In seventh grade, my favorite outfit consisted of a black cropped t-shirt, orange and black plaid capri pants, and black loafers with no socks. I wore it proudly on the first day of school and at least once a week all fall.

I was sad when the weather turned cold. I still really wanted to wear the outfit, especially the pants, but I was freezing my little heinie off in them. (Do not ask me why I loved those pants so much; they were hideous.) I swapped out the t-shirt for a black sweater. To keep my legs warm, I donned black tights, but my feet were still cold in my loafers. I didn’t have any warm black socks, so I put on white cotton ones over the hose. And then my black loafers.

Black, white, black, orange, black. It was not a good look, and approximately half of my classmates informed me of this.

With a heavy heart, I retired the capris until spring.

P.S. Artist Liz Massey interviewed me recently. Check it out at her blog, Creative Liberty!

Sarah Ockler’s debut novel, Twenty Boy Summer, is nothing short of stunning. It’s the story of Anna and Frankie, best friends who spend a summer vacationing in California with Frankie’s parents. It’s been a year since Frankie’s brother, Matt, died, and Anna still hasn’t told anyone that she and Matt were secretly in love. Anna’s own grief is palpable and overwhelming, but she swallows it because, in some ways, she doesn’t feel entitled to mourn the loss of a boy who was never officially her boyfriend. Meanwhile, Frankie is determined to help Anna lose her virginity, and the two stage a contest to see who can be the first to kiss twenty boys before the vacation’s end.

Ockler’s exploration of grief in this novel is thoughtful and touching without being heavy-handed. Themes of love and loss are intertwined with her gorgeous writing. Every sentence shimmers. As I was reading, I kept thinking to myself, “How does she do it? How does she make every single sentence so beautiful?” I haven’t encountered many authors who can pull that off, but Ockler is one of them.

Sit up and take notice. Sarah Ockler is a YA star on the rise.

Dumb Things I’ve Done*

1. Cut my own hair. More than once.

2. Called up a boy who already made it clear he wasn’t interested

3. Stapled my fingers together. On purpose. (Okay, I was seven, but still.)

4. Eaten gas station nachos

5. Tried (and failed) to sneak my friend in the college cafeteria because I was too cheap to buy her dinner

6. Worn acrylic nails

7. Briefly dated a guy who told me up front that he was a jerk, thinking he wasn’t serious. He was.

8. The Macarena. It was still fun, though.

9. Driven to North Beach in San Francisco on a Saturday evening and expected to finding a parking spot

10. Wagered on one of those Guess Your Weight things at the state fair. My height usually throws people off, and they think I weigh less than I actually do. The guy at the fair was only a pound off my real weight and announced it to the crowd. I was a little overweight at the time, and the whole thing was incredibly embarrassing.

*These were poor choices for me. If anything above has worked for you, I’m tickled pink. But seriously, don’t tell me you enjoyed stapling your fingers together. I won’t believe it.

I have issues with the word “just.” I tend to overuse it in my own writing, but that’s easily remedied with Find and Replace in Word. No, most of my problems with “just” stem from the way others hang on this word, minimizing problems and simplifying situations.

“Just” rears its ugly head in a lot of well-meaning, unsolicited advice. As a new mom, I hear it all the time. “Your daughter won’t cooperate at bedtime/mealtime/in the car/at the supermarket? Just do X! Everything will be fine.”

Most of the folks who say this don’t have children, or it’s been a very long time since they tried to just get a toddler get into her carseat or make her wear a bib. Dealing with little people is complicated, and if it were a matter of just doing what they’re suggesting, I would. I probably already did it, in fact.

It just didn’t work.

I find it’s best not to engage certain people in these topics if I don’t want their input, so I’ve learned to keep quiet. I have plenty of sympathetic mommy friends who are right there in the trenches with me, anyway.

Because I am currently a stay-at-home mom, people are curious about my work plans for the future. I taught ESL to college students up until my daughter was born, so I am sometimes asked, “Are you going to return to teaching, or do you want to just stay at home and write?”

Whoa there, pardner. Back up for a second.

Just stay at home and write.

This question pays no regard to the round-the-clock job of raising my child, which I enjoy tremendously and feel incredibly fortunate to be doing. Secondly, the “just” in the question implies that balancing writing with motherhood would be simpler than teaching.

Uh, yeah. Not so much.

While teaching is full of challenges and stresses, it is way, way easier (at least in my experience) than trying to make a career out of writing or caring for a child. Or doing both at the same time.

Like I said, I’m grateful for my situation and wouldn’t want to change it. I don’t have time or reason to feel sorry for myself. But anyone who thinks that what I’m doing now isn’t hard just needs to spend a day in my shoes.

I had a crush on a boy named Bobby in fourth grade. We had a class party the day before winter break, and our teacher made us popcorn and hot dogs and let us play board games. Bobby challenged me to a Battleship match and shared his popcorn with me.

I was pretty sure I was going to marry him, but things never progressed past that one date.

Oh, well.

I first heard about this amazing author when I was writing TMI. My editor sent me notes on the first draft, and she recommended I check out Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock. D.J. Schwenk lives on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and dreams of playing football with the boys. She is the polar opposite of Becca in TMI. D.J. is as quiet and emotionally guarded as everyone else in her family, and her story is driven by the fact that so little talking is going on.

My editor was right: Dairy Queen was a shining example of the opposite of what I was trying to do. I thought of it often as I worked on my next draft of TMI, making Becca chattier and more candid. Murdock’s novel also helped me think about how quiet, guarded people might react to Becca’s personality.

Thanks for the inspiration!

I gobbled up Dairy Queen’s sequel, The Off Season, within days of its release. I was impressed by Murdock’s fairy tale, Princess Ben, which came out last year and shows her versatility as a writer (P.B. has a formal, Olde English style, quite a departure from D.J.’s voice). Murdock just published a third installment about D.J.’s life called Front and Center. I can’t wait to read it!

Check out this overshare! This week’s contributor sure can write dialogue. Thanks, “Anna”!

Emily* and I are in yearbook; in fact, we’re partners for an art and music spread. So we wanted to take pictures of this one guy who is a digital photographer (since photography is an art, really), and we had to pull this guy Tim from his class and take a picture of him. We were using a yearbook camera and…well, anyway, you’ll see how significant this fact is later.

In yearbook, we were told to not do boring, wall-background mugshots of the students, so I tried to come up with poses that students could do…though maybe this was a little too much. “Hey, let’s take a picture at that tree over there!” I pointed to some tree in the middle of the campus. Emily agreed, so all three of us walked to the tree, which had a short wall surrounding it.

“Um…so how should we take the picture?” Emily asked.

I turned to Tim. “Why don’t you put you put your foot on the wall, and put your shoulder on your knee, then put your head on your hand–”

“Anna, we don’t want him to look like a gay male model here,” Emily broke in (cue, laughter from all).

“Fine, then just smile at the camera,” I said to Tim. Tim agreed, and I was just about to take the picture when…a teacher with his suitcase came walking by in the background.

SIGH. “I can’t take the picture. There’s a man in the background,” I said (cue, more laughter from all).

Again, delay. We waited until the guy very, very, very slowly made his way across the scene (a la the testudineous character from “The Tortoise and the Hare”).

“OK! Let’s take the photo, and let’s do it fast!” I said.

Snap! Photo shot.

“Great! Now let’s take a few more!” I said. I pressed down on the button. No snap. Nada. Nothing. “Er…Emily, this is the right button, right?”

“Yeah, it is,” Emily said, after brief inspection.

I pressed the button again. Zero, zip. SIGH, yet again. “It’s not working,” I announced.

Emily tried to take the photo, but to no avail. “It’s off, smart one!” she cried, and of course I started to crack up. “Gosh, I’m so ditzy! You know, I once broke three headphones in one month?” (true story, btw)

“I’m not surprised,” Emily answered (cue, even more laughter). So Emily tried to take the picture…it didn’t work. GREAT.

“Here, let me look at it,” Tim said.

“Yes, yes, please do! You’re the photographer, really,” Emily and I said. Later, Emily and I rolled our eyes about it, saying what technological idiots we looked like in front of Tim. Anyway, Tim thought he fixed it–emphasis on “thought.” Nope, camera didn’t work. So Emily instead snapped a picture with her iPhone; Tim then went back to class, and Emily and I returned to the yearbook room.

How does the story end? We ended up not even needing that one picture I took of Tim, or the photo Emily took. We still needed a new picture of Tim (which we did, fortunately, eventually get).

And the moral? Never look like a technological idiot in front of a technological pro, and don’t ask the latter to pose like a gay male model.

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent and technologically challenged.

Spill your TMIs to me: sarah (at) sarahquigley (dot) com. Guidelines can be found here.

The 2009 Debutantes (including me!) are giving away a set of 46 young adult and middle grade books (including TMI!) to one lucky library. If you aren’t a librarian, spread the word to your awesome librarian friends about this FAB contest. It’s open worldwide to public and school libraries until December 31. Check out the 2009 Debutantes site for a complete book list and details on how to enter.

Reasons I’m okay with not being famous

1. Every time I ate a pastry, pregnancy rumors would swirl.

2. Baseball caps look totally dorky on me.

3. It’s tough enough leaving the house with a toddler in tow; I’d can’t imagine what it would be like to wade through a swarm of paparazzi.

4. I refuse to schmooze, hobnob, or canoodle with anyone.

5. I do not need my own reality show.

6. I’ve worn my hair the same way for nearly twenty years, and no stylist to the stars is going to change that.

7. I enjoy going unrecognized at the grocery store and gas station, thankyouverymuch.

8. Look what happened to Britney and Lindsay.

9. I’m never going to fit into sample sizes.

10. My San Francisco friends would never forgive me for moving to L.A.

Jacqueline!

Congratulations, my dear, you will soon have all this in your possession:

Thanks to all who entered the contest and helped me spread the word. And if you didn’t win, don’t fret, my pets! The holidays are just around the corner…and so is another giveaway.

Stay tuned.