here's my book!

Yes, it has finally arrived on store shelves near you! Probably not, actually, but you can get it from Amazon or Scarecrow Press.

I'm really happy my book is finally in print, and out there in the world, but it's also kind of scary. People can read it and critique it--perhaps even say bad things. But that's okay--I can take it. I'm already working on my next project! I'm hoping to write a biography of author Maureen Daly who wrote Seventeenth Summer. This novel is pivotal in many ways to the entire world of fiction about and for teens. I love her--she died a few years ago.

Seventeenth Summer also has a special place in my heart because it is set in the midwest--Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin, to be precise, and until I moved to Iowa I never really knew what cottonwood fluff was. But I had read about it in Seventeenth Summer, and one day I was driving to the store and there was all of this fluffy, white stuff floating around in the sky--I realized it was cottonwood fluff! Amazing. I still hope to take a field trip to Fond Du Lac one day. I can never seem to interest my students in this adventure . . . I wonder why?