I’ve been working as a kindergarten teacher this year to help pay the bills. It’s been a nice change of pace for me: fun, challenging, and far more rewarding than most of the crummy jobs that have kept me afloat in previous years. And every now and then, I get to take home some priceless quotes from the young ones. While it’s not really appropriate to share most of those in my blog, I thought I would mention today’s quote of the day.

I showed the children a copy of my book for Share (”show and tell”). I held the book up in front of them so they could see the cover and my picture, and I explained the title as best I could in a G-rated way (omitting the subtitle, of course). The children, who are learning to write themselves, seemed quite impressed and had a lot of questions for me.

“How long did it take you to write?”
“How many days did it take you to write?”
“How many hours did it take you?”
(there were a lot of time-related questions because they were most impressed by the sheer number of words I used to fill up so many pages)
“Why is the first letter of the chapter bigger?”
“Does it have any pictures?”
“Are those your shoes on the cover?”

and then, my favorite, referring to the sexy female legs on the cover:
“Is the woman in the red shoes your fiancée?”

Love it.

In other news, I was interviewed this morning by a charming woman from USA Today. Barring any celebrity suicides, I should be in the paper on Thursday as part of their New Voices feature.

One final note: Today I was inundated with wonderful congratulatory emails from friends in response to my mass emailing late last night. I’m too tired to even begin responding to them all, but please know (in case any of you are reading) that your good cheer found a happy recipient. And thank you.