Wendelin Van Draanen's Blog, page 12

OK Mini-Post

Tomorrow I'll be visiting 3 middle schools in Moore, Oklahoma as part of a support / fundraising effort for the kids and schools that were affected by the tornadoes that blasted through this area in May.



By visiting, I don't mean sauntering through. Or just clicking through a slide presentation. I want to connect with these kids and their teachers and what they've gone through, which means I'll wind up being emotional and spastic and exhausted by the end of the day.



Which means I should go to bed right now because I'm in a different time zone and I've got a super-early start time in the morning.



But I will be back with more, and hope to have a picture or two to share.



'Til then, good night from Oklahoma!

The Indelible Years

Looking over old class photos, remembering

Yes, my elementary school reunion happened, and it was a lot of fun! And it struck me again how powerful the growing years are. How they mold you (or scar you), and how they stick with you for the rest of your life. It was interesting to reminisce and listen to what people remembered. Besides recalling things about each other, there was quite a bit of talk about teachers. Which ones were nice. Which ones were mean. And which ones went crazy.



The kids in the neighborhood were like family--you saw them every day, you went to school together, you played in the street together, you played at their houses, you spied on them (and they spied on you!). They had a part in shaping you, and no matter the time or distance, you will always remember them.



I write for young people not because I can't write for adults, but because I think writing for young people matters; that what you experience during your growing years--in real life as well as in literature--will influence the person you become. What you're imprinted with during that time can be indelible.



Sammy Keyes is the person she is because I truly believe that she can help young people find their center. She's there for the fun and adventure that comes with having a good friend, but she's also there to help kids believe in themselves and face their fears on their way to becoming strong, confident adults.



Having so many of us travel long distances to see and celebrate the kids we knew in each other reminded me of the importance of who we were to each other back then, and how our shared experiences helped us to become the people we are today.



I'm so glad I went.

Real Post Tomorrow

Just because I know some of you wait for me to post (which is awfully sweet), I'm checking in to let you know that I'll be a day late this week! See you tomorrow!

Olly Olly Oxen Free!

My first published book is titled How I Survived Being A Girl. It was bought by the same editor with whom I've worked on all my books, but she was at HarperCollins at the time so it's not part of the catalog I have at Knopf and (long story short) it is now out of print.



When I wrote HISBAG I had no idea what it meant to be published. Oh, I had a theoretical idea, but having written several books that never saw publication, I didn't think through the hazards of giving characters names too similar to those of the people on whom those characters were based.



Maybe I just didn't believe that this one would ever see the light of day (or bookstore shelves) either.



Nicknames seemed safe. Who would ever claim to be those characters? In real life (and in the book) the people next door were called Freeko and Fattabutta. (You read that right, and I will skip over the whole explanation of this because, really, nothing can explain away those names. Or excuse the things we did to them. Those are tales better left to the pages of a novel.)



When HISBAG came out in 1997 my mother suggested that I take out liability insurance in case Freeko and Fattabutta decided to sue me. I wasn't worried. We'd moved away ages before, and they didn't seem like readers.



Definitely not readers.



But fast forward to 2013 and sudden I am worried. Not about being sued. And not about any of the adults from the neighborhood. The last one standing moved into a 'home' earlier this year. (Which makes me very sad. She was an awesome neighbor. And such what a tolerant person! Her house was headquarters and she had so much patience for the wild neighborhood kids tearing through her house and yard.)



No, I'm suddenly worried because next weekend I'm traveling back to my hometown for an "elementary school reunion."



No kidding!



Most of me is super excited about it. Some of these kids I knew from K-6th. Formative stuff happens during that time and it'll be so much fun to reminisce about our shared experiences and hear each other's varied recollections. Just to see these people again after all these years and find out where they've wound up is going to be great. It's way better than a high school reunion. It's way more...pure.



But someone in the reunion group posted a comment about how I'd written a book about the neighborhood. And all of a sudden I'm going Uh-oh! I mean, it's been quite a while since I've read the book. What did I say about people? I remember that Andy down the block became Little Andy in the book. (Do you think he'll figure that out?) And will Wobblehead know who she is?



There's even a map in the beginning of the book pointing out who lives where!



And it's clearly The Neighborhood.



I guess all I can do at this point is hope that the "kids" take the book in the spirit intended, and recognize that it represents a magical time in our lives--a time where you could go "bombs away" on boys from the top of the jungle gym and no one posted you. A time where there were no rules in four square (back slaps and spins were fair and fine and expected). A time when getting slammed in dodgeball just meant you'd better move faster the next time someone hurled a ball at you.



I hope I still have some of my moves, 'cause there's no hiding from this, and I may just need to dodge and duck if enough of them have read the book.



Olly olly oxen free!

Consolation Surprise

So random Twitter people were selected for the Killer Cruise giveaway, and as far as I can tell none of the winners were my blog regulars.



Which makes me sad! I think the regulars here are the  nicest group of the internet. You're always so supportive of each other (and me, too!) and I was hoping at least one of you would be picked. So this morning when I was pouting about it to Mark he pointed out that I have a few of my own early copies of Killer Cruise that I could donate, and before you know it, we had a plan and got to work.



We printed the comments that were left at the blog over the last 6 weeks. We cut them into strips by name (making them approximately equal in size regardless of the length of the comment). The more active someone had been at the blog, the bigger their chance was of winning a book, but even if a person had left only a single comment over that span of time, they still had a chance to win.



Then we stuck all the strips in a hat (well, a grocery bag) and picked three names.



As luck would have it, the odds bore out in favor of multi-commenters.



So!



Will the following people please start jumping up and down:






"Optimistic4Ever" (I guess it pays to be optimistic!)
"Gabrielle" (Mark actually pulled your name out twice. Lots of comments from you!)
"Yusa" (I'm glad Mark picked your name--happy birthday!)





If any of the three of you happen to have also won at Twitter, please let me know so I can give the book to our first runner-up (who I won't torture by mentioning by name).



If not, please e-mail me your mailing address so I can ship you a book!



For the rest of you... I'm sorry again! Doing the best I can...



FYI, sometime during the week I'm putting up the new Twitter campaign (Free Book Fridays). The giveaway will run every Friday through the end of the year, but I'm making only one post about it so this Twitter stuff doesn't interfere so much with our regular programming (whatever that is, right?)



Anyway, know I appreciate all of you so much. See you next Sunday (and in the comments, of course!).

Win a Killer Cruise!

I’m excited! Random House is doing a giveaway on Twitter for
3 autographed hardcovers of Sammy Keyes and the Killer Cruise.



Here’s how it works:
: Follow me @WendelinVanD and tweet "I want to win a Killer Cruise!
#SammyKeyes"





Do it before September 8th and that’s it! You’re entered.



Easy-peasy!



On Sunday, September 8th we will announce three random
winners  on Twitter and get book-mailing
info from them via direct message.



So…go on! Tweet me!



PLEASE NOTE -- Because of shipping costs, we can only mail
books to addresses in the USA.



PS After this we'll do a Twitter "Free Book Friday" through the end of the year with various Sammy Keyes titles. It'll be fun!

A Little Heads-Up

I wanted to give my regular readers a little heads-up about next Sunday's post : 




Instead of my usual newsy or personal post, there'll be instructions for a Random House sponsored contest
for winning autographed copies of Sammy
Keyes and the Killer Cruise via
Twitter. I know some of you aren't on Twitter, but maybe you have a friend or
parent who is so you can enter?




Just wanted to let you know!




Hoping you're having a good week,

Wendelin

The Long Hike Home

My wonderful sister & me.

Wearing tributes to our dad (the tie),

our brother Mark (the Scout shirt)

and our mom (the hair scarf)

Today we fulfilled my mother's wish of having her and my dad's ashes scattered in the High Sierra. These were the mountains where our family often backpacked; where we kids learned survival skills, the merits of packing light, and an appreciation of nature.



Mom would always stop and examine flowers on these treks--she had a real love of wildflowers, even the small, plain ones that the rest of us easily overlooked.



She also was intrigued by rocks. Any family vacation we took, she came home with rocks. (Her license plate was an abbreviation of Rock Gatherer, which sort of sums things up.)



After Dad died, Mom took to traveling to distant lands and (in keeping with her quirky sense of humor) packed along rocks from one end of the earth to deposit on another. She relished the thought of "confusing archaeologists of the future" with her naughty rock shuffling. Which is why it was fitting that on this trek up the mountain we carried along rocks from her collection, and packets of wildflower seeds.



Dad's ashes have been waiting in a closet for 35 years, Mom's for only a couple of months. They're mixed together now, high in the Sierra, overlooking a stunning mountain range and valley, and the Cliffs of Valhalla (a word my sister tells me is a Norse or Germanic word for heaven). And scattered among our parents' ashes are Mom's rocks and the flower seeds we hiked in, sprinkled with some tears of their daughters.



Time to go home...

Dad's triangle tied with the ribbon from

Mom's wedding bouquet



My sister and I were there with our own families, and after the ashes were scattered, everybody took a turn clanging the metal triangle our dad made to call us home when we were kids. (I can't believe my sister backpacked it all the way up to the scattering site, but she's quite a hiker.)



For all the difficult "last set of switchbacks" my mom and dad coaxed me through over the years, this was a trek steeped in only love and gratitude; a long walk where I spent time appreciating all they did for me, and all they taught me.



It was an honor to make this journey for them.



An honor to take that final hike home.

The Favor

I'm terrible at asking for favors. I like doing favors for other people, and I enjoy it when someone does something nice for me, but asking them to do something for me? It gives me the willies.



And yet, ask I did.



What got me over the Favor-Asking Threshold was wanting to do a favor for somebody else. See, Mark has a good friend (Dan) who loves the LA Dodgers. I think it's fair to say that the root of this extreme Dodger love is not the team itself. The players may be fan-worthy, but they come and go.



It's also not the City of Los Angeles. Or the contagious Dodger love effused by one-time player and longtime manager Tommy Lasorda (who, quite famously, says he bleeds Dodger blue). No, Dan's love for the Dodgers is rooted in the voice of the Dodgers--Vin Scully--the man who's been doing play-by-play coverage of Dodger ballgames for 64 seasons.



Let's pause and consider sixty-four seasons.



I do understand the love of Vin's voice. Growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles, it was the summertime soundtrack for our neighborhood. Our neighbors, the Myers, were huge into baseball and hearing Vin's voice reminds me of slip-'n'-slides and hot dogs and ballgames in the street.



But for Dan, Vin's voice was more than that. It was a constant in his life--a familiar voice full of storytelling and picture-painting and comfort.Talk about bleeding blue, Dan has never not listened to Dodger baseball.



Now, I have a friend who works for the Dodger organization. She is also an incredible puppeteer ("Feed me, Seymore!") and a scriptwriter. I met her during the book-to-movie process for Flipped, so I haven't known her all that long, but she's someone I recognized immediately as being sincere, astute, and forthright. It didn't take long to also see that she had a great big heart, and that she was someone I wanted as a friend.





My big-hearted, beautiful friend

Which is the very worst kind of person to ask a favor of.



I mean, it's just wrong to impose on a new friendship or someone's big-heartedness!



But Dan's girlfriend (learning of my Dodger connection) took me aside and asked about the possibility of getting something signed to Dan by Vin for his birthday. And knowing how much it would mean to Dan to have something signed to him by Vin, I approached the Favor-Asking Threshold and knocked.



My friend was receptive and after over a month of plotting and juggling the logistics of an epic birthday surprise, Mark & I traveled to Dodger Stadium with Dan and his girlfriend, and Dan got to shake hands with Vin and tell him what he meant to him.





Dan & Vin Scully in the Press Box Hallway

I've got to say that Vin Scully is a classy guy. He looks you in the eye. He listens. And he's funny, too. When Dan told him about falling to sleep to his voice as a kid, Vin quipped, "Yes, I'm afraid I've put a lot of people to sleep over the years."



So Dan met his idol, and he did get a signed baseball. (Mark had one tucked away in his cargo shorts and when we asked Vin if he would mind autographing it for Dan, he graciously agreed. It was only afterwards that my friend told me that their contract specifically states that they cannot ask for autographs).



As if that wasn't enough, Dan also got to meet (and get pictures with) Tommy Lasorda, and Fernando Valenzuela (a star pitcher for the Dodgers in the '80's) and Nancy Bea, the Dodger's organist since the late 1980's.



All before the game!



And then...what a game! The Dodgers (who were down from the get-go) came back to beat the Mets in the bottom of the 12th inning. It was certainly a magical night at (what Vin has dubbed) the Magic Castle.






Vin with The Running Dream

Mark and I got to meet Vin, too, and I brought him my most sports-based book as a gift. And although he probably gets all sorts of stuff from people he doesn't know, I brought it for him anyway because I wanted to give a piece of me as a token of gratitude, instead of asking for a piece of him.




Our friend told us afterwards that she had never arranged a meeting with the sportscaster before. And I could tell she was anxious about it--that she was going way out on a limb to make this happen. But she was super happy that it all worked out, and I was over-the-moon happy that I'd helped facilitate a dream-come-true moment for Dan.



And now, despite the excellent outcome, I have stepped away from the Threshold.



You won't find me near it again for a long, long time.

CatDog!

When our boys were young they went through a short phase of being into a Nickelodeon animated show called CatDog. In case you didn't share that experience, the show featured a cat conjoined with a dog. Two heads, no tails. (Don't get into the physiological impossibility of it. It'll get you nowhere. Simply give into the utter ridiculousness of it.)



During that time, our younger son was excited beyond belief to be giving his brother a CatDog "doll" for his birthday. It was large, with a plastic middle that could accordion in and out enabling the heads to talk to (and meow and growl at) each other.



Now, this is actually not a post about CatDog.



It's a post about keeping secrets.



About how hard it can be.



"Do you want to know what I got you for your birthday?" young son asked his brother who was in the upper bunk.



"No!" cried the birthday boy. "Don't tell me!"



What followed was an exchange of pleas and commands, followed by an (eavesdropping) parent intervention. "Don't tell him," we finally ordered young son. "Now go to sleep!"



After we left, there was a short stretch of silence and then our older son cried, "CATDOG? You got me CATDOG?"



We barged back in and scolded the gift-giver who said, "I didn't tell him! I promise! I just whispered it into my pillow!" He gave us an incredulous look. "And I was so quiet!"



Quiet or not, the secret wanted out. It wanted out very badly. And even though the intention was to only tell the pillow--to bury the secret deep inside the pillow--the secret didn't want to stay inside the pillow. It wanted to escape the fibers and genie up through the air and into the ears above.



It wanted to infect someone else.



Yes, infect. This week I've decided that a secret is like a virus. It's easy to spread accidentally, hard to contain even consciously, and it gives you a fever.



A fever that seems only to break when you tell somebody else.



I consider myself to be a very good secret-keeper. I like being trustworthy and dependable. I know how to keep my mouth shut. As Sammy would say, "It's in the vault."



But the past few months I've had a little insight into why people don't get away with murder. Or heists. Or even lesser crimes.



They give themselves away.



The fever hits, out it slips, and all it takes is infecting one other person for it to become airborne.



Just one.



Even if that person promises they can keep a secret.



So with that very basic (yet significant) thought, I will sign off for the week wishing you good secrets, well-kept.