No, they’re not criminals; they’re not drug addicts; they don’t stock their homes with poisonous snakes.

But they do make it shockingly easy for me to part with my money.

I’m thinking of one friend in particular.  This weekend I took Miss M to the mall to see The Secret World of Arietty, which I totally recommend.  We met up with Miss N, one of Miss M’s BFFs, and Miss N’s mom, a close friend of mine.  (Miss M has been good to me that way — I love all her closest friends’ moms.)  We’re about to buy our tickets when we see another kid from the girls’ class, Sir H.  He’s with his mom, who’s just fantastic, and who owns two clothing stores in the mall.  I’d never been to either of her stores, so we all agree to meet up at the higher-end one after the movie.

Oh my.  Her store.

It’s awesome.

We walk in, our eyes goggle, and in about two seconds, Miss N’s mom and I are trying on outfits.  Even the girls get in on it, ooh-ing and aah-ing over purses, trying on dresses, and squealing over everything.  Sir H’s mom, the owner, offers us the employee discount, which is wonderful, and I walk out of there with a dressy sweater and shirt I adore, a new purse for Miss M, and several tank tops from her less expensive store across the hall.  Sir H’s mom sends us on our way with a promise to open the store one night for all the school moms, serve drinks, play music, and let us all have a clothes-trying-on-festivus.

It sounds like a blast… a perilous blast.  I have real problems resisting fabulous clothes at a fabulous discount… especially when plied with wine.

This is why Sir H’s mom is a dangerous friend… though I admit it’s a danger I plan to enjoy tremendously.

Do you have any dangerous friends?  Friends you love, but with whom you know you’ll spend too much, eat too much, do too-crazy things?  I wanna know — tell me all about them!

And if you’re in L.A. and want to come shopping with me, I happen to know a fabulous little store…

If you are, come hang with me!  I’ll be at the Passion and Prose conference, “the first annual conference that brings passionate romance readers and several dozen of their most beloved romance writers together for a fabulous day of conversation and fun.”

Keep in mind the term “romance reader” and “romance writer” casts a wide net.  We’re not just talking books with Fabio on the cover.  If romance is involved in a story, it has a place at this conference; and since a lot of YA includes romance, the genre will be all over the place.  I’m thrilled to be joining many other YA authors on the 25th, including Margaret Stohl, Jessica Spotswood, Beth Revis, Marie Lu, Sara Wilson Etienne, Andrea Cremer, and of course, the amazing Meg Cabot.

Here’s the schedule for the event.  You’ll see there’s all kinds of opportunities for readers and writers to hang out and chat, which will make it a lot of fun.  Added bonus — they just lowered the cost by half, so it’s much more reasonable.

Now I just need to hone my Populazzi elevator pitch for the author speed-dating sessions.  Any suggestions for summing up the story in a super-fast, super-compelling way?  Maybe a headline that sums up the basics and leaves you aching for more?  Believe me, I’d love your thoughts!  And if you plan to come to Passion and Prose, let me know — I’d love to meet you there!

At the end of January, I ran the brand spankin’ new Tinkerbell Half Marathon at Disneyland.  It’s a chick race — 90% of the runners were women, and about 90% of them wore wings and/or sparkly skirts.

I did not.  I was there to run.  I had high hopes of breaking my half-marathon PR (2 hours, four minutes), and maybe… just maybe even breaking two hours.

No, I hadn’t been running a lot since the New York Marathon back in November, but I’d been getting my butt kicked regularly at Carter Fitness, so I figured I could do it.  To help me along, I ate a completely decadent, butter-sauce filled meal at Napa Rose, the award-winning, insanely delicious restaurant at Disney’s Grand Californian.  I washed down the meal with two glasses of a no less than splendid Riesling.

This, for anyone who doesn’t know, is precisely the wrong meal to eat the night before a race — especially a race in which you’re hoping for speed.  And to make matters worse, the phone rang with an accidental wake-up call at 3am race morning, a full hour before I’d intended to get up.  Not enough time to go back to sleep, so I curled up in the corner of the bathroom (so as not to disturb Miss M and Pre) and read a book for an hour.

Yet for all this poor preparation, I felt terrific at the start line.  I wasn’t going to run, I was going to soar on wings of joy and determination.

Until a mile in… when I realized my bladder wouldn’t last.  I’d need a pit stop… and while I was at it I decided to shed my outermost layer of clothes, which meant I had to re-jigger my iPhone armband, Spibelt, and headphones… by the time I was finished I’d lost about five minutes, every one of which I knew I needed if I hoped to break two hours.

Oh well.  If I wasn’t going to PR, I decided I should take advantage of photo ops.  Here’s what I got:

Me with The Three Caballeros

Terrorized by Rogue Pirates

Probably for the best I threw in the towel on chasing the PR, because before the race was over I had to stop for yet another pit stop, which just proves my initial hypothesis: my bladder has refused to accept the memo about what it takes to be a successful long-distance runner.

In the end I finished with a time of 2:20, and since I sadly have an ego about these things, I always have to qualify as decent “considering it includes two potty stops, two photo ops, and a costume change.”  And like all Disney races, this one came with a super-fab medal.  Check it out (you might have to click on the picture and zoom in to see the medal well):

Post-run and loving the bling!

My next run is the L.A. Marathon, for which I will be woefully unprepared — haven’t done a run of more than 13 miles since November.  Anyone else doing that one?  I’d love the company!

My First Scandal.

Doofenschmirtz Backstory: I’m good friends with the librarian at Miss M’s school.  She’s incredibly supportive of my books, and while she has the whole lower school reading my fairy book series, Populazzi‘s not entirely appropriate for most of the under-twelve set.  The book is appropriate for the upper schoolers, so my friend — we’ll call her Angie — passed the book along to the librarian there.  Let’s call him Doug.

Doug read Populazzi and loved it — so much so that he wanted it to be the inaugural novel of the school book club.  Fantastic!  Doug and I met and he filled me in on the whole grand plan: he’d have the students read the book, I’d come in and chat with them… it would all be spectacular.

We had the conversation before the holidays, and I hadn’t heard from Doug since, but I figured he just got bogged down with other projects and hadn’t gotten around to launching the club quite yet.

Then just two days ago, I ran into Angie at a coffee shop.

“I’m so sorry about the book club!” she said.

“Sorry?” I said.  “Why?”

“Oh.  Doug didn’t tell you?”

He didn’t, but it turns out what had happened was that he had launched the book club with Populazzi.  At least, he’d tried to.  Until one of the students complained it was “too racy,” and therefore inappropriate for the club.

Doug didn’t want to start the club with a scandal, and he certainly didn’t want to start it by angering anyone’s parents… so he pulled the book.  I imagine he didn’t tell me because he was embarrassed.  I emailed him immediately and told him not to worry, I understand his position and it’s fine.

Do I personally think my book is too scandalacious for a high school book club?  Of course not.  Sure, it deals with some hot-button issues like sex, drugs, and eating disorders… but teens deal with those issues too.  And in Populazzi there are consequences to every decision Cara makes.  Not preachy consequences, just the real life ripples that come from throwing certain rocks into the pond.   Personally, I think it’s valuable to read about a character who doesn’t always make the best choices — especially in a book club setting where you can then talk about what drove him/her to those choices and think about what the character could have done differently, or what you might do in the character’s same position.

That said, I get where Doug is coming from, and I’m honestly not upset.  I in fact gave him some alternative titles to start his book club.  None of them are sanitized stories — they’re all beautifully messy and real — but they’re terrific, and worthy of group discussion.  Specifically, I recommended Sorta Like a Rock Star by Matthew Quick, Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King, and Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson.

And speaking of the great Laurie Halse Anderson, I feel like my book club “banning” has put me in great company.  LHA’s Speak is among the ALA’s Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books of 2000-2009, as is Judy Blume’s Blubber and Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret.

Best of all, being “challenged” puts me in the company of my favorite characters, the gang at Hogwarts.  Yup, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series starts off the Challenged list.  I therefore take the whole episode as a badge of honor, and in my mind I’ll send Cara, Claudia, and Archer over to the Three Broomsticks to swap war stories with Harry, Ron, and Hermione over mugs of butterbeer.

If you’re an author, have you ever had an experience like this?  As a reader, what books from the challenged/banned list are your favorites?  (I linked to the list above.)  I look forward to your thoughts!

A selection of books I've read/will be reading soon, from authors I've met along the way.

Know what most of the books my recently-read and to-be-read list have in common?

I know the authors.

It’s true.  Both my current reads are from women I know through The Debutante Ball: I’m reading Unraveling Isobel by Eileen Cook in hardcover;  MWF Seeking BFF by Rachel Bertsche in iBooks.  Also in my iBook TBR pile is Deb Ball author Erika Marks’s Little Gale Gumbo.  Sitting on my bookshelf I have Audition by my fellow Stages on Pages author Stasia Kehoe, and Leverage by Joshua Cohen, whom I met through Stasia.

Those are just the books I have on deck and in current rotation.  Scan through everything I’ve read in the past several months, and you’ll find 90% of the books are written by people I know.  (The other 10% is mainly Harry Potter.)

Pretty much if I know you, I’ll read you.  And if I like what I read, I’ll devour your work voraciously until the end of time.  Eileen Cook, Sarah Pekkanen, and Matthew Quick weren’t even on my radar until I met them through the Deb Ball; now that I’ve experienced their brilliance, I will read everything they write.  (Speaking of which, I just clicked over and pre-ordered Matthew Quick’s Boy 21.  I know nothing about it except that Q wrote it, and that’s enough for me.)

What about you?  When you meet an author, be it in person or online, do you tend to run out and buy his or her book?  Will you take a chance on a genre or a book that sounds like it wouldn’t normally be your thing if the author is someone you enjoy?  What percent of your TBR list is stacked with books by authors you know?

Back when I first started blogging, I did a post looking for a nickname for my husband, since I wanted to save his anonymity.  As you can see, I tossed out several options, including Zucchini, Manimal, and Sheldon.

None of them stuck.

Now, however, I know what his alias should be, and I hereby introduce you to…

PRE.

That’s “Pre” as in Steve Prefontaine, multi-record-setting runner.

I have dubbed him Pre because after ten years of blissfully sleeping in while I went out for long marathon training runs… my husband has become a runner.

He kept it from me at first.  I’d roll out of bed early on a weekday morning and see no sign of him, though his car was still there.  I’d imagine he was walking Riley, but Riley would still be in the house.  I didn’t think much of it — he could have been getting something from the garage, or fixing a sprinkler — anything, really.  I’d hop on my computer and do my morning e-mail check, and by the time I was done he’d be in the shower, finished whatever it was he was doing.

Then one morning I caught him coming back into the house.

Sweating.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“Um…” he replied sheepishly, “I was just… you know… going for a run.”

Pretty sure streamers exploded out of my head, and I may have even launched an impromptu parade.  My husband was a runner!!!!!

Immediately I began a mile-a-minute babble-fest covering everything from walk/run ratios to nipple guards.  And I signed him up for a 5K.

This was why he’d been cagey about his new hobby; he was afraid I’d make a huge deal out of it.

He was right.

Every Hanukkah gift Pre received from Miss M and I was running-oriented.  We outfitted him with a Timex Ironman watch with interval timer, an entire Cool Max wardrobe, a Spibelt, the iMapMyRun app, and training books by Jeff Galloway and Chi Running’s Danny Dreyer.

Here’s the fascinating thing: while I’ve been a runner for ten years, I’m still not one of those people who needs to run.  I love exercising, but I can be happy going for a hike, doing a boot camp class, even hopping on the elliptical at the gym.

Pre?  He’s a runner.  He’s dedicated.  He’s out there almost every morning, knocking out a 5K loop followed by 8 minutes of abs.  (And in true guy fashion, he’s already sporting a three-pack while I’ve been at the exercise-six-days-a-week thing for ten years, and still have more pooch than pack.)

Pre’s even breaking into my stash of energy bars because he’s “craving the protein.”

It’s kind of a major turn-on.  If it lasts, we can even run marathons together one day; we just have to enlist another relative to watch Miss M.

So now I turn it to you: ever had a spouse/significant other adopt one of your favorite hobbies?  Were you thrilled about it?  Did it bring you closer together?  And did he or she stick with it long term?

Pre does his first 5K next week.  I think he’ll love it.  I hope he’ll love it… I’m already signing him up for his next one!

I immediately said yes.  I’d never blurbed before, and it’s not often you get to experience a whole new verb.  It also felt like a big deal because it’s such an “established novelist” thing to do.  I was absolutely thrilled…

…and okay, a little nervous.  I remember how anxious I was when Populazzi was sent out to potential blurbers.  I had nightmares that we’d hear back nothing but a slew of, “Yeah, um… I really don’t want my name attached to this book.  Thanks, though.”  (Happily, that didn’t happen — I got great blurbs from Hilary Duff, Eileen Cook, Matthew Quick, and Deb Caletti.)

What if I didn’t like this book Crystal was sending me?  I’d have to be honest, and even though I didn’t know the author personally, I’d feel terrible passing along a bad review during those nail-biting final months before publication.

Turns out there was no need to worry at all.  Jennifer Gooch Hummer’s  Girl Unmoored had me riveted from page one.  I purposely read nothing about the book before I dove into its pages — I didn’t want any preconceived notions — but I’ll give you the official summary:

The sharp, quick-witted novel follows Apron, a young woman who has come unmoored by a sea of family drama and break-ups. But when she meets Mike, she’s met her mooring. Although Mike and his cantankerous boyfriend, Chad, don’t know what to do with her at first—Apron just seems to keep showing up, usually with a fat lip—they eventually offer her a job in their flower store. And then it’s smooth sailing for Apron, until she uncovers Chad’s secret. Suddenly Apron is forced to leave behind the safe harbor of childhood and navigate the stormy seas of a young adult. She knows what her real job is now, and it has nothing to do with flowers.

I have a full page of notes I took as I was reading, so I could wax rhapsodic about the story for ages, but I’ll sum it up with my blurb:

With stunning emotional honesty, Girl Unmoored shaves away layers of innocence to reveal the true meaning of love, and the power we have to save one another.  Effortlessly funny and poignant, Jennifer Gooch Hummer’s masterful debut offers surprises until the very end.  I am head over heels for this book, and will gladly scream its praises from the rafters — for sure a must-read!

In other words, I kinda liked it a little.

Girl Unmoored doesn’t come out until March 6th, but you can pre-order it now.  You’ll be thrilled you did.

I’ll post more about Girl Unmoored when it hits the shelves, but for now I have a question for you.  Reading this ARC made me feel like I was privy to something really special — something truly singular that most of the world doesn’t yet know is out there.

Have you ever had that experience?  Have you seen an early screening of a movie, read an ARC of a book, heard a demo of a record, visited the soft opening of a theme park ride… experienced something before it was released wide, and known it was exceptional?  If so — and if it’s something you can share — I’d love to hear about it!

I expect it to be insane.

Kidscreen is basically a kids’ TV frenzy, filled with television creators/producers and buyers from all over the world.  I’ve never been, though a couple years ago I coincidentally was in NYC at the same time, and met up with some friends who were attending the conference.  I remember a schmoozetastic wonderland — the lobby of the sponsor hotel teemed with people looking very Hollywood and “taking meetings.”  I even took a few myself; it seemed like the thing to do.

This year, I’m going because I’m developing a show for someone who’d like me to join her at the conference and help her pitch it.  I’m all over that — should be a lot of fun, especially since pretty much every exec, producer, and agent I’ve ever met will be there.

The awesome side of that is I’m sure I’ll never be more than two seconds away from a friendly face with whom I’m excited to re-connect.

The stressful side is that my brain is a bit of a sieve, which means I’m all but guaranteed to completely blank when I see the face of someone I should totally know.  That moment will be followed by several waves of self-loathing, during which I smack myself for being so hideously bad at the networking thing.

If I were Hermione Granger, I’d make flash cards.

Of course, if I were Hermione Granger, I’d remember everything I’d ever seen or read, so it wouldn’t be an issue.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.  And on the off chance you’re going to be there, let me know… and maybe send me a flash card of yourself so I can start studying now.

Now to turn it to you.  Do you ever go to networking-type conventions in your field?  If so, what do you like and dislike about them, and what have you done to get the most out of them (ideally while having a good time)?

I have purple fingers and toes.

Okay, purple finger and toe nails, but still.

The most entertaining part about it to me is that the urge for purple nails came upon me like a tsunami.  I was driving around, minding my own business, when — BOOM — an epiphany!  I must have purple nails.

I know — some people have epiphanies about world peace, or a brand new technology, or even the perfect twist for a thorny expository problem in their new novel.  Me?  Nails.

I’m hoping it’s a sign of something bigger.  Maybe the purple nails will inspire me in spectacular ways I can’t yet fathom.  At the moment, mine is not to question.  Mine is only to follow where inspiration strikes.   And today, inspiration strikes purple.

Your turn — ever been blasted with the sudden knowledge that you must do something that seems absolutely inconsequential… but you can’t get it out of your head nonetheless?  If so, what was it?  And did you follow through and do it?

Oh — I’ll also do the Mammoth Mud Run again this summer.  That was phenomenal.

So I turn things over to you to help me figure it out.  I’m feeling especially fond of half marathons right now, since the training schedule is far more reasonable.  I know there are amazing halves out there, so I’d love some suggestions… which ones should I do in 2012?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!