Be it

What I Did In NYC

I went to New York last week to do some non-writing related work. It was super fun!

For instance, I got to meet Jane Pauley, basically one of my all-time idols: She co-hosted the Today Show, deputy anchored the NBC Nightly News, then co-hosted Dateline NBC all years before Katie Couric did….

(She’s also married to Gary Trudeau, the creator of the Doonesbury comic strip. How amazing is she?)

Meeting her was like a dream come true….

…even though, like always, I acted like a total dork when the big moment came. I actually said the words: “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

Yes, shoot me now.

So, Jane, if you’re reading this, I apologize: I’m not worthy.

(We both went to Indiana University, which is how I got to meet her. She showed up at the alumni event I co-hosted!)

Also while I was in New York, I HAD to take some time out to visit one of my other idols:

OK, I didn’t get to meet her in person.

But Sandra Bullock was SO good in The Blind Side, the true life story of the woman who adopted sports hero Michael Oher when he was in high school.

I give The Blind Side three BIG tiaras:

Run—don’t walk—to see it!

The main reason I was in New York, though, was to make my OWN movies…ones that I wrote (and starred in).

I think I really annoyed some people at Scholastic Books by running up and down the stairwells, screaming at the top of my lungs.

The next day, I stopped by City Wing Tsun to film my next series of videos.

I will admit: Things might have gotten a little out of hand.

OK: Maybe a LOT out of hand.

Totally fake blood! No authors were killed in the filming of my book trailers!

Although I was a bit sore the day after from having to do multiple shots of that tackle. Now I know how Michael Oher must feel.

I had so much fun though!

(Except I have totally have to buy a new sweater. Banana Republic! Wasn’t it cute?)

Oh, well. They say to make real art, you have to sacrifice!

More later.

Much love,

Meg

Be it

Put Your Big Girl Panties On and Deal With It

Could this have been a crazier week? First Tiger’s wife went Carrie Underwood on him!

Then my husband took a swan dive and broke his ankle!

Then the plot of Glee actually moved forward!

I think I’m still in shock.

When things get out of control like this, I often think of the little home made sign hanging in my gynecologist’s office:

I love this sign! Because this is really what we just have to do sometimes.

(Especially in the gyno’s office…but in life, too).

Do we ever get as much done as we’d like to on any given day? Most of the time I don’t know how I’m going to handle ANYTHING going on in my life (deadlines, copy-edits, emails, dwindling supply of beverages in my mini-fridge, etc).

It’s only because I have so much help in the form of an amazing agent, fantastic editors, go-getter publicists, astounding assistants, awesome friends and family, and of course, He Who Shall Not Be Named In This Blog that I get ANYTHING done at all.

The rest of the time, I’m just thinking of that sign in my gyno’s office:

I was actually supposed to be leaving for New York today! I have a bunch of meetings and some new book trailers to film next week….

…not to mention I’m supposed to be co-hosting a fancy Indiana University alumni cocktail party (did you get your invitation, fellow alums?) with He Who Shall Not Be Named In This Blog’s best friend (and we had tickets to see Shelby Lynne perform live at Carnegie live)!

(Did you know Shelby Lynne saw her mom get shot by her dad right in front of her when she was 17? Talk about needing to pull up your big girl panties!)

I really thought I was going to have to put off the trip completely because of He Who Shall Not Be Named In This Blog’s accident.

But thanks to our own personal Pull Up Your Big Girl Panties Team—the doctor, nurses, anesthesiologist, and everyone else who put him back together…not to mention the incredible full time support team we’ve got going here at Casa Cabot—I think I might make it to NYC after all!

Yes. It IS all about me.

Ha, no, not really.

And I WON’T be seeing Shelby Lynne. Because how could I enjoy her knowing that my poor husband is back home in bed….

…watching all the free Writers Guild Oscar pre-screeners that keep arriving in the mail?

(We just got Funny People and Bruno and The Serious Man and that Zoey Deschanel movie that’s supposed to be so cute! And now I have to watch them by myself when I get back. AFTER I’m done with all my deadlines because HWSNBNITB is like, “Don’t you have a bunch of book trailers to write and some books due? Yeah, I guess these movies are all for me.”)

Shut up. I know: See subject line of this post.

More later.

Much love,

Meg

Be it

Don’t Be a Book Licker!

It was an exciting weekend here in Casa Cabot. Why?

Well, since I’m going to be speaking and signing at the Miami Book Festival this coming Saturday (the fair starts TODAY! Click here to see all the amazing authors who are going to be there!) the Miami Herald asked me for some advice for girls.

My response was printed online and in the paper (I think. I don’t get the Miami Herald so I didn’t actually see it)!

The article is about how, by craftily disguising my books to look as if they’re merely about princesses, teen supermodels, and quirky fourth graders, I’ve actually gotten an entire generation of girls to read about important issues, like gender equality….

Shhh! Don’t let anyone in on the truth about my diabolical plot to spread feminist ideology across the globe through my deceptively chick-litty looking books!

So there was that…as well as Taylor Swift’s performance on Saturday Night Live, which was so fun to watch….

And the fact that my MOM won my Significant Object (yes. She wanted it. To go in my baby box. Which is now more like a trunk. Please don’t ask).

So that will be over $200 going to the Heifer Project! Yay!

But other than that, my weekend kind of stank, due to the fact that I ended up engaging in some heavy book licking.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, a book licker is someone who’s writing a novel, but instead of just finishing it and surrendering it to her editor, she keeps going back and re-reading it over and over, finding tiny things wrong with it, and revising it. She never actually gets to The End.

(This is not to be confused with a baby licker, which is a person who fusses over her baby so much, she eventually licks all his fur/skin off. CPS or the zoo keepers eventually have to come and take her baby away from her.)

Baby Licker

I’ve always striven to keep my book licking to a minimum so my books could come out in a timely fashion and thus get to you, the reading public.

But this weekend I started licking my current project and just. Couldn’t. Stop.

I could tell I’d crossed the line when I started calling all my friends and going, “I should just throw this book away, shouldn’t I? I know they already paid me the first part of my advance. But maybe I can just give the money back and start over. I’ve been thinking about starting a new series about zombies anyway!”

My friends offered all sorts of (totally unhelpful) advice:

“I think you should eat some mini-Butterfingers.”

(Like I don’t do this every day?)

And:

“What page are you on? Yeah, well, you know you say this exact same thing every time you get to that page.”

(No, I don’t.)

“Yes, you do.”

And:

“Why don’t you just go watch the crackheads on Intervention until you feel better about yourself?”

Finally, one ultra mega bestselling, highly revered children’s book author with whom I happen to be friends listened to me book lick for like five minutes, then finally burst out with:

“What the hell isa matta with you? It’s just a book, for chrissakes. Quit whining, sit your ass down, and finish it!”

Wait…what?

It’s just a book?

I’m sorry, but no author has ever said that to me before. NO ONE. It’s not “just a book.” It’s…it’s….

Well, I guess it is.

This was just so startling to hear, coming from such a pantheon in the industry. Was this really how he’d managed to write so many beloved, award winning, bestselling books? He didn’t lick them? He just told himself “It’s just a book,” then sat his “ass down and finished the thing?”

That’s just so….

…cool.

I am going to do exactly as he says.

Tomorrow.

After I eat about ten more pounds of mini-Butterfingers, and watch four episodes of Intervention.

More later.

Much love,

Meg

Be it

Ghost Story

This is truly a creepy Halloween. Just in time for the spookiest night of the year, a rodent (I pray that it is a rodent and not a larger mammal, such as a human being) crawled into a wall of our house and….

Died.

And we cannot find its body.

Do you want to know what a rotting corpse smells like? A real rotting corpse?

Come to my house!

(Or better yet, don’t, unless you love the smell of death and Glade plug-ins.)

We should use the opportunity to set up our own haunted house.

But instead, we have abandoned the affected rooms, moving everything we need out of them (this includes Henrietta’s litter box, which is now in the master bathroom, and that’s a whole other story), installing Glade Plug-ins, shutting the doors, and hoping for the best.

Gross.

In other Halloween related news, yesterday in the New York Times there was a story about a ghost at an NYU residence hall (see, “The Spooky Suitemate”), “Molly,” and how some “mean girls” riled her up (which reminds me: check out this hilarious Onion piece on how some popular mean girls made the whole country cry).

At Hayden Hall, the dorm where I worked when I was at NYU (the basis for Death Dorm in the Heather Wells series), we had a much cooler ghost. He was a male.

I know because a psychic student had a long conversation with him one day. When she reported this to me (she came down to my office to ask if anyone had died in her room the year before, because when she’d woken up that morning, a ghost had been sitting on the end of her bed), I sent her immediately to Counseling Services….

Who sent her back with a clean bill of mental health.

Then the counselor she’d been assigned (whom I knew well) called me to say:

“Uh, Meg…yeah, she actually described in detail the student who committed suicide in that very room twenty years ago when I worked there…down to the tie-dyed shirt he was wearing when he hanged himself. I know this sounds insane…but I think she actually had a visitation by him. She says she comes from a family with a history of sensitivity to psychic phenomena.”

CREEPY!

The scariest part of all (besides my being so close-minded–although in my own defense when a girl comes into your office and says the words, “woke up with a boy sitting on my bed” and you work in a dorm, the words “roofies” and “rape” will always automatically be the first things that flash through your head: so I was just doing my job) was that that whole floor ALWAYS had problems, like desk drawers slamming closed (and sliding open) for no reason, chairs moving from one spot to another (without anyone touching them), and of course doors slamming (without a breeze).

Until I found out about the ghost, I was always giving them new desks…but the new desks kept having “faulty” drawers, too!

After I found out about the ghost (I apologized to the girl for sending her to Counseling and she was all, “That’s okay. It happens all the time.” And yeah, she was kinda part of the inspiration for the Mediator), I just told the residents what was going on.

So when they came down to say, “When I left for class my chair was on one side of my room, but when I came back it was outside my bathroom door,” I’d be like, “Let me tell you a story….”

Everyone was always cool about it. They even sort of liked the glamour of being the only floor with a ghost!

I’m sure the ghost of Hayden Hall is still there, punking residents to this day.

I bet he’s mad HE didn’t make the Times.

As for our own “ghost,” I’m certain someday we’ll find a little mouse skeleton.

In the meantime, I’m hoping you have a better Halloween than I am…and just remember:

Fake dead bodies are WAY BETTER than real dead bodies (of the rodent variety, obviously). So be safe!

And if someone tells you they’ve seen a ghost, don’t automatically send them to Counseling Services.

More later.

Much love,

Meg

Be it

Awesomely Naked Updates

It’s Fantasy Fest Week here in Key West!

You think things get crazy in your town for Halloween? Where I live for the week leading up to Halloween, people come from all over the world to party, elect a King and Queen (the two people who raise the most money for AIDs Help), have a huge parade, and walk around buck naked.

Here is the winning float from last year’s parade

I’m not sure when or how the naked part became so socially acceptable (and technically, the police are supposed to arrest anyone not wearing “body paint”).

But I must say it’s a little disturbing when it’s six o’clock on a Monday night and all you want to do is go downtown to grab a burger, and there are seven or eight people crowding the sidewalk in front of you wearing nothing but dog collars and feather boas.

Another float from last year’s parade

Although I completely understand that some of these people are cancer survivors who are excited to have a chance to show off their new bosoms (which reminds me, I just saw on CNN that due to a combination of factors, though still rare, tweens and teens of all ages are beginning to get diagnosed with breast cancer. So get in touch with your body!)

Reader Brooke M really knows how to carve a pumpkin.

Fortunately it’s against the law for restaurant owners to let naked people dine in their facilities. Could you imagine? I mean, my having to eat my burger where someone with no pants was just sitting?

To be completely honest, I am not sure what is going on here, but I like it.

In other news:

The Runaway page is finally up! No excerpt yet (it’s too soon)…but you can check out a pretty detailed “what it’s all about” page!

And we finally have an excerpt up for Princess Diaries #1! Can you believe we never had one?

Now ALL my books (except, for some reason, Boy Meets Girl…and we’re working on that one) except the Patricia Cabots have excerpts…but we have a neat little explanation as to how the PC books came about.

And if you’re coming to see me at the Miami Book Fair on November 14, this is where you need to go at 11:30 (it’s free):

Miami Book Fair International * Miami Dade College 
300 NE Second Ave., Miami, FL 33132
Batten (Building 2, 1st Floor, Room 2106)

And don’t forget to place bids on my Significant Object!

Remember, for every dollar you bid, I will MATCH it, and all those dollars will go to buy some lady who really needs one in order to escape poverty a COW (or other animal) in some foreign country somewhere!

If you don’t think buying a lady a cow (aka microfinancing) works, just read THIS AMAZING article from Oprah.com about one woman whose life was changed forever by Heifer International…Yes: by the cow people!

For every dollar you give, I will give a dollar. If you give ten dollars, I will give ten dollars. COME ON, PEOPLE. BREAK ME.

Otherwise, you know I will just spend the money on a new dress to wear in Miami.

(Well you can’t expect me to show up in body paint, now, can you?)

More later.

Much love,

Meg

PS Oh my God, how could I forget? Friday Night Lights premieres tonight for those of us with DirecTV. Thanks to Persnickety Snark and Sarah Dessen for reminding me!

I totally have it DVR’d and will try to Twitter about it but my fingers might be too covered in Cheeto dust to operate my keyboard.

Be it

Runaway

What’s that you keep asking me? When are you going to get to see the cover to Runaway, the final book in the Airhead series?

Why, that’d be today!

I got the final manuscript turned in, the revisions completed, and now I’m just awaiting copy edits (a copy editor works to improve the formatting, accuracy, and style of manuscript, not the content).

So I think it’s safe to finally reveal the front cover:

I know, isn’t it great????

I wish I could give out the name of the cover model, because a lot of you keep asking about her….

But you seriously have no idea how many guys email me about her!

Who is she? Where does she live? Can I have her email? I promise I’m not a stalker.

What? Excuse me, but do you really think I’m going to fall for that?

I can only assure you that she’s totally fab, and also a complete brainiac—she’s going to Stanford!

Thus she is way out of the league of any guy writing to the author of a book cover on which she has appeared, unless he happens to be a fireman or works for Doctors Without Borders or something.

(But even if you do, don’t email me about her because I still won’t trust you with her. Look what happened with that guy and poor Annie Hathaway. And he said he worked for the Vatican!)

Here she is with adorable Cosabella, on the back:

As you can probably tell from the cover, the action gets WAY RAMPED UP in this book. I can’t tell you a lot because I don’t want to spoil it, but Stark goes CRAZY EVIL!

I can’t tell you how though. I even kept it from Scholastic: it’s not in any of the proposals I gave them. NO ONE KNEW. My editor was like: WOW!

(And I don’t get wows from her very often, because she’s been in this business for a long time. She’s the one who bought Princess Diaries 1 as a tiny baby editor, like on her first day of work when she still had an N Sync calendar on her desk.)

The dark secret that got Nikki killed?

IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND.

When I was originally researching Stark’s Dark Secret, of course I consulted a number of Computer Geeks–of whom I know many because when you write novels on laptops, you often need to have them rescued (from viruses, cats knocking them off beds, being left on top of air conditioners so they freeze to death, etc, all true BTW and why I own 8 laptops…the shame).

And so computer geeks become your best friends.

Mine are basically like Felix (from Being Nikki) and Sheldon from Big Bang Theory combined, only with less social skills.

And they were all like:

“Make the computers be hypnotizing people.”

Me: To do what?

“To take off their clothes.”

Me: Um…okay. Do you maybe have some other, less R-rated ideas that I could put in a book for teenagers? Also that make sense?

“The computers could be taking people’s money.”

Me: Um…Richard Stark is the richest man in the world. Why would he need people’s money?

“What if all the computers are connected to one vast network and are trying to take over the world and human beings have been forced to form a ragtag rebellion against them and some of the humans are actually robots and you don’t know which are robots and which are humans?”

Me: Yeah…that is the plot of The Terminator. Also The Matrix. And Battlestar Galactica.

“The real problem is that you have no imagination. It is amazing that you even have a career.”

Although because they love computer inhalant, YouTube, and the show Intervention, my Felix/Sheldons did show me this, about which I have no comment and on which you should click at your own discretion.

Fortunately, I was able to come up with an amazing secret for Stark without their help.

The bad news is, it is so amazing, I don’t know if we’ll be able to give out Advanced Reader Copies of this book, because…well, for the safety of the nation, we have to keep the explosiveness at a minimum.

I’ll be posting an excerpt closer to the pub date of May 2010, though.

If you want to join the Airhead Facebook page to discuss what Stark’s secret could be amongst yourselves, it’s right here.

And, I might as well warn you now so you don’t FREAK OUT….

This site is getting a small facelift.

So if you come here one day and it looks totally different, that’s why.

It wasn’t Stark.

Then again….

Maybe it was….

More later.

Much love,

Meg