I've been writing most of my life with occasional long stretches away from it. For 30 + years I wrote mostly poetry, often weak, bad poetry, imitative and unoriginal and what I thought poetry should be. I got extraordinarily lucky in 1998 when what became my first novel, STUCK IN NEUTRAL was accepted for publication by HarperCollins kids books and, published in 2000 it won a Printz Honor Award in Jan 2001. I got kind of rich and famous from that, have published 6 more y.a. novels with HC and am now putting out some ebooks of my own. I'm on this site to return to poetry, mostly, at least that's the plan right now.

So much personal info about me is almost clichéd shit that seems true of all my colleagues; crummy h.s. student, ADD, like alcohol too much, struggled to find a partner in life who can stand me for very long--blahblahblah-Have become busy on Twitter though I put my $ on Facebook back in the day and so came late to Twitter. 

I like dogs and my wife and single malt scotch and I'm at least smart enough and self-conscious enough to know how much of an asshole that makes me sound like. LOL