When I was in eighth grade, I wrote a short story about a black-eyed chickadee that flew into the New York City apartment of a lonely old woman and changed her life. I had written stories before, based on characters I had read about in books, but this was the first one that was original. I remember feeling extremely satisfied and incredibly powerful.

I still feel powerful when I write, whether I’m composing a 750-word column about women’s tennis or putting the finishing touches on a book. I even get excited about a single good sentence. A few years back, as Editor in Chief of the Scholastic Children’s Dictionary, I was responsible for writing many of the sample sentences, which show how an entry word is used. Those sample sentences were my creative outlet from the daily grind of editing definitions. Alice plays a mean game of baseball (for the word mean). The shrill blast of the whistle signaled the beginning of the race (for the word shrill). The best sample sentence could be the beginning of its own story.

Writing has been a big part of every job I’ve had, and it’s enabled me to quit some of those jobs and work from home fulltime. Besides my books, I’ve written for newspapers, magazines, TV, textbooks, and the Internet, for kids and adults, both fiction and non-fiction. Here are a few samples of the work I’ve done in recent years.

In college I studied women’s history, so I was thrilled to be asked to write an article for 33 Things Every Girls Should Know About Women’s History, edited by Tonya Bolden (Crown Books, 2002). The book is a terrific collection of essays, profiles, historic documents, and art highlighting women’s contributions to U.S. history. My article is called, “Who Was First, and Why It Matters.” Click on the cover to learn more about the book, or to order it.

I also contributed to Game Face: What Does a Female Athlete Look Like? by Jane Gottesman (Random House, 2001), the companion book to a museum exhibit of photographs showing girls and women playing sports. I wrote the “Snapshots from Women’s Sports History” portion of the book, as well as a short section called “Groupies,” in which I recall my travels as a tennis fan. Click on the cover to learn more about Game Face, or to order it.

From 1999 to 2000, I wrote a bi-weekly column about women’s sports for WeSweat.com (later OxygenSports.com), a Web site of Oxygen Media. You can read some of my columns by clicking on the titles.

Dainty but Dynamite (Oxygen Sports, 2000)
Honoring Martina (Oxygen Sports, 2000)
10 Events That Shaped Women’s Sports (Oxygen Sports, 1999)

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