Now, I know you're thinking my first book was maybe DANIEL THE DRAW-ER, or something sophisticated like that, but... this was my true first book. I wrote this bad boy, titled NEW KID, when I was in the sixth grade. That was the year I attended public school, as you can see from the title, which was heavily influenced by the New Kids on the Block. This was a risky move on my part because I wasn't allowed to listen to the radio and certainly wasn't allowed to drool over boy bands.
If you look close enough, you can see the peace signs my friends drew on the cover--which I immediately covered up because peace signs were against the rules, too. The back cover, which I didn't take a picture of, is littered with the name of my New Kid of Choice. Can you guess who my future rockstar husband was? :-D
I wrote the bulk of this story during school when I was supposed to be working on just about everything but writing a book. And then my friends would steal it to read when they were supposed to be doing just about anything but reading their friend's book. Good times.
The story is about a girl who moves to a new town (duh!) and becomes friends with a ghost who wears Groucho Marx glasses and a boy named Derrick. But who cares about Derrick. We're talking about a ghoul with fantastic fashion sense! They all communicate with a device called a trigaphone, which is pretty much a triangle walkie-talkie. I pretty much invented the modern cell phone, if you think about it... but whatever.
While this original story is pretty horrible, I've taken ideas from it and inserted them in some of my more recent books (Derrick became Derek, the gross jock in my upcoming YA paranormal; the orchard scene also ended up in the same book. The main character, Maggie, became a character in my YA contemporary romance). That's the fun part of being a writer--being able to write about whatever you want and mish-mash things together without most people recognizing it.
Someday I will type this story out or figure out a cool way to preserve it (the folder is getting a little weathered, if you couldn't tell from the picture), but it's fun to take it to school visits. The kids really relate to the idea of the notebook pages in the folder, and the teachers all really relate to the NKOTB adoration.
So, there you have it. My very first book.
If you look close enough, you can see the peace signs my friends drew on the cover--which I immediately covered up because peace signs were against the rules, too. The back cover, which I didn't take a picture of, is littered with the name of my New Kid of Choice. Can you guess who my future rockstar husband was? :-D
I wrote the bulk of this story during school when I was supposed to be working on just about everything but writing a book. And then my friends would steal it to read when they were supposed to be doing just about anything but reading their friend's book. Good times.
The story is about a girl who moves to a new town (duh!) and becomes friends with a ghost who wears Groucho Marx glasses and a boy named Derrick. But who cares about Derrick. We're talking about a ghoul with fantastic fashion sense! They all communicate with a device called a trigaphone, which is pretty much a triangle walkie-talkie. I pretty much invented the modern cell phone, if you think about it... but whatever.
While this original story is pretty horrible, I've taken ideas from it and inserted them in some of my more recent books (Derrick became Derek, the gross jock in my upcoming YA paranormal; the orchard scene also ended up in the same book. The main character, Maggie, became a character in my YA contemporary romance). That's the fun part of being a writer--being able to write about whatever you want and mish-mash things together without most people recognizing it.
Someday I will type this story out or figure out a cool way to preserve it (the folder is getting a little weathered, if you couldn't tell from the picture), but it's fun to take it to school visits. The kids really relate to the idea of the notebook pages in the folder, and the teachers all really relate to the NKOTB adoration.
So, there you have it. My very first book.
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