25 Things You Don't Know About Alyssa Sheinmel

Today I have Alyssa Sheinmel, author of the soon-to-be-released The Stone Girl, on the blog to tell us 25 things you don't know about her! Click here to learn more about The Stone Girl!

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:

1. Everyone thinks I’m a born and bred New Yorker, but I’m originally from California’s Bay Area. 
2. I stopped writing The Stone Girl when I was about halfway through because I thought no one would want to read it. 
3. I loved writing The Lucky Kind and I hope to write another book from a boy’s point-of-view someday. 
4. 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. 
5. My favorite TV show right now is “The Vampire Diaries.” 
6. I’ve never read The Catcher in the Rye. 
7. I think that reading Alice Hoffman, Mary Gordon, or Joan Didion can fix writers’ block. 
8. 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. 
9. I often prefer writing in the third person to writing in the first-person. 
10. I reread The Lord of the Rings trilogy every few years, always in winter. 
11. The first chapter book I ever read by myself was Judy Blume’s The One in the Middle in the Green Kangaroo. 
12. 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.) 
13. The last book I read was A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin. 
14. I mostly write in my pajamas. 
15. I ask members of my family not to read my books (though only about half have agreed to it!). 
16. I hate getting my hair cut. 
17. 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. 
18. I don’t like to read anything I’ve written once it’s been published. 
19. Thanksgiving is my favorite day of the year. 
20. I’ve written stories for as long as I can remember. 
21. I love the Q&A part of book events. Please ask questions! 
22. I wear sweaters, scarves, and boots even in the middle of the summer. 
23. I read something by Ernest Hemingway almost every day. 
24. 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.) 
25. I only just joined Twitter in March, but I’m totally hooked. (Follow me @AlyssaSheinmel!)