Author with a fancy website and everything.

The anthology Love Is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts will be out this month, featuring an essay by yours truly and many others. The book’s website is now live, with an awesomely morose Flash animation created by fellow contributor and illustratrix Emily Flake, who shows you just how it feels sometimes. (Go to www.loveisa4letterword.com to see what I mean.)

More news and announcements about the book soon, including information about the launch party and reading at Housing Works in New York City on July 29th. For now, check out the flyer:

You can also order the book at Amazon or Barnes & Noble or IndieBound or Powell’s.

Last year I rediscovered my old childhood obsession with the Little House books and Laura Ingalls Wilder. This year I’m writing a book about it all.  I’ve visited the sites of Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie and I’ve seen all manner of Laurarabilia at the Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri. I’m making plans for another big trip out west in July to see the rest of the homesites, and in the meantime, I’ve been trying my hand at various nineteenth-century frontier activities, such as churning butter, frying salt pork, and playing with corn-cob dolls. And then I’ve been writing.

I’ll be working on the book through the end of the year, and Riverhead Books will publish it sometime in 2010. The working title is The Wilder Life—don’t know yet if that will change, but we’ll keep you posted.

Some days the work is as fun as roasting a pig’s tail, and other days it sucks like Plum Creek leeches. Either way I love it.

Would you like to help? I’m always interested in hearing about other people’s Little House memories and experiences—anything involving the books, visiting the homesites, or even the TV show. If you’re interested in sharing, contact me and I’ll send you a very informal questionnaire. Then we can talk Laura until the cows come home, though we should really keep them from running over the sod roof of the dugout house.

I’ve also been taking photos and video of my research adventures and eventually I’ll be sharing all of those, too. You can search using The Wilder Life tag on my Flickr site to see what I’ve posted so far. (There are many more where those came from.)

And if you still need an internet Laura fix after all this, you can always follow HalfPintIngalls herself on Twitter.

Yes, I wrote a picture book. And as of this spring it’s out.

There’s been a growing need for books about peanut allergy, and the folks at Albert Whitman were looking for something new. We’d published The Peanut-Free Cafe in 2006 and we wanted to be able to offer something else. And one day, during an editorial meeting, we were talking about how we wished we had another peanut allergy book. We were also talking about how we could wished we had some kind of princess picture book. (Memo from children’s book land: princesses are HUGE.)

“We need a book called ‘The Princess and the Peanut,’” I said, not too seriously.

“You need to write a book called ‘The Princess and the Peanut,’” my boss said. “Seriously.”

Okay, then! I promised I would try.

I had another reason for writing a book like this. Chris has several food allergies, including one to tree nuts: almonds, pecans, cashews—pretty much any nut that isn’t a peanut. So I know about having to to be flexible, checking food labels and asking questions; about having to speak up in inconvenient situations. I started thinking about how all this might affect someone’s very princessy birthday party, and that’s when Paula and Regina started to come to life.

And then I had to rewrite it a ton of times, and then wait around anxiously while everyone else at Whitman was off in another room discussing whether or not the story was as good as something that would have come from a writer outside the company, and also, I’m sure, discussing how badly I dress and how I never dust those action figures that I have in my office. (That’s definitely the downside of getting your book published by the same company you work for.)

The upside, of course is that I got to see my book get made, and watch slowly as Paula and Regina really came to life, thanks to  Tammie Lyon and her completely perfect illustrations. I especially love Regina’s big round owl glasses. THERE ARE NEVER ENOUGH CUTE GLASSES GIRLS IN CHILDREN’S BOOK LAND.  Oh, and you can see another illustration from the book in Tammie’s online portfolio.

Anyway, now the book is done—along with the other Spring titles that we worked on last year. Of course, now we’re already well into working on production for the next spring’s book, and you barely notice when a current title hits the shelf.  Except when you’re the one who wrote it, that is.

(Buy it from Albert Whitman, or Amazon, or BN.com, or Powell’s, or IndieBound. )