Inspired Friday with Lara Zielin

Lara Zielin is a 2009 Debutante and author of Dount Days a fabulous novel that was published yesterday!

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“You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?” – Talking Heads

The Story Behind DONUT DAYS

I grew up in a small Wisconsin town, with a fairly typical family, attending a fairly typical school. As we say in the Midwest, “It was fine, just fine, thanks.” But by the time I was a teenager, I couldn’t help but feel something was missing, that I didn’t have some of the answers I was looking for.

I hoped that falling in love for the first time would help answer some of my questions. It did, for a while. Then I got my heart chewed up and spit out, and that was the end of love for a bit. I partied for a while but that didn’t really work either. It made me sick and, worse, made me look ridiculous.

Then, when I was seventeen, I joined the church. The evangelical church, to be specific, which, in case you don’t know, is the really loud, really boisterous kind of church with really friendly people who want to tell you all about their experiences with God.

It was cool. And actually, for a while, it was really cool. I got some answers—at least for the time being. I don’t believe everything now that I believed then, but I at least found people who were willing to talk to me about stuff. What happens when we die? Is there really a god? What is the meaning of life?

It was deep stuff. But it was good. It was exactly what I needed at that time in my life.

When I graduated from Carleton College, I moved to Minneapolis and that’s when things changed. I joined a new church where I saw a completely different side of the evangelical community. Instead being focused on helping people and being kind, the church I attended was focused on money and status. Deceit and corruption were rampant. When questions were raised, the congregation was told to “have faith” and to “trust God.” All this while our donations to the church were misspent, and the pastors lied.

I stopped going to church and eventually moved away from Minneapolis to Michigan. I went to a new church for a while, but I never really became a member. I had a sour taste in my mouth that wasn’t going away. Once again, I was riddled with questions. Why did some people use the church for their own gain? Why did politics and religion seem to always go hand in hand? Was god really as dogmatic as evangelicals made god out to be?

Writing DONUT DAYS became one of the ways I tried to come to terms with what happened at that Minneapolis church. My experiences there became the inspiration for Living Word Redeemer in the novel, because I saw that corruption, deceit, and greed can infiltrate a Christian community as easily as hope and love.

I believe in God, and I believe in the church, but I wrote DONUT DAYS because I also believe that it’s okay to question absolute power, and that no pastor is infallible.

Many teens—and, I’d argue, people in general—have doubts about what they’re seeing, about what they’re being asked to believe. The process through which they figure it all out should be embraced, should be acknowledged. Instead, it’s all too often labeled as doubt, and the person doing the questioning becomes a pariah—not just in the church, but in a variety of contexts. This happens with friendships, with love, with families—all of which are themes in DONUT DAYS. The book might take place against the background of the church, but it’s about topics that are much bigger and broader than that.

I’m still looking for answers, which is a good thing. And it brings me to my last point, which is that, in general, my great hope is that DONUT DAYS encourages people to thoughtfully question what they believe, and why, about everything. Everything. And I hope it makes them crave donuts too, at least a little. Because donuts are fun and yummy and they go good with a glass of milk and a book.

Happy reading!

xoxo

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Thanks so much Lara!! Everyone else be sure to check out Lara's novel. :)

Inspired Friday with Megan Frazer

Megan Frazer is the author Secrets of Truth and Beauty which is now out!

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It was a slim little paperback. Dark cover. A boy on the front standing in the mist holding a football helmet. It was The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. I started reading it in my high school's library, slightly embarrassed because everyone else I knew had already read it years before. See, in those days, reading YA was not done by actual young adults – teens, that is – but by younger kids. And I was a senior! This was a kids book, and I read adult books – The Sun Also Rises, War & Peace, The Handmaid's Tale, that sort of thing. As far as I was concerned, The Chocolate War was a kid's book.

But everyone had read it, and I guess I felt like I was missing out. So I picked it up, started reading, and was instantly drawn in. “They murdered him,” it begins, and the story and I were off and running. It's a book about something seemingly trivial – the annual chocolate sale at a school – but the suffocating politics, not to mention the emotional shifts of day to day life, were palpable.

It was the sequel, though, Beyond the Chocolate War, that really got me. Cormier takes Archie, the villain of the original, and goes into his perspective. He was able to take this despicable character and make him sympathetic. Not pitiable, that would have been easy to do. He was still conniving and manipulative, yet I liked Archie. I wanted to help him, to save him. The language of the novel was tight yet beautiful. The pacing perfect. And it really made me think – not just about the issues, but the language, the characters, the plot development. Reading it worked my mind in the same ways that my favorite novels by adults did.

Robert Cormier opened my eyes to what YA could be. I had wanted to be a writer for many years, but it was after reading these books that I declared that I was going to write smart books for smart teens.

Now if only the path had been so straight. Instead, I got a little diverted. I went to college. My protagonists aged along with me. My senior year I took an honors fiction seminar, and explained to my peers my desire to write for teens, and yet my thesis was not YA at all. Perhaps it was my teacher's nonplussed reaction to my statement, or maybe I just needed to do some other kind of writing, but for several years my writing veered away from young adult.

I wrote two novels – one a mess, one that was decent if not great – and many short stories. Some of the stories were published online or in small journals. But really, I was not getting where I wanted to be. Then in the space of about a week, two people told me I should try YA. So I took the teen section from the mess of a novel and tried shape that into a complete novel. Then I was watching Little Miss Sunshine, and thought, “What would happen if one of those girls got fat?” In that moment Dara was born and my novel, Secrets of Truth & Beauty took off from there.

Robert Cormier was my initial inspiration. He hit me hard in the gut with his prose. It took that second spark, though, the movie, to get me to finally write that smart book for smart teens.

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Thanks so much Megan! :)

Inspired Friday with Suzanne Crowley

Suzanne Crowley is the author of The Stolen One which will be released on June 30.
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I grew up with fascinating stories of my ancestors. There was the bishop on my father’s side who came over to America from England three times in the seventeenth century, outlived several wives, and lived to be a ripe old age of 97! On my mother’s side we can boast of a relative who came over on the Mayflower, an American revolutionary war hero, James Gray, who fought along with his father and uncle for America’s Independence, and a great grandfather who was a rough rider with Teddy Roosevelt.

But it was James Gray’s ancestor, Lady Jane Grey, the tragic queen of nine days, who intrigued me the most as a girl. What little girl wouldn’t be fascinated with a young queen, a teenager, forced to take the throne and marry a boy she did not love? As a teenager myself, I toured the Tower of London and saw the spot where she was beheaded. This was something I didn’t soon forget.

It began a lifelong obsession with the Tudors. I read as many books as I could on the era including anything by Lady Antonia Fraser and Allison Weir. Henry the VIII and his poor wives and later Queen Elizabeth provided endless hours of entertainment. I loved the intrigue, the romance, the riches, the jewels, the heatrtbreak, and in some cases, the horror. It all made my heart go pitter-patter. Somewhere along the way I came across a little bit of mystery that never received more than a sentence or two. But it was enough to plant a seed.

When I received the contract for my first novel, The Very Ordered Existence of Merilee Marvelous, my agent got me a two-book deal. “Do you have an idea for a second book?” she asked me on the phone when she called with the news. I was groggy from bone graft surgery on my gum. “Ummm, yea I thinks so,” I mumbled. But as soon as I got off the phone, I quickly forgot about the pain I was in and ran to the computer. I typed up a one paragraph synopsis of the mystery I had read about so many years ago. I sent it off to my agent to forward to my new editor.

A year and a half later when my first book came out, I finally sat down to write the story that had been simmering in my head for many years, inspired by a very distant relative who lived centuries ago. It became “The Stolen One.” Enjoy.

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Thanks so much, Suzanne! :)

Inspired Friday with Darlene Ryan

Darlene Ryan is the author of many fiction/ non fiction books for young adults, including her newest release, Five Minutes More.

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Five Minutes More is the book that wouldn’t go away. I could never get the story written the way that I wanted it to read, so I’d work on the manuscript, get stuck, get discouraged, and put it away. But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Finally I decided I would finish the book—no matter how awful it was. Well, the finished story wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t very good, either.

I knew something was wrong with the plotting, but I had been working on that book on and off for years and I’d lost my perspective. At first I thought of doing something melodramatic with the manuscript, like putting it through the shredder or having a bonfire in the driveway.

Well, the shredder sounds like a senior citizen with asthma if I try to feed more than two pages at a time through it, and the city frowns on bonfires in the driveway so close to the well water field. So, I asked my friend Susan, who is also a writer and an excellent editor, to read the whole thing.

She liked some parts, she found some dumb mistakes I’d made, and she said, “Could you _______.” I can’t tell you what goes in the blank because it’s a major story point.

It was an “aha” moment. I realized Susan was right. I rewrote like a maniac. When I was finished, Five Minutes More was finally the story I’d been trying to write for years. I hope everyone enjoys reading it.

Thank you Lauren for inviting me to be part of Inspired Fridays.

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Thanks so much, Darlene! :)

Inspired Friday with Cheryl Renne Herbsman

Chery Renne Herbsman is the author of the newly released Breathing ( you can check out my review here).
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I first met Savannah during a writing group exercise. On that particular night, a woman came to the group who had never been there before. I immediately recognized her strong Southern accent as Carolinian. You might think all Southern accents sound the same, but they’re actually quite different. I grew up in North Carolina, but hadn’t been back in a while, and the way this woman spoke just sounded like home. Somehow, that opened a window in my mind for Savannah to jump in. She appeared full-blown and began telling me her story.

When I write, I don’t use outlines. I just put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and see where it leads. Whenever I sat down to write, Savannah kept showing up, kept telling me what was going on with her. I could hear her voice more clearly than I’d ever heard a character’s voice before, which is why I wrote the dialect. I wanted to stay true to the person she presented herself as. I really like Savannah. She was a fun character to spend time with.

Even though she seems so real and separate, I know that she had to have come from within me. So, of course, there are parts of me that inspired who she is. Like Savannah, I fell in love with an older boy when I was a teenager and our relationship was long-distance at times. We hung in there with it and the challenges we faced strengthened what we shared. He and I got married the summer before my senior year in college. This June we will be celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary. So I really do believe in true love and the possibility of finding it when you’re young.

I was always a dreamer and a hopeless romantic (Savannah prefers to call it a hopeful romantic). I still am. So there’s definitely some of me in Savannah. And there’s even some of my husband in Jackson, although they are also very different. I think characters are inspired by parts of us, then take on lives of their own.

This book was great fun to write. I love Savannah’s spunk and all her funny little sayings and her absolute refusal to be talked out of her dreamer/romantic tendencies. I hope readers will enjoy her story as much as I did.

Thanks so much, Lauren, for having me!
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Thanks, Cheryl!

Inspired Friday with Gayle Forman

Gayle Forman is the author of several books for young adults including her most recent one, If I Stay.

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The file name for the first draft of If I Stay was Why Not? It’s not that Why Not? was ever a title I had in mind for the book. It was more that when I first started writing, I was not sure if what I was writing was a novel, a young-adult novel, a viable anything. Also, at that point, even though I’d published a couple of books, including a YA novel (Sisters in Sanity, which I think about twelve people had read) and a travel memoir (You Can’t Get There From Here: A Year On The Fringes of a Shrinking World, read by slightly more than twelve), I did not have a literary agent (mine had quit agenting) and my editor had left her job, which meant I really didn’t have a publisher either. I had a half-written novel, which was being re-written as a YA novel, and that was not working in YA any better than it had been working in adult form. So basically, I felt like I was starting from square one in the publishing business, even though I’d been working as a journalist and author for ten years.

So this is where I was when I got the idea for If I Stay, and the idea really came as a question (semi spoiler alert): What would you do if you knew that your family had died and you’d been left behind? It’s something I’d thought about a lot, for years. But suddenly, this character, Mia—this 17-year-old cello player popped into my head, fully formed, even though I knew nada about cello—and demanded my attention. She was here to answer that question for me.

When I started writing, I had no idea where she would take me, what the answer would be, what her decision would be. I also had no idea if what I was doing was for my own gratification or edification, or if it was meant to be a book that people might read. Because really? A young-adult novel, about an out-of-body teen cello player having to decide between life and death? This did not seem like a Good Idea. And I did not have all the usual people—agent, editor, etc.—to run it past.

Instead, I didn’t do any of that. I mentioned the idea to one friend. She started to cry. I started to cry. A day or two later, I started writing. I saved the file as Why Not? I did not tell anybody what I was doing, not my friends, not my usual group of writer pals who read my works in progress, not even my husband for a while. Nobody. I just kept going, which is hugely uncharacteristic for a blabbermouth like me.

I got so completely swept up in the story that the question of whether or not the book was a book or who it was meant for or whether it was too heavy or depressing to be YA, none of that mattered. I just wrote. And wrote. And wrote. I figured I would worry about the other stuff later. And in a weird way, it didn’t matter. Writing it was such an emotional experience, such a—and I know this sound cheesy—transcendent one, that it was gratification and reward enough.

So given all that uncertainty and secrecy and not even thinking of this as novel, it has made what’s happened to it all the more surreal. This thing that started as Why Not? in total privacy is being published in the far corners of the world and I get emails from people responding to it in the most personal of ways, which both blows my mind and fills my heart.

Maybe there’s some lesson in that. Something about following a path with no obvious outcome, about it being okay to ask questions that you might not have answers to. Hey, why not?

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Thanks so much, Gayle! :)

Inspired Friday with Sydney Salter

Sydney Salter is the debut author of the the newly realeased My Big Nose and Other Natural Disasters.
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I love doing writing exercises to hone my skills. The initial idea for My Big Nose And Other Natural Disasters came from making a list: five terrible things that have happened to you.

Come back with me to the summer before my senior year in high school. I’d just gotten a job delivering cakes, pies, and flowers in Reno, Nevada. That same week, my mother—renowned for her creative (extreme?) parenting—had grounded me from driving for a month (okay, she locked my car in a mini-warehouse). So I biked to my job as a delivery driver. Nice irony, huh? Well, about four days into the job I headed off to The Colonial Inn Casino to deliver pies.

Now, in my defense:

* I drove a small Datsun hatchback (when it wasn’t, you know, locked up due to a stupid fight with my mother).

* The delivery van’s back windows were painted over with blue paint.

* The delivery van’s side mirror was cracked, creating more of a prism effect than a see-what’s-behind-you effect.

* The alley was kind of narrow. The van was kind of wide.

* Reverse? Not my biggest driving skill. Last December, I accidentally backed into my sister-in-law’s car, not once, but twice. (How many of you got a new taillight for Christmas? Very romantic gift, if you’re looking for ideas).

Okay, so back to the delivery van. I threw the long, skinny gearshift of the rather wide van into reverse in the rather narrow alley. And backed the sliding door through a short metal post. I’m still haunted by the horrific sound of metal ripping through metal.

Now did I mention the wedding? After the pie delivery my boss and I had to rush off to set up a garden wedding across town. Have you ever tried to load a tiered wedding cake through the front seat of a delivery van because the side and back doors (not my fault) don’t open? Okay, sure. But have you done it with a woman who wants wring your neck with her frosting-covered hands?

Now, in my defense:

* I only wanted to help.

* We were kind of late, you know, because loading a cake through the front of a van takes a lot more finesse than going through the sliding door.

* How hard could it be to stick a few columns in a cake and set another layer on top?

Okay, so back to the wedding cake. I plunged the plastic columns into the elaborately decorated bottom layer. I ran back to help my boss with the flowers. While I was gone, the top tiers of the cake had tumbled from the columns onto the ground. I’m still haunted by the horrific vision of frosting mixed into a shapeless ball of cake and grass.

I got fired. And bicycled home in tears. My mother felt so sorry for me that she immediately released my car from the mini-warehouse (it was a really stupid fight).

I wrote My Big Nose And Other Natural Disasters during National Novel Writing Month. The story came pretty easily when I combined this disastrous day with my strongest insecurity: my big nose. The title just came to me too!

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Thanks so much, Sydney!

Inspired Friday with Sarah Darer Littman

Sarah Darer Littman is the author of Confessions of a Closet Catholic and the newly relased, Purge. You can vist her website here.

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I was suffering from a horrendous case of the "Second Book Blues" back in 2006, when I went to Kindling Words, a writing retreat for published authors and illustrators. Several ideas for my second book had already been rejected, and I was depressed and wondering if I was really meant to be a writer or if the success of my first book, CONFESSIONS OF A CLOSET CATHOLIC, was just a fluke. (Yes, authors are notoriously insecure!) Ellen Wittlinger (Marisol's Story, Hard Love) was leading the author strand that year, and her theme was "Inspiration". She asked us to bring photographs or pictures that inspired us.

My mother had been cleaning out her house and she'd found this picture ( said picture to the right) of me on a Caribbean holiday we took when I was about 14. I brought this photo to the workshop because it made me sad - sad because looking at it now I realize I had quite a nice figure but at the time I was convinced that I was fat. I wanted to write a book for the girl I was then, and for the girls - and guys - out there who feel the same way today.

I came away from Kindling Words knowing I had to write the book that eventually became PURGE. It wasn't what I was being told I should write, but it was the book I needed to write. I'd been showing my agent and editor things I was working on after I'd written a few chapters, but with this I decided to write the whole book before I showed anyone anything. I needed to be true to my process and let this book happen.

PURGE is a book about which I feel particularly passionate because I've suffered from body image issues my entire life, and was actively bulimic for many years as an adult. I've been in recovery for seven years now, and it's one of the most fulfilling things for me as an author has been when readers have written or come up to me and said how they were able to relate to Janie. I didn't want to sugar coat Janie's experiences and make it seem like recovery is simple and easy, because Lord knows it isn't, but PURGE is, ultimately, a hopeful book because recovery IS possible. I'm living proof of that.

If you want to learn more about getting help with eating disorders check out the resource page on my website: http://sarahdarerlittman.com/eating_disorder_resources.html

Thank you for letting me share my inspiration with you!

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Thanks so much, Sarah! :)

Inspired Friday with Heather Duffy Stone

Heather Duffy Stone is the author of the newly released This Is What I Want To Tell You. You can check out her blog here.
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I’ve always been really interested in the way we define family—how different it is for each of us. This is something I remember being really aware of in middle and high school. About seven years ago I wrote a short story that I think came from this. It was about a young mother who was sending her children to school for the first time. Watching them climb the steps of the school bus, she started to reminisce about the love affair she’d had with their father. I wrote this story and then I put it away for a while. I just hit a wall with it, though I knew there was something about it I really liked.

About four years later I was about to move to Italy and my friends threw a going-away party for me. Through this strange turn of events, someone came to this party who I’d known when I was much younger. He was someone, maybe the first person, who I had really fallen for. And I was completely thrown. Seeing him brought back all of these feelings and memories about why we fall for the people we do and how you can know someone for a few minutes or weeks and years and they can just have such complete impact on you. Anyway, after this party I moved out of the country and I wrote an essay about that night.

And then I was teaching an absolutely amazing group of students in Italy—just really funny, challenging, creative, curious honest students and we were reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky—and it was pretty much the only book I could get this class to read and I thought, this is the kind of book I want to write—this truth, this reality.

So somehow, I have no idea how, all of these things came together when I was reading through old files on my computer. Those children from the schoolbus suddenly became 17 and that party I’d gone to suddenly grew a character and my students inspired me to write about the way we fall for people and the two sides of ourselves and the reality of not having it all figured out. And all of this somehow inspired This Is What I Want to Tell You. This is what I love about writing stories though, that all of these things come together in this impossible way that makes a fictional world make sense!

Thank you SO much for having me! This was really so fun to write about.
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Thanks, Heather. I can't wait to start your book.

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

Inspired Friday with Siobhan Vivian

Siobhan Vivian is the author of A Little Friendly Advice and the newly released, Same Difference. So, without a futher ado here's Siobhan talking about Same Difference!

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Same Difference was a very personal story for me. I based it off the summer before my senior year of high school, when I went to a summer art program in Philadelphia.

When I was growing up in New Jersey, I knew how to play what I’m going to call “the game”, which means that I knew what to do to blend with the in-crowd, the “right” friends to have…all the stuff that keeps you afloat in high school. It wasn’t all bad, necessarily. I had good friends. I liked my life. But I also felt like there were parts of my personality that I had to bury, to hide from my friends, because they’d think I was weird. A lot of times, I felt like a phony. Like I was playing pretend.

But then I go to Philly and meet all these super cool artsy kids who just don’t care what people think of them. They’re doing crazy stuff and into music I’ve never heard before. It was all so exciting and inspiring, and I found myself drawn into this whole other world. I was totally inspired by the confidence they had. I let some of those hidden parts show. It was exhilarating!

Only, that was a game too. You needed to act a certain way to be friends with those artsy kids. You couldn’t like things that were popular. You had to put on a show. And did I mean it in the same way the artsy kids did? Or was I acting again? In a way, both groups were similar. There were rules you had to follow.

By the end of that summer, I was so mixed up. I didn’t know which version of myself was the real one. Was I the suburban girl who played by the rules, or the arty wild girl who didn’t care what people said/thought about her?

So that became the inspiration behind SAME DIFFERENCE…the story of a girl who has to find true herself, while she splits her time between two very different groups of friends.

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Thanks so much, Siobhan. That was a great guest blog!

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

Inspired Friday with Jillian Cantor

Jillian Cantor is the author of an amazing book called The September Sisters which will be released on February 27. You can check out my review on it here.
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I first sat down to write The September Sisters in the fall of 2003. I had another novel that I’d written first, that I’d recently abandoned after a lot of agents told me it was well-written but unsellable. At first, I thought about giving up on writing all together – I couldn’t imagine that I would ever have time to write another novel much less find an agent much less sell a book. But then, I got laid off from my teaching job, just before the semester began due to budget cutbacks, and the only job I could get was teaching one class at a community college two mornings a week – a total of three hours a week out of the house! Suddenly, I had the time to write, and I also felt like I had to do something productive until I found another job.

Before I started writing, though, I thought about what I could do to make this novel attempt more “sellable.” I decided I would write something in the first person and include a mystery in the story. But I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to write about yet. Then I saw a show about missing children – it seemed there were a lot of missing children cases in the news right around that time, and on the show I noticed that a lot of the missing children had siblings. What happened to those siblings after their brother or sister disappeared, I wondered, as I watched? And the first seed for the book was planted.

At around the same time, I had also, fairly recently started to become close to my own younger sister. When we were kids we hated each other – we used to fight all the time! Our grandmother always used to tell us when we grew up, we would love having a sister, but we never believed we would. Until it actually happened – once we got into our twenties, we actually became friends!

But I still had vivid memories of our childhood fights, which always seemed worse in the summer without school, and in the pool. And then it occurred to me to think about what it might have been like if after one of those fights in the pool, after we told each other that we hated each other, if something terrible happened, if one of us had disappeared.

And thus, The September Sisters was born, a little bit of bad (or maybe in hindsight, good) luck, a little bit of trying to figure out what could make my writing more sellable, a little bit of TV, and a little bit of childhood memories.

Thanks so much, Lauren, for inviting me to be a part of Inspired Fridays!

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You're welcome, Jillian!!

Want to part of Inspired Friday? Well, just contact me at laurenscrammedbookshelf@gmail.com with Inspired Friday in the subject line!

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.

Inspired Friday with Lynn Weingarten

This is an idea that I came up with one day when I was home sick from school in January. I have always wondered what inspires authors to write their books. So, I thought, why not do something were the author talks about their latest book and what inspired them to write it? Hence, Inspired Fridays' were born. This is going to be a weekly or every other week feature depending on how many authors agree to do this. Also, if the author offers up a copy of their book for a giveaway, there will be a contest.

So, without a further ado this is Lynn Weingarten talking about her newly released book, Wherever Nina Lies. You can check out her myspace page here.

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I was a book editor for five years before I started writing full-time. When I was leaving my editing job, I sent an email to everyone I knew who worked in publishing saying, "Hey! If anyone might want me to write anything, I'm over here!" Some people at Scholastic got in touch with me and told me they were looking to do a YA novel that would have drawings in it that would play a pivotal role in the story. They asked if I'd be interested in trying-out to write it. I said, "Oh boy would I ever be!" A lot of my inspiration for the story came from trying to figure out a plot that would naturally lend itself to this specific format. That said various things in my own life inspired various parts of the story -- I was a barista in high school, I have an older sister, I've been on road trips, I had a couple friends who ran away for a while during high school (but very, very luckily they ended up coming back okay).


The book ended up being about a girl named Ellie whose older sister, Nina, vanished two years before the book begins. Nina was a wild and crazy party girl, but also a really good artist. All the illustrations in the book are meant to be her drawings. Quite early on in the plot, Ellie finds a drawing of Nina's tucked in between the pages of a book at a vintage shop, and this starts her off on a hunt for her sister. Accompanying Ellie on her trip is a hot and mysterious stranger whom Ellie barely knows and various scandalous things happen along the way.

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Thanks so much, Lynn! Your book sounds great. :)

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