Bree Despain

So one of the pleasures of teaching creative writing is that you can get out your pom-poms and CHEER!!!! when a former student makes good.

Last summer lovely Bree "Divine" Despain signed up for my class at BYU's Writing and illustrating for Children's Workshop (best conference in America btw) and shared a thrilling paranormal romance along the lines of TWILIGHT with us. Anyway, I was impressed and had a feeling Bree would sell it. Which she did. And people THE DARK DIVINE comes out in December. Yay for our Bree!

I want to make two points here. The first point is that I didn't teach Bree a thing. She was already an experienced writer and workshopper when she showed up to my class. But I'm delighted to claim her as a former student.

Second thing. I said THE DARK DIVINE is similiar to TWILIGHT, which it is, because there's romance! And creatures of the night! But without taking anything away from Stephenie Meyer's achievements, which are considerable and I do feel like she gets picked on unfairly, I think THE DARK DIVINE is more tightly constructed from the sentence level on up.

I'm so proud of Bree and I wish her all the luck in the world.

Wishing I could violate my own rule

I have a few rules of conduct I try to follow as a writer. One of them involves not getting into shouting matches with column readers whom I've annoyed . . .

Anyway. I just read a letter to an editor stating that if Ann Cannon wants to dump on TWILIGHT, she should actually read the book first and not just blog stalk for her 411.

Okay. I want to get in my car, drive to this person's house, possibly pull her hair (girl fight! girl fight!) and say "I read it! Give me credit! In fact, give me EXTRA CREDIT!!!!!"

Only I won't. Because I'm a professional. And also I don't know where she lives.