Get this stuff out of my head!

You know when your brain is full of so many things all at once, some of which have nothing to do with each other, and you're afraid to stop and take a breather because you're afraid you'll fall behind?

Yeah, that's me. My brain is full. I need to clean house.

1. My WIP (work in progress) is done. Well, the first draft is done but it's wayyy too long. It's 96K which is about 30K too much so I will need to cut about a third of it. I almost didn't follow my own advice, which is to JUST FINISH IT! I was about to stop before the last few scenes were written (for a number of reasons but one of which was that I was just plain depressed about it) and then HH reminded me that I was not doing what I tell everyone else to do. So I plowed on through, knowing that I will have to make some major revisions before anyone can read page one, but that's okay because NOW IT'S DONE and I have something to revise.

2. ALL ABOUT VEE got an amazing review at Pajama Mommy! Oh, I was so thrilled when my Google alerts sent me the link. Please check it out when you can. I definitely have to link this one to my website. She called it a "must-read"! How much do I love that??

3. ALL ABOUT VEE also got an amazing review at Chandra Rooney's Good Karma Reviews! Thank you again, Google alerts! btw, I love her description of her blog: "making the internet a nicer place one week at a time." It so perfectly fits with her review of the book! Take a gander over there too. This one is another for the website! And can I also mention how I love that she takes VEE seriously, that she doesn't consider the book "lightweight" (no pun intended, I swear...)?

4. LOST is gone for another year. This makes me unreasonably sad. I swear the shortest hours of the day are the ones when LOST is on. HH and I are total freaks. Okay, that's enough. I'm sad again.

5. This weekend is Book Expo America (BEA) here in LA and every writer I know is attending. It's a huge show at the LA Convention Center. I'm very excited but a little nervous. There will be LOTS of authors (not just us YA writers), TONS of books, and MANY, MANY publishers and agents. This is a big show for booksellers and librarians to find out what's hot, what's new, and what books they should look out for. Hint: You can't go wrong with a book by C. Leigh Purtill. LOL!!

Okay, one more...

6. I still haven't seen "Indy 4" but I will very soon. I promise! Ninja Webmaster has been bugging me about this for weeks so I have to see it before everyone he knows has spoiled it for him.

All right, that's some of the stuff in my head. Now I have to tackle the emails...

Fat Girls in LA

The title of this post, as many people know, was the original title of ALL ABOUT VEE.

While I was visiting schools last week – particularly the high schools in Wallingford and Cheshire and my old college in Massachusetts – most of the teens and women expressed surprise that the beautiful young woman on the cover of my book was considered “plus-size” by the modeling world. The comments I got were:

“She’s the same size as me and I am not plus-size.” (She wasn’t.)
“She looks like a regular woman to me.” (To me as well.)
“I don’t care what they say – she’s gorgeous and I love that dress.” (So do I.)

The conversation then moved onto the recent win of the first plus-size model on “America’s Next Top Model.” Whitney is a size 10.

“Size ten? That’s my size! And I am not plus-size.” (She really wasn’t.)

I mention this because it made me so happy to hear those comments from teens I hope to influence with my book. I’m glad to know that there are lots and lots of girls out there who don’t subscribe to the “thinner is better” philosophy like so many people do (and as a dancer, believe me, I see and hear it all – that’s another blog post).

You know, there are so many blogs in what they call the Fatosphere that host fantastic discussions about what it’s like to be heavy in a skinny world and all of the discrimination women face when they don’t look like models (check out some of my faves, like Shapely Prose, The F-Word, Disordered Times, Fat Lot of Good, and many more) and I wouldn’t pretend to try to give an account of that sort of discrimination. I can only talk about weight issues from my point of view – that of someone who has ALWAYS considered herself to be overweight.

So I will.

Stay tuned…

Celebrity sighting in the sky!

On the flight from Atlanta to LA, HH and I sat 2 rows behind the writer Joel Stein, who has a column in both Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times. Not many people recognize writers, especially columnists, but he was wearing a little tag that said, “Joel Stein,” on it so that was kind of a gimme. I knew who he was but HH doesn’t read the paper so I had to explain.

Here's his website to give you a better idea of who he is and what he writes about.

As it turns out, Mr. Stein was playing flight attendant on our flight, making the mixed drinks or what the airline calls “adult drinks.” And for anyone who reads Mr. Stein’s columns, you know what he would do with a straight line like that. He told us over the PA system that he had been training all day so I guess he knows a little more than the rest of us!

He was wearing fashionably torn and stone-washed jeans with a long sleeved striped shirt, tails untucked, and ladies, he wears cotton briefs (couldn't tell the style but did see the elastic strip when he bent over - naughty, naughty!). Delta would NEVER let their flight attendants wear such sloppy clothes - or such unkempt hair - but Mr. Stein must have charmed them all.

I'd say he did a pretty decent job. If it were me, I would be flippin' terrified! But I do have to admit he was slow. He took soooooo long to mix drinks for people, and this is without much banter, that the cart was in the aisle next to my ear for so long I was starting to get claustrophobic. Although nervous, he covered it up well, cracking jokes when he could but being as conscientious as he could allow himself to be.

Afterward, HH and I happened to be walking from the plane next to him when HH decided to ask him where the article would be published (Time). Then Mr. Stein wanted to know how we thought he had done. We gave him 2 thumbs up (he seemed a little in need of support) and he liked that. He showed us his battle scars from his single day of intense training (he told us he had to practice with the water slide, among other things) and we replied that we were bummed it was such a safe flight and that he didn't get a chance to show off what he'd learned.

Mr. Stein liked that too.

We'll keep an eye out for his article!

From the Queue

A little something to discuss while I'm traveling today...

Remember when you were a kid and the mail was a daily event you looked forward to? Maybe a card with cash from Grandma would arrive or a new issue of "Sports Illustrated" would be there. Then you got older and the mailbox held bills and past due notices and jury summons. Who wanted to get the mail then? I still dread it. The fun stuff comes in email; the misery via USPS.

Ah Netflix, my old friend. It makes going to the mailbox fun again.



This weekend we saw a great doc: "My Kid Could Paint That" about Marla Olmsted the 4 year old art prodigy whose father was subtly accused of painting for her by a 60 Minutes producer. It's very well-balanced, neither pro or con and allows you to make your own decision.



We also saw "Elizabeth: The Golden Age." Not so golden for the big E. Although I love Cate Blanchett and Clive Owen, I felt like this saga of Elizabeth's life was depressing all around and ther was very little joy in it. In the previous movie, she at least had love even if she had to give it up. And btw, how much did Joseph Fiennes (from E 1) and Clive Owen (from E 2) look alike?

Wishing you all happiness on my birthday...

Pablo Picasso said, "It takes a long time to grow young."

Gertrude Stein said, "We are always the same age inside."

And my nieces said, "Happy birthday, Auntie Leigh!"

All three of these quotes make me supremely happy on my birthday.

Kudos to Cook!

Your new American Idol, as Ryan Seacrest would say. Honestly, this is the first Idol album I will actually buy.

I am visiting the east coast now so I learned 3 hours in advance that David Cook had won on Wednesday and I couldn't tell any of my Idol fan friends! Then I woke up and found 50 emails on our group list!

Anyway, it's all pretty much over now, but I have to say how thrilled I am that David C won. I made my mother watch it with me on Tuesday and Wednesday and even she loved him. She said David A was too young to sing some of the songs he was singing and she's right. It's just that he doesn't have a lot of life experience for some lyrics and that's okay. He has plenty of time to do things.

I was especially happy that Simon apologized to David C for being dismissive of him and proclaiming David A the winner. Whether he knew then that Cook had won or not, I don't know. I'd like to believe he knew he was wrong and should have been more fair to him. But then again, I want to believe in the basic humanity of most people.

Today I'm headed up to my college reunion where I'll be teaching a class on YA literature to other reunion folk. I hope people enjoy it!

Whoo-hoo, Cheshire High!

Ah, the old alma mater...so much has changed, so much has remained the same. For instance, I walked in the side door which used to be near the main office and I told them I was a visitor and they looked at me like I was crazy. The main office had moved to the front of the building!

This is the WRONG door!

This is the RIGHT door!

But the Senior Walk was still there and the gym (there are 2 now) and the library looked the same too, although they had way more computers than we ever had (computers were just a bare figment of the popular imagination then).

Me with Ellen Speirs

The first class librarian Ellen Speirs introduced me to was Diann Milone's Creative Writing class. I think they might have been a little shy (or sleepy?) because they were kind of quiet but they did get very animated when talk turned to Veronica and her size (they didn't think the girl on the cover was at all plus-size).


Second class was World Lit, Megumi Yamamoto's class, which we sat for in the library. They had a lot more questions and wanted to know about writing and publishing and what sort of movies I like that had been adapted from books.


After lunch (with the teachers in the faculty lounge! I felt like I was spying!) where I met a teacher from my old days, Rob Schaefer (although I didn't have him as a teacher), I went back to the library to talk to Donna Carbone's Film and TV class. After telling them all about my experience as a script supervisor and standards editor, talk quickly turned to writing, especially screenwriting and books and LOST and movies and Denzel Washington and how great Robert Downey Jr was in "Iron Man."


It was another amazing day with more amazing students! I hope they all remember to email me if they have questions I didn't get to answer.


I think I'll have to devote an entirely separate blog post to all the stuff I observed at CHS and how it influenced what and why I write about schools in my own books.

Oh and a Cheshire Herald reporter was there to interview me which was way cool because I remembered that a couple of the very first things I had ever written were for that publication many, many years ago! They were sports articles! Wow, strange how things come back to you, huh?