exclusive author notes - spoiler alert!
On this page, I give away information about how I wrote 7th Grade with My Fabulous Friends, My New Neighbors, & 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" 13-24 when I was thirteen and fourteen 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 13: Middle of the School
Here’s something funny: I never went to middle school. Like, at all. I was homeschooled during sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. So I never had the “transitioning to middle school” experience the way most kids do. I did, however, have the “transitioning from being homeschooled to being a twelve-year-old starting ninth grade at a public high school with over 2,000 kids” experience. It was… interesting. I liked some aspects of high school. My teachers were nice (I never had anyone like Mrs. Engel), and I made a few friends in my classes. I didn’t like the getting-up-early part or the awful behavior of some of my classmates. Not much of Allisen’s first month of middle school was consciously based off of my first month of high school—her experiences are her own. However, the reason I gave Learner’s Academy a block schedule (four classes during first semester, then switch to four different classes for the second semester) is because that was what my high school used, and therefore what I was familiar with. The idea of having seven classes in one day just seemed bizarre to me! (Which is funny, because now that I’ve worked at a middle school with the full-year, seven-class-a-day schedule, it’s the block schedule that seems weird! I had already planned out what “Freaky Friendships” would be about when I wrote “Middle of the School”, so even in the original version, I was able to plan it out with Allisen meeting Vee and her gang at the end of this book, and being thrilled that she finally had friends. |
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Book 14: Freaky Friendships
I never hung out with anyone like Vee and her gang, but I’d always read books where the main character was hanging out with fake friends/mean girls/people who were trying to change her. I guess that was my inspiration for “Freaky Friendships.” I always liked the parts in books where the main character stood up to those people and told them, “You know what? I don’t care if I don’t fit in. I don’t care if you don’t like me. I’m going to do what I know is right, and I’m going to just be me.” I hate it when people change who they are in an attempt to make others like them, or when they start doing things that are wrong just so they can fit in. Although I’ve never been in the kind of situations Allisen finds herself in during “Freaky Friendships,” I imagine that I would act similarly to how she acts—making excuses in the beginning, not going along with the bad behavior but not really saying anything against it either, and then finally leaving for good when they went too far. I wanted Allisen’s departure from the group to be firm and final, letting Vee and her girls know that their behavior was not okay with her, and that she would not be spending any more time with them. |
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Book 15: Giving Thanks for Thanksgiving
This book has an interesting story. I don’t think I had a plot idea for it until I started writing it, which might explain why the original version was pretty bad. The central plot of the original story was that Allisen, Kim, and Shevea signed up to volunteer at the soup kitchen without consulting their parents. Then Allisen realized that one of the days they'd signed up to work was Mirisen's birthday! Shevea realized that that day was also her mom's birthday, and Kim realized that she had to babysit her sister that day. Rather than confessing to their parents that they'd signed up to work that day, or canceling with the soup kitchen, they sneaked out of their houses and to the soup kitchen, where they served for a couple hours and got back home without anyone really noticing that they were gone. They eventually told their parents on Thanksgiving, and their parents basically said, "Oh, that's great, honey. Let's all go!" and they all went and served whole turkeys to people at the soup kitchen. When it came time to edit and re-write for publication, I knew that some parts of the story had to go. But I was still trying to keep with the “we didn’t tell our parents” plot, and it wasn’t working. I was getting frustrated because I didn’t like the story, but I also didn’t know how to change it so I would like it better. I finally just pounded out a sloppy copy, then finished the rest of 7thGrade with my Fabulous Friends, My New Neighbors, & Me, and then went back and re-wrote “Giving Thanks for Thanksgiving.” I realized that the “we didn’t tell our parents” plot needed to go, and decided that the story should focus on Allisen getting undesirable jobs, with a sub-plot of Shevea hiding the fact that she used to eat at the soup kitchen. Since I had volunteered at a soup kitchen by the time I wrote the published version (but not the original paper version), I knew what kinds of tasks Allisen and her friends may be asked to do, and I knew that they would not be serving entire turkeys to people! |
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Book 16: Many Miracles
My church has a Christmas pageant every year, and like at Allisen’s church, each grade has a specific role that they play. At my church, the roles of Mary, Joseph, the Angel of the Lord, and six shepherds are randomly drawn from the sixth-grade class, just like how the speaking roles at Allisen’s church were drawn from the seventh and eighth grade class (although in the original paper version of this story, people had to audition for those parts). I probably did, consciously or subconsciously, base Allisen’s Christmas pageant off of the one at my church. I’m sure that’s where I got the idea, at least. In the original version, Jack, Kim, and Shevea all randomly showed up at Allisen’s church on the same day, and Jack and Kim decided to join the pageant. I changed that for the final version because I decided it wasn’t realistic. The parts about the grandparents not being able to come, and everybody getting sick—those were just to add more problems to the story, since the title is “Many Miracles.” But it does seem like people in my family often get sick around Christmastime! |
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Book 17: A Mystery To Solve
I loved mystery books when I was little. My favorite series was The Boxcar Children, and I also enjoyed Nancy Drew and Cam Jansen. When I was nine, I started writing my own mystery series about a girl named Doylie Dot. Those stories are very funny to read now. Allisen’s Notebooks is not a mystery series, of course, but I still thought it would be interesting to include one mini-mystery in the series. So I invented the plot about the grandma’s pillow going missing. The original version of this story was essentially the same as how it turned out in the published version. |
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Book 18: Happy Hearts
I’ve never been to a real, actual school dance. That would explain why, in the original versions of the Allisen’s Notebooks, every single school dance was large and lavish, with people actually dancing in pairs. Basically my only concept of a school dance was the Yule Ball from Harry Potter. I had to edit the dance scenes later on to make them more casual and middle-school-ish. When I was first writing the series, this story was the first time Stivre was ever mentioned. I made him up solely as someone for Kim to have a crush on. When I started editing the stories to publish them, I went back and made sure he was mentioned before. Originally, there was an additional plot aspect of this story, in which Mirisen was going to start attending Learner’s Academy and following Allisen around to all of her classes. I removed that because it didn’t fit or even make a lot of sense. |
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Book 19: Friends Forever
I remember being SO excited to write this story. I had looked forward to this plot for the longest time. It’s not based on something that ever happened to me. It is kind of based on a book from the Amazing Days of Abby Hayes series, in which the main character’s moved-away best friend comes back for a visit and has totally changed. I don’t know why, but stories like that were always interesting to me. I think something I like about this story is that even though Emalie Maye has changed, she’s still a nice person and she still enjoys spending time with Allisen. You and your friends won’t always like all the same things, and you’ll change as people due to your life circumstances and what you’ve experienced. But often, when it comes to friendship, there’s still common ground to fall back on. You still have the memories of what made you friends in the first place. And chances are, you and your friend still like some of the same things. |
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Book 20: A Vacation To Remember
This story is somewhat based on an actual vacation I took, although my vacation was nowhere near as messed-up as Allisen’s. The Christmas I was nine, my mom, brothers and I were supposed to fly from Indiana, where we lived, to New Hampshire, where my grandparents lived. We had a connecting flight in Washington, D.C. Except… due to weather conditions, once we actually got to D.C., our connecting flight was canceled. No flights were going out until the morning. My mom wasn’t looking forward to spending the night at the airport with a 9-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a 1-year-old. Fortunately, someone with a van offered to take us to a nearby hotel. I remember arriving at the hotel at 12:04 in the morning. My mom let my 6-year-old brother and me each pick a frozen treat from the vending machine in the lobby, and then we went to bed. The next day we took a shuttle bus to the airport (that was exciting!) and were then able to get our connecting flight into Boston. My grandfather came to pick us up, and we were all excited, except… our luggage was missing. We waited forever in the terminal for it, and then we found out it had been sent on the wrong plane. We went to my grandparents’ house without it and someone went back the next day to pick it up. We stayed at my grandparents’ house for a few days, and were supposed to head back home on New Year’s Eve. But guess what--that flight ended up getting canceled too, because there was too much fog on the runway! We went back to my grandparents’ house and celebrated the New Year with them. The next morning, we got up super early to get on the new flight that we’d managed to get tickets for. Our ticket-number seats were spread out all over the plane—me in the front, my baby brother in the back, my mom and 6-year-old brother at different points in the middle. That obviously wasn’t going to work, so we talked with some people and ended up with three seats right next to each other and one in the row directly behind them. We had a connecting flight in Chicago, and I don’t think anything was messed up about that one. Finally, we made it to Indianapolis, where my dad picked us up and brought us home. It made a very interesting story to tell! |
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Book 21: A Time of Change
Ah, moving. By the time I wrote this book, moving had become a normal facet of my life, and I looked at it as an adventure. But that’s not how I always thought of it. I was ten when my parents put my childhood home on the market. The idea of moving had been vaguely thrown around for a couple years already, but when my parents put the house up for sale, the idea became real. And when we got an offer on August 15 that said we had to be out of the house by September 30, the idea of moving became super real. I did NOT want to move. I’d lived in the same house my entire life, and I loved it—the downstairs bedroom my brother and I shared, the long hallway we could run up and down, the huge upstairs living room where we did gymnastics, the enormous backyard with our swing set and tree fort and rope swings and trampoline. Our raspberry bushes by the detached garage. All the friendly trees that I had come to attach personalities to over the years. The place where we’d buried my cat Abby when she got hit by a car. This was the only home I’d ever known, and I didn’t want to live anywhere else. My brother and I never did any of the destructive things Allisen and her siblings did. However, we were just as disgruntled as they were about having to clean up for showings. And I do remember, on one of our last nights at that house, lying on cots on our bedroom floor and saying stuff like, “The new people walk in and go to use the bathroom, and we tell them, ‘Nope! You bought the house—not the toilet!’” and “The new people come and we tell them they have to build a bridge from the road to the front door, because ‘you bought the house, not the yard!’” I also wrote a song about how much I didn’t want to move. |
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Book 22: New To Get Used To
…We moved anyway, of course. At first, we put all of our stuff in storage and went to live with my grandparents. I missed my old house, but I had fun getting to see Grammy and Grampa every day, and making friends in their neighborhood (our old road had been a dead end with a couple teenagers but no younger kids). And speaking of friends in the neighborhood, Allisen’s awesome neighborhood full of kids who all hang out together regardless of age is strongly based on my grandparents’ neighborhood. Throughout the years, my brothers and I always had a big group of neighborhood friends to play with. They taught us Ghost in the Graveyard. We taught them Dog Pound, a game our dad had made up years ago. We played Capture the Flag, 4-square, Kick-the-Can, Cops and Robbers, and a bunch of games we made up on the spot. And it didn’t matter if you were four, or if you were sixteen, or if you were way older or way younger than everyone else in the group. We were all friends. |
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Book 23: Easy Money
The idea of all the kids in the neighborhood deciding on “summer jobs” was something I made up, not something we ever did in my neighborhood. I have babysat for several different families over the years, but (fortunately) never for anyone quite as awful as Matthias was in the beginning. All of my interactions with parents have been positive, and I’ve never been fired. I quite admire the maturity and perseverance with which Allisen handles her situations throughout this story—if I’d had that job when I was twelve, I probably would have just quit after the first day! |
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Book 24: Pizza Petto/Pete Zepetto
The title of this story came first. It was based on something our imaginary friend Mirisen Zepetto used to say: “You take pizza, you take petto, put ‘em together and what do you get? Pete Zepetto.” Then I had to come up with a plot to go along with the title, so I made up something about how a random pizza place run by Allisen’s dad’s friend was having a special “Pizzas made by kids” campaign, during which all proceeds would go to “charity” (I never specified which charity). I still had the part about Pete getting in trouble and having to move back home and ending up working at the pizza place with Allisen, but in the original version Pete was much more disruptive and crazy, until a girl named Lahchlia started coming and calmed him down (Lahchlia pretty much morphed into Shawnee for the published version). I’ve never worked at a pizza shop, but one of the things my brother and I used to love playing with our Pound Puppies was “Prince Pizza”. A pizza shop in the Pound Puppies’ town would run a camp for all kids between the ages of (here it would vary, depending on which Pound Puppy kids we wanted to be able to go), and those kids would get to work in the restaurant and learn how to make everything—much like Allisen and the other kids get to in “Pizza Petto/Pete Zepetto”. Now that I think about it, that’s probably where I (subconsciously) got the idea for this story in the first place. |
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