Writer talk

On Friday, September 21, at 7 PM, the following YA authors will be appearing at Children's Book World in Haverford, PA:

DAVID LEVITHAN (author of Every Day)
ELLEN HOPKINS (author of Tilt)
ELIOT SCHREFER (author of Endangered)
BETH KEPHART (author of Small Damages)
JENNIFER R. HUBBARD (author of Try Not to Breathe)

I'm so excited to be a part of this, and I hope that if you're in the area, you'll stop by!

For today's writerly talk, I have a couple of quotes from David Rakoff's book Half Empty:

"Funny thing about words. Regarded individually or encountered in newspapers or books (written by other people), they are as lovely and blameless as talcum-sweet babies. String them together into a sentence of your own, however, and these cooing infants become a savage gang straight out of Lord of the Flies. .... It will take the civilizing influence of repeated revisions to whip them into shape, an exhausting prospect."

"Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly ... And yet, I don't for a moment forget that this is not a life of mining coal ... Each morning begins suffused with this sense of privilege, shell-pink and pulsing with new hope."

Now excuse me while I stride into the shell-pink dawn to wrestle with my savage gang of words!