As anyone who’s been following my tweets knows, I’m in between novels right now. I’ve turned Novel #4 over to my agent. It’s her problem now. So it’s on to Novel #5. Yippee! In my effort to zero in on a world class heavy weight champion of a story, I’ve been doing a lot of…  keep reading »

Rick Santorum may have saved his wife’s life, but he doesn’t want you to know that. Here’s his version of what happened after he and his wife chose to perform fetal surgery on their baby, as told to NPR’s Terry Gross: Like many medical procedures, there’s a risk of infection, and when the procedure was…  keep reading »

For those of you who weren’t tuned in on Thursday night, I had the opportunity to chat online with Scott Westerfeld, Robin Wasserman, and David Levithan on a variety of subjects from how we did on the SAT’s to our stupidest book ideas of all. The event was hosted by Figment Fiction, a brilliant website…  keep reading »

Your eleven-year-old daughter can walk into any Walgreen’s or CVS, buy a bottle of Tylenol, take six or eight or ten tablets because she has a really bad headache (and hasn’t yet learned about proper dosage)–and die. Tylenol is available over the counter. It can kill you. Plan B can’t kill you. But because of…  keep reading »

There’s a great article by Katherine Ozment in Boston Magazine on how she went from helicopter parent to free-range parent. According to the many experts she queried in her quest to raise happy, self-sufficient kids, all of this attachment, bonding, and constant supervision we’ve been doing is having measurably negative effects on kids. Apparently, they’re…  keep reading »