exclusive author notes - spoiler alert!
On this page, I give away information about how I wrote 6th Grade with My Crazy Classmates, My Super Smart Sister, & Me. This includes sensitive information about the plot as a whole, so if you haven't read the book yet, PLEASE don't scroll any further down this page! Instead, buy the book on Amazon, read it, and then you'll be welcome to explore this page :)
stories behind the stories
I hand wrote the first drafts of "books" 1-12 when I was eleven and twelve years old. On this page, you'll find scans of the original covers and notes about how I came up with each plot.
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Book 1: School Starts
My brother and I had a lot of imaginary friends when we were younger, and they all went to an imaginary “Fun House” school called Racecar’s Rook. One of our imaginary friends was Mirisen Zepetto, who had an older sister named Allisen, a younger brother named Harrisson, and a crazy older brother named Pete. One day when I was eleven, I decided I wanted to start writing a series. I chose Allisen Zepetto as the main character for my series, because I thought it would be interesting to write about someone who was fairly normal but had an unusual family. In the original paper versions of the series, Allisen’s school was still called Racecar’s Rook (all Fun House schools had weird names), but I changed that for the published version because the name didn’t make much sense. |
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Book 2: Me, A Babysitter?
I used to write the titles of the next three books on the inside back cover of the one I’d just finished. So, once I finished writing “School Starts”, I wrote that the next three books would be called “Me, A Babysitter?”, “Moving Time”, and “The Holidays Approach.” Then I had to come up with plots revolving around those titles. The original version of “Me, A Babysitter?” had a plot line that didn’t make a lot of sense. Allisen’s parents both got random 2-week jobs in Kansas, so Allisen had to babysit her siblings at a Fun House school in Kansas while her parents were at work. No… that never happened to me, and nor did I ever have to babysit my siblings at a hotel in New York City while my mom was at press conferences! This mini-story was entirely made up. |
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Book 3: Moving Time
Looking back, maybe it was a little weird for me to have Allisen’s new friend, who she met barely a month ago, move away so early on in the series. But maybe not. After all, that’s what happened to me in third grade. Third grade was the first year I went to a physical school, rather than being homeschooled. I was kind of nervous about starting school, but within the first few days I had become best friends with a girl in my class who was also new that year. We spent all of September and half of October doing everything together… and then in the middle of October, she moved all the way to the other side of the country. As you can imagine, I know exactly how Allisen felt when Emalie Maye moved. I did end up becoming best friends with another girl later on in third grade, and she and I hung out together all through fourth grade as well. In fifth grade, she also moved away (and then I ended up moving later that same year), but she and I have kept in touch and are still best friends to this very day! |
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Book 4: The Holidays Approach
This plot was entirely made-up, with no aspects of my own life finding their way into the plot (unless you count the fact that my church has a Christmas pageant or that my family celebrates Christmas). The original plot was that Allisen’s family had a random kid from a mental institution in Indiana come and stay with them for a few weeks (this kid was someone who had gone to my brother’s and my “Fun House” when we lived in Indiana). The kid was primarily just weird and disgusting, with his habits of eating bugs and wearing a diaper over a skirt as his regular attire. Then one morning he cut Mirisen’s hair and hit Harrisson with a stick, and that was the last straw. Allisen went in and yelled at him, and then her parents kicked him out. There was absolutely no way I was keeping that plot line. So I needed to come up with something else… and I thought of the perfect idea. Pete! Pete had been mentioned since “School Starts”, but had never really come into play much… but making him the main focus of “The Holidays Approach” allowed me to keep some elements of the plot the same (such as the idea of having someone really annoying messing everything up in the weeks leading up to Christmas), while at the same time turning it into something believable. |
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Book 5: Why Me?
I don’t think I had a plot idea in mind when I came up with this title. When I did come up with the plot, it was something familiar to me: having a broken wrist. The first time I broke my wrist (arm… rabius… ulna… whatever!) I was seven. We had a rope swing in our backyard, next to our wooden balance beam, and one of my favorite things to do was stand on the balance beam holding the rope and have my dad throw me around the tree, running over to catch me before I came back around and hit the tree. Well, one time he flung me around and my grip slipped. I fell down and landed on my left arm, and, well, it broke. I had a yellow cast that I had to wear for six weeks. The second time I broke a bone was when I was ten. This was on our other rope swing… this rope swing was on a dirt hill, and my brother and I decided it would be super fun to rollerblade from the top of the hill all the way down to the rope, where we could grab it to slow our momentum. We were right. It was super fun, for a couple days. Then my grip failed me again, and I ended up falling and landing on the same arm I’d broken three years before. I wrote the original “Why Me” when I was eleven, so I still remembered pretty well what felt like when I broke my arm. The way Allisen’s arm feels when she moves it certain ways, and the process of having her X-rays and getting her cast, were taken right from my memories. |
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Book 6: Love, Love, Love!
Another one that I didn’t have a plot for when I came up with the title. I just knew the book would take place in February, so of course it should have something to do with love. When I started writing the original book, I decided that the plot would revolve around Allisen finding three people very hard to love: Pete, Nalcie, and this random boy in her class named Jack Bersner (who when I originally wrote the story, wasn’t even new to the class, but I went back a year later or so and squeezed in a part where it specified that he was new). When I re-wrote the story to publish it, I removed Nalcie as a main character because the things she was doing that were annoying Allisen probably wouldn’t annoy someone in real life (such as giving her a valentine before Valentine’s day—oh no!), and I removed Pete as a main character because I’d already addressed Allisen’s struggles with him in “The Holidays Approach” (also, Pete didn’t even really do anything in the original version, what made him so hard to love was more of the fact that he existed!). I decided the focus of the story should be on that annoying new boy who won’t leave Allisen alone. It’s not something that’s ever happened to me, but the way I wrote Jack and Allisen’s interactions with each other in the final version was enough to make “Love, Love, Love” my favorite chapter of 6th Grade with my Crazy Classmates, My Super Smart Sister, & Me! |
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Book 7: Pupsurprise
We got our dog, Honey Brown, when I was eight. We already had two cats, Indy-Anna and Abigail. We’d never had a dog before, but we were very excited to get one. And then the trouble began. Honey Brown was ten months old when we got her—old enough to be potty trained and fully grown, but still a puppy. She chewed up everything we left out—toys, stuffed animals, even the leg of our couch. We left her in the car for an hour while visiting someone, and she chewed through a seatbelt. We let her outside to run around in the yard and she chewed through our rope hammock. And Honey Brown loved food. It didn’t matter whether it was roast beef, donuts, or a loaf of bread—if we left it where she could reach it, it would be gone in a matter of seconds. She once found a bag of Halloween taffies and ate the entire thing, wrappers and all (as evidenced by the fact that for several days afterward, she pooped out orange and black wrappers). She chased everything that moved—from our cats, to the neighbors’ dogs and horses, to the occasional car that came up our dead-end street. Allisen’s family’s experiences with Surprise are very much based off of my family’s experiences with Honey Brown. We never considered giving Honey Brown back to the animal shelter. We did, however, end up getting a zap collar for her, and it worked very well—my dad never even had to use a leash when he took her for walks. We only used the zap collar when she was outside, but even her inside behaviors improved as she matured. She and the cats never became good friends with one another, but I never feared for the cats’ safety around her either. Honey Brown could definitely be a troublemaker, but she was also a very good dog! She loved people and was very friendly. We never had to worry about her biting or attacking anybody, because those were just things that she didn’t do. She was a great guard dog, though—her loud barking would alert us whenever anyone was nearby. She loved to snuggle with us in our beds or lie on the floor and have her belly rubbed. We were blessed with Honey Brown’s company for ten years, until she passed away in February 2012. |
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Book 8: Going To Carolina
I remember being excited to write this book. It did not come from any of my personal experiences, but Carolina Tipp was another one of our imaginary friends—the cousin of Mirisen Zepetto. In the world of our imaginary friends, Carolina originally lived in Connecticut. She went to a really nice Fun House called Raccoon Waters, or maybe it was Clearwater Creek—whichever one it was, it was one of the best Fun Houses in the world. I ended up changing the state Carolina lived in (before I started writing the original series) because I wanted her Fun House to be located in a very calm, serene, nature-esque place, and I thought of Pennsylvania as that kind of place based on my uncle’s woodsy property. |
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Book 9: Showtime Star
I have been in several plays before, but none in which the actors were quite this bad. Some aspects of Allisen’s story check out with my own; for example, when I was ten, I really, really, really wanted one of the main roles in our production of Honk! Jr., but I ended up receiving the much smaller role of a duckling. I was disappointed but did my best anyway. Turkeys Lurking is a fictional play. However, I did not make it up for the purpose of putting it in the Allisen’s Notebooks series. I had come up with the general plot of Turkeys Lurking, as well as the main theme song, many years before—probably when I was around seven or eight. I think Turkeys Lurking was originally a movie, and there was even a Turkeys Lurking 2. Then it became a play when I wrote a different story about a girl in a class play (shortly before I began writing Allisen’s Notebooks). I started writing the actual play at one point in time, but it wasn’t very good and I ended up losing interest. Will I ever write Turkeys Lurking for real? Maybe. It’s not in my short-term plans right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a possibility. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see! |
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Book 10: It's Your Choice
Allisen’s experience of getting her ears pierced is basically the same as mine. I was at the mall with my mom a couple days before my eleventh birthday, and we went to Claire’s and my mom asked me if I wanted to get my ears pierced. I did, so I picked out some pretty turquoise earrings (my December birthstone) and sat in the chair. Everything about how Allisen’s ear-piercing process went is pretty much directly copied from my memory (I kept the description more or less the same as it was in the original paper version). I have never owned gerbils, nor have I ever had the opportunity to name a pet all on my own. We did have a surprise party for my mom’s 40th birthday, but it was planned by my dad and grandparents, not by my siblings and me. I’ve never been part of a group of friends who get together regularly to play a sport. The Domacie/Steven drama originally had a much bigger part in “It’s Your Choice,” and actually in the series as a whole. Domacie Cooce was one of my brother’s imaginary friends from Indiana, and when we moved to New Hampshire and he came to visit, he became really good friends with Mirisen. As time went on, Domacie (who had always been rich and somewhat snobby) became more and more self-centered and obnoxious, and eventually Mirisen met Steven Luquae and wanted to go to dances with him instead of Domacie (our Fun House used to have a lot of dances!). There were always huge problems, like Domacie trying to sneak into the dances even though he wasn’t technically allowed. There were a lot of aspects about Domacie, even in the original paper books, that I realized later on weren’t realistic (such as him living in Indiana and flying out to New Hampshire every time our Fun House had a dance), but I still wanted to include him as a minor character in the series. |
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Book 11: Camp Nature Woods
As a kid, I never went to a sleepaway camp without my family. However, most of Allisen’s experiences at Camp Nature Woods do come from the experiences I’ve had at various camps I’ve been to. In fourth grade, I got to spend three days and nights at a nature center called Bradford Woods, along with all the other fourth, fifth, and sixth graders at my school. We were randomly assigned tables in the dining hall, and we had the Yuck Bucket contest at every meal to cut down on table waste. Our first lunch at Bradford Woods was chicken patties, just like Allisen’s first lunch at her camp. We went on hikes, looked for animal tracks, did team-building activities like the human pyramid, and tried fried dandelions and dandelion pancakes. My friend and I even played with our stuffed animals on our top bunks at night, after coming back from worship time. When I was ten, my mom took my brothers and me to a family camp called Camp Timber Ridge. Camp Timber Ridge had a lake with a rope swing, and a big room where we did crafts while it was raining. Lights-out was at 10, and the way the three bunk beds were set up in each cabin is exactly how I picture the bunk beds in Allisen’s cabin. My experiences from Bradford Woods and Camp Timber Ridge essentially are Allisen’s experiences at camp (although, fortunately for me, the whole part with Endri and Lauren and Beth was entirely made-up). The canoeing part was not in the original version of the story, but I added it to the official version based on something I did at a camp I went to with my American Heritage Girls troupe when I was in high school. Overall, I’d say that “Camp Nature Woods” is probably one of the Allisen’s Notebooks stories that most closely relates to my life! |
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Book 12: Do You See How I See?
I don’t wear glasses and I’ve never gone to an ophthalmologist. The original version of this book was purely awful, mostly because I had no idea what it would be like to get glasses. In the original version, the plot of Allisen needing glasses was completely finished by the 6th entry, which was August 8. She got glasses, she could see, and voila—problem solved. The rest of the book was devoted to Allisen and her family discovering that Harrisson was color-blind. When I was re-writing to make the book publishable, I realized that the color-blindness part didn't work at all. Harrisson was already seven years old, and color-blindness tends to be detected much, much earlier. So I got rid of that aspect (by the way, Harrisson is not color-blind), and made the whole book about Allisen adjusting to her new glasses—which I feel is a lot more interesting and relatable anyway! |
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