Meredith Efken has experienced much of what she describes in her debut novel, SAHM I Am. From cleaning up smelly diaper wall art and surviving temper tantrums to displaying innocent bouquets of half-wilted dandelions and being covered in slobbery toddler kisses, Meredith enjoys the life of a stay-at-home mom--despite the challenges. She and her husband, Jason, find that parenting and homeschooling daughters Jessamyn and Catrin keeps their lives entertaining, interesting and busy. They live in a tumble-down fixer-upper Victorian in Omaha, Nebraska, where they are jail wardens for Tadi and Tara, the Houdinis of Siberian huskies who make an art form of escaping the backyard. Meredith struggles with how to be an attentive mom and a productive writer. Housework? Gave up on it long ago. In addition to writing and homeschooling, she's a student in the Vineyard Leadership Institute, so she's pretty much insane. But she hides it by doing nearly normal stuff such as playing keyboard and singing on her church worship team, co-founding a local Christian writers group and drinking a lot of chai. Meredith also hangs out with other writers in American Christian Fiction Writers, where she's fooled them into thinking she is sane and rational enough to manage their email loop and web forums. Shhdon't tell. Meredith's writing tends to have themes about personal identity and becoming who God designed you to be. This often makes her characters collide with what their culture or even their churches or other leaders say they ought to be. And then she discovered she can write humor. She's been declared by fellow author Randy Ingermanson to be "funnier than Erma Bombeck," which she often questions, but hey, it's a great quote. You can decide for yourselves if it's true.