On juggling professional identities...and a COVER REVEAL for KEEPING PACE!

Here’s the top left corner of KEEPING PACE’s cover. Read on to see the rest after some back-to-teaching musings!

My two professional identities–teacher and writer–have always felt deeply connected. I grew up thinking of myself as a reader, but not a writer. Not a real writer, anyway. I was convinced that I knew how to write essays and term papers, but nothing that required true creativity . . . until I became a middle school teacher and found myself inspired for the first time to try writing fiction. 

I started drafting a middle grade novel during the summer after my first year of teaching, and then for several years after that, I wrote and studied writing craft while I also taught. There were times–like when grades and comments were due–when I didn’t write at all. And then there were summers, when I’d write all day every day. But for the most part, my teaching and writing coexisted and fed each other. I was a better teacher of reading and writing because I was reading and writing so much myself. I was a better writer of middle grade fiction because I spent my days with middle school kids.

Even though these two parts of myself feel fundamentally intertwined, I’ve never actually been a published author and a classroom teacher at the same time . . . until now. 

My first book sold just before my tenth year of teaching. By the time it came out, I’d made the decision to stop teaching for a while so I could focus on being an author and a new mom. Now, six years later, I’m back in the classroom, trying to figure out how to balance three jobs that are very important to me: mom, teacher, and writer/author. Or maybe four, if I separate the writer part that involves dreaming up, drafting, and revising stories from the author part that’s all about promoting those stories once they become books. It’s definitely a dance, as fellow mom-teacher-author Lorien Lawrence said it would be when I asked her how she manages everything, and it’ll probably take me a while to learn all the steps.

The week before last, on the Thursday of the second full week of school, I sat down at my desk when the sixth graders were all out at a special, thinking maybe I was starting to get the hang of this schedule and I could bang out a lesson plan for the next day before the school day ended instead of doing it late at night after everything else.  But then I noticed an email, sent fifteen minutes earlier, from a librarian I was supposed to be on a Zoom call with to talk about details for an upcoming school visit I’m doing as an author. My author Google calendar hadn’t synced with the school one, so none of my reminders had come through and I’d completely forgotten. 

I was so embarrassed and upset with myself. But the librarian was available to get on the call late, and we talked about everything we needed to talk about (even though the sixth graders came running back upstairs toward the end, loud and exuberant, wanting to know who I was talking to and why). It was completely chaotic, but it was okay.

Another thing I wasn’t fully prepared for is that a few of my students have chosen to read my books. One has been reading Coming Up Short, one is reading Up for Air, and another–who already finished Up for Air–is now on to Saint Ivy. It feels way too awkward to conference with them about what they’re reading when they’re reading a book that literally came from inside my brain. But still: pretty cool. The other day, for just a moment, I imagined that a younger version of me, who poured her heart into three books that went out on submission to editors and didn’t sell, could look out from her spot at the front of the classroom and see actual students reading my actual published books, and I felt overwhelmed with pride and gratitude. 

(Granted, I haven’t done any writing since my first inservice days began in August, so I’m going to have figure out how to manage to do that from time to time if I want to publish any more books after the next one . . . but hopefully I’ll figure that part out soon?)

Another student recently asked me if they’re all going to get free copies of Keeping Pace when it comes out in April, and his mostly joking question made me realize how excited I am to get to launch a book for middle school readers while actively teaching middle school. Obviously, a new book’s release is one of the most exciting parts of being an author . . . but it can also feel very stressful and isolating. For me, it’s easy to get stuck inside my own head and let my worries and disappointments drown out some of the happiest bits in the weeks before a new book’s publication. I think it’s going to be grounding to continue to be around kids when Keeping Pace comes out, and I can’t wait to share all the fun parts with my students and be reminded of how cool it truly is to be publishing a new book.

And speaking of the fun parts, Keeping Pace now has a final cover that I get to share with you all right now. Tada!

The art is by Eda Kaban, and the design is by Deena Micah Fleming. I love the font, the background, and the tagline. I love that the cover coordinates with the covers of Up for Air and Coming Up Short, my other sports-related stories. And I love that both my main character Grace and her former-best-friend-turned-academic-nemesis-turned-unlikely-running-partner, Jonah, are pictured. They both have such a special place in my heart, and I can’t wait for you to meet these sweet, awkward, funny, excessively competitive overachievers.

The full book description below, and you can find preorder links here and add the book on Goodreads here.

Thank you, as always, for reading, and I hope that if your September has been chaotic, it’s mostly been the joyful, okay kind of chaos like mine.

Love, Laurie

A poignant middle-grade novel about friends-turned-rivals training for a half-marathon—and rethinking what it means to win and what they mean to each other

Grace Eller has spent most of middle school working toward one goal: beating her former friend Jonah Perkins’s GPA so she can be the best student in her class. But when Jonah beats her for eighth grade top scholar and then announces he’s switching schools for ninth grade, it feels like none of Grace’s academic accomplishments have really mattered. They weren’t enough to win—or to impress her dad. And the summer looms over her head. With nothing planned and no more goals or checklists, she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be working toward.

Eager for a chance to even the score with Jonah, she signs up for the Labor Day half-marathon that she and Jonah used to talk about running together someday. Maybe if she can beat Jonah on race day, she’ll feel OK again. But as she begins training with Jonah and checking off a new list of summer goals, she starts to expand her ideas of what—and who—really matters.

Engaging and heartfelt, Keeping Pace is about wanting to win at all costs—and having to learn how to fail.