Melissa de la Cruz

Mel's Shopping Diary

Podcast Up!/Nice Reviews/Existential Questions

August 30, 2006 Some fun stuff today...

I taped a podcast for HarperCollins' Sweet & Sassy Summer Girls of Fiction Podcast, and it is now up on the HarperTeen site here. Scroll down to Episode 11, which is my podcast. I talk about thrift-store shopping and more! I was nursing a cold while I taped it, so my voice I think sounds a little hoarse, and I think I ramble on too much because of all the Sudafed I was taking.

Recently I found out Blue Bloods has been nominated for an ALA Quick Pick For Reluctant Readers! The Au Pairs was a 2004 Quick Pick, and Skinny-Dipping and Fresh off the Boat were both 2005 Quick Pick Nominees. It's an honor just to be nominated (natch) and it's so fun to see Blue Bloods on the list!

There's a nice review of Blue Bloods here along with Jennifer Barnes' Golden and Cara Lockwood's Wuthering Heights, both excellent books!

Here's also a nice review of Mistletoe that I found on a YA blog.

And here's something I found tres amusing--this disgruntled reader thinks I don't even exist! "Melissa de la Cruz, the supposed author of The Au Pairs, which furthers my theory that these books are cranked out by recent college grads in a Hoboken sweatshop, the authors names made by snootynamegenerator.com."

First off, I love that I have a snooty name! Because I once asked my dad where our name came from and he said when the Spaniards came to colonize the Philippines, they posted names on a tree, and the Filipinos had to pick one (because we didn't have last names in our native culture). And our ancestor picked "de la Cruz" so in a sense, it's not a real name. But it is MY real name. And I do have Spanish blood--on my mom's family's side were wealthy Spaniards (the snooty Reyes family).

What's funny is that if I don't exist, then who wrote all those incendiary essays for the New York Press? Or those sex articles in Marie Claire? Or published her dad's emails on McSweeney's? I've been a published writer for a decade, and my career can be traced via Google at any time. I've only been writing YA books for the last three years, but I certainly didn't come out of nowhere.

And alas, all the books written under my name ARE all mine, the deadlines are mine, the advances are in my checking account, and any praise or blame, falls on me, not some poor annonymous college grads... Hilarious. You've got a have a sense of humor when you are somewhat in the public eye. (And I'm so glad that as authors, they don't post pics of us dropping or gaining weight on the cover of tabloids!)

xoxo
Mel