My First Novel

I was twelve and I had finally finished it.  I remember knowing it was done, because I'd reached the magic number of one hundred pages.  It was in my loopy cursive and extra-special, I thought, because it was on the colored notebook paper I'd convinced my mom to buy at the beginning of the school year.  It was more expensive than the regular old white kind with the red line up the side, but my mom was an artist and recognized the importance of such things.  And it had almost no messy erasures either, because I always got hundreds on my spelling test, and more importantly, I was definitely not into revision.

Then I told my friends and family that I was going to get it published.  I believed that with all my heart--so much that I wrote to Judy Blume and told her all about it!  Don't ever throw away your work, she told me.  And I didn't...it's still in a green binder, and I look at it from time to time.  For a long time, I kept it in the corner of my room where I could see it when I was writing.  Maybe it was to remind myself about how great it felt to sit in that orange plastic chair in Mrs. Rinear's class, tuning out everything around me and getting my words down on paper.

Thank goodness I finally did learn to revise, because this Tuesday, I  get to see ALSO KNOWN AS HARPER on a shelf.  It's not those same one hundred pages from the sixth grade, which is a really good thing for the readers!  The story on the pages is a different one, but my own story hasn't changed.  I'm still someone who tunes out the rest of the world to try to get my words to take shape.   By the way, I'd do anything to have one of those orange plastic chairs for my house!

If you are in the area, I'd love to see everyone at Other Tiger bookstore in Westerly, Rhode Island on Tuesday, May 26 at 6:00.  (Maybe I'll read from the green notebook...)