Where to Find Me

Hey, all! I'm pretty much stationed over at my Flat-Out Love site from now on... where I am determined to be a better blogger than I've been with this site!

New book

I'm going to have a new book out soon called FLAT-OUT LOVE. (Check out the beginnings of the website.) Working on a cover now, but it should be ready for download on Amazon within the next few weeks. So exciting!  It features a college freshman, Julie, and is a great crossover read for all ages. Here's the book description:

Flat-Out Love is a warm and witty novel of family love and dysfunction, deep heartache and raw vulnerability, with a bit of mystery and one whopping, knock-you-to-your-knees romance. 

Something is seriously off in the Watkins home.  And Julie Seagle, college freshman, small-town Ohio transplant, and the newest resident of this Boston house, is determined to get to the bottom of it.

When Julie’s off-campus housing falls through, her mother’s old college roommate, Erin Watkins, invites her to move in. The parents, Erin and Roger, are welcoming, but emotionally distant and academically driven to eccentric extremes. The middle child, Matt, is an MIT tech geek with a sweet side … and the social skills of a spool of USB cable. The youngest, Celeste, is a frighteningly bright but freakishly fastidious 13-year-old who hauls around a life-sized cardboard cutout of her oldest brother almost everywhere she goes.

And there’s that oldest brother, Finn: funny, gorgeous, smart, sensitive, almost emotionally available. Geographically? Definitely unavailable. That’s because Finn is traveling the world and surfacing only for random Facebook chats, e-mails, and status updates. Before long, through late-night exchanges of disembodied text, he begins to stir something tender and silly and maybe even a little bit sexy in Julie’s suddenly lonesome soul.

To Julie, the emotionally scrambled members of the Watkins family add up to something that … well … doesn’t quite add up. Not until she forces a buried secret to the surface, eliciting a dramatic confrontation that threatens to tear the fragile Watkins family apart, does she get her answer.

New Review

The lovely Keira over at Literature Young Adult Fiction has given Relatively Famous a very nice review. Please stop by the site to check it out!

Snowstrosity.

Holy cow, has it been snowing. Non-stop all day. I've shoveled twice, and miraculously managed not to swear when I found that the plows had left TWO FEET at the end of my previously perfectly shoveled driveway. I don't mind looking out into the back yard, where the snow looks beautiful on the trees. But the front? All I see is masses of white nuisance that I will have to lift and carry to a suitable dumping area. But I do get to have cocoa after I shovel. So that's a plus, right? All of these pictures are from ten o'clock this morning, before the additional snowfall. Ugh.

Product Spotlight

I'm hooked. I will never use any other serum in my hair besides Rusk Sheer Brilliance. Generally speaking, I refuse to pay out the nose for products, and this stuff did not make me break my promise. I paid a little over $10 at drugstore.com, and you truly only need a dime sized amount, so this should last me a while. Trust me, I have thick hair and I'm used to needing twice the recommended product amount. I use this after I blow dry and my hair feels like silk. Silk, I tell ya! No frizzies, no flyaways, and everything settles in perfectly even after a super hot blow dry and workout with the flatiron. Somehow this isn't greasy, and let me tell you that nothing irks me more than having put in a good thirty minutes styling my hair only to have the results ruined by some oily shine product.

"I Eat Words" Questions

Thank you to I Eat Words for having me over and asking such fun questions. (Isn't that the best name for a book blog???) Here's a copy of the post:

1. Where did the idea of having a famous father come from? 

I’m not sure, to be honest. It’s not so much that I wanted to write about a famous father, but more that I wanted to write about the sharp disconnect between a father and daughter. It was really the idea of exploring a new and complicated relationship that appealed to me. Dani’s father, Mark, is so initially narcissistic and rather unlikeable, that writing about his development as he begins to rediscover his former, more compassionate and appealing side was really the draw. I liked the dichotomy of the superficial Hollywood backdrop vs. the deeper, complex relationships and coming-of-age issues.

2. Do you see a lot of yourself in Dani?

Parts of her, yes. I think that we’re both pretty inclined to take people at face value initially. Dani, despite her reservations about her father (based on what she knows about him through tabloid news stories and rather crummy action movies), she is willing to give him a chance. She puts herself out there for him and allows herself to be vulnerable. I do the same thing. The hitch is that you can get hurt pretty deeply, the risks outweigh the reward of making a really great connection with someone.

3. Can we expect a sequel? 

I’d love to do a sequel. I have a ton of ideas for what might happen in the next book, but it really depends on sales. I’ll have to figure out if it makes financial sense to devote the time to another. It would be really fun to see what happens as Dani, Mark, and Leila settle into their new lives… So, I don’t know. We’ll see!

4. Do you have any tips or suggestions for other authors out there?

Write, write, write. It sounds obvious, but the more that you write, the better you’ll be. Show your work to people—lots of people—and ask for honest feedback. I always instruct my volunteer readers to please tell me what they don’t like, if a character does something “off,” if a scene is boring/too fast/not exciting/not funny/generally crummy. Hearing that your book is “perfect” is wonderful, but is not, frankly, all that helpful. Honesty is what helps. It can be very hard to see your story objectively, and sometimes scenes or characters don’t read the way that you’ve envisioned them in your head. A fresh perspective can make all the difference because others can see what you can’t. So be open to criticism. That’s how you learn.

The other key to writing is to learn how to use that DEL button. You just have to edit what you write. Nobody gets it right the first time. Cutting out paragraphs, or even chapters, that you’ve slaved over is brutal. I understand. You might cry. You might get heartburn. I can’t predict what will happen to you (I tend to fling myself across the bed and wail), but you still have to do it. Getting rid of unnecessary words and scenes, etc. will make your writing tighter and your story stronger. You don’t need thousands of adverbs and adjectives cluttering up your pages when clear and simple can do what you need. And just because you planned on having scene X doesn’t mean that you can’t just cut the whole thing out if it’s unnecessary. Everything that you write should be there for a reason. If you can’t find one, delete it.

5. What can we expect from you in the future?

My agent is shopping a manuscript for me right now, called Falling For Him. The main character is starting her freshman year of college in Boston, and when her dorm housing falls through, she moves in with family friends. She develops an online romance with the eldest brother, who is away traveling, and gets deeply enmeshed with the rest of the family, including the particularly complicated daughter and her parentified older brother. There is plenty of humor and a bit of a mystery thrown in, but mostly the story is a character study of this young woman and her relationship with a very dysfunctional (but loveable) family. Plus, there is a bang-up romance that has made all of my test-readers cry. Yay! I love making people cry. Kidding, kidding…

I’m just about to start outlining another book that I’ve been mentally tossing around for a few months. I tend to procrastinate getting my ideas down into something resembling organized thought, but I’m hoping that within the next few weeks an actual plot will appear in a file on my computer.

Guest Post over at Burning Impossibly Bright

I'm blabbering on over at Burning Impossibly Bright about New Year's Resolutions. Ambur has been so wonderful to me and an enthusiastic supporter of RELATIVELY FAMOUS. Thank you! Here is a copy of that post, but please stop by her site and check out all of her wonderful reviews.

A New Year, A New Set of Ramblings

It’s a new year. Ugh. All this pressure to turn ourselves into better people via lofty resolutions? Yeah, I don’t think so. That sounds like too much work. Instead of “resolutions,” I prefer to go with “absolutions.” I will absolve myself of guilt for looking forward to so many less-than-honorable upcoming events of 2011. Like the fact the Britney Spears has a new album coming out. Seriously, I’m practically peeing with excitement. Although this is not nearly as exciting as the time that she shaved her head, because that was ridiculously entertaining. I mean, in a sad, mentally unstable, scary way. But nonetheless… it was awesome. I still dream about it… the way her eyes bugged out of her head as she wielded the electric razor, flashing her new tattoo all over the place… Bliss! Oh, so maybe there will be an equally thrilling celebrity scandal this year! Maybe Khloe Kardashian will shave her head next. Or beat up Kim and Kourtney. Or start spelling her name with a “C” the way it should be because she has finally had enough. She’d have a spectacular breakdown, yes? So I absolve myself of any delight that I might take in any celebrity firestorm.

“American Idol” is starting soon. I’m gonna watch. I know, I know. It’s a tragedy, but I don’t care. It’s the only reality show that I can’t quit. Jennifer Lopez is so hideously annoying, and her singing makes my ears bleed, but both of these factors mean that I will not be able to tear myself away from this disaster. (Side note: Was “Jenny From the Block” not the most annoying, self-serving song ever? “Hi, I make millions per year for being an idiot, but I can tie a rag on my head, throw on some big ol’ hoop earrings, and pretend that I’m just a gal off the streets!” Barf.) And Steven Tyler is… Well, look, he’s Steven f’ing Tyler. I just have to see how he ended up on this show. So, there. I will not feel badly about myself for cranking up the volume while watching AI.

Also, despite getting my coveted Wii Fit, I will not hate myself if I do not workout seven days a week. Or even five days. Or four. Fine, four would be smart, but setting goals only sets one up for failure.

I want to try to blog more, but the world will not come to an end if I don’t. Author Heather Webber has the right idea by doing short daily blog post. If I weren’t so lazy, I might be able to muster up the wherewithal to get this done. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, but I won’t resolve to this. Speaking of Heather, I am totally looking forward to the third book in her Lucy Valentine series, Absolutely, Positively. Lucy Valentine brings psychic powers to her job at her parents’ matchmaking business.  I probably have some sort of writer crush on Heather, but I honestly adore everything she writes, and this series in particular is so adorable and perfect for all ages. Romance, mystery, charming characters, paranormal elements (done very well!), and plenty of humor. Anyhow, she does everything right, so I should model my blog behavior after her.

Other guilt-inducing behaviors that I will absolve myself of:

-Eating chips with salsa and guacamole as a meal.

-Shoveling the bare minimum amount of snow to just squeeze the car out of the driveway and then fretting that the neighbors think that I’m a lazy jerk who does not care that her driveway looks wretched. Tough. Shoveling stinks, and I usually cry at least once while hacking away at a snowplowed pile of ice chunks. Bare. Minimum. And I will be proud of that.

-Reheating the same cup of coffee thirty times in a day. I like doing this. Yes, it’s gross, but I find it comforting for some reason. Sue me.

-Checking my Amazon sales numbers 56 times a day. Pathetic, yes? Go ahead. Ask anyone who has self-published and they’ll tell you the same thing. We’re all addicts. I like knowing that on January 1^st I sold three copies of Facebooking Rick Springfield, one copy of Relatively Famous, and two copies of What the Kid Says. It’s fun. Traditional publishing doesn’t give you that minute-by-minute information, so we are all glued to our accounts hoping for big numbers. Um, not that those are terribly big numbers… but one can hope.  I won’t be embarrassed about my obsessive logging in.

-On a slightly more serious note: Being a slow writer. It takes me a long time to plan out a book, and an especially long time to write the first third. I’m slow and methodical, and I like to write cleanly. I envy writers that can whip out a book in two or three months, but I have to accept that I just don’t roll that way. When I really get into the book and have the feel and pace down, I can crank it out like nobody’s business. But the early stages for me are dreadfully slow, and I have to stop beating myself up about that. Right now I have a book idea that’s been stewing in my head for quite some time, and it’s finally ready for me to really map it out. I’m simply not going to rush myself. It will take however long it takes.

In the meantime I will be busy absolving myself of my other sins. Now, pass the salsa…