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because I am this tight with MC Hammer. Don't I look like a total dork with my mouth all askew? :) Here we are at the Ypulse Conference in San Francisco, where I also got to meet the awesome Melissa Walker, author of the Violet on the Runway series which I absolutely love -- I mean, seriously. Violet is this awesome geeky, awkward, freakishly tall and totally unpopular high school girl who gets discovered by a top modeling agency and becomes this amazing model...but guess what? Her problems don't magically go away. And since author Melissa has seen the inside view of the modeling industry (she has an article in the current issue of Teen Vogue, too), she is the perfect author to tell it like it is. I love this series and can't wait to read book three, Violet in Private, which comes out August 5.

I also met Justina Chen Headley, author of Girl Overboard and one of founders of the amazing Readergirlz. With her was her very cool son, who rocked.

And then there was David Levithan who claims half responsibility for Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. He's also an editor at Scholastic and is involved in the upcoming 39 Clues, which is getting a lot of buzz. David and I shared the stage with Mortified author Dave Nadelberg and spent about 30 minutes embarrassing ourselves talking about our teen experiences.

And I can't forget to mention very cool editor Cindy Eagan from Little, Brown, who was a blast.

Awesome conference! You? Must come next year, okay? Okay.


And hey! Do you Twitter? https://twitter.com/lisa_mcmann

It's funny; Damon and I are the greatest downstairs neighbors ever, but our upstairs neighbors have really put us to the test these last few years. We're never bothered by noise, no matter how loud (though the guests we've hosted have been, and it's pretty extreme what these guys do), and there have been a number of ridiculous nuisances—some that have involved the building and landlord, but most that just affect Damon and me. But, living downstairs, you become the guardian of people's personal lives, and these guys have clearly been going through a rough patch. (Understatement.) Even though our landlord eventually asked us to please tell him everything—because he's been having his own issues with them—I could never bring myself to add to their problems. It would have been more than legitimate, but I just couldn't. I knew too much.

Anyway, they moved out this week, and last night we found this on our doorstep:

We put these in a vase already, but they came wrapped in the paper shown.

Dear Neighbor and Friend
  Just a short note to say goodbye & thank you for being great neighbors to me - i.e. putting up with my parking, etc. . .
  Your kindness & grace did not go unnoticed
  [her name and apartment number]