The last week of May always reminds me of trips to and from the hospital, navigating the back streets of the city in the car with my mom and my grandmother. One trip stands out. I am not sure how close he was, if we were right in the middle of it or nearing the end, but it was a beautiful day and I made a mental note to remember that. I can still see the houses, the trees and the shadows they cast in the sun. I don’t know why I told myself not to forget that exact moment but it’s stuck in my head and it is so vivid.

Waiting rooms. Soft cushy chairs and couches, the carpets. Standing outside the hospital at night, watching people go in and out. How the air felt out there. I remember the breeze exactly.

This is probably so morbid, but if there is one subject I think I could write about over and over again, it’s loss and grief. The way it transforms us. I will never stop being fascinated by the inescapable reality of losing people and the the things we carry after someone we love has gone. How we cope. The questions that kind of loss inspires.

I try to carve out answers in books, one published, one to be published, lots not, knowing full well I’m not going to come away anymore satisfied than I was when I started. I just end up with more questions, which almost inevitably become more books. But there’s something in asking those questions out loud, I think.

Sometimes it’s not just asking those questions, but trying to articulate a certain feeling–physical and emotional–so it can be more understood, so there is less loneliness in having it. Like, I’ve always wanted to know if everyone’s throat gets so constricted it aches right at the top and it’s like there’s something there you can’t even swallow around? And it hurts so much you can’t even speak. But in that exact spot. At the top of the back of your throat? It’s sort of like how I get brain freeze except not, which is totally weird, I know, but the best way I can describe it. Or how grief can make your skin feel like an electric bruise.

Fall For Anything is a book about grief and loss. It was a hard book to write. Sometimes it would veer left when I thought it should be going right and other times it was just the opposite, but in the end I think it did what it was supposed to and I think everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be on the last page. Mostly, I wanted it to be honest. Peeling off a band-aid. At one point in the book, Eddie thinks, I think to find some kind of understanding, you have to be as close to the truth as you can get to it. I believe in that, whenever I write and whatever I write. Otherwise, what is the point?

I drafted Some Girls Are at my grandparents’ house, that summer. It is not a book about death, which is sort of funny because I was surrounded by my grandfather’s absence when I wrote it. I wrote in the kitchen all through the night and I always had a bottle of water, a cup of coffee and a can of coke next to my laptop. Sometimes, when I was stuck, I would wander into the dining room, where there are photographs of him. I would look at them. I would go back into the kitchen. I would sit in his chair. I would get back to work.

It will be two years this Thursday.

We put a solar light on his gravestone. I like to go past it when we’re in the car at night and see it.

My agent’s guidance, support, cheerleading, keen eye, belief in my work, patience, listening, savvy, passion and communication has made all the difference in this crazy/overwhelming/fantastic business of writing. Cracked Up to Be was going to be my last attempt at trying to get published before going on hiatus and looking into more practical pursuits. I didn’t want to stop, but I was really starting to think seeing my books on shelves wasn’t in the cards…

I remember querying my agent, I remember getting the full request in my inbox, I remember getting her email about wanting to discuss representation. My heart totally stopped. I remember that initial phone conversation, hanging up and telling my mom, “I want Amy to be my agent.” And very shortly after that, she was. Two years later, here we are!

I will always be grateful for my agent’s belief in Parker’s story, in Regina’s story, in the books I’m working on now. I wrote and dreamed of being published. Amy was obviously instrumental in making that dream a reality. She put my books into the hands of an incredible editor, who I also love working with, and now those books are being read, which is something I may never quite believe but will always be so grateful for. It’s changed my life! That alone makes it really hard to articulate just how much I love working with my agent and how much I appreciate her. What words could do someone who has made that kind of positive impact justice? None. But I will tell you that one of my absolutely favourite parts about finishing Some Girls Are was putting Amy’s name on the dedication line.

Amy, thank you for all the hard work you do on my behalf.

For a list of participating blogs, check out this entry at Lisa and Laura’s blog, and to all those hard-working, awesome agents out there, this is for you:

Beth Kephart, Neesha Meminger, Margo Rabb and many other awesome authors weighed in and the ensuing discussion in the comments is good stuff. After I took it all in, I thought, God, I wanna talk about writing Some Girls Are and why I chose mean girls for my next novel, but I don’t know where to begin.

I’m still not sure where to begin, but when has this stopped me from doing anything? Never!

I think mean girl lit is booming not because it’s easier to write about mean girls (it’s so not easier to write about mean girls, in my experience!), but because girl aggression and bullying has and, unfortunately, may always be pretty prevalent in our society (while I was writing Some Girls Are, my friends would often forward me horrifying news stories about girl-bullying). I think mean girls are so very much a part of popular culture now because we’re very eager to see our reality reflected in fiction, to find some understanding in our experiences and to feel less alone.

Some Girls Are is a story about one particular group of really, really horrible girls who abuse their status in high school and treat each other like complete and utter shit while they do it. I had no intention to proselytize about the horrors of girl-bullying nor to glamorize it. Though redemption plays a role in Regina’s story, I wouldn’t consider it a mean-girl-gone-good type novel. I feel Some Girls Are is about desperate attempts at self-preservation in an increasingly hostile environment.

At the same time, I also prefer people to draw their own conclusions about what I put out there, so maybe someone will argue everything I just said and insist that it proselytizes, glamorizes girl-bullying and is a redemption story. So maybe the most I can say about my own book is that it is definitely about mean girls.

EITHER WAY. Why mean girls? I guess they’re trending, but I don’t write to trends, I write what interests me. Mean girls have always fascinated me and I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing the girl-bullying I perpetrated and experienced in my school days. One thing that constantly amazes me is how fresh that pain and humiliation feels after all these years in a way a lot of other, crappier experiences I’ve gone through just… don’t. That I haven’t gone through that kind of emotional warfare and manipulation in my relationships with girls since I left school gives me further pause.

When I was in school, I was very codependent and afraid to be alone. The only way for me to offset that anxiety was to attach myself to people, other girls. I never quite made the connections I wanted to because I wasn’t coming from a very sincere place, but I didn’t care because anything was better than being left alone. I also happened to be one of those girls there was nothing to be gained by knowing and I knew this made me expendable. It’s strange to, at a very young age, know you’re expendable without fully understanding why. My expendability made me feel threatened and so I would strategize a lot to ensure my positioning within my clique without even considering what I was doing as strategizing. I worked hard at working my way up with the kind of mathematical precision that amazes me in hindsight because the LAST thing I am is mathematically precise.

I eventually managed to become very close to a power player. I enjoyed that position a little too much. And after it all blew up in my face (inevitable), I found myself living my nightmare: I was isolated, alone. A fate worse than death. I was teased and degraded in those subtle, underhanded ways girls often bully each other. Despite the role I played in my own downfall, I was hurt, betrayed and ANGRY. And I had little to no understanding of why this stuff was happening.

Well, I knew why but not, y’know, WHY.

And can I just say, my anger was magnificant! And yet, for as angry and betrayed and demeaned as I was, I was also convinced I COULD NOT LIVE without these very same girls. So I was in this place of HATING THEM while shuffling up to them with my head down and begging for their forgiveness at regular intervals. Not pretty.

They did eventually forgive me. Somehow, being around this group of people who knew how to use my deepest, darkest fears and secrets against me was better than spending recess alone (yeah, again–WHY?!). I spent the rest of my school days terrified of my BFFs. I worried horribly about making one misstep and was constantly bracing myself for a fall. I became a constant apologizer, just in case. I frustrated my friends by asking them repeatedly if they were mad at me, because I never wanted to be surprised like that again.

It wouldn’t be until much later that I realized my perspective on my girl-bullying experiences evolved and became distorted during and after the time they occurred. I felt so victimized that I could not remember a time I was terrible. I honestly couldn’t. The contempt I had for my old friends was fierce and the self-aggrandizing self-pity I had for myself was truly a thing to behold. This bitterness it left with me motivated me in weird ways (“I will show them all!”) and gave me a weird sense of entitlement I can’t totally describe.

Anyway, then one night, years later, I found an old tin of passed notes from my school days, between me and those girls. And, wow. There it was in my own handwriting, something that I couldn’t deny–

I was awful.

I can still remember that cringing, red-faced, stomach-sinking feeling of seeing JUST HOW AWFUL I WAS to my friends. It was a… humbling moment to say the least.

It was also a turning point.

From that point on, I was obsessed with my own experiences, my awfulness, the really bizarre dynamic I had with my friends, and desperate to shed some light on what I had gone through. I realized that as I was going through it at the time, I was desperate for someone else to do the same. I basically felt (and still feel) this all-encompassing need to acknowledge it and talk about it and find out if I wasn’t alone. I would begin exploring my experiences through storytelling. First I took photographs:

Again, to touch on one of the questions in Colleen’s post, I think we’re very eager to see our reality reflected back at us in fiction. At least, I know I was (and am) and that’s what motivates me to write today. As a girl who bullied and was bullied, I was very hungry to see the truth of what I went through in art, in entertainment. And to be honest, I never quite found what I was looking for. There are lots of books out there about overcoming, to be sure, books about making sense of that kind of trauma, but I was more interested in books that drew back the curtains and showed how truly awful it was and could be in school. For me, it was not so much about finding answers, it was about finding out if people had the same questions. I wanted books that stepped back and said, “Hey! This is kinda really fucked up, isn’t it?”

Because–as a teen–I honestly did NOT want to be assured that I could overcome, weird as that might sound. I just wanted to be assured the uglyness was there because knowing other people knew it was there made me feel better. So anyway, that was my reality. I wanted and needed to put it out there some way,aAnd that is ultimately why I wrote Some Girls Are, why I chose to write about mean girls.




… AND I GUESS I JUST THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW.

Anyway, here are the cheshire cat and Ash in pumpkin form!:

GLAMOROUS.

But it’s not ALL glamorous soft weeping. Last Tuesday, I got the final cover for Some Girls Are! Unfortunately, I can’t reveal it yet but I’m seriously looking forward to that point in the future where I can. I absolutely love it. My editor and cover designer worked super hard to get it perfect and I can say, without reservation, that they did. I was also chuffed to see SGA spotlighted at Sharon’s blog for Waiting on Wednesday yesterday.

Other happy-making things: C.K. Kelly Martin, who is one of my all-time favourite YA authors, released a short story called Orange Crush for Stop, Drop & Read’s blog anniversary! If you loved her debut, I Know It’s Over, you should check it out. You should check it out anyway, though. It’s centered around Holland, Nick’s sister and it’s fantastic. Another thing I really enjoyed on the internets as of late was readergirlz’s Art Saves project. Check out the posts there or on the amazing Little Willow’s blog.

I am binge listening to Muse a lot lately. These guys are so fantastic! They know how to PERFORM. And you can tell when you watch them it’s what they were meant to do. And if it’s not what they are meant to do, they are excellent fakers. I will see these guys in concert some day if it is the last thing I do. Check out this live performance of Apocalypse Please from the HAARP DVD:

More soon.

What great blog entry fodder, I thought, for someone who has spent the last week writing in their sparkly pink housecoat and not brushing their hair!

So those who have been reading this blog for a while know of my fan history with the Backstreet Boys on account of my blogging about it once before. Not only did I firmly believe the BSB would outlast the hell out of N*SYNC (I still don’t understand how it all went wrong), I also went to great lengths to teach myself the As Long As You Love Me Chair Dance and I was freaking AWESOME at it if I do say so myself, even though I can’t do it anymore because my joints aren’t what they used to be get off my lawn. Brian was my favourite. That’s What She Said.

Making fun of BSB fans is like shooting fish in a barrel.

But not their #1 fan.

But if I am being completely honest, when I said they were hunks I just meant Brian. I don’t know WTF I was supposed to make of the other members of the group. Nick had a BOWL CUT, you guys. Bowl cuts are never cool. Not even when you are an 11-year-old fangirl.

I then went on to tell them that I ordered their CD from BMG and was eagerly awaiting it in the mail. I did this so they would know I was funding their celebrity lifestyles. I used this to segue into an autographed photo request because how could they turn me down when I made them what they are today?

EXACTLY.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find a stamp.

So a recent comment on one of my older blog entries led me to discover something interesting. HEY GUYS, LOOK AT THIS:

But can I say, as much as I sometimes dislike my asymmetrical eyelids and tire of opening my eyes REALLY WIDE for photographs just to even them out, it makes me sad that this is considered a correctible problem. Enjoy the novelty of being able to have two different expressions at once, people! I KNOW I DO.

So is it egotistical when you want to make a photograph of yourself your own desktop background?

Let me explain: when I was teeny, my mom took these three pictures of me JUMPING OFF THE COUCH in quick succession. I often refer to these photographs as, “The last time I was happy.” I don’t know why, since I am generally a content person. Maybe because I like to see my mom roll her eyes when I say it?

Anyway, regardless of whether it’s egotistical or not, these photos make me happy when I look at them, so I scanned them in to make them my desktop (so I could be happy all the time!) and then I decided why not show the interwebs because HEY GUYS, LOOK AT HOW CUTE I WAS:

Okay, now let’s bring the mood down a little and watch the first official trailer for New Moon together:

So here is a story:

When I was five, I ran away from home. I was mad at my parents because they wanted me to clean my room. I was not going to do it. I mean, I wasn’t just not going to do it–I was NOT!!!! going to do it. The whole idea was repugnant to me. In fact, Not Cleaning My Room was probably the first thing in my life I felt truly passionate about. Maybe it was even my first cause.

(I would then become a child who would go on to watch PG-13 movies well before I was thirteen and fake sick on multiple occassions so I wouldn’t have to go to school. I often trace the moment it all went wrong back to that time my parents tried to assert their authority over me and I resisted and they never tried again. And now you know how I came to drop out of school and marry a James Dean type who never washed his hair but sparkled and who I would later go on to divorce, but anyway.)

I grabbed my favourite teddybear (essential equipment for my new life on the streets!) and crept out of the house. I made a clean break and I didn’t look back, not even once. Halfway down the street, I was feeling pretty great. By the time I hit the stop sign at the corner, I was terrified and still just a little too proud to go back. I did what any reasonable five-year-old would do.

I started to cry.

And then a familiar car eased its way around the corner and came to a stop in front of me. The driver’s side window rolled down. My grandfather. No one had yet realized my absence or alerted the neighbourhood, he was just there–as he would always be there for me–and he made sure I got home.

Here is another story:

I spent every day after school at my grandparents house. Slept over there on the weekends. Spent close to entire summer vacations there. There was no place I would’ve rather been than in that house across the river, with them. But it was a bitter bone of contention with one of my childhood friends, who gave me an ultimatum when we were something like nine-years-old.

“You spend too much time at your grandparents house,” she told me. “It’s either me or them.”

I told her it was nice knowing her.

My grandfather was one of the most loving, warm, gentle and kind-hearted men I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. He was a spirited man, firm in his beliefs and his politics. He was a generous man. If there was something within his ability to give, he would give it to you. From the mints in his pocket to the piano he insisted I have when the songs I was learning to play became bigger than the keyboard I was playing them on. He never asked for much himself.

He valued his family more than anything and took great comfort in their closeness and their well-being. Being a part of his family was knowing you were loved, that you were important to someone, and that things wouldn’t be the same without you there. To be honest, I can’t believe I ever got used to that feeling, that I ever let myself get used to that feeling and didn’t marvel at it every single day.

Which is something I do now.

I miss him.

I don’t really care, however, about clothes or designer labels. I think the outfit I am wearing right now actively reflects this and because you cannot see it, it’s a sparkly pink housecoat. And I think it’s from Walmart. I have never felt compelled to be like, fashionable (this is is my first obstacle in becoming Lady Gaga’s BFF, obviously) and fashion in general and designer labels simply do not interest me.

Until now.

I WANT A PAIR OF RAY-BAN WAYFARERS, YOU GUYS.

Look at these sunglasses:

But look at those sunglasses, you guys. ROY ORBISON wore them. Look at Roy Orbison:

Anyway, HE had Ray-ban Wayfarers.

But I don’t.

And I want them.

PS Also, I assume these are Ray-Bans:

PPPS It’s not.