Springtime in Texas is a rare phenomenon. We suffer through summer from late April to early November (really! 95 degrees on Halloween isn’t uncommon). The shoulder months – my favorite months, March and November, when everything is cool and shifting and lovely, and just going outside makes you feel like anything is possible – disappear in a gorgeous blink. Click for more.

This spring slipped through my fingers even faster than most. My best friend and I got married in our backyard in April, surrounded by our friends and family (it’s corny, I guess, to call your spouse your best friend – but why on earth would you marry anyone else?). It was heart-achingly beautiful. If you need wedding advice, I offer this: grow up and move to a strange city and wait seven years; find yourself, despite your curmudgeonly introvert tendencies, surrounded by fiercely smart and capable and caring friends, and then weave them and their talents and skills into your wedding. We had a friend DJ, another friend take pictures, another go to the grocery store with $200 and buy up all the fresh flowers and make a sea of bouquets. It was enormously beautiful and humbling. For days after, I awoke before dawn, thinking, I’m so happy that I might die from this. I might die from this now, and it would be okay.

(I did not die.)

(There were too many other things to do.)

In literary news:

In May I got to travel to Brooklyn to come out as a literary debutante at the One Story Literary Debutante Ball, which was a surreal, glitter-filled dream. The annual event raises money for the magazine, and “debuts” its writers who have published a book in the last year. I wore a white vintage ballgown and combat boots and curtsied on a stage, and the New York Times got a photo of it (plus my friend Ben, who has a beer bottle sticking out of his pocket).

I also got to travel to do signings at BookCon and ALA with the incredible Soho Press team! (GUYS. Can we talk about how much I love these humans? I LOVE THESE HUMANS. They are warm-hearted, brilliant and hilarious, all of them.) The photo above captures me preparing to do my first ever signing, at BookCon. This event was the actual coolest because I got to meet so many teen readers. It’s very easy to fall into a bubble of isolation when working on a book – to begin to believe that The Book is a Word doc on your laptop, and The Author is the person who sits all alone at said laptop. To meet so many amazing readers is like coming out the end of a very long tunnel, blinking into the light, and remembering that the rest of the world – the world you wrote the book for, and began to worry was just a dream – actually exists.

So thank you. To everyone who came through my signing line that day: thank you. I really hope you love this book. I wrote it for you.

If you’ve had the chance to read the book, show it some love on Goodreads! (Last week, a woman wrote that the book leaves you with “a hangover, but not a tequila hangover,” and it made me laugh. Thank you all for your kindness and brilliance.) xxo, K