Today's Thanksgiving, and there are many, many things this incredible and insane year that I am grateful for, but I'm going to keep it short.

I'm thankful:

1) that I am still wildly in love with my best friend, who happens to be my husband. We met when I was 19 and when he asked me to go out with him, I told him "give me a good reason." He's been giving me good reasons to love him for nine years now.

2) that some people love my books. I don't need the whole world to love them. I don't even need a lot of people to love them. But as long as there are some people out there who love them, I'm pretty darn happy.

3) that my kids shout "MAMA!" and hug my knees when I come home from book conferences.

4) that I have found a really wonderful publishing home. I love Scholastic and I'm beyond thrilled to be writing for them for the foreseeable future. Thanks, guys.

5) that I still love writing. That after a year of insanity, of bestsellers lists and face out in bookstores, of foreign rights sales and auctions, of movies and madcap dashes towards revision -- I still love to write. I was really afraid that somewhere along the way, that would change and it would become a business or I'd get burnt out or . . . anything. But no. Whether I have everything or nothing, it turns out that it's still the same: I'm still a writer.