I'm going next week to a recording session for The Boyfriend List audiobook. The actor is Mandy Sigfried, who also read Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, so I know she's got to be fantastic.

I'm SO excited to be on audio -- as I've posted before, I love love love them and would never get any exercise at all without them.

Vote for your favorite teen books of the year here -- and the books are all nominated by actual teen readers, not librarians or anything.

I'm ashamed how few of them I've read -- but I gotta vote for that Harry Potter and for A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray, which I'm currently reading with my breath held.

Well, I missed Teen Read Week, which sounds amazingly fun, and their website has a huge list of spooky Halloween-type novels you can read if you're a horror fan, so check it out even though you won't be reading at the same time as everyone else.

Why did I miss it? I was in LONDON losing my laptop in the airport and spending the week not knowing whether the manuscript to Fly on the Wall, my next book, was gone forever! Fortunately, my backup worked and all is okay. But I nearly lost my crap. And that's putting it nicely.

Pip pip!

St. Paul's Cathedral and the Millenium Bridge across the Thames River, London

The Boyfriend List will come out in Italy, Great Britain and the Netherlands! I am so happy about it.

Yippee!
I just got back from the "Pushing the YA Envelope" panel at New York is Book Country, where I heard Rachel Cohn, E.R. Frank, Francine Pascal, and Mariah Fredericks.

Sadly, there wasn't much talk about pushing the envelope because everyone agreed that they simply wrote about what they wanted to write, and aside from taking out extraneous swear words, they hadn't been censored at all in writing for teen audiences.

However, Frank was v. interesting when she talked about how many teen audiences expect her to be a black man -- and she's a white woman -- and how that leads to interesting discussions with her readers. And Cohn was super-charming and revealed that she's a monster procrastinator and wrote most of her forthcoming book Shrimp in one month, fueled primarily on cake!

Pascal, who does both the Sweet Valley High series and the Fearless series, was very interesting and funny; and Fredericks revealed that she can write two novels at a time -- three pages on one, then three pages on the other!

In the audience with me were Kristin Kemp (The Dating Diaries) and Maryrose Wood, whose Kittens & Dawgs series will hit stores next year.