Megan McCafferty

Backstreet Boys, Beck, and Barry Manilow

Friday, February 15th, 2008

I made many a mix tape in my day. Especially in late high school and all throughout college. Oh, I loved making mix tapes. There was no put-off-a-term-paper procrastination tactic I enjoyed better than making a mix tape. I agonized over song choices, taped, then re-taped songs that I needed to include, always tried to time it so there were only a few seconds of dead air before the cassette tape clicked off or automatically reversed itself to play Side B.

I made and gave away mix tapes for birthdays, break-ups, goodbyes (during my first two years of college, all my closest friends transferred to other schools…before I eventually did too), parties, no reason at all (like, I would pick songs so the first letters of each title spelled out messages like, YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND, MONICA) though I was not indiscriminate. I wouldn’t exhaust that much energy into making a mix tape for just anybody, like, you really had to earn it. (I remember one of my college suite-mates getting particularly pissy with me when I kept dodging her requests that I make one for her. I was like, “I wouldn’t even know where to start with you. You like Kriss Kross! You told me you don’t get Achtung Baby. How can you not get Achtung Baby?!” Etc.) And I rarely kept copies of said mixes for myself, though I did document the song lists in whatever notebook I was keeping at the time. I love mix tapes, so it’s no surprise that one mix tape (“Last Day in the Hallway”) played a crucial role in the oh-so romantic courtship between an eighteen-year-old me and the sixteen-year-old boy who eventually became my husband.

Anyway, these are the songs for an unnamed mix tape, which were actually burned onto a CD but I still like referring to it as a mix tape for sentimental reasons, despite the advancements in technology and quality. I’m pretty sure I made it for my friend Nancy’s birthday back in 2000. It is very, very millennial.

As I’m typing this, I’m thinking it might be fun to scan and publish other song lists from other mix tapes I made back in the day. This would also serve as a great procrastination tactic because it seems like there’s nothing I love better than the tension between determination and procrastination. The stricter the deadline (say, to write 1,000 words a day) the more ridiculous the distraction (say, tracking down all my mix tape song lists from yesteryear so I can post them here).

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2000 (Second Helpings #11))

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Brainstorming “plot things.”

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2000 (Second Helpings #12)

Monday, February 11th, 2008

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2000 (Second Helpings #11)

Monday, January 28th, 2008

“Sloppy Firsts 2: Electric Boogaloo” and other really bad ideas.

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2000 (Sloppy Firsts #42)

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

I’m often asked if I have any influence on the covers. (I’ve even been asked if I am the model on the covers, though as I get older that question is asked less frequently.) The answer is sort of. For Sloppy Firsts, I provided a color palette, and suggested that the designers create some sort of visual that could be “branded” for future covers, so that when a buyer saw the book, she would recognize it as a Jessica Darling novel. Hence, the striped band at the bottom, a design element that was too successful, I guess, because it is now ubiquitous in YA books (I won’t cite specific titles, just take a walk through the Teen section of any bookstore) which pretty much negates the concept of the “branded” band.

I also suggested that words describing important firsts be superimposed on top of the cover image in an “invisible” embossed font. They nixed that idea.

Here I was brainstorming those firsts…

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2000 (Second Helpings #10)

Friday, January 18th, 2008

This was the first page of a new notebook. I assume this why I included the date as a reference–a practice I pretty much abandoned on page two.

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2000 (Second Helpings #7)

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

More of me trying to figure out what all the characters have been up to since Sloppy Firsts…

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