Category: LHA

Got in from New York City last night.

Off to the Rochester Children’s Book Fest right now.

Details later.

We ate dinner at a friends’ house in the village and sat on their porch so we could enjoy the trick or treaters. (Nobody comes to our house… way too far out in the country. ) It was delightful. My favorite costume was a totally excellent dracula, around age 5, and a couple of tiny fairies. Then there was a pirate bawling at the top of his lungs. “Can this be the last house (sob, sob)? I want this to be the last house (more sobbing)!” If it wasn’t the last house, I hope he sends his therapy bills to his parents.

What were the coolest costumes you saw last night?

Awake well before the sun today to work on revisions. I love the thought that the veil between the spirit world and the walking world is thinnest this time of year. I do not like horror movies or slasher films – real life is scary enough for me, thank you very much, and I think chain saws are best used on trees, not people. But I like the wind moving through the skeletal trees, chasing the leaves across the meadow and the geese out of the corn fields. I love fat pumpkins glowing with candles, and children dressed as ghosts and lions and sunflowers reminding us that life is all about sweetness and giggles. Happy Halloween, everyone.

Writer’s Almanac has a nice history of Halloween, if you care.

The revisions are unfolding nicely; fun scenes to even out the pacing between dramatic chapters, transitions that make sense (I hope), and some humor to balance out the dreadful stuff in my Main Character’s life. I really adore him.

BH and I head back to NYC on Wednesday for some book stuff and a day of researching (yes, I’m already beginning the earliest stages of work on the next book). I have to buy a dress today. This is one of my least favorite things to do on the planet, but I know that I’ll be happy once it’s over. I don’t have many dresses and they are all for summer-time. Must suck it up and pretend that I am an adult who has a complete and weather-appropriate wardrobe. Le sigh.

added later I hate shopping. Loathe it. I was never in danger of buying a dress because I never saw one that was remotely attractive, except for a couple that were suitable for the Oscars. Shopping for a different kind of outfit – pants and jacket/pants and sweater was complicated by the fact that nothing fit. ARGH! I hate shopping. I finally found up with a new pair of pants (8 tall) because my husband is the most patient man in the world. I swear I am only going to order from catalogs for the rest of my life.

For Halloween I will go dressed as a gawky, tall girl whose clothes don’t fit.

Things that are frustrating me right now:

1. My parents’ insurance. I spent all afternoon on the phone trying to sort out one mess after another. I bet healthcare would be more affordable if the employees of insurance companies were better trained. You do not want to know how many calls I had to make to get a simple answer to a simple questions. Grrr…
2. My desk is awash in backed-up mail again.
3. My revision is not yet done.
4. This is a very bad hair day.
5. College basketball hasn’t started yet.
6. I didn’t get to the gym today.
7. October is almost over.
8. I’m hungry and I don’t know what to eat.
9. I hate myself when I am whiny like this.

On a much happier note, yesterday’s visit to Long Island City High School (in Queens) was a blast. It is a massive school – nearly 4,500 students! – but it felt like a warm and nurturing place.

Thanks to everyone who made me feel so welcome.

The traffic in New York City yesterday was insane. Brain-splittingly insane. To amuse myself, I looked for things to take pictures of. And I found this:

This is a group of traffic cops in training. We were lost in Queens at this point, so we asked them for directions. They did not know how to get us where we were going. I guess it was the first day. What is the collective noun for such a gathering? A signal of traffic cops? A misdirection of traffic cops? A gridlock of traffic cops?

I forget to mention that I visited the new location of my favorite NYC bookstore, Books of Wonder yesterday. It is now teamed with the Cupcake Cafe. You should visit there right now and buy books and eat cupcakes.

Yes, that’s what I had for dinner tonight. How can you resist a menu item like that? It had squid (duh), bamboo shoots, broccoli, onion and chili in coconut milk. I liked it. Didn’t love it, but liked it enough to eat an entire plateful. I wonder if I will have strange dreams because of it.

The day flew by.

The ladies of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School hung out with me at Teen Central, a HUGE YA section at the Donnell Library on 53rd Street. This is the library that had an Anti-Prom last spring, for kids who were feeling a little rebellious about the prom concept, but still wanted a good party. They had more than 100 kids show up for it. This is an idea whose time has come.

The men and women of Bushwick High, Academy of Urban Planning, Bushwick School for Social Justice, and New York Harbor School. I had such an amazing time with them…. and one of their teachers brought cookies. For everybody.

Some of the kids who stayed late to chat.

Now it’s back to revisions and then sleep. I’m at Long island City High School in Queens tomorrow morning, then the long train ride home. Since I was in Brooklyn today, I want to answer an email I received last week from Jessica in Sheepshead Bay. She wrote: i read the comments section where you said you don’t read many ya books because your usually busy writing them and since i want to be an author i always thought it was important to write books i myself would read i mean whats the sense of writing a book you yourself wouldn’t read? what would make you think other people want to? do you think that aspect of writing is important?

Thanks for giving me the chance to clarify this, Jessica. I agree if you want to be an author (or if you are an author) you need to read a lot. And I really encourage people to read outside of their favorite genre; that’s how you learn new things. I was not in any way disrespecting other YA books. I LOVE them. But books and characters I love tend to stick around in my head, like ghosts. And I think it would be immoral as well as illegal to steal from other authors. So when I am writing YA, I read other kinds of books. That way, the voices of my characters are coming solely from me. Does that clear it up?