As a novelist for young adults, I spend a lot of time trying to recapture the emotions I had in high school. For me, there wasn’t much joy in being a teen. I wrote poetry back then, and a lot of what I wrote captures my self-loathing and fear and confusion. I sometimes wrote about wanting to get life over with. But I also wrote about hope. I hoped things would get better. I only half-believed they would. So if I could go back in time and talk to my teenage self, this is what I’d say: All those feelings...
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My muse is an elusive thing. Sometimes it swells my chest and comes out through my fingertips, but most of the time, it stays locked in a box at my feet, only occasionally making a surprise appearance. It’s hard to pin down what inspires me to write—what makes my muse come out of its box—but in thinking about it for this blog, I remembered a chance encounter I had when I was eight years old. I was sitting in a laundromat while my mom and I waited for our clothes to wash. I’d brought along my spiral notebook, and I...
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For the teen art contest at my book-launch party, I asked teens to draw or paint one of two things: (1) A self-portrait. One of the book’s themes is about how we see ourselves. Tera, the main character, paints a number of self-portraits, and in each one, she sees herself in a different way. (2) A secret. In the book, Tera draws a secret as “a black wad in a girl’s stomach. A black wad with tiny teeth” that gnaws at her. Teens were asked to draw what a secret looks like to them. Party guests enjoyed viewing all of...
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Today, I’m feeling pretty lucky. Aside from the fact that I have a wonderful family and that we’re all in reasonably good health, March 18, 2015, is the official release of my first novel: A Work of Art. Not only that, but I got to celebrate by sitting in on a parent book-club meeting at my son’s school where they were discussing (dun-dun-DUN) my book! Yes, I know it sounds narcissistic, but you have to understand that getting to discuss a book that I wrote (and getting to discuss it with people I respect) was something I’d fantasized about long...
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