Thank you to my good friend
Marisa Whitsett Baker for including me in her leg of The Next Big Thing Blogroll. Marisa has devoted many years of her life to the craft of writing. She is a thirsty sponge who cannot read enough to satisfy her ever deepening knowledge of everything literary and she's an excellent and gifted writer to boot. She has been a vital part of my own writing experience, whether it be cheering me on from the sidelines or giving me the perfect word when it just won't come to me. So thank you Marisa. I can truly say that the book I'm getting ready to discuss would not be written had it not been for you.
The Next Big Thing Blogroll is a fun opportunity for writers to share details of their various projects. You can follow the links in this post to find out about projects other writers are working on.
1. What is the working title of your book?
I have one complete and edited novel, one complete novel that has yet to be edited, and two that are still being written. The one I'm going to talk about this time is my baby, my first completed novel. I cycled through several titles for this one, some real, some humorous. The title that ended up sticking is Intertwined.
2. Where did the idea come from for the book?
From real life. Well sort of. My relationship with my husband inspired me to write this novel. Once he and I had been dating a while and started sharing stories of our pasts, we realized that on more than one occasion we may have bumped into each other. There were exact places and events we both attended. I found that incredible considering we grew up nearly 700 miles apart.
Something about knowing him before I knew him fascinates me. The first time we met (the first time we knew we met) we both experienced a love at first sight magic. I clearly remember when our eyes met for the first time and a feeling washed over me telling me to remember the moment because he was special. It's hard for me to believe that we could have seen each other before that moment and not had the same connection then. The more I thought about it, the more I questioned whether what I thought was love at first sight was merely a product of circumstance. If we had met at one of those places would we still have fallen in love and gotten married? Were there things in life we had to experience and areas we had to grow in before we could be together? So many questions, so few answers.
The daydreams began.
Our age difference plays an interesting role in my imaginings. I am six and a half years younger than he is. The timing of our first encounter could have a large impact on how we viewed each other. I imagine when I am five and he is almost thirteen. Both of our families have chosen to take a spring break vacation to Gatlinburg. (This is likely since it was and is the #1 vacation spot for both our families.) It's my sister's turn to pick the pancake house. (If you haven't been to Gatlinburg, pancakes are a large part of what you do while you're there.) I walk up the stairs to the front porch of the log cabin, following my parents and sister, dragging my feet since I didn't get to pick the restaurant. Movement down the long row of rockers catches my eye. There's a little girl about my age violently rocking back and forth. She looks right at me and says in her thick North Carolina accent, "We're rockin' and rockin' and it's driving us crazy!" He looks at me, not paying too much mind since I'm five and he's thirteen. He smiles awkwardly, embarrassed of his little sister's boldness. Then the rest of his family comes out the door and they all make their way to their car. Before he turns the corner, though, he looks over his shoulder to see if I'm still looking, never suspecting he will marry that little girl some day.
Fast forward to the summer before I left for college. I was a few months away from nineteen, he had just turned twenty-five. My good friend who is the biggest Sarah McLaughlin fan on the planet suggests we go to Lileth Fair in Murfreesboro. At the same time his friend is trying to talk him into going to the same concert. "No," he says, "it's not just for girls, but there will probably be a lot of girls there." He had just gotten out of a long relationship and he wasn't looking for anything serious, so the concert might be a good way to get him back into the dating scene. And there we were, two people in a sea of 18,000 who would fall in love some day. What if he brushed past me, but I was so focused on finding the bathroom that I didn't even notice? I walked on clueless and his eyes followed me all the way to my place in the back of the line.
My freshman year of college, I was invited to a city-wide bible study for people in their twenties. While I attended just once, he went every week. His roommate was in the group who led it. I remember meeting his roommate that night. He welcomed me and promised to introduce me to some other people later. He called to me from across the room, only I had used my fake name, Alex, on my name tag, and I wasn't great at responding to it. I didn't realize who he was talking to until it was too late. I'm fairly certain he was going to introduce me to my husband that night, but fate kept us apart a few more years for some reason.
I thought about these daydreams and others often. Playing them out over and over wondering what it would have been like to meet him at different times. One day (after being inspired by Stephenie Meyer, but I'll get to that in a minute.) I sat down with the intent of writing a story that followed one of the alternate meeting scenarios I obsessed about. Alexis began to speak to me. I heard her voice telling me her story. If you are a writer you know that when your character speaks to you, you better write it down. So I started writing.
And now, what you have all been waiting patiently for...
Here is the synopsis of the book:
At twenty-nine Alexis feels stuck in her life and marriage. In the beginning she and her husband, Dillon, were madly in love. As time passed, their infatuation waned, and was replaced by feelings of abandonment. With the indirect help of her psychic great aunt Vinnie, Alexis and her best friend, Claire, are thrown into their past and their eighteen-year-old bodies at the exact moment Alexis’s life began to spin out of control. After the initial shock of unintended time travel, Alexis realizes she has choices again. She must decide if what she and Dillon had is worth a second chance and revisit the ghosts who still haunt her: family members who have passed, people who hurt her, and those Alexis hurt along the way. If she can relive the painful memories, her journey to love Dillon again will begin. She can finally answer the question that always kept her feelings suppressed: do soul mates and true love really exist or did she and Dillon just meet at the perfect moment and place in their first life? The choice of which path she will take the second time around proves to be more difficult than she anticipates, and at times she will have to rely on the strength of her friendship with Claire to pull her through.
3. What genre does your book come under?
Intertwined is a Women's Literature novel. It is the story of Alexis figuring out how to resolve all the bruises and soft spots in her soul that keep her from loving Dillon completely. She is a woman in love so there are of course romantic elements thrown in. There is a fantasy element hanging around in there too.
4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
The actress who should play Alexis will have have a very versatile look. She will have to pass for eighteen and thirty. Also Alexis is a character with a lot of layers. So the actress will have to be able to convey a variety of emotions all at once. And most importantly, she will have to look exactly like the Alexis in my mind. :) Tall order to fill, but I have found the actress who will do it flawlessly. Samantha Barks
The person who needs to play Dillon is not an actor at all. He's got the hair, the dimples, and the smile though. Scott McGillivray from HGTV's Income Property. And I have to admit this choice is all about the look. With his native Canadian accent, I'm not sure he can pull off Dillon's smooth North Carolina accent. But since this movie is only taking place in my head at the moment, I figure I can cast whomever I want.
The next actress will play a part I haven't talked about much, but is a critical part of the story: the role of Alexis's best friend, Claire. She is Alexis's voice of reason at times and her cheerleader at others. Alexis is prone to self-sabotage. When faced with adversity Alexis turns inward and loses faith in herself easily. Claire is the one who gives Alexis a firm kick in the pants to keep her on track. Some who have read my novel say that at times they keep reading more for the Alexis and Claire moments than for the Alexis and Dillon moments. Meet Claire, who will be played by Rachael Taylor
Next we come to Rob. Rob is Alexis's college boyfriend and the third leg to the love triangle of the book. Rob and Alexis, or Rolex as they are sometimes called (by me in conversation, not in the book), broke up not too long before Alexis meets Dillon in their first life together. Rob has beautiful blue eyes and a boyish quality about him, which is why I chose Ian Harding for the part.
This is a lot of fun. I could do the cast for the entire book, but I'll just do one more. Jared is Alexis's high school boyfriend who completely smashed her heart in a way she never fully recovered from. While she was with him, she was so caught up in him, she failed to realize how dangerous he could be. When she goes back and sees him through the eyes of an almost thirty-year-old woman, she's frightened by how close she came to his wrath. And since I'm already breaking the rules with my cast, I'm going to do a time jump. (Kind of appropriate since my book features a time jump.) For the role of Jared I cast Marky Mark from the movie Fear. Dangerous and irresistible.
5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
When almost thirty-something Alexis Hayes wakes up in her eighteen-year-old body, she has to choose between the future she knows, complete with all its regrets and missteps, and the chance to start over fresh and fall in love with her husband again for the first time.
6. Is your book self-published, published by an independent publisher, or represented by an agency?
None of the above...yet. I am currently seeking agent representation.
7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I wrote the first draft in about four months, granted my first draft consisted of barely 30,000 words. I edited it for over three years and now it's a little over 80,000 words. I haven't been working on it all day every day, though. In the meantime, I've written all or part of 3 other novels. I've also been a full time accountant and a full time wife and mother of two beautiful children. (I can call them beautiful without sounding conceited because they are both adopted. I had nothing to do with their genetic beauty.)
8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Intertwined shares plot elements with The Time Traveller's Wife. They are both about two people meant to be together who meet at different times in their lives, including time travel type meetings. Also Intertwined has self-discovery themes similar to the ones that Joshilyn Jackson writes so well.
9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Well, in particular, my husband and our relationship inspired me to write this novel. As for writing in general, which began with this novel, Stephenie Meyer. I was not an avid reader before I watched the first Twilight movie and left the theater to immediately buy all the books because I simply needed more. I found myself searching for anything Twilight and found some interesting articles on Stephenie Meyer's back story and how she came to write Twilight, and was inspired. I had always loved to write, but never considered writing an actual novel. After learning that Stephenie Meyer hadn't written a novel before Twilight, I decided I could do it too. Alexis began to speak and I began to type.
10. What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
As part of a writing exercise to get to know my characters better, I wrote a few scenes of Alexis and Dillon the first time around. I wanted to know how they met and fell in love and how it all went down hill to get to the point where we first meet them in the novel. I got so absorbed in these side stories, I didn't want to go back to the main storyline. There was something so raw and real about the emotions they felt. I couldn't figure out how to work those feelings into my novel. My husband, whom I should have gone to in the first place since he was the inspiration for this novel, pointed out that it was my novel and if I wanted them in there, I should just put them in there. Duh! So I did. There's an interesting back and forth with the novel where you get a few scenes of Alexis navigating her past, then you get a glimpse of Alexis and Dillon in their marriage relationship and how some of the conflicts carryover.
And now that my blogroll time is finished. I would like to pass the torch to Andrea Hoffman. Andrea also works full time in the accounting world, but knows how to use her left brain too. She is a fabulous writer and has one complete novel and two partial novels under her belt. She has a natural ability to bring her characters to life with seemingly no effort. Next week she will post her answers to these questions here on my blog. Check back to learn about her latest project. You'll be glad you did.
