"Cooking with Courage" (Video), My Writing and Editing Playlist, An Answer from Dear Abby, Advanced Reading Copies + more!
Hi, friends!
This week I recorded my first baking video (thanks to my librarian friend Ryan for putting this idea in my head)! Rachel saw some pumpkin-shaped pumpkin bread on TikTok and asked me to bake it — so you can watch the video and check out a revised and annotated recipe on my website:
I also recently put together a YouTube playlist of a bunch of the songs I listened to while I was writing and revising Snow Struck that you can read about (and listen to) here. I probably played each of these songs 1,000 times last year and I’ve been listening to them all morning . . . but I’m still not sick of them yet!
Blast from the past: This is an old picture of me and Rachel and our friends Amy and Joe playing on the sidewalk in Queens for Make Music New York (our music: too jangly to use for a writing soundtrack and 100% not on YouTube, so it didn’t make the cut)!
In case you missed it, you can also now request an advanced reading copy of Snow Struck on Netgalley! Teacher, librarian, publishing, blogger, and reviewer friends: this means you — I’m not in charge of approving the Netgalley requests, but would absolutely love it if my publisher was flooded with them :)
Please feel free to share this link widely . . . and if you’d like to help me boost this message on Twitter, my tweet about the advanced reading copies is here.
As always, I also have a bunch of free teacher resources and more available for download on my website. I’m also still writing letters to classrooms and sending out pre-order goodies (bookmarks and stickers and bookplates, while supplies last).
For pre-order goodies, just fill out the form at the link above. For teachers or librarians who want a letter for their classroom (and/or a bunch of bookmarks and stickers) - you can just reply to this email and let me know your mailing address, if you want to!
If you’re able, please also disregard the typo in the following tweet 😂
I promised “Dear Abby” in the subject line - so here she is: when I worked for publishing companies, if one of my coworkers/friends teased me about something . . . my running bit was to tweet at Dear Abby to get her take. I’d forgotten all about that until recently, when I found a screengrab of one of her responses from 2014:
To be fair, I was posting a LOT of skateboarding selfies back in 2014 and you can see some of them here 😂 I know I have a couple more responses in my files (one was about describing hair as “dirty blond”), so I’ll be sure to share those if I find ‘em.
Genuinely, thank you to everyone on this list for forwarding and sharing and pre-ordering and generally making me feel like I’m not just sending these emails out into the void of the internet. If I could bake you all some pumpkin-shaped pumpkin bread, I would!
Your fan,