When the third novel in your YA trilogy gets Book of the Month in a poll on Long and Short Reviews after they gave it four and a half stars, that's wicked cool, and deserves a hamburger out.  So Ken and I went and got one, taking The Mom along for the ride and the snack.  To the right is what happens if you give an iPhone to your 94-year-old mom and show her how to use the TinType app.  I actually really love the picture.

I'm still pretty chuffed about that WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? review from LAS.  It's one thing to get a solid review from a friend-of-a-friend or a fellow author who knows you from the Facebooger. But when you get a good review from someone who has no reason to give it to you other than her own pleasure at having read your book, that's a reason to put on your big, black reading glasses and let your husband make rabbit ears behind  your head. 

Go Bean and Zak!  The whole Bean Book Triology is available from Amazon in your choice of media: either Kindle or paperbacks.  And you can contact me through this blog if you'd like an autographed paperback.  Here's the link to my Amazon author page; you can get to all my books from there.







And here's my official badge and everything. WOOT! 
Meanwhile, it's National Poetry Month--and time for me to get back to my writerly roots.  I was a poet long before I wrote YA fiction, and I often marathon online with other poet friends in April, writing a poem a day.  One other thing I'm really happy about is the fact that writing fiction has loosened me up as a poet.  That sounds braggy, and I didn't mean it to--but all the woodshedding I did with editors over the three Bean books feels like it changed the way I look at writing in general. I wasn't going to marathon this  year, but I'm so glad I chose to!  As always, I'm having a great time at The Waters, a fine and dandy poetry workshop and online space to draft and get support.

Speaking of poetry, I just turned in my final round of edits to Kelsay Books for Unforgetting, which will be my next book of poems, due out soon.  I've chosen a piece of art for the cover, and gotten my blurb requests out...Don't have a cover design yet, but if you'd like a sneak peek, here's the painting I'm using.  It's by my longtime friend and cover artist Nancy Quaglia. 


Unforgetting is a book about memory and memory loss. It's very much about my mom as she struggles with memory--but it's also about my own memories.  A lot of the poems in the middle of the book started out as sketches for chapters in the YA books, which are set in 1970 and 1972, so it all kind of fits together.  And the book is also about losing my dad, with whom I had an intense, often difficult relationship. 

Nancy's cover art is a beloved memory of mine.  It's the kitchen door to her old house in Piermont, a yard in which I spent a lot of time with her and her lovely daughters.  I thought a door was appropriate for a book about memory.

...and as I type these words, the sun has just come out here in the lower Hudson River Valley, where I live.  We had CRAZY storms earlier today, and I am grateful that the flooding near me wasn't worse than it was.  So--happy spring!  Happy NaPo!  And hug a writer today!