THE #PITCHWARS #WISHLIST POST (2019)

Hello possible #PitchWars Mentees! Thanks for stopping by my blog. I've tried to be as thorough as possible below so you'll know who I am, what I'm looking for, and how I will work as a Mentor, but if you have any Qs feel free to con...

I wrote my first ‘novel’ when I was six. It was called “Kindergarten Chaos,” and I penned it to fill what I saw as a void in Kid Fiction: not enough chapter books without pictures for pre-school and kindergarten students. (I genuinely thought there was a huge untapped...

NOTE: 

This is my 2018 list. For my 2019 list, please see the post "PitchWars 2019."

THE PITCHWARS WISHLIST POST

Hello possible PitchWars Mentees! Thanks for stopping by my blog. I've tried to be as thorough as possible below so you'll know who I am, what I'm looking for,...

Lately, I've been wondering - how #OwnVoices does a novel have to be to be considered #OwnVoices? And how much personal information about his/her/their marginalized identity does an author owe a reader?

First, to define the term.

When I Googled “What is #OwnVoices,” this...

PART ONE

I had the idea for Planet Earth is Blue somewhere around 2014, but it was just a vague note in my "Possible Middle Grade Novel Ideas" folder for an embarrassingly long time. I just couldn't come up with a main character, and without that, there's not much to go...

"Can you tell me how to get-

How to Get to Sesame Street?"

On April 2nd, World Autism Day, it was announced that Sesame Place had officially become the world’s first (and currently only!) Autism Certified theme park.

This is great news, but came as no surprise to me.

I’v...

It's #ThrowbackThursday, and I'm thinking about the '90s today. In particular, I'm thinking about these friends I had in the '90s. There were seven of them, they were awesome, and they were older than me. Until we were the same age. And then I was older than them. All...

I started writing fanfiction as a tween, around 1997. My first big fandom was Scarecrow & Mrs. King, a TV series that aired from 1983-1985, though I also liked Designing Women, the Baby-sitters Club, and Law & Order fics and fandom. I shared some of my work online, mos...

Two summers ago, I accompanied my goddaughter's twin brother, B, then-9, to a class at Brooklyn Poly/NYU's Tandon School of Engineering, where he would be learning to build a website. 

The college offers regular weeklong sessions to kids on the Autism Spectrum wh...

I started keeping a diary when I was about seven years old. My first one was small, square, had kittens on the cover, and locked on the side with a tiny silver key. From second grade through college, I wrote in journals all the time, and with two (lost) exceptions, I s...