Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

Menu
  • Home
  • About Wendy
  • Books
    • Books for Adults
      • The Wilder Life
      • I’m Not the New Me
      • Other Books and Anthologies
    • Books for Kids
      • A Garden to Save the Birds
      • It’s a Pumpkin!
      • The Princess and the Peanut Allergy
      • Wanderville
      • Wanderville 2: On Track for Treasure
      • Wanderville 3: Escape to the World’s Fair
  • More
    • Media and Publications
    • Wanderville Extras
    • Book Clubs and School Visits
  • Contact

Archives for April 2006

Aw, you guys.

April 27, 2006 by Wendy

You’ve kept donating. And now we’ve raised nearly a thousand dollars. I am speechless. Does someone want to pledge an early Saturday morning wakeup call so I can get out to Naperville in time next week? I think your money would still go to the cause if I overslept, but as a matter of principle, I would like to, you know, walk the walk.

I have so many things to plan right now it’s making me twitch. And yet I’m compelled to babble about the following:

America’s Next Top Model: Clearly Jade is some kind of emotional Rasputin, able to withstand repeated attempts to kill her gargantuan ego week after week. I am starting to admire that. Also, I hope Danielle’s new teeth don’t change her accent. Also, Sara is tall and needs to be reunited with her own kind, pre-law majors. And Furonda is skinnininninny.

I keep reading all this stuff and thinking: why do we want seventeen-year olds to publish bestselling novels anyway? Why can’t we just amuse ourselves by training dogs to say “Ri rove roo” and leave the kids alone? (I have a way longer rant against the notion that anyone younger than twenty should be published, but it’s for another time.)

Tomorrow is Chris’s birthday and I bought us tickets to see the Comedians of Comedy show tomorrow night. I think it’ll be fun, considering the last time he was at a comedy show on his birthday he had a few drinks and hit on one of the performers, and they totally wound up dating the whole next year. And then some.

Filed Under: Chicago, misc, personal, popcult

Update!

April 25, 2006 by Wendy

THANK YOU. THANK YOU, PRETTY PEOPLE.

I am less than $100 away from the goal now, thanks to those of you who have pledged. I’ve sent out a bunch of personalized copies (five? six?) of The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan now–and between this and the contest, I’ve just about run out of books! So while I’m all out of the new book, I can still offer a personalized copy of I’m Not The New Me to anyone who pledges more than $75. And THANK YOU THANK YOU.

Update: 4:06 PM –GOOOOOOOOOAL!!!!

Filed Under: General, personal

I am walking

April 20, 2006 by Wendy

Two weeks from Saturday I’ll be doing Walk for The Whisper, a benefit for ovarian cancer research and awareness. The “awareness” part, for me, happened when my mom was diagnosed this past fall. Now that winter and her chemo are over things are looking up, and now I feel like walking. It’s simple as that. Or maybe it’s not simple, but when it comes to stuff like this, everything is a total understatement.

My fundraising page is here. My goal is $700. Please help if you can. If you can donate more than $75 I’ll throw in one of my books, personalized.

Filed Under: Body, personal

Blow by blow

April 19, 2006 by Wendy

I’d heard about the tornadoes that hit Iowa City last week, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I saw photos of the damage. As soon as I saw that that some of the worst hit areas were in my old neighborhood–I lived just up the street from this sorority house–I began to look all over Flickr to see if I could find out what happened to my old place.

For three years I lived on the first floor of an old house a mile off campus. It was perched on a little bluff overlooking a quiet intersection with a brick street. It had two porches, one off each bedroom, and an old-fashioned metal roof. Right after we signed the lease, my roommate and I showed the place to her mother, who declared it a deathtrap for about fifteen different reasons, many of them stupid.

“How are you going to keep people from just climbing in your windows?” she asked. We’ll lock the windows, we told her. She wondered alound if the carpet had mold, the deadly kind. Probably not, we told her. “The bathroom is upstairs? You’re going to fall down those stairs in the middle of the night,” she said. No we won’t, we told her. She was sure the place was filled with mice or termites or radon gas. (It wasn’t.) The floorboards might warp. (So what?) The gasket seal on the refrigerator could be better (The hell?) When she’d finally run out of things to find fault with, she stepped outside with us and peered up at the beautiful old tree in the side yard.

“That tree is going to fall on the house,” she said.

But as it turned out, it fell the other way.

Filed Under: misc, personal

Reading in May!

April 10, 2006 by Wendy

I’ll be at Barnes & Noble Webster Place the night of Thursday, May 25th, 7:30 pm to read from Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan, And no, I haven’t yet figured out how I’m going to READ from a book that consists entirely of pictures and snickery captions, so it should be a hoot.

Filed Under: General

All the good stuff

April 10, 2006 by Wendy

This weekend I have been up to my teeth in doing promotional stuff–stuff which of course I can’t discuss without further promoting the thing I’m promoting, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t just write about promotional stuff on this site.

So instead I will tell you about how I was on my way to this record fair on Saturday to visit Chris (who was selling records there, because he has a lot of records, and if he wanted to he could build himself a bunker out of records and sit inside it listening to more records while eating records, like that’s how many records) and see if he needed me to run and get change or a sandwich, because he doesn’t really eat records.

I passed a man on the sidewalk outside the building. He asked, “You going to the record fair?” Yes, I told him. Then he barked, “WELL, DON’T BOTHER. I BOUGHT ALL THE GOOD STUFF.”

And I rolled my eyes and I walked by and thought but I’m not buying records, you dunderdick and couldn’t help but feel a little indignant that he had to spit that little gob of hubris in my direction. Why couldn’t he keep his totally imaginary schadenfreude to himself? The only good response to a person like that is to travel twenty seconds backwards in time and tell him to shut up in advance.

I am glad it’s spring but I swear, this is the coldest time of the year for me, when the wind blows more and the building-controlled radiators run less, and the heady mix of bright sunlight and icy breeze makes me squinty and strangely exhausted.  I’d tell you to wake me up in June, but I have so much to do between now and then, I’d better stay awake.

Filed Under: bookstuff, personal, promo

Archives

  • March 2016
  • January 2014
  • December 2012
  • July 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • September 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • July 2010
  • May 2010
  • February 2010
  • December 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006
  • January 2006
  • December 2005
  • November 2005
  • October 2005
  • September 2005
  • August 2005
  • July 2005
  • June 2005
  • May 2005
  • April 2005
  • March 2005
  • February 2005
  • January 2005
  • December 2004
  • November 2004
  • October 2004
  • September 2004
  • August 2004
  • July 2004
  • June 2004
  • May 2004
  • April 2004
  • March 2004
  • February 2004
  • January 2004
  • December 2003
  • November 2003
  • October 2003
  • September 2003
  • August 2003
  • July 2003
  • June 2003
  • May 2003
  • April 2003
  • March 2003
  • February 2003
  • January 2003
  • December 2002
  • November 2002
  • September 2001
  • July 2001
  • May 2001
  • February 2001
  • January 2001

The Wilder Life on Flickr

Recent Press and Links

  • Essay: A Little House Adulthood For the American Masters documentary on Laura Ingalls Wilder, I contributed a piece to the PBS website about revisiting the Little House books.
  • Essay: The Christmas Tape (At Longreads.com) How an old audio tape of holiday music became a record of family history, unspoken rituals, and grief.
  • Q & A With Wendy McClure Publishers Weekly interview about editing, Wanderville and more.

Connect with me

Visit Us On TwitterVisit Us On FacebookVisit Us On Instagram

Where else to find Wendy

  • Candyboots Home of the Weight Watcher recipe cards
  • Malcolm Jameson Site (in progress) about my great-grandfather, a Golden Age sci-fi writer.
  • That Side of the Family My semi-secret family history blog
Copyright © 2023 by Wendy McClure • All Rights Reserved • Site design by Makeworthy Media • Wanderville illustrations by Erwin Madrid