Hi all,

I finally have a new office address where you can write me (you know for those class assignments your teachers make you send – which are too fun to read).

Office of Melissa de la Cruz
3940 Laurel Canyon Blvd. #1268
Studio City, CA 91604

You can also send self-addressed stamped envelopes to the above address and we will send you bookplates. Bookplates are stickers with my signature that you can put on your books. And a couple of you have emailed asking if the signed book you bought from Target, Walmart, K-Mart, or the local grocery store, really *IS* my signature. It is! It is! I signed about a thousand books at the Levy warehouse, which ships them to various outlets. So yeah, that’s my autograph! Cool, huh? I had fun doing it and I heard I might have broken the record for fastest-books-signed-in-an-hour. Take that, Dan Brown! Heh!

Just so you know, I don’t actually work in that office, my assistant just picks up the mail there. Not that you all are stalkerish in any way, but just thought I would add that. 🙂

Again, thank you for all your letters offering condolence and sympathy. It is very hard to believe my dad is gone. I go between stunned-staring-out-the-window-in-silent-shock to blubbering to just coping. I cried so much in the past week I bruised my eye. Did you know that can happen? That you can cry so much your eye hurts and turns red? And also sometimes you can cry so much that no tears fall anymore? It’s weird. Anyway. The writing really helps, I feel very focused now. And it helps to talk about it. I don’t think I’ve ever really understood death before—just how brutally final it is and just how terribly short life really is. Even if you die at 100 I think it will still feel short, because life is so wonderful and for it to end seems just too awful for words. Anyway…back to work for me.

xoxo
Mel