Inspired Friday with Lauren Baratz-Logsted!!!

Lauren Baratz-Logsted is one of the nicest authors I have talked to yet. So, I was ecstatic when she agreed to do an Inspired Friday post! :)

Anyway, Lauren is the author of many books for Young Adults ( Secrets Of My Suburban Life, Me, In Between, and Angel's Choice), Kids (The Sisters Eight series), and Adults ( Crossing The Line, A Little Change of Face, How Nancy Drew Saved My Life, and many others) Also, she is the author of the upcoming Crazy Beautiful, which is already getting a ton of buzz around blogging world. So, without a further ado here's Lauren talking about what inspired her to write Crazy Beautiful!

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Like all writers, including J.K. Rowling, I've had my share of bad luck, although I suspect the bad-luck wand strikes J.K. less frequently than it strikes me. But one thing I am extremely fortunate in is that I never have a shortage of ideas for things to write about. I like to say I see the world in novel-sized chunks and at least a few times a year, I see or hear about something that makes me think, "Ooh, there's a book in that!"

Two winters ago I took my daughter Jackie (one of my coauthors on The Sisters Eight series for young readers, the other being my YA novelist Greg Logsted - quick plug for family project) to see "Beauty & the Beast" on Broadway. A couple of things struck me: 1) that it really is a timeless tale of star-crossed love; and 2) that the reason this is the fairy tale that has translated best into stage and screen adaptations that can be enjoyed by adults as well as younger people is because the principal male is not one-dimensional like all the various Prince Charmings of "Cinderella" or "Snow White" - on the contrary, he's the most developed character in the piece.

So then, as my mind tends to do, I started thinking along the lines of, "How do I take this wonderful old classic and make it new? How do I make it different (and hopefully special) so that readers might not even see the similarities (if I didn't tell them about it in blogs like this)?"

And my mind kept percolating and I kept thinking about how B&B is about two themes - how people assume so much about others based on surface features; and also how love transforms the way we are seen and how we feel about ourselves - that are still of relevance to today's teens. Before you knew it, there was the lead female character, Aurora Belle, a girl as beautiful as her fairy-tale name; and before you knew it, there was the lead male character, Lucius Wolfe, the boy with hooks for hands, the boy who everyone thinks is crazy. And then before I knew it, I was writing a thoroughly contemporary he-said/she-said story and having a blast writing from a first-person male point of view...and...and...and...

And that's my Inspired Story and I'm sticking to it.
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Thanks so much, Lauren!! I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of Crazy Beautiful.

If you are an author and would like to be a part of Inspired Friday, please contact me at laurenscrammedbookshelf@gmail.com.