I have these "pinch me" moments when I realize I got to be the thing I wanted to be growing up. I'm right where I belong.

We dated in our early 20s, when we were working at the same newspaper. We broke up, got back together and broke up again. I wanted to get married and have kids, but he wasn't ready. So I married someone else, had my daughters and the marriage ended ... and there was Bill. He'd never gotten married and was finally, finally ready. We discovered that we were still each other's favorite people to talk to.

There's a part of me with every book that thinks, What would it have meant for me tohave had this book when I was a kid? I decided to create a book for girls like me. The Littlest Bigfoot is about bullying and body image and girls who don't fit in. It's like training wheels for my adult books - like Sex and the City, but with 12-year-olds.

The idea you can tell a writer of a specific religion to stop writing about that religion is presumptuous.

Found, I told myself. Try to get found.

You move forward because thats the way it works; thats the only place you can go.

I'm so glad that social media gives me a chance to do that, to celebrate books I love and help proselytize for books I love.