Thursday, March 21, 2013

The Internet is cool!

Day 21 of 31 at Two Writing Teachers!
After getting dressed this morning, I quickly glanced at my iPod to see who left comments on my blog after I went to bed.

Michelle! She's so nice. :-)

Scroll.

Mandy.  I don't know her!  Ooh, A new person!

Scroll.

Linda Mullaly Hunt.  LINDA MULLALY HUNT?!?!  Seriously?!  I check the name again to make sure my eyes aren't deceiving me in the dimness.


Oh. My. Gosh. Linda. Mullaly. Hunt.  My body does a funny little jumping dance, seemingly without instructions from my brain.  An author left me a comment!  A real author of a real novel, not even a teacher-author-blogger like Ruth or Stacey or Lee Ann!  (Not that they aren't amazing enough, but this is a whole new level of amazing!)

oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh!
A small squeal escapes from my lips.  I glance at Husband's sweet, peaceful figure cozily curled under the blankets.  He doesn't move.  My eyes shift over to the clock: still 20 minutes until it's time to wake him up.  I'm going to burst before 20 minutes have passed!  I squeal again, on purpose this time.  He groggily rolls over and squints at me with sleepy eyes.

"Honey!  You know when I posted about my booktalk in class the other day?  THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOK left me a comment on my post!!!  She read it and she liked it and she said she learned from it!!!"  My words trip over themselves as I breathlessly read him the whole comment.

I couldn't wait to get to school and show my students.  They didn't exactly jump up and down, but they thought it was pretty cool.  (They also got quite a kick out of how excited I was.  Nothing wrong with letting them see me delighting in my reading and writing life!)  We also had fun watching the book trailer she recommended.

After school, I got on Twitter to tweet about my exciting comment from a real author.  While composing my tweet, I searched for Lynda so I could cite her in the tweet.  Curious to see what she tweets about, I looked through her recent tweets and almost stopped breathing when I saw this:

Not only did she comment on my post, she tweeted about it!!!
Could this get any better?!

I read a book, I shared it with my students, and I wrote about it.  Five or ten years ago, that would have been the end of it.  Thanks to technology, the book's author read what I wrote, wrote back to me, and shared my writing with people she knows.  She learned about how teachers share books with students, and I feel like I met a rock star.  The Internet is so cool!

5 comments:

  1. That is so cool! I know exactly what you mean. Same thing happen to me but it was a professional book author (also teacher). Husbands just don't get the excitement of seeing someone you admire respond.

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  2. OK. So this is WAAAAAYYYYYY cool! I would have been jumping up and down too! I'd be posting the pictures of the tweet and comment!

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  3. So, I get to say it too: This is so-o-o-o cool, Jennifer. And you were doing exactly what you thought was good to do. Time to be rewarded for sure! I'm so happy for you. Linda Mullaly Hunt is a wonderful author & now I think she's even better than I thought before. The book is marvelous (as we know). Keep grinning & jumping up & down!

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  4. Okay, Jennifer--now, seriously. You are amazing. Just delightful. If CT and OH weren't so far away, I'd love to have coffee with you.

    It isn't that you wrote about me (Actually, that kind of just seriously floors me. I mean, this is so, so sweet). It's that, even though I don't know you, I can somehow hear your voice in my head. I can feel you smiling. I doubled over laughing at the description of you waking your husband--because I would do the SAME thing.

    Wow - how *incredibly lucky* your students are to spend their days with someone who has such a light and enthusiasm for books--and, more importantly, LIFE! If Mrs. Murphy were a real person, she'd say the same thing. :-) You are a gem, Jennifer--and I really hope our paths cross in the real world someday.

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    Replies
    1. Wow Lynda, thank you so much for taking the time to read my blog posts and leave these incredibly kind, thoughtful comments. I loved your book, but now I can see that you are an amazing person in addition to being an amazing writer!

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