Awhile ago, back when I was feeling semi-confident in my ability to maintain a weekly blog, my buddy Nancy Bo Flood emailed me.   I’ve been told I overuse BFF, to the point that when people find out I’m actually friends with said BFF, they’re  surprised.  So Nancy is not my BFF, but it sure seemed like it as we brushed our teeth together in a dorm bathroom  at Vermont College, where we were both getting our MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

Now Nancy has written a YA novel, Warriors In The Crossfire, just out from Front Street Books.  And I promised to do an in-depth, cool profile of her/ her piece de resistance.  Then I forgot to blog.  So this post is a pre-post to Thursday’s blog, a professional, awesome post (unlike…well…the posts up to now).  This way I’ll have time to spread the word about Nancy, and the post won’t have only one reader.

Also on Thursday:  there will be prizes!  So tell everyone you know.

To prep myself for writing an actual blog with, you know, information, I decided to start with something easy:

Don’t you hate it when something that is supposed to be easy is actually NOT easy?  That’s how it was with this picture.  But it was worth it, wasn’t it?  I mean, check out that Chocolate Cheese Pie.  It, along with its cousin, the Heath Mud Pie, were two of my favorite things about our Disneyland vacation.

This was the other one:

Yep.  Disney-wrapped chocolates at turn-down every night!

There was more, much more,  to the trip than chocolate.  But really, how can anything  follow that?

See you Thursday.

The other day I was telling my agent Michael, who recently moved to Los Angeles,  about my fear of earthquakes.  We’re talking verging-on-paranoid fear (some might say I’ve already reached the point of paranoia).  He assured me that one of the first things he did when moving to California was prepare survival kits for the [...]

Ah,  American health care.   Truly, you are an admirable foe.  One of your many mysteries in the Flex Spending Account.  Supposedly at the beginning of the year we intuit how much money we will spend on health care the following year, and if we predict correctly, we get to use  it tax-free.  If we guess [...]

The moment you’ve all been waiting for…the winners of  the WIFYR giveaway are:  Laura, Kaylie and Lana!  Congratulations!  Please email me with your address and choice of book!  This is where my friends say:  “Email address in the sidebar,” but I don’t know if my email address actually is in the sidebar, so it’s just: [...]

If you haven’t already, check out my uber-swank contest promoting the Writing for Young Readers Conference this summer!  Yours truly will be teaching the beginning novel workshop,  so for all you writers out there, sign up!  You will be hard pressed to find a better value for your money out there.  And I’m all about  [...]