I was personally touched by the disease last year, when my grandfather lost his battle with leukemia. So now, along with my Team in Training running group, I am racing to raise money to help battle blood cancers.

By September 5th, the day of the half marathon (in Disneyland!), my goal is to raise over $2000 to go toward finding new treatments and eventually a cure for this devastating disease.

So what does this have to do with you, you ask? I have forty copies of my books (including some various fun editions, like a lush mass market paperback of Fallen from the UK, the audio book, a couple Spanish and Italian versions, and even a few advance copies of Torment!) that I will be auctioning off to the first forty people who make a donation (of $10 or more) through my Team in Training website. I will sign, personalize, and send a special thank you note with the book to anyone who helps me support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

You can visit my fundraising website here and make a secure online donation on the right hand side of the page. I’ll get an email notification when you do, and as long as you include your email and mailing address when you fill out the donation, I’ll have all the information I need to send you your personalized book. I will email you before I send your book to check whether you have special dedication wishes, or if you can read, say, Chinese and want that edition! I have no idea how many of you will be interested in this, but if we exceed the forty books I’m starting with, I’ll update my blog and maybe increase the quantity. (That would be incredible!)

These can be yours!

I know that many of you and the people you love have also been touched by some form of cancer, and it feels wonderful to know there are great organizations out there like Team in Training and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society that allow all of us to get involved–even in a small way–to save lives.

Do I look like a girl who is about to run 13.1 miles?

I had a really nice signing after the panel:

I saw some amazing costumes, including a few that I was too stunned by to even photograph. One was made of only a strap of red patent leather fabric about an inch thick.

And after the con, we had a great time in San Diego. We stayed near Ocean Beach and walked all around the neighborhood, eating many fish tacos and watching Milo take his first brave dip in the ocean.

Great weekend! Now it’s back to writing PASSION….

First off, I’m excited to report that I’ve been nominated for an Indigo Teen Reads award in the Best New Writer category. This is the inaugural year for the contest, run by the great Canadian bookstore, and the best part is: readers get to choose the winners! Please visit the site, fill out the very quick registration form, and vote for Fallen (and me) in the Best New Writer category.

This is what you’ll see after you vote. If you’re hard core, you can come back and vote every day!

Next up, I’m about to head out on a blog tour in the UK for a little armchair (or desk chair) travel. Tomorrow (June 30th), you can find me at Book Chick City, and I’ll be making about ten more stops after that. More details, dates, and links to come.

My Brit blog tour coincides with the perfect-beach-read mass market paperback release of Fallen in the UK, and I also have this wonderful new trailer to share. Some of you Brits might be seeing it during the theater previews for Eclipse this week!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, the monster list, taped on the back of our closet door, is taller than both of us and took three photographs to capture. But Jason still managed to slay it. See all the little check marks?

For the past five months he’s been preparing for his oral exam, which he takes this Friday (!!!). For three hours, three professors will grill him on any/all of these books, asking questions like “How would you teach this text in an introduction to Shakespeare class?” And this is just the first of two monster tests he has to pass before he writes his dissertation. Hear that, all you future English PhD’s out there? Are you scared? (I’m scared.)

So around here, it’s been one book a day, every day, for five straight months. He wakes up in the morning, he reads. I take the dog for a hike, he reads. I fool around online for seven hours, he continues to read. Because these are major doorstops of books. Tomes. Like on Tuesday: he sat down and read the Bible. The whole thing! Another day he tackled the very thrilling Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Sounds like a real page turner, huh? Today he’s reading Paradise Lost. He’s got serious speed-reading skillz.

I marvel at his reading stamina and am feeling very proud that he’s made it through this list. As if it wasn’t already before, his brain is certainly a goldmine now.

So good luck on Friday, Jason, and thank you for always flagging the angel references for me. xx

At my signing. Thanks, Lacey, for the pic.

This year, being on the author side was so much fun. I loved spending time with my team at Delacorte and loooved hearing all about their brilliant plans for Torment’s release in a few months. I got to meet my British, Australian, and even Croatian publishers and talk about plans to visit both the UK and Australia/New Zealand over the next year. I got to see Susanne Collins accept an award from the American Booksellers Association—and had to hold myself back from tackling her and telling her how much I love her books. I sat down with my agents to talk about plans for the next book after Torment (hard to believe I’ll start writing that in a few weeks!).

I even did a literary “speed-dating” event. Now, I’ve proctored speed-dating events during my days as a waitress and, at least at the restaurant where I worked, speed-dating usually shook out to be a bunch of pretty ladies showing up to meet a bunch of not so pretty dudes and everyone went home looking lonely. Not the case at BEA! Our speed-dating meant that I sat at a table with my lovely editor, Wendy, and every three minutes, a new group of independent booksellers and librarians would come over for a chat. In an hour and a half, I got the chance to talk to about a hundred and fifty people. My head was sort of spinning and my jaw hurt from smiling, but it was an incredible feeling. I reconnected with a few booksellers that I met on tour for Fallen last year, but I also got to chat with so many booksellers from places I have never been—and now hope to be able to visit their stores.

The trip was as rejuvenating as it was exhausting. I’m back home now feeling ready to write and even more excited to hit the road in September for the Torment tour. Details to come on dates and places for that tour, so check back in a few weeks.

And, oh yeah, I won an award! (Hard to photograph, but very exciting.)

Torment SneakPeek

And, for your listening pleasure, here’s Willie crooning about angels.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A few months ago, I went to visit my parents at the house where I grew up in Texas. My mom, in her mom way, likes to make use of my presence to clean out closets.

“Can we throw out these softball trophies?”

“What about these old dance recital costumes?”

“You’re never going to wear these shoes again, are you?”

And on it goes. If Mom and I fill up a garbage bag to take to goodwill, the day has been a success. This last trip, she was going through my old dresser, tossing things into the trash with reckless abandon—until we came across an old sketchbook buried in the recesses of a drawer.

“What is that?” my mom asked, when I leapt up to save the sketchbook from its date with the trashcan. I recognized it immediately. I’d filled it up on a road trip my family took to Colorado in the summer of 1994. The binding was split and a few of the pages were loose, but otherwise, it was still in good shape. Once glance at its rough maroon cover brought back a flood of memories.

It was the summer between seventh and eighth grade. My family rolled in a dark green Ford Aerostar minivan back then. Baby-tees and colored jean shorts were all any one I knew was wearing. I remember I had this one baby-tee with a bar code across the chest. (Why??) That whole trip I could not be separated from my discman, which would have been blasting either Ace of Base and or the Joseph and the Amazing Technicolored Dream Coat soundtrack. We drove fourteen hours from Dallas to Boulder with my brother throwing things at me from the back bench of the minivan.

And I wrote it all down.

I did not look like this.

I’d documented everything we ate on our vacation. Every restaurant name, every dish that every member of my family ordered, every meal of every day. I wrote down everything we wore (yes, the baby-tee with the bar code made a few appearances). I wrote down the weather and what the stars looked like each night and jokes my brother told. I drew floor plans of the little cabin we rented. I drew the escape route we took when we filled the cabin with smoke using the wrong kind of wood to make a fire. I had a page for funny bumper-stickers I saw on cars we passed along the highway. I made notes of what each of my friends were doing the two weeks I was out of town.

It was a time capsule of that summer—but it was more than that.

People ask me all the time when I first knew I was going to be a writer. I don’t think I knew it then. A lot of kids keep diaries. But flipping open this book fifteen years after I’d filled it, I could see it. My attention to detail was pretty intense. I guess I was either going to be a novelist or a detective.

People also ask me if I have any advice for aspiring writers. I don’t think that being a writer means you have to fill a sketchbook with every meal every person in your family ever eats, but I do think there’s value in taking note of the things that are happening around you. There’s value in finding something interesting in even the most mundane details of life. Because somewhere, there’s a story in them. Someday, maybe you’ll lose the sketchbook, but the sense of curiosity will be rooted deep inside you. More than anything else, curiosity is what keeps me writing today.

Some say he’s a cautious dog. Easily terrified is another way of putting it. Matt captured a lot of Milo’s adventures on film. Here’s a clip of some of the fun he had without us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For my birthday on Sunday night, Jason took me to a secret supper club in Santa Monica. It’s run by these two cool women chefs, pops up in a new location just four times a year (you get an email two hours before the meal to let you know where to go), and is so underground that I was supposed to agree not to blog about it. Whoops! But I the food was so so so incredible and it was such a cool, special birthday present that I must at least mention it. Not by name. Below is the remains of a chocolate souffle with corn ice cream and chile-flecked cotton candy.

Stunning, isn’t it?

Also known as “Another dress for us all to covet!”