Last week, while the rest of the children’s publishing world was in Bologna, Italy, I was in Florence.
The other one.
The Alabama one, which is certainly not Italy but still a vastly charming town.
Although they did have fountains, oh yes they did.

(Um, the umbrella is so the fountain doesn’t get me wet. I really thought it was funny at the time)
And here is the very meta fountain inside the beautiful Florence library. 

I got to drive there with Rachel Hawkins, drive home with Irene Latham, and had a great time speaking on a panel at the SCBWI schmooze. Thanks to Pat Wheeler and Shelia Renfro for making it happen and for a fabulous lunch. It was great dipping my toes in the speaking waters. Well, almost drowning since I jabbered so much. Little, holed up author let loose!

Irene brought chocolate. I’m offering it to the camera for some reason. I do not know what that reason is.

Rachel and I actually got there early so we hit up the used book section of Salvation Army and found matching copies of this book:

I broke out into a cold sweat when I saw it, because I remembered reading it in sixth or seventh grade and freaking out and swore I would never enter my attic in case there was a vampire. An easy oath, being as we didn’t have an attic, but still. Spooked!
So I was actually nervous to read it again because I wasn’t sure if it would hold up. And sure enough, my writing brain got in the way and I got annoyed with a few technical things and didn’t even have nightmares this time around. It’s still a decent book, though. The style is kind of different, and Caroline B Cooney manages to make something unique out of the idea, which at the time was actually probably more fresh. And maybe I’m just a mature adult now. Yes, that must be it.
No. Lies. Thanks to Louis Duncan and Christopher Pike and RL Stine, I’m still a paranoid wuss. Like shower curtains. CAN NOT CLOSE THEM! What if my scary ex (who was the head of the football team and a total golden boy so of course I fell under his demonic spell!) was lurking behind there, knife poised? I mean, OK, so I never dated a football player, but what if my neighbor did and the guy just got the wrong house?
**For a great post on this book and many more early-nineties teen horror faves, check out the geekening blog!
Anyway, I swore off scary media of any kind after I saw the PREVIEW for The Ring–not even the movie, just that freaky girl doing the dead-girl crawl was enough for me. 
But then I was at the library and I saw this:

And thought, hey maybe it will redeem the vampire/cheerleader book. And it can’t be that spooky–Lauren Myracle doesn’t usually write horror.
Yeah, um, that was stupid. Because that sure ain’t puff paint on the cover. Blood is usually a give away that some sort of spookiness will go down.
Dude.
Kept me up until 1:30–I even had to re-read the ending three times because I was just kind of shocked. And then, of course, I couldn’t be alone with my THOUGHTS, so I tried to wake my husband up, but he was like, "You aren’t waking me up because you were reading that book with the blood, are you?", which is just not what you want to hear from your knight in shining armor, but whatever. My next solution was to block out the SCARY BLOOD SCARINESS by plotting out my next book about princesses, and maybe throw in a sub-plot involving glorious moonbeams! Yay! So shiny!
I woke up about and hour later with my kid hovering next to the bed. Oh my gosh, y’all, I don’t think she could have scared me more if she was standing behind a closed shower curtain. So then I had to let her get in bed, to PROTECT her, and then I had to get my other kid so she wasn’t alone and then our bed broke from the weight of four people.
Moral of the story: Don’t read this book, unless you have a small family and a big king-sized bed.
Also, now that I think about it, I might re-read some of my thirteen-year-old faves now. Oh man, this one… 

So gave me the willies, and I grew-up in DRY VEGAS!!!