I am kind of excited because this is my first blog entry. I don't know if anyone will actually read it, but it is fun to sit here and write it.

To begin with I am a writer. I live in New York City with my husband and my three kids and a large sweet dog named Finny, and a hamster named Moonbeam, who bites. The first book I wrote was called The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. My newest book is featured on my profile. It's called The Last Summer (of You and Me) and it will be published on June 5. My main hobbies are running and eating, which sort of cancel each other out. I don't have a TV and I don't have a drivers license. That makes me kind of odd, I know. And very unsuccessful in carpools and pop culture trivia quizzes. I do have a movie projector.

I love to read. I guess that's not shocking. The most recent book I read was called Lonesome Dove, the hugely great and famous novel by Larry McMurtry. It was amazing and I loved it. Now I go around saying "dern" a lot-as in "put your dern cereal bowl in the dern sink." Also, I have fallen in love with Gus McCrae. I miss him when I'm not reading about him. My husband might be jealous except that Gus is fictional. It's not the first time I've fallen in love with a fictional character.

In my ardor for the book, I couldn't help renting the movie of it-or TV miniseries to be more accurate-from Netflix. This is never a good idea. You must wait for your ardor to die down before you rent the movie. And even then it's not usually a good idea. Not because it wasn't a fine movie. It really was. Robert Duvall is one of my favorite actors. But he is not Gus McCrae. Movies and books are completely separate experiences-each potentially enjoyable, but not to be compared. As a reader, I feel like Gus belongs to me in a way that Robert Duvall up there on the screen in my living room never will. Robert Duvall is an actual person and not subject to my beliefs or hopes as Gus is. Gus, you see, has become a collaboration of sorts between Larry McMurtry and me. (Larry McMurtry may not see it that way.)

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go. That's partly why it's fun to sit down and write this dern blog with the hope that I'm connecting with a few readers. We've got a lot of people in common.

On a different and completely irrelevant note, I love sour gummy candy-in the shape of worms, fruits, kids, whatever. I love it.