THE WHOLE WORLD comes out May 25th, and for the whole month of June I’ll be traveling around the US promoting it at the following fantastic bookstores. Do you live near any of these locations? Please come! New Jersey: Friday, June 04, 7:30 PMWords, Maplewood’s Bookstore 179 Maplewood Avenue, Maplewood, NJ 07040 (Just a 40 minute train ride from Penn Station, New Yorkers!) Ohio: Tuesday, June 08, 5:00 PM (ETA:…

I have mixed feelings about luck. Philosophically and morally, I abhor the concept of someone being “lucky.” It’s not democratic. It’s not fair. But, in my personal experience, I recognize that I’m lucky. It’s not that nothing bad happens to me. Bad stuff has. But so much of the good stuff has been over-the-top good. There’s definitely a skew. I feel relieved when I find some kind of reason behind…

When my sweetheart moved from England to California many years ago, he got there ahead of most of his belongings. He moved into a work friend’s spare bedroom and slept in a sleeping bag. I asked him (over the phone, in the course of our long-distance courtship) what of his things he missed most. His answer? His OED. The OED, in case you don’t know, is the Oxford English Dictionary….

My bad habits: 1) Snacking too much. 2) Pausing to check my email while I’m playing with the kids. 3) Staying up late because I’m too tired to get off the couch to go up to bed (and watching just one more recorded episode is so tempting!) 4) My most pervasive bad habit has to do with parking lots, but it applies all over my life: I’m an on-time kind…

I was advised by author Manda Scott to finish the next book before the first one comes out. If you don’t, bad reviews of the first book will convince you that you can’t write, and good reviews will convince you you can’t write anything that good ever again! Yes, I can see my mind would definitely do that to me, so I’m working on it. These are the stages I’ve…

I write about my sweetheart a lot, and also my boys. I love them to pieces. But I fear I’m a bit of a broken record on those subjects, so I challenged myself to choose a different subject for this week’s subject of “Love,” and the implication it carries, on February 14th, of romantic love in particular. A long time ago, in college, I was madly in love with a…

Look! Look! I have a cover! There were several things I suggested as good possible cover subjects, and a bicycle was one of them, so yay. Not all authors are so lucky. Two Bloomsbury covers have been in the news lately for misrepresenting race on two of their covers this past year: Liar and Magic Under Glass (Both have been since fixed (Liar here and Magic Under Glass here), but…

A little less than one year ago, England was snowed on. It was just a few inches but it was the most that had been seen here in 18 years. Because it’s so rare, they have no plows. The transportation systems freaked out. We were on our way home from Paris (where the morning snow had given our boys their first shared snowball fight). The Eurostar handled the weather fine….

When I was 17, I visited the Frick Collection in New York with my friends Mary and Laurance. The Frick is just the right size to visit the whole of it in one day, and has the prettiest women’s bathroom in the city. My favorite way to enjoy a museum is to focus on only a few special pieces that draw me in, and pass the rest. We wandered the…

If deadlines don’t exist, I have to invent them. I don’t always achieve my personal deadlines, but I usually come close. They’re my way of breaking down a huge task (write a book!) into manageable chunks. I wrote The Whole World in a year, entirely on self-imposed deadlines (well, and one looming contest deadline; I didn’t win). Now that I have external deadlines for the next book, I’m amazed at…