I love lists (and exclamation points!!) so here's me:

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* I collect PEZ. I even have a Christmas tree covered in PEZ dispensers and rolls of PEZ candy.

* My first job was making ice cream cones at Dairy Queen.  

​* I’m terrible at crossword puzzles, but I try to do one every day.    

* I know an astronaut. (For real! We wrote a book together.)

* I’m married to my high school sweetheart, and we have three kids and two dogs. 

* I have a tiara. I don’t wear it in public though. 'Cause, you know, that would be super weird.  

* I’ve tossed a penny on Ben Franklin’s grave.

* The best birthday gift I ever received was an autographed copy of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee.

* I used to be a Kindergarten teacher. 

* The book SAVVY by Ingrid Law is one of the things that inspired me to pursue my dream to write fiction, so I snuck the title into my first middle grade novel. (If you ask me, I'll tell you the other thing!)

* My  personal record is 18 1/2 roller coasters in one day. It happened June  14, 2010 at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. The 1/2 is a good story that  involves a 400-foot rollback at night. It. Was. Awesome!

*  I’ve been writing professionally for twenty years and sold the very  first article I ever submitted. (Fellow writers, don’t hate me. If it  makes you feel better, I’ve been rejected too many times to count  since.)

* In 2008, Highlights for Children nominated my article “How the Brain Fools the Eye” for an American  Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award. That was  pretty exciting since science was one of my favorite subjects in school.   

* I am a black belt in taekwondo.  

* I have almost a dozen tattoos. My mom knows and thinks they’re cool. 

photo credits: Carmella Van Vleet