Denise Vega interviewed at Bildungsroman.

Denise Vega, by the way, is the author of Fact of Life #31.

The whole interview is worth reading, but this really made me laugh:

Click Here (to Find Out How I Survived Seventh Grade) was one of the first books for kids about blogs or told in blog format. Did you keep a diary during your middle school years?

Not during middle school but I did during high school and college. I've gone back and read them a few times and totally cracked up! I was such a dork. There were several places where I hinted at some big incident or event that had happened to me, saying "there's no way I'll ever forget this so I don't have to say exactly what it is." Well, guess what? I have absolutely no idea what I'm referring to! I encourage anyone who keeps a journal (online or off) to be specific so you can remember events when you look back as an old person like me.

Same here -- except it wasn't that I thought I'd remember everything, it was that I was so worried someone would find and read it (I don't think extreme paranoia was what I was supposed to carry away from Harriet the Spy, but I digress...) that I never wrote about anything that could possibly cause problems later.  Which means, basically, that I wrote about what we had for dinner.  No wonder none of my diaries ever lasted for more than a week.