I read Us Weekly almost every week. It’s a total guilty pleasure, I know, but I just can’t help myself. One of my favorite features is called “Twenty-Five Things You Don’t Know About Me”; every week, they choose a different celebrity to tell us twenty-five things about him or herself. I am definitely not a celebrity, and Us Weekly will certainly never want to interview me, but why should that stop me from making a list of twenty-five things about myself to share? Here are my Twenty-Five Things:
- Everyone thinks I’m a born and bred New Yorker, but I’m originally from California’s Bay Area.
- I stopped writing The Stone Girl when I was about halfway through because I thought no one would want to read it.
- I loved writing The Lucky Kind and I hope to write another book from a boy’s point-of-view someday.
- My favorite TV shows of all time are “The West Wing,” “Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip,” and “Sports Night,” and I think Aaron Sorkin has taught me everything I know about how to write dialogue.
- My favorite TV show right now is “The Vampire Diaries.”
- I’ve never read The Catcher in the Rye.
- I think that reading Alice Hoffman, Mary Gordon, or Joan Didion can fix writers’ block.
- I came up with the name of the protagonist of The Stone Girl, Sarah Beth – Sethie – Weiss when I was in Napa, California, planning my wedding.
- I often prefer writing in the third person to writing in the first-person.
- I reread The Lord of the Rings trilogy every few years, always in winter.
- The first chapter book I ever read by myself was Judy Blume’s The One in the Middle in the Green Kangaroo.
- I love all animals, especially dogs and horses, and those ASPCA commercials make my cry and cringe and occasionally flee the room if I can’t find the remote to change the channel. (But I have to admit, they’re effective – More often than not, I do end up making a donation later.)
- The last book I read was A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin.
- I mostly write in my pajamas.
- I ask members of my family not to read my books (though only about half have agreed to it!).
- I hate getting my hair cut.
- The Stone Girl is definitely not a memoir, but it was inspired by my own struggles with body-obsession when I was a teen and in my early twenties.
- I don’t like to read anything I’ve written once it’s been published.
- Thanksgiving is my favorite day of the year.
- I’ve written stories for as long as I can remember.
- I love the Q&A part of book events. Please ask questions!
- I wear sweaters, scarves, and boots even in the middle of the summer.
- I read something by Ernest Hemingway almost every day.
- I worked in the marketing department at Random House Children’s Books for nearly seven years. (Sometimes I use my old business cards as bookmarks.)
- I only just joined Twitter in March, but I’m totally hooked. (Follow me @AlyssaSheinmel!)

1 comment:
This was interesting... I'll have to check out Stone Girl. Stumbled upon your blog while searching for a picture of Jane Eyre, I guess you wrote a post on that earlier. anyway, I am an avid reader too... so your page here is pretty interesting.
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