For the past three months I have been training for a half-marathon with a group called Team in Training. Team in Training is a philanthropic organization that raises funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Leukemia causes more deaths than any other cancer among children and young adults under the age of 20 and is the number 1 cancer in senior citizens.

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?

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

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.

When he got to our house, he was scared of everything! The front door. The bathroom. The guy mowing the lawn outside. The chihauhau duo next door. Getting in the car. Getting out of the car. Plastic bags most of all. The woman we adopted him from had saved him from a kill shelter and thinks he was abused by his last owner. But he seems to get more and more energy the more love we give him. In the four days we’ve had him, he’s come out of his shell and has a very warm and funny personality.

Today I took him hiking in Runyon Canyon. It is amazing how many people want to talk to you when you have a puppy. He make a lot of dog friends. He bounded up to the summit of the park. He  tried to flirt with Kristin Cavallari’s Yorkie (he’s clearly adjusting to the Hollywood scene very well). Then he passed out in the car on the way home.

He likes to curl up under my desk while I’m writing, which is good, because I think we’ll both be spending a lot of time there. I am turning in the final (I HOPE!) draft of Torment to Random House on Monday, and very soon, it will be time to start working on the prequel!

There's the car down at the bottom.

My husband launched his car off this cliff a half an hour before hour wedding. Some of you already know this little story, but for those of you who don’t: Relax! No one was in the car, no one was hurt (save an olive tree that was split in two), and our wedding was pret-ty perfect after that. As the Jewish side of the family was quick to point out: “What’s a wedding without a little broken glass?”

I bring this up now because the car we bought to replace the wrecked one is a stick shift. And I have never driven a stick shift. So the time has come for me to learn.

I take that back. When I was fifteen, a boy I had a crush on gave me a lesson driving his car in a parking lot. I don’t remember what kind of car it was (junky, red) or even how it happened that I got him to agree to teach me. But I was so fearless—popping the clutch, grinding the transmission—I didn’t even know how fearless I was. He was cringing in the passenger seat, then scowling, then yelling at me to get out of the car.  Never worked out between us, in case you were wondering.

Fast forward to this weekend, when Jason and I decide to go out to the desert (where it is flatter than hilly LA) for a couple of days so I could get comfortable driving a manual car. So there we are: out on the open road, entering the surreally beautiful Joshua Tree National Park.

Healing waters at our hotel in Desert Hot Springs

I take the wheel—and suddenly, I’m terrified.

Do I look nervous?

Why was it so much harder than I remembered when I was fifteen and didn’t even know how to drive at all? Maybe, I realized later, because I was fifteen and didn’t even know how to drive at all. This weekend, that fearlessness I felt at fifteen seemed impossible. Not when there were cars honking and flipping me off at four-way stops, not with all the false starts and shuddering shut-downs. Jason, it must be said, was patient as a little saint. I was the one growing more and more frustrated. Yes, there were some tears.

The trope about teaching old dogs new tricks kept springing to mind. But come on, I’m not that old. The premise of one of my favorite childhood movies, Defending Your Life, was starting to make sense in a whole new way. Is it possible that the older we get, the rarer—and more difficult—it becomes to pick up a truly new skill? Do we have too many excuses and too many reservations? If all that’s true, then what’s the quickest way around fear?

I was thinking about this when we left the desert yesterday (with Jason driving) to head to a reading and signing at the Borders in Long Beach. The passage I read was from the prologue of the novel where Luce is at her most fearless with Daniel.

It blew me away to see so many people turn out for the reading!

After my driving lesson, I wanted to focus to this brave opening moment in Fallen, and I realized I want to write more and more scenes like it in the books to come in the series. Maybe there’s even a bit of hope that some of this bold impulsiveness will rub off on my life off the page. It’s what’s so beautiful to me about teen stories. It’s why young adult writers get to focus on falling in love, and leave break-ups and baggage to adult books. Because vaulting oneself into something new and unknown—whether it’s driving a stick shift or falling in love—is much easier with a little bit of fearlessness.