Works in Progress
From the Archives
A Brand-New, Top-Secret Project on Twitter
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Just heard there was a shooting at the grocery store across from where my 8th-grader has played in chess tournament… https://t.co/z23JpGfdqI -
Thought of @TracyDeLopez and all who have pondered the pros & cons of GoodReads! https://t.co/nwVbvQY9DD
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Heartbroken... https://t.co/k5aJ07sufo
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Kudos to Kirkus for recognizing that the world needs more kindness! And to @jacquelinejules to providing it in her… https://t.co/gOpT2VACeE
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What an amazing morning at @DCBilingual--so very honored to have shared time with these phenomenal students and sta… https://t.co/HSBPvbkYDS
Spinning
This book takes place in Baltimore, in 1954, and is about (among other things) a girl whose mother has mental illness. Stay tuned for news about this project!
Cheeseburgers and Other Hazards of Sixth Grade
Also called "The Other Rowitzes", this book is about a girl who learns her parents had another child before she was born, but he was estranged from the family when he married a non-Jewish woman. I started working on this novel at age 19 and didn't quit for about 10 years. During this time I graduated college, earned a master's degree, got married, and lived in three different states plus the District of Columbia. It was read and commented on by many kind friends, and it will always have a special place in my heart and in my second desk drawer.
The Lost Novel
There was one novel before all the others, although I don't remember its name. I wrote it in eighth grade in a red spiral notebook, and it was about a girl who was accepted to a gifted and talented program for middle school but struggled with whether to leave her friends behind. The novel represented a year's worth of free-writing assignments for English class, and I unfortunately lost it on the school bus a week or so before the end of the school year, before I could get credit for it. But I didn't care about the credit, or about my C in fourth-quarter English; I was heartbroken for my lost novel.
Currently I write on a laptop and back up my work to a flash drive and a desktop computer. Ironically, the one thing lost during a recent hard drive crash were the files for this website! The site itself survived on a server, but the files were un-editable by the program I used to create the site, so I had to reconstruct it if I ever wanted to make changes. This is just one of the many ways in which my life as a grownup resembles my life in eighth grade.