Alex Borbolla at @bloomsburybooksus has acquired world rights to Zombie and Brain Go to School by Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic and Laan Cham. In this follow-up to New York Times bestseller Zombie and Brain Are Friends, the deadly cute duo spends a day learning just how much fun a brain can have in the classroom. Jennifer Laughran at Andrea Brown Literary Agency represented the author, and Jemiscoe Chambers-Black at Starling Literary + Media represented the illustrator; publication is scheduled for Spring 2027.
Really pleased with what Booklist has to say about NOT LIKE EVERY DAY by me and @gabriellegrimard_illustratrice .
I'm so proud of this collaboration and grateful to @thejordache@mccorrea64 and @randomhousekids . I know many teachers are anxiously waiting to get their hands on copies as they prepare for the new school year.
Happy Gotcha Day to Needles O'Shea!
Fifteen years ago, I found this ridiculous little creature shivering in a pothole (swipe) in a warehouse district of Palo Alto. His eyes were sealed shut with conjunctivitis and he was starving and struggling with an upper respiratory infection.
When I reached out to get him out of the pothole, he bolted for a nearby fence (swipe) and huddled there. I grabbed a farmer's market bag and stuck him inside and took him home.
He would spend three weeks with the @peninsulahumanesociety where I would check in on his health weekly before he was healed of all his illnesses and issues.
Except for one: "Too feral to be adopted," they told me. Hissed and growled at anyone who came near him. He would have to be put to sleep.
NOPE. I went and got him the next day. They waved all fees and wished me luck.
That first photo is his first minutes back with us, hiding behind a toilet, delicately bleeding from being neutered, and trying his level best to scare me away with his tiny hisses and growls.
In the coming days, I spent hours in the bathroom with him to socialize him. I wrote my first book with him (Suffering Succotash) and hand-fed him baby food to get his appetite up.
The fourth photo was taken just a few weeks later. And the rest are history.
This is a cat who pretty much never hisses at us -- and when he does it's hilarious because it's so pathetic -- and just spends his days wanting to be loved. Which he very much is.
THIS BOOK! Checked out from my library but I'm going to buy it for my permanent collection. It's beautiful in SO many ways and made me freakishly hungry and I'm going to buy copies for our favorite Chinese restaurant because I couldn't stop thinking about them the entire time.
Shout out to @chefchuslosaltos .
This AM, I had a totally delightful school visit with 3rd graders in Chester, NY who won the visit from our Publishing for Minnesota auction. I got to read Zombie & Brain Are Friends, talk a bit about revisions, and book talk some of my favorite books.
Best part was bragging on my friends who produce such beautiful, hilarious, and stunning books and having a student ask, "How do you know so many authors?"
It's all about community.
#BeAnAmbassador
Thoughts about community have been occupying 94.7% of my brain for the past few days, and I was reflecting on the people who gave me a hand up, opened their DMs to me for questions and advice, became friends with me online even when I was just a fangirl of their work and had nothing of my own to prove myself to them.
Turns out, those people didn't need me to prove myself to them. They were just generous souls who were happy to engage in discussions, advice, and community building.
I look at those names now: all women. And I wasn't just fangirling the women in the kidlit industry, I was definitely fangirling the men (the usual suspects, of course) but none of them -- not a single one of them -- offered the same kind of community that these women did.
Even when I met some of them IRL, as a published (several times over) author in the presence of other published authors, they looked past me, through me, to the men standing behind or around me. They are not my community.
But is because of the women -- or in spite of those men -- that I offer a hand up, an ear for AMAs, manuscript critiques, support, and cheerleading to others coming up in the industry. That community is so much more important to me than that provided by the current AYPL and it will continue to be so.
I'm sad not to include @csoontornvat 's A WISH IN THE DARK here (I loaned it to a teacher for a class read) but she is definitely in this community stack for me.
