This month marks the release of two books that I'm very proud to be a part of!

The first was this one:

Rookie Yearbook Two was released at the beginning of the month. I still pinch myself on a regular basis because writing for Rookie really is my teenage dream come true. This book is like receiving a box of a hundred really cool ‘zines. It’s filled with amazing essays, photos, illustrations, DIYs, interviews with people like Carrie Brownstein and Judy Blume, and so much more that I’ll just let my lovely boss Tavi tell you about it. The Rookie piece that I am most proud of appears in Yearbook Two and I have to say I teared up a little when I saw it in print.

Very Superstitious: Myths, Legends and Tales of Superstition is a project I'm super psyched about for a couple of reasons. One, it's a charity anthology and the proceeds from the first 5,000 copies go to SPCA International. My kitties mean the world to me, so I'm proud to be supporting pets worldwide. Two, this gave me the opportunity to write a ghost story. I love, love, love ghost stories, but I've never written one. This was particularly fun because I got to write about a local legend.

Forest Park, Illinois, where I spent the past nine years before moving to Seattle, is the one corner of Chicago where I really felt like I fit and part of that was because it's a quirky town that is proud of it's 30 to 1 dead to living ration. It's a city of cemeteries and one of those cemeteries, Jewish Waldheim, has a ghost--a young hitchhiking flapper ghost who is like the brunette, less famous Resurrection Mary. No one knows who she actually is--and I had my fellow YA author/ghost legend expert, Adam Selzer help me do a ton of research on who she might have been, though newspaper articles like this were about all we could find. I relished the opportunity to make up a story expanding on what little is known about Forest Park's Flapper Ghost.

I named her Lulu after the spirit that lived in my childhood home--at least according to my junior high Ouija Board adventures. She and the characters she meets in her story, "The Road Home," also play a small role in The Grief Book. Sadly, I still don't have any news to report about that, but writing and releasing this story is tiding me over and I hope it will tide you over, too!

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