Thank you to everyone who sent kind emails and your own stories of loss. Thank you for sharing and for making me feel so much better. You guys are just awesome.

I feel much better today, mostly because my books are just too much fun to write! Misguided Angel for some reason was really difficult to write, but in the end it was exactly what I wanted it to be. It’s funny because I had the story for the book for SO LONG in my head and in the end it’s exactly like the story I originally conceived and yet it was so hard to get there. (Deadlines flew by. Whoosh! With no finished book.) One of the things that is so wonderful about being a writer is a sense of accomplishment once it is done. Priceless.

I’m working on Bloody Valentine, which is heartbreaking and insanely awesome at the same time. You guys are gonna lurve it because I am so obsessed with it, seriously, I wake up and think Schuyler, Jack, Oliver and Mimi are all real people. It’s weird to remember that they are characters that I made up. They seem very real to me. But as Meg Cabot says, You can love your books but don’t looooove your books. It always surprises me that I get my books done because there is so much REAL LIFE to live—raising a child, being a wife, running a household, keeping in contact with friends, having a LIFE. Books are not a life. I love what I do, but it’s not good to be so one-sided.

Today I made my word count and I’m off to have lunch with a dear friend I haven’t seen in a long time. I’m all dressed up because it’s lunch in Beverly Hills and when in Rome… 😉 I’m looking forward to gabbing and shopping and then going off to Disneyland with my family with our brand-spanking new VIP!!!! PASS!!!! from my wonderful publisher.

Have a happy weekend everyone!
xoxo
Mel

The other day I thought to myself, “Am I ever going to be happy again?” It was a strange thing to think… especially as I am not an unhappy person, one of my oldest friends told me when we first met that I struck her as incredibly cheerful in a very old-fashioned, almost apple-cheeked, 19th-century way, that I was “merry”—something you never think of as person as being anymore. I thought that was a good word to describe me, as I am a lot like my dad and my dad was very… well, merry. He had this liveliness about him. He was such a happy person and yet his favorite motto was “I’d rather be miserable in wealth.” He liked nice hotels, Pop.

Since my dad passed away seven months ago, while the immediate shock and intense sorrow has faded a bit, I find that there is a gloom that has settled over me somewhat, that I am not quite the person I used to be before it happened. Nothing like this has ever happened to me or my family before. Sure, my parents lost their fortune and we had to move to the US, but it’s only money. Really. I learned that very early in life, I grew up thinking three-month vacations to Europe was the norm. When that ended, it was a huge shock but it wasn’t as bad—not even in the same league—as this. Losing someone you love..I never really understood what that meant. What loss means. Absence. Missing. It amazes me sometimes: here are my dad’s books, here is my dad’s library card. There is the couch he used to sit on when he would come over. He used to drive my car when I drove him to chemo. It’s like he’s everywhere but nowhere. Even the word ‘grief’ looks like grief, doesn’t it? The way it fits together, with that g and that f, it already looks so sad. Grief is a good word to describe grief. It’s a sadness that stings, that is somewhat unexpected. What is that saying? Grief is another country.

Sometimes I forget why I am sad, I just notice that I am not as happy as I used to be. Not as merry maybe. Definitely a little blue around the edges. A little melancholy. I know that no matter what, for the rest of my life, the feeling of missing will never go away. And that this loss will only compound as the years go by and we all slouch towards the inevitable.

Will I ever be happy again? I hope so. My dad certainly was. He lost a brother when he was 18, his mom when he was 25, his dad when he was 33. Both his sisters died of cancer in their late 50s, early 60s. (My dad died at 60.) And yet he was the happiest person I knew. He told us to survive his loss and to carry on. He even joked about it. When friends would call and ask how he was during that last hard year, he’d always say, “Buhay pa!” (“Still alive!”)

Nice things that happened when my dad died. The flower storm. The cards. The cards with checks, from Filipino friends. My mom cried as she opened those—she had forgotten that in the Filipino culture, it was a custom to send money when someone died. That the community shares your loss. And sends money to help offset funeral costs. It’s an immigrant thing.

We buried my dad in a cemetery. The American way, it seems now, is to cremate and scatter. I grew up going to the graves of my grandparents every weekend. In the Philippines when someone dies you wear a black pin for a year to show everyone you are in mourning. It seems so casual to me, to scatter ashes. But where would you visit? Where would you go when you feel sad? Or the urn in the living room. Really? Just…there? Remains? By the fireplace?

Some days it is easier to forget, and then some days it is not.

xoxo
Mel

We taped this video a year ago while I was at BEA! And now here it is. Lots of fun sneaks at what is in the book!
Enjoy!

xoxo
Mel

The big book giveaway!

I have many many copies of my many many books. Too many for me to keep. If you are a librarian and would like copies of my books for your library, email my assistant at melissadlcoffice at gmail dot com with your library’s address and we will send you books. Subject line: LIBRARY BOOK GIVE AWAY! Simple as that. This giveaway is to libraries only. So if you would like your library to have copies of my books, please ask them to email us and we will send them books.

Right now we have tons of advance copies of KEYS TO THE REPOSITORY. If you would like a copy, please email your name and snail-mail address to melissadlcoffice at gmail dot com with the subject line KEYS TO THE KINGDOM. Oh yeah! I’ll put all the names in one of our fabulous Ittala bowls and my daughter will pick TEN lucky winners. Contest is open to international readers. (Why not?) But I do have one caveat, last time when we did a book giveaway, some of you guys were in college and you didn’t pick up your book and it kept getting sent back to us and my assistant kept trying to send it back to you and it just got frustrating. So if you are in college, we will only send it to your HOME ADDRESS. Oh college kids. I remember what THAT was like. “Package? What package? What time is that party again?” The contest it open until JUNE 11TH 12 MIDNIGHT PST. We will send books out the next week so you get them before publication (June 29th). But remember! You need to put in your snail-mail address. And your home address. (NO PO Boxes. NO College mailboxes.) Have I nagged enough? 🙂 GOOD LUCK ALL!!!

xoxo
Mel

This is one of my favorite pieces of art:

It’s Damien Hirst’s My Problem is You.

I stare at it every day as I’m putting on my face creams (a four-step process lately), as it is displayed in our master bathroom. It never ceases to amaze me how many different kinds of drugs are in this cabinet. And their names! Floxacin. Temazepan. Some of the drugs I recognize (Valtrex: who could forget those commercials?). Some I’ve seen from my dad’s chemo regimen. (Didn’t he take Fluorouracil?)

I mostly love the juxtaposition of all the prescription drugs with the title: “My Problem is You.”

Every time I look at it, it makes me think of something new: anxiety, depression, sadness, cancer, hope in a jar, the health care industry, pop art, which then makes me think of my dad, or my work, or Andy Warhol, or how lucky I am that I don’t suffer from any ailments that require me to take any drugs. My family had only one way to deal when life got difficult. Can you guess? As Paul Rudnick said so eloquently in “I’ll Take It” – “We worked it out in the sale rack.”

My dad went through the highs and lows of cancer with very little mood-changing or mood-lifting pills, much like he weathered all the changes in his life. (And needless to say, he was a shopper.) He was a naturally happy person, a raconteur, he’d once been an investment banker with his own fund as well as a cafeteria operator at Sears, he was a CEO and an immigrant, he loved limousines and gossip rags, New York City, fancy hotels, mall Chinese food, thrillers, the Ivy League, and us, and not in that order. When we learned the disease had finally arrived at its final stages, his first words to us were “Don’t despair.”

Two days before he died, he was joking with us that the nurse who prayed the rosary with him who kept getting the words wrong. He kept telling me to Stop Crying. He wanted us to be happy and to remember him like he was: dancing at our weddings, teasing us, laughing as he picked up a pair of chopsticks (he had a particular fondness for meals that required chopsticks), all those marathon poker games where he’d bluff to oblivion.

It is so freaking hard to Stop Crying.

But I try to remember. Don’t despair.

And so instead of drugs in a medicine cabinet, we have a picture of them framed on the wall.

It’s a very reasonable piece of art, it’s just a poster, and if you want one the Gagosian will sell you one happily, online even, unlike say, if you want to buy an original Jeff Koons, you can’t, since they “place” them with only the right museums or collectors—as in, vulgarians need not apply according to the delightfully snobby art dealer.

I never know what looking at it will make me think about, and that’s the fun of it.

xoxo
Mel

Mike and I were out at dinner on our weekly date night several months ago. (Shut up. I don’t think it’s pathetic to call it “date night”. I actually think it’s rather sweet. Because before we had the kid, like typical New Yorkers, we went out almost every night, and we just took it for granted. Now because we only go out once or twice a week we dress up, and we try to have you know, conversation instead of the usual honey-do lists and chore wrap-ups.) Anyway, we were in Joel Robouchon in Las Vegas and feelin’ romantic.

We hopefully never look like this on Date Night.

That night, I told my husband about the whole phenomenon of the manic pixie dream girl, and I did my whole rant, how I hate how some guys idealize a type of quirky, cool, unknowable, mysterious and CRAZY girls and how I simply hate those kinds of girls, and those kinds of movies (500 Tedious Days of Summer, etc) how the whole thing was so offensive because boys of a certain type just worship these chicks and ugggh….they SO don’t deserve it and why can’t anyone just make a movie about falling in love with a nice practical sweet girl and not some manic pixie dream girl?

Zooey. The embodiment of the Manic Pixie.

And then Mike said, “But you’re MY manic pixie dream girl.”

WHA???

WHAT DO YOU MEAN??? I asked my husband.

In answer, he did a checklist: QUIRKY. COOL. UNKNOWABLE. MYSTERIOUS. SEXY. (Blush) and mostly, CRAZY.

YOU. ARE. A. MANIC. PIXIE. DREAM. GIRL. He smirked.

While I see myself as a rather staid, infinitely practical and completely predictable person, the kind of girl who is a girl’s girl, someone who’s always “the friend” and was never the WAIF, NEVER the kind of girl who ever has to be RESCUED or some ridiculous thing like that, the girl who is more of the “sidekick” rather than the star, my husband thinks I’m hot and crazy. Which is apparently a good thing.

Maybe our relationship is just volatile. Or maybe I am a manic pixie dream girl. I dunno. (Sort of doubt it really.)

But god if that wasn’t the most romantic thing my husband ever told me.

So, to all the manic pixie dream girls out there. I apologize.

Garth. I’m not a pixie. I always thought of myself as a Garth.

When I was younger, my girlfriends and I had this favorite urban myth about our love lives. This one went, “someone is in love with you, you just don’t know it.”

This romantic fantasy that we absolutely believed in was that there was someone out there, watching, admiring and yearning for us (not in a stalker way but in a sweet Hollywood movie way)– but he would never come forward because he was just too shy… and we would never find out… until you know, class reunions or drunken confessionals or something.

This fantasy made us single girls feel very special… that even if we did not know it, even if we were lonely, or alone on Valentine’s Day, or dateless on a weekend night, someone, out there, was totally in love with us.

At least, I found it romantic until it happened to me.

When I was 23 some guy came up to me and told me he had seen me every day at my subway stop for months and now he was finally getting up the courage to ask me out.

You know what I said?

NO WAY! NOT INTERESTED! STRANGER DANGER!!!

I practically ran the other way and I never went to that subway stop again. Even though the guy was actually pretty cute and dressed in a suit and probably completely normal except for that one admission.

Because you know what makes the SECRETLY IN LOVE fantasy work? KEEPING IT A SECRET! LOL!

But you know what is better than a stranger who is secretly in love with you? Finding out that the guy who is secretly in love with you is the one you’d already married.

Awww…

Anyway girls, remember, someone could be in love with you RIGHT NOW. It could be the guy in your math class. Or the guy who works at the video store. Or the guy YOU have a crush on. You just never know. I firmly believe someone is secretly in love with every one of you RIGHT NOW. *pinches all your cheeks*

For more manic pixie dream girl stories, read Reality Matters. One of my favorites is Neal Pollack’s Married By America, which talks about the Crazy Girl Phenomenon.

xoxo
Mel

Hey kids,

I’m still here. Just been working a lot, trying to make my deadline for MISGUIDED ANGEL and lots of deadlines right after—it’s like a train wreck—if I don’t make this deadline then the rest of the book caboose suffers. So it’s been nose-to-grindstone over here and blogging has been left to the wayside.

Just popped in to share that I will be tweet-sneaking peeks at KEYS TO THE REPOSITORY starting May 21st! So don’t forget to follow me if you want to see them. The book comes out June 29th!

I’ll be back once I turn in the book and then probably will disappear again until about September when all my books are FINALLY turned in. Am taking my summer vacation in the fall. 🙂

xoxo
Mel

My lovely British publisher Atom books just sent over the cover for KEYS TO THE REPOSITORY. A bit different from the US cover since the books are just being introduced to the UK market now, and Atom felt it would be good to have the city nightlife and our lovely heroine featured in the cover.

I love it!!!

xoxo
Mel

I have some upcoming events! Check out the events page for more deets!

I will also be on tour in October for Misguided Angel, and will be at the ALAN conference in November. To my Canadian readers: I won’t be in Montreal until 2011 for the book festival in November. So sorry but the dates conflicted with the ALAN conference that I had already committed to – but see you next year!

Come see me!

xoxo
Mel

My editor just sent me the Publishers Weekly 2009 Bestseller List! WOWZA! Blue Bloods is all over this list!
Van Alen Legacy is #29 on the Hardcover Front List, Revelations is #44 on the Paperback Front List, Blue Bloods is #44 on the Paperback Back List and Masquerade is #63 on the Paperback Back List.

So proud and happy and now STRESSED because I am on the drop-dead deadline for Misguided Angel. Aaaaah!

xoxo,
Mel