My publisher is releasing my 2001 book, Breathing Underwater, with a new cover, its third. The reason for this is, basically, because boys don't like to read the book with its current cover, which shows a boy and a girl. I actually got an e-mail from a teacher who wanted to know how to buy 100 copies of the book with its 2001 cover for this reason ( Read more... )

“Do any human beings realize life while they live it, every, every minute?”
                                                                             - Thornton Wilder, Our Town

What does it mean to realize life every, every minute? And is it possible to do that and also accomplish anything?
        When I was a high school senior, I ( Read more... )

I'm surprised I forgot this one thing I learned from Richard Peck. It's one of the most important. Well, they're all important, but I think this one is especially important to me ( Read more... )

The world lost Richard Peck yesterday, and I am saddened, not only because a great voice is now silent and children’s literature has lost one of its most generous souls, but also because he will never see the book I dedicated to him, my fourteenth and the one that, other than my first, most exemplified the ideals I learned from Richard. So I’m ( Read more... )

I got an e-mail from a young woman who read Breathing Underwater in school. I actually get e-mails from this teacher's class every year for maybe the past ten years. They're always well-thought-out, and I always answer them.  It blows me away that, 17 years and 12 books later, readers are still connecting with this book and these characters. ( Read more... )

Head on over to Twitter and enter to win an advance copy of Beheld (which other mere mortals will be able to purchase in January) Just tweet what you would do if you had Kendra’s witch powers (Me, I would use them to communicate with my dog, to say stuff like, “The bathroom is for humans” and “I’m only insisting you eat dog food because it’s ( Read more... )

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I’ve just been answering an e-mail from a college student who is writing a paper on Malificent (or, as I told her, “the old fairy”) in Sleeping Beauty and wanted to know why I gave her the backstory I did in my novel, A Kiss in Time. As I sometimes do, I got a little long-winded and started to reflect on villains and backstories in general, so I ( Read more... )

Tomorrow, I’ll be at the SCBWI Florida conference here in Miami. I am giving a workshop on fairy tales, and I’m critiquing manuscripts, but I’ve gone many years when I haven’t been speaking, just to learn. I’m always amazed when writers think they know to much to learn from a conference, and I once sort of wrote off a fellow writer as a snob for ( Read more... )

          You’re attending a conference! Yay! And you’ve sent your manuscript ahead for a critique! Double yay! Lots of people submit manuscripts for critiques, hoping to be “discovered” by an editor or agent. Even if that doesn’t happen, you can get a lot out of a critique by a fellow writer, which may eventually put you on the path to discovery.

( Read more... )