I Google Image searched “guilty face,” so I could post one here to reflect my guilt for being an infrequent blogger, and this one came up.  You like?  You think it reflects guilt?  I’m not sure, but the other main option was OJ Simpson, and I just didn’t feel right about including him here comme ca.

I’ve been busy, with great things, some of which I can share and some of which I won’t, but busy, busy, busy.  Here’s what I can tell you: The Cybils!  I am reading reading reading for these awards.  So far I have especially enjoyed Ann Angel’s RISE UP SINGING, a biography of Janis Joplin, which really captured Janis’s pain amid the achievements.  And I’m loving LINCOLN’S FLYING SPIES, by Gail Jarrow, about the hot-air balloonists who spied for the Union Army!  Who knew, right?  Completely fascinating.

Another note of busy: the play I’m overseeing at school is in rehearsal, and I get to spend two hours every night cracking up.  This play and the actors are so freakin’ funny.  I feel lucky that I get to be a part of it–though it’s definitely time-consuming.

That’s pretty much all I can share about le busy.  So now I’ll share 6 other random facts, just for laughs…

1) I hung out with my mentee today (she’s 12), and as usual, she completely whipped me in Skee-Ball.  I don’t understand it, but she always gets some balls in the 5,000-point range.  I’ll never be as good as she is.

2) Instead of paying $849 for a flight the other day (actually, I just would not have gone), I found the same flight available through Bonus Miles and instead paid just $105!  Go, Bonus Miles!  Thank you, US Airways! (Who ever thanks an airline?)

3) In a terrible mood and stranded in a lame town the other day, I went to the pizzaria … pizzeria…. oh, I spelled it right–and couldn’t even get a slice (no slices on Saturdays–what the–), so I ordered the cheesy bread.  Turned out to be just like a pizza, with no tomato sauce.  So good, and yet–I would’ve just ordered a whole pizza if I’d known, and taken it home!)

4)  I can’t believe America’s Next Top Model will be over this week!  Sob!  I love ANTM!  Who do you think will win?  I think Kayla.  Jane’s so outta there; Anne is too guarded (though I wish someone could communicate it to her like this), and Chelsea’s just too grim.  Kayla’s got the unusual looks, pleasant demeanor, and ability to deliver.  I like her muchly and hope she wins!

5) I got to speak to 20 librarians at Destinations Booksellers on Friday as part of the store reaching out to schools.  It was so fun–I’m sorry, I love answering questions in front of a crowd–and they even gave me a gift certificate!  I immediately bought Rex Zero the Great Pretender, by my former advisor Tim Wynne-Jones.  I’m loving reading it.

6) I have an appalling number of dishes that have been sitting in the sink since–nope, I’m not going to tell you how long.  (Well, okay: since Friday. I didn’t want you to think it was, like, really long.) So now I’m going to wash them.

Tootle-oo!

1) A lovely review from Melina at Reading Vacation–a blog by a reader who’s actually the target age of my book!  Melina is in middle school, and I’m so impressed by the way she’s become a fixture of the kidlit blogging community.  She’s very up-front about her age (and the fact that she can only Tweet with her mom next to her), which I think is courageous; if I’d been her, I would have probably tried to hide those things, but she obviously understands that hiding your true self is a complete waste of time and so charms everyone.   A general brava to Melina and a link to her review of N&M:

Reading Vacation on Nice  and Mean

My favorite part: “As much as I didn’t care for Marina and her meanness, I liked getting into her thoughts and trying to understand WHY she was the way she was.  In the end, I think Marina was insecure and drunk with power.  Sachi, on the other hand, became a doormat because her parents planned her every move.”

See what I mean about the good writing?  I wish my former students had been able to whip off book reviews as craft as those!

2) On Wednesday evening, I had my live web-chat with readers at New Moon Magazine!  The girls asked fun questions, and I can’t wait to get the transcript so I can post some of it here.  But I thought I’d also include New Moon’s review, also by a middle-school reader, Rachel.  (Isn’t it funny how one review was by Melina–which is pretty close to the name Marina, the “mean” in Nice and Mean–and the other is by Rachel, Marina’s frenemy?  Are there any Sachis in the house?)  Here’s Rachel’s review.

I love this part: “I think I think I’m most like Sachi’s friend Lainey in this book — we both have *odd* styles, and are totally comfortable with being different and not dressing like everyone else.”

Little-known fact: I first created the characters of Nice and Mean in a novel about the character of Lainey!  It was my first novel and it wasn’t good enough to get published, but I do have a soft spot for Lainey, so I’m tickled that Rachel mentioned her here.

Finally, the cover of Nice and Mean, illustrated by Linzie Hunter, was featured on Jacket Knack, a great blog by my grad school friend Carol Brendler and my former grad school advisor, Julie Larios.  As you might guess, Jacket Knack contains “thoughts on the covers of kids’ books,” and as you might expect if you know Carol and Julie, it’s innovative and funny and always points out something about covers that I’ve missed.  I’m thrilled that the cover of Nice and Mean caught their attention, and here’s what they have to say about it.

Soon, I hope to show you these amazing scrapbooks that the kids at Community Prep School in Rhode Island made of Nice and Mean.  Wow.  Now when people say, “What was the best part of getting published?” I’ll have an answer.  You’re gong to love ’em.

Happy Halloween, by the way!!

I don’t know if anybody has ever read the little subtitle of my blog, up there in –hm, is it the right-hand corner?  I’m in a different window as I write this and I can’t see the blog, so maybe it is I who should be subtly chastised by implication for not reading my blog descriptor.  In any case, it says this:

Thoughts about reading

Thoughts about writing

Sometimes a love song to pickles or cake

I don’t know why I came up with it; I guess I thought I had to have some purpose or other to this frightful mayhem and madness that is called blogging.  In any case, I have to be honest and admit that while I do talk about reading and writing, love songs to cake have been infrequent, and those to pickles have been virtually nonexistent.

I would hereby like to apologize to pickles and offer some remedy.  Pickles have been very important to me in my writing life.  Around 11 in the morning, if I’m writing all day, I start to get yens for lunch but don’t want to ruin my appetite, and these salty, crunchy snacks are both low-fat and filling.  I used to go for Vlasic Baby Dills, Spiciness #2, but several years ago, The Wife brought sour pickles into my life, and I haven’t had much truck with Baby Dills since.  Thank you, wife, and thank you, sour pi–okay, waaait a minute.

The real purpose of this entry WAS to bring a recent bout with cake into the forefront.  However, when I went to the fridge to confirm the brand of pickles so I could find the appropriate image, I learned that what The Wife introduced was Kosher Dills.  But they are different Kosher Dills!  They are pale and sour, rather than urine-colored and vinegar-y.  What is this pickle mix-up?  Are there any pickleologists in the mix?  Somebody, please explain!

I’ll just add quickly here that as a compensation for having waited an hour at the doctor’s office yesterday, I stopped on the way home and bought myself a lemon tart at a place I always pass but never patronize.  So thank you, Cake Flour, for yesterday morning’s deliciousness.  See the picture; hear my love song.

Seriously, please solve the mystery of the pickles!

My burrito was nowhere near as good as this

This is the Facebook update I really wanted to post  today, except it just sounded too stupid:

JESSICA LEADER:

Fantasized about a lunch burrito of black beans, pepper jack, avocado and green salsa

But for about the first time ever in her household, there were no black beans

She should have remembered that she didn’t let herself buy pepper jack (and so there was only string cheese and fancy sour cheese that doesn’t taste good in burritos)

She hasn’t bought avocadoes in weeks and strangely, neither has that wife of hers (said wife really goes for the avocadoes.)

So instead, she made a something

(distinctly NOT a burrito) with chick peas, cut-up string cheese, and green salsa (at least she had that green salsa.)

It started out poorly, with her forgetting to flip the tortilla before piling on the filling, and since the steam-crisped tortilla is her favorite part, she scraped off the filling to flip the tortilla.

Alas, she had used the cast-iron pan, not the non-stick one

So you know that that tortilla did do?

Yes.  It stuck.

But that did not deter her.  She gamely scraped and tried to steam-crisp that second side.

It worked okay

But when she had removed the filling, it scattered

(the wife is reading over my shoulder and exclaimed, “This is terrible!  And I will get you avocadoes, and black beans!  You must tell me if you want the Jack cheese.”  The wife is the best, no?)

Anyway.  Scatteredness.  Poor cooking.  Actually, non-melting.  Something about the string cheese on the stove–I don’t know.  It didn’t work.

(The wife chimed in, “It’s also low-fat string cheese.”  She’s smart, too.)

I think I blocked out how it came to this

But I ended up sitting down with a mess of knotty chick peas and semi-melted pellets of cheese that didn’t even stay in the wrapper

They were just hard and gross and once again scattered

And it was very sad

(the wife is laughing)

(sympathetically, she notes)

And tomorrow I will go to the grocery store.

I’m sure you can see why I didn’t put this on Facebook.

News summary: After a very fun run of it, my serialized story in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Not That Girl, has wrapped up its monthlong appearance.  You can read  You can read the series from start to finish here.

I was also thrilled to get this lovely review from Tweendom, which is run by the lower-school librarian at Little Red School House in NYC.  (I did a little Internet sleuthing; it’s true.  The school looks almost nothing like that picture, by the way; although it is, in fact, little and red, it’s on the corner of very busy 6th Avenue.  That image was so gorgeously Maxfield Parrish, though, I couldn’t resist including it.)  Little Red was so much cooler than I was that I didn’t even know anybody who went there, but I can recoup some of that lost coolness now by having a nice mention on the librarian’s review blog.  You can read it here, or just enjoy this part:

“Jessica Leader has gotten the multiple worlds of the middle schooler down pat. Seventh grade tends to be a time of big changes…of kids figuring out who they want to be and where they are going to fit in. Marina and Sachi, while seemingly opposites, illustrate this beautifully. Round out the cast of their satellite friends and many types of kids are shown without seeming like Leader simply lined up types and put them in. Nice and Mean shows readers that most likely, the kids they think of as mean aren’t all mean, and the kids who seem nice definitely have some back story of their own!”

Off to the beach this weekend, and I desperately hope that Earl does not delay me!  I have kind of a horrible fear of flying,

and if this flight is punctuated by turbulence, I don’t know what kind of state I’ll be in when I get off the plane.  If you want tosay a little prayer, I wouldn’t mind being included.

Happy Labor Day weekend!  May the fruits of your labor be recognized!

At my reading on Saturday, a brave middle-schooler asked me, “If you had a daughter who was dealing with mean kids like the girls in your book, what would you do?”  I tried my best to answer the question in the moment (see my earlier post on this), but I went home and thought about it a lot.  Here’s my 8-step plan for dealing with meanness in school:

1. Don’t try to address the mean person directly

Usually I’m in favor of addressing people directly, but in the case of school meanness, I don’t think a talk from another kid is going to change the mean person.  I know that novels tell you that standing up to bullies is good, but I think that mean people are secure in their meanness and aren’t going to stop just because someone their age asks them to.

2. Do Involve a Teacher

Maybe I’m just saying this because I’m a teacher, but teachers care about how kids are doing and want to help.  Teachers want to create safe schools where kids feel good about themselves and are undistracted from learning. In addition, luckily for you, they love to be approached personally for help. (Teachers can be vain, just like anyone else.)  Also, while your powers may be limited to talking to the mean person directly, teachers can do sneaky things to limit bad behavior (more on this later.)  So ask your teacher if the two of you can find a time to chat, although a word about timing:

3. Don’t Wait Until Something Really Bad Happens to Ask for Help

We’ve all been there–that one week when everything just goes to you-kn0w-where and we want the adults to step in and do something.  Definitely ask for help if you’re in that situation right now, but if you’re not, now is the time to meet with your teacher.  Specific events of meanness get sticky; there’s a lot of blaming and denial and it’s hard for teachers to get at the truth and figure out the right thing to do.  Just choose an ordinary day.

4. Also, Try to be Brave Enough to Go in Alone

As a teacher, I always got a little suspicious when more than two kids approached me at a time, and three or more turned into a teary free-for-all.  Come to me one-on-one and you’ve got my attention and respect.  I also had an easier time responding to kids without their parents there.  It was easier for me to feel sympathetic and come up with good ideas because I didn’t feel like I was under pressure.  Imagine yourself as a teacher, and some brave student comes to talk with you alone.  You’d feel sorry for the kid and have the urge to help them, right?

5. Tell Your Story, With a Medium Number of Details.  Be Humble.

You might want to begin like this: “I’m not saying this to tattle, but I’m having a really hard time with so-and-so being mean to me this year.”  You can give a few examples of the ways this person is mean and how it makes life hard for you.  Does he or she make fun of you in the hall or hide your belongings? Does this person send around rumors that have caused fights with your friends?  Without going into too much detail, give some examples.  (If the teacher wants more specifics, he or she will ask.)

Then say, “I know I’m not perfect, and I’m sure there’s more I can do to be nice and include people.  But it would be great if this person could be just a little less mean.  And I wanted to tell you because I thought maybe you could help.”

6. Come Prepared with Suggestions

Before your talk, think: how could teachers be effective?  Do they need to monitor the halls, bathrooms, or lunch tables better?  Teachers are stationed at those places for a reason, but they get lazy and even shy and don’t wander among the lunch tables as much as they should.  Your request could spread the word that they need to do this more.  Maybe teachers need to assign partners in certain classes so one person isn’t always left out, or make sure that two people never get to sit near each other.  There’s no such thing as a school where the teachers’ only job is to teach.  If there’s meanness at your school, the teachers need to be doing their  job more thoroughly.

7. Also Ask the Teacher for Suggestions

After you’ve shared your stories and your request, pause so the teacher has a chance to think.  Hopefully, he or she will have some ideas but that may not be the case just yet.  If you feel like your teacher is stumped, you can provide assurance: “I don’t expect everything to change right now, because I know teachers are only human.  However, it would be great if things could get even a little better.  I even feel glad that we got to chat just now.  Can we maybe talk again later this month?”  This will signal to the teacher that a) you are polite and reasonable; b) you’ll be back, and they need to come up with some solutions!

8. If it Doesn’t Work the First Time, Keep Trying Until it Does

Maybe you chose a teacher who had the time and desire to help, but maybe not.  Try not to feel discouraged–just find another one to talk to.  Or approach your principal or the school counselor.  If you talk to two or more teachers and no one does anything, it’s time to involve a parent.  Share with your parent all the approaches you have tried and the suggestions you made.  They will probably be peeved that the teachers didn’t help you and will summon all that energy when they go in and talk to the adults at school.  I’m optimistic that that will get things moving, but I’m more hopeful that you’ll have already made some difference.

Whew!

That was a longie, I know.  But I repeat my question to the girl in the audience: on a scale of huge tiny, was that helpful?

And as for the rest of you–kids, parents and teachers–is there anything you would subtract or add?  I’d really like to know.

Things have been getting a little serious, what with this Stepping in the Same River business and Musings on Gurgi , so I’m going to add a little levity.  I was just reading the funny phrases on the back cover of my notebook, and I thought I’d share some of the faves. 

“I don’t know.   I’m not, like, a professional smellologist.”  — Dick Casablancas on Veronica Mars

“…and he doesn’t demand apologies from people who criticize him, because what is there to criticize?”  — Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! Host Peter Sagol, on Carl Kassel

(or is it Karl Cassel?  And am I going to be divorced for not knowing?)

“I had to be very mature and very tolerant, and those are not my usual qualities.”  — Someone Benedictus, on the experience of writing a new Winnie the Pooh Story

“Milkshakes!”  Ariana snapped to attention.  “Double back.  We need to get some milkshakes.”  — New York Times Article on driving the Oregon Fruit Loop, where you can get fresh cherries

“Managed to avoid the hoyden Emily Thompkinson, who has purloined my creation and added things of her own. Nefarious Creature!”

–From Emma Thompson’s Golden Globe acceptance speech, in the style of Jane Austen, for adapting Sense and Sensibility

I hope you enjoyed.  They certainly cheered me up!

To SJJ

If there was some part of you that wanted to indulge in a pedicure in the next day or so

just know that I would be amenable to such a thing

I have a wedding to attend, after all

and you and I have a tradition of such things

and you might not be able to see your feet for too much longer, I am told

so think pink

(or maroon, really, as is your wont.)

Hello! Gosh, I feel like I’ve been a non-internet vacuum these last couple of days, even though I think I posted less than a week ago. I certainly am in a vacuum of sorts–I’m in New London, Connecticut. Not that New London is a vaccuum in and of itself (and maybe I just like saying vacuum, because I like those two u’s next to each other, and the way I pronounce it in my head as “VACK-you-um”)–I’m just in an, um, self-contained pouch.

My partner is working at the venerable Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and since I am about to attend–nay, participate in–my best friend’s wedding in New England this weekend (!!!), it made sense for us to come up here together.  (Thre is a much more ridiculous picture of O’Neill at the center itself, but I can’t find it online.)  Anyway, while A. has been faithfully attending to the play at hand, I’ve been hiding out at the lovely house they’ve let us stay in, working on a la novel.  Did I mention that I finished a draft?  Maybe I did, which is a huge accomplishment, at least a year in coming.  I also re-outlined and cut 90 pages just for starters!  I always laugh at how hard we writers try to nudge up our page counts and then how much we cackle when we’ve cut whole chunks.  It makes a certain amount of sense, but it’s still funny.  As a teacher, I never would have been like, “The students just learned twelve new vocabulary words and forgot five!  Bliss!”

In the midst of all this novelicious productivity (which is also, I might add, somewhat lonely, although the beach awaits at the end of the day)–are odd memories of New London.  I passed through here all the time on my AmTrak way to and from college, of course, but I think I only stopped here once, and not even on purpose.  It was the summer of 1996, and I was on my way back from visiting a friend, whom I’d formerly had a huge crush on.   I’d thought we’d had a good visit, including a nap for me on Saturday afternoon that was, no joke, The Best Nap I have Ever Taken, but then Sunday morning we got into a fight somehow.  It was strange, because we’d never fought, but I remembered her accusing me of not, I don’t know, supporting her relationship with her boyfriend, and I burst into tears.  “That’s so not true!” I blubbered.  “I always ask you about him and how things are going.”  Who knew which one of us was right, but I’m not the kind of person who bursts into tears during fights at all, so it obviously really upset me. 

We reconciled enough to go on a great bike ride and meet up with two other friends for Mexican food, and then I was on my merry way back on AmTrak–except that the train stopped in New London with a bomb threat.  Since this was in the late ’90s, it was way more of an eye-roll than the actual scare it might be a few short years later.  (Gosh, it’s kind of crazy how much things changed in such a relatively small amount of time.)  Anyway, we all had to unload off the train and of course there was hardly anywhere to go and I hadn’t eaten dinner, but we ended up at the bar across the way that must make a huge living from stranded travellers.  I don’t remember if I got anything in the way of enough to eat, but the great thing was that the Women’s Gymnastics Team Competition was up on the screen!  So not only did I get to see my beloved gymnastics (I’m sure readers of this blog will understan what that means to me)–but I also got to see Keri Strug do her amazing vault with a cracked ankle or whatever it was to victory!  I can be a bit of a wimp and I am sure that if I injured myself on a vault, I would have been like, “Sorry, Team USA; you may be the Magnificent Seven” (a reference I didn’t understand then and still relate to only hazily), but you’ve made your bed with your poor scores.  I can’t do anything for you at this point, so I think I’m going to sit it out for Vault #2.”  Not so for Keri Strug!  As I slurped Diet Coke at a New London bar, Keri Strug ran and flipped and landed on that injured ankle and brought the US GOLD.

Or at least, I think she did.  The crazy thing about memories of important events, as I learned ound September 11, 2001, is that they create–oh gosh, this is becoming eerily related–a sort of vacuum.  They suck nearby events into their orbit to the point where people who attended weddings in July or November of 2001 will say, “Yeah, that wedding was right around September 11th.”  I suppose the important event in my story, embarrassingly, might be the winning vault.  Maybe it didn’t occur that night as we waited for the train to be searched; maybe that was later, on my mom’s bed, with my cousin who was living with us for the summer.  I honestly don’t remember. 

What else to say?  I stopped being friends with the crush, although we did have a rather poetic re-meeting.  We didn’t correspond over the summer except for me to send her a postcard requesting that she return a library book I’d left behind, and apparently I’d said something like, “I’ll see you online at the bookstore,” because that was pretty much how you’d see everyone back on campus. 

I didn’t see her then, and I didn’t contact her, but a few weeks into school, my roommate and I were at Shaw’s (oh, that great Shaw’s–I still think of their Indulgences chocolates sometimes)–and there was the crush in the cereal aisle.  (Okay, I made that up–I have no idea what aisle it was.)  It was deep enough into the year that it was clear that our silence meant something, but I hadn’t known she cared until she said, “Well, I guess it’s not the bookstore after all.”

She may as well have been speaking Sanskrit.  “Um, what?” I asked.

“You know.”  She blinked.  “That thing you said in your postcard–how you’d see me at the bookstore.”

“Oh.  Yeah, I guess not.”

And we weren’t really friends after that.  Which in way was too bad, because I’d really enjoyed her when I’d thought she might like me back, but the things that had complicated the crush (including the fact that she turned out to be, you know, kind of straight) got in the way, and in some ways, at least at that time, she wasn’t such a good friend.  I will say, though, that that is the only time I ever remotely felt like I had the last laugh on anything, though if for some reason the crush is reading this (which I sincerely doubt), I hope she knows it does not reflect on her.

So au revior, bad crushes–I’d get a much better one several months before September 11th, 2001, who would become my wife–and hello to a less troubled New London; and hello wife herself, whom I am about to go off and meet, maybe for Mexican food, not at a bookstore.

[That’s my answer.  A picture’s worth a thousand words, and while this post is only half that, you don’t need to read it to provide your answer.  You will, however, miss an amazing coincidence unless you read!]

Right around Thursday is when I run out of steam with the work-week and start posting questions on Facebook like, “What pipe-dream profession do you wish you could have?” or “What were the favorite foods of your misspent youth?”  The answers are always great–etiquette consultant!  spy!  Lick-em-ade!  Hot pockets!–and add a real boost to my productivity.  Some people work best when they are totally unplugged, but I find that as the week wears on, I work best when I have frequent, fun, brief distractions. 

Today, I’m going to try a little experiment: putting the question on my blog.  I’m excited to hear answers to the question,

What movie are you embarrassed to love?

I ask because of a funny coincidence.  Fellow Tenner Jenn Hubbard and I were both psyched to be on the Summer Blast Blog Tour, she on Writing and Ruminating and I on Shaken and Stirred.  Amazingly, we both referenced the incredible Hugh Grant-Drew Barrymore movie, Music and Lyrics.  (Is anybody else noticing the conjunctive titles here?  “Writing and Ruminating”–“Shaken and Stirred”–“Music and Lyrics”–“Nice and Mean”…  I tigress.) 

Anyway, I had to laugh, because while Jenn relates to the youths of today (I haven’t read her book, The Secret Year, just yet, but I’m dying to), she has a very thoughtful blog, and I’m basically kind of an entertainment snob, so the fact that we both have a thing for this goofy, kind of predictable movie was quite a surprise. 

But I even cringe to dismiss the movie, because it is so great!  First of all, it start out with a dead-on-the-nose (if that’s not from the redundancy department of redunancy) spoof of an 80s video, featuring Hugh Grant’s character, called “Pop! Goes My Heart”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGLXpIojJkg. 

A movie that can put that together knows what it’s doing, right?  Plus there are incredibly charming scenes of the songwriting collaboration:

And Hugh Grant is funny, right?  Sarcastic but also suave.  You’ve got to be observant to pull that off, too.  There’s a wicked parody of a Brittney Spears type (I’ve given you enough YouTube links to last the lunch break, but just put in “Buddha’s Delight + Music and Lyrics), a legitimate backstory for our creative collaborators…Darn it, I’m not going to be ashamed anymore:  I love Musis and Lyrics!  I think it’s great.  It’s charming and real and has New York City in the background and Hugh Grant in the foreground, and Drew Barrymore is pretty cute, too.

And now I want to know–

which movies are you

kind of

sort of

embarrassed to love?