The Students At Frontier High School

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My fellow author buddy, Jeff Schober, who is a teacher at Frontier High School has me by every once in awhile to do a little talk and read from my book In Real Life.

On Tuesday, I swung by on a quick break to hold court for one of his classes.

I love when Jeff calls me for a number of different reasons:

1). We get a chance to spend a few moments talking about writing and the horror stories about the publishing companies. We don't spend much time on the publishing end of it...we both enjoy the writing process too much to gripe about it for more than a moment.

2). I get to meet his students. Jeff's class is always ready to listen and we share a few moments together. I love getting the look from students who are interested in the process and since I love attention...we all benefit. That's a good-looking class there, right? They were great!

3). I get to go back to my roots a little. There's always a question about what made me interested in writing and I get to talk about the love of reading. My beautiful wife and tremendous kids aren't all that fascinated with the right word choice...so talking about the early books is great.

4). I get to read from In Real Life. Jeff introduced me by telling the class that he read the book in one sitting. That's a great compliment for any writer and I was always proud of the work I did on that book. It never got enough play because the book was released on September 10, 2001. There were a few problems with that release date including what happened the next day, and the fact that Jake got sick just a few weeks later.

So it was a forgotten book.

I read the chapter The Ugliest Girl of All-Time. It's a sweet story about young love. It's a story that always made me proud for having written it.

As I read it I laughed at my own word choices.

Which may sound a little weird, but I had not remembered it all that well. It had been at least a few years since I read it.

The story ended just as the bell rang to end the class so I didn't get much time to say thanks to Jeff or the class.

But I'm grateful to all who were there.

And that's why you write, people!

It's all summed up in a half-hour window of being able to talk about writing!

I'm thinking of mentioning it to the wife and kids but I already know their response:

"You're a geek!"

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