New Girl on the Blog!

I generally have bad associations with being the new girl. This is mainly because when I moved from St. Louis, Missouri to Oak Park, Illinois in third grade, I had a really hard time making friends. I know now that those girls that turned their noses up at me because I didn’t have the right clothes and was bookish were just snobs and not even really cool anyway. But the fact that it took me about seven years to feel like I’d found my place in my new town left a little bit of a chip on my shoulder and when I walk into new situation, anxiety flares.

However, when it comes to writing and reading related things, I’ve always seemed to fit in right away. When I started school at Columbia College Chicago, I felt comfortable in the Fiction Writing Department immediately, so comfortable in fact that I got a job at the office there and stayed for five years! And when my debut novel I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE sold to a YA publisher and I had to familiarize myself with the YA world, I felt immediately welcomed. I’ve been navigating my new school, if you will, for about a year now, and many of the gals on this blog have been my guides. And now to be invited to hang out with them at the Teen Fiction Café? Well, that invitation pretty much makes up for all those slumber parties I wasn’t invited to in grade school. The people that hang out here are way cooler than the queen bees I went to school with in my book and I know we’ll have wayyyyyyyy better conversations, too.

But I guess now is the time to stand up in front of the class (or in the middle of the café as the case may be here) and tell ya all about myself, right?

So I’m Stephanie Kuehnert and I’m from the Chicago area. My 29^th birthday is coming up on July 13^th. I’m huge into music and the top five most played artists you’ll find on my iPod are Nirvana, Hole, Social Distortion, Rancid, and Against Me!, but I listen to a pretty wide variety of stuff from punk bands to Pink to legends like Johnny Cash. I swoon over Johnny Depp. My favorite TV shows are Grey’s Anatomy and Degrassi (all of them, I grew up on Degrassi Junior High and High, but I’m totally addicted to the Next Generation, too), but I also like the weirder stuff like the X Files and Twin Peaks. I’m obsessed with pirates and Hello Kitty and big sunglasses and vintage dresses and the city of Seattle. I work an office job now, but I really loved bartending.

Oh yeah, and I wrote a book called I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE, which officially comes out from MTV Books on July 8^th, but you can already buy it on amazon now (way to throw me off, amazon!). Here is the basic deal about IWBYJR (ie. what you will read on the back of the book):

A raw, edgy, emotional novel about growing up punk and living to tell.

The Clash. Social Distortion. Dead Kennedys. Patti Smith. The Ramones.

Punk rock is in Emily Black’s blood. Her mother, Louisa, hit the road to follow the incendiary music scene when Emily was four months old and never came back.

Now Emily’s all grown up with a punk band of her own, determined to find the tune that will bring her mother home. Because if Louisa really is following the music, shouldn’t it lead her right back to Emily?

You can find out more about the book on my website.

Now, since I was lovely enough to get an invitation to Teen Fiction Café, I would like to invite all the lovely people that hang out here to my cyber release party for I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE. It is a week long party with lots of fun guests and prizes. That’s right a week long! See the lengths I go to to make an impression! I really want you guys to like me and think I’m fun! Lol! But seriously, here is the invite and I hope to see you at one of my blogs next week!

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