view their comments, go to www.amazon.com/abna.

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The history of Wyoming is one of passing through. I always joke that the big empty is like Australia, and that nobody ever got here by accident, but a lot of us did-we were on our way to somewhere else; Louis, Clark, misguided missionaries, lost trappers and mountain men who didn't really care where they were made up the first influx of outsiders who moved on. Only the Indians stayed here for months at a time, and they were proudly nomadic. I wonder if any of their travois had beaded bumper stickers that said NATIVE.

The Oregon Trail went through Wyoming along with about a half-million immigrants who never thought once about staying. Stage lines and the Pony Express traveled through, along with the Bozeman Trail, the Union Pacific rail lines and finally the interstate highways.

In a boom-bust culture, people come and people go that being mostly dependant on the economy. I remember seeing a bumper sticker in Gillette that read, GIVE US ONE MORE BOOM AND WE WON"T SCREW IT UP. Well they got it, and with the current state of methane drilling, and the highest exportation of coal in the country, Wyoming has had a budgetary surplus of over a billion dollars for a few years now.

Over a billion dollars.