shanders.bsky.social
THE GREAT WHEREVER (forthcoming from Holt, summer ‘26); COMPANY, 2024 winner of the L.A.Times Book Prizes Award for First Fiction: https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/company. Mom, twin mom, lawyer, Silver Springer. She/her
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Wait but…Encanto
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Personally I think the movie is child’s play compared to the book!!
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🎉🎉🎉🎉
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There’s no way I have any tips that you don’t already know, so just here to say good luck!! I enjoy street festivals with kids, but mostly because almost anything is better than house with kids
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Anecdotally everyone I know who got married <30 did and everyone I know who got married >30 didn’t
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This is so kind of you!! It’s a tough needle to thread, but definitely very possible to make yourself available as a helper without crossing any boundaries, and I’m so glad there are people making an effort to do that
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I hope the Strathmore gets tons of wonderful events out of this very stupid turn of events
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Me w/LeVar Burton 😭
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I really can’t believe I have no memory of sweet Sister
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My kids (three boys) have an older sister—not a half-sister; I've checked—who isn't allowed to live with us anymore because her parents (us) thought she was eating too much food. Sister this and sister that
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Omg 😳
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Yes, and I do also tell my kids to expect that if they do stuff that impacts other people, they should expect them to have opinions about it. And sometimes I’ve had to get involved if a parent was correcting my kid in a way that wasn’t appropriate—we just have to be prepared to balance all of it
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I DO feel ok making requests based on unarguable facts—“That stick is hitting him, would you please give him a little more space?” that no parent would be able to take issue with
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Great piece! I definitely fall into the category of not being comfortable correcting others’ kids in the wild because parents do get so touchy about it. (In my experience, the more the kids are ok misbehaving in their parents’ eyesight, the touchier the parents are when they’re corrected.) But…
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Sadly I think feeling pressure to do it to keep up with the Joneses is a misguided version of “wanting” to
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Tacky!!
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Whoops, here is a link to my lecture as a one-off:
one-story.com/product/hist...
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We’ll take a close look at a few of my favorite stories that leverage characters’ sibling rivalries, old friendships, etc. and talk about how we can make our characters 4-dimensional by mining their pasts. Can be done solo or as part of One Story’s ongoing series of craft lectures.
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I hope she enjoys herself tremendously!!
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*talk them out of it, that is
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I already hate it infinitely, and then when I remember that these same influencers wouldn’t bother to do it for their own kids at all if there wasn’t Instagram/TikTok to post it to, my rage quintuples
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There’s a particular moment in the movie (it’s early on) that is so meaningful to me that it’s worth seeing one more time in the theater, even if I have to go by myself, but then where does it end 😭
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Sounds to me like a good enough reason to go one more time!
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Wait. What?? The worst
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I think it’s just a shtick for lots of people, but I can’t wrap my head around it. I went more than 30 years without kids and cannot remember a single instance of giving a shit what other people’s kids were doing at restaurants, much less seething about it online later
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Yeah, many things missing, and the issue is probably quite largely about the limits to how much of a comprehensive answer you can give to that question in an ig comment. Like if someone asked me “why isn’t your house cleaner?” and I only had 100 characters to work with, I’d just say “no time”
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(Also, as I reread the framing of the article I think maybe the author is just using “Gen Z parents” to mean people who have small kids in 2025, which…partial credit)
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So apparently Gen Z starts at 1997–some of them are 28 years old!! Very much old enough to have preschoolers.
Obviously if the Gen Zers in the article are teen parents, though, it’s less surprising that they’re not parenting with perfect selflessness
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That part panicked me too 😓
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I think when an author makes enough money on a single book to retire her entire family, all bets are off for sure
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You can also get books from the library, move them into storage or gift them on when you’re done reading etc…basically despite all the options I think there’s no stopping a person whose wish is to live in a book cocoon for the vibes
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Definitely
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I’m sort of kidding, and these stats do surprise and depress me, but I don’t think it’s just a Gen Z defect. (For the record I’m a curséd Millennial with peers in both generations and nightly reading is standard for basically every parent I know)
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I mean, I know what I said isn’t rocket science, but I do often hear people being like Come onnnn, just name a book you hate!! Just tell me and my readers/listeners!