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"This is a big week for Maya van Wagenen. Just 24 hours before we meet, her very first book hit shelves across the country. She's in New York to appear on The Today Show, do a million interviews, and take part in the publicity whirlwind that accompanies a buzzy release. But unlike most first-time authors, Maya's worried about keeping up with the assignments she's missing back at her high school in Georgia.\n\n\"I actually feel really bad right now because I'm procrastinating on all my homework!\" the 15-year-old admits over tea and sandwiches on the Upper West Side. I tell her she gets a pass, what with promoting her book and all. Oh, and by the way, Popular isn't just any YA tome\u2014it's her 8th grade journal that's been published for all see. Yes, this is a very big week.\n\nAs a middle schooler in a Texas border town, Maya considered herself an outsider. \"I always struggled with making friends and finding confidence,\" she says. \"I felt ostracized and bullied, and it was really hard for me.\" Then she stumbled upon Betty Cornell's Teen-Age Popularity Guide, a 1950s how-to book that her dad picked up at a thrift store before she was even born. She decided to follow the advice\u2014devoting each month of her 8th grade year to different chapters like \"Good Grooming\" and \"Be a Hostess\"\u2014and see if she could, in fact, become popular. Every day she'd take notes on how people responded to her secret efforts (that's right, nobody knew she was conducting this social experiment) and then she'd write fully fleshed-out stories about her experience over the weekend. Spoiler alert: Betty's tips worked, although not necessarily in the way she anticipated.\n\n\"Pushing myself out of my comfort zone and doing things I never thought I'd have the courage to do definitely helped to boost confidence,\" Maya explains. \"I learned a lot about the person I was and wanted to be, and I made friends for the first time in my life. I learned that the kind of popularity based on the hierarchy our school created wasn't real. Reaching out to others and having the courage to stand up for yourself and for other people\u2014that's the kind of popularity that's important. It could change the world.\"\n\nAfter she finished the project, she sent the journal to her family, including an uncle who passed it along to a writer friend who in turn forwarded it to his agent. The agent wanted to sign Maya immediately. It was only a blur from there: Penguin was the first publisher to bite, and Dreamworks snapped up the movie rights months before the book's April release date.\n\nWhile there were tons of people pulling for Maya, her biggest supporter was no doubt Betty Cornell herself. In the book, they connect over the phone, but a face-to-face meeting was inevitable. \"I flew out and stayed with her and her daughter,\" Maya says. \"Betty's exactly like you would expect. She's 87 years old and looks fantastic. She's just a wonderful person\u2014she lives the book with everything she does, and she's been so supportive.\" As icing on the \"vintage wisdom for a modern geek\" cake, Betty's book has been reissued in conjunction with Popular's release.\n\nMaya still adheres to Betty's advice, which means she's gotten used to putting the pearls she donned during the experiment to good use. Today she wears her full set alongside a beaded bracelet that reads \"vegetarian,\" plus jeans, Converse, and a bright pink blazer. She looks every bit the polished part, albeit with her own quirky twist.\n\nAnd while she's riding the high of Popular for the time being, she has something else on her mind: her next book. Besides all that homework she has to contend with when she gets home, she's also writing a novel to round out her two-book deal from Penguin.\n\n\"I'm excited to move on to fiction,\" she says, noting that she doesn't think she'll write another memoir for a while. \"Fiction has always been my first love\u2014it's what I wrote when I was younger, and what I continue to write on the side.\" Her second book is slated to come out just in time for senior year, and while her professional writing duties keep her from extracurriculars, she does find time to indulge in Netflix (she's a fan of Doctor Who, Sherlock, and the original Star Trek) and Facebook (which is where she keeps up with her friends, since she doesn't have a cell phone\u2014by choice).\n\n\"People always ask me, 'Why don't you just homeschool so you have time to work?'\" she says. \"But it's fun, and I want to be a young adult writer! This is my chance to experience high school, so it's a priority.\"\n\nGetting inspiration for a whole new cast of characters is totally sophomore year-appropriate, though now it's time for Popular's subjects\u2014Maya's former classmates, many of whom she hasn't talked to since her family moved to Georgia at the conclusion of the book\u2014to weigh in. \"I think people are a little nervous. The guy I wrote about having a crush on had no idea I was doing a book, so that should be interesting,\" she says with a smile. And then there's that tweet somebody posted, which perfectly sums it all up: \"Hey, remember that girl Maya Van Wagenen from middle school? She wrote a book. We should have been nicer to her.\"__"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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