DARCY & RUSSELL COMES OUT IN TWO WEEKS!!
A….fortnight1, if you will. 😁
I hope you’re going to be able to come to one of my events! I’m heading to Texas this weekend for the North Texas Teen Book Festival - I can’t wait!
And then I’ll be at YallWest on 5/4 - on awesome panels! Come say hi!
AND then my launch will be on 5/6 at the Ripped Bodice! I’ll be chatting with Maurene Goo, about one-day books, and writing, and romance, and Taylor Swift. I hope to see you there!
And then just in case, here’s my tour stops again! Just for clarification - the Powell’s Location is the Cedar Hills one! All the details are on my site here!
Phew! Okay. Now that all the housekeeping’s out of the way, let’s talk inspiration.
It’s an interesting thing. Not all my books have one or two things I can point to. Some do! My buddy Diya Mishra, years ago, told me the story of how she pre-prommed at Disneyland, and immediately, I was like, there’s the story. A girl in a prom dress gets pulled into a Disney fairy tale, and fits right in, because she’s wearing the right dress2.
The idea for The Unexpected Everything came from being on tour in DC, and having some time off to wander - and it got me thinking about politicians, and politicians’ kids, and then just like that, I had the story.
Other books, though, are more like soup. There’s the simmering broth of a theme or idea or world I want to explore. And then stuff gets tossed in, little by little, and I figure out what belongs in there to make a coherent dish. (Kind of lost the thread of that metaphor there, huh?)
Darcy & Russell was one of the times where I had an idea, all at once. There was the spark of the idea - and then my two real-life inspirations that came along with it. I can tell you ONE now. The other one will have to wait until after the book comes out. But I hope it’ll be worth it. (It involves movie stars.) (And my first time ever encountering a saltwater pool.)
The first spark of the idea was actually from the first season of Loki - which just goes to show, there’s no such thing as procrastination3! Because what if I hadn’t watched Loki? Then I wouldn’t have had the idea for this book. No spoilers for Loki season 1 (truly a sentence I didn’t think I would be writing today) but my favorite episode of the whole season was a two-hander, one that everyone was calling the Before Sunrise episode.
And watching it, I remembered just how much I loved those movies, and what a great concept it is for a story, and then…
IDEA.
It really came rushing in all at once, almost fully formed. I didn’t know the details of who these people were yet, or what their specifics and shadings would end up being. But just like that, all in a rush, I had it. Two people stuck after a music festival, stranded at a bus station. They’d meet, they’d fall in love, they’d discover things about each other…with the ticking clock of college starting imminently underscoring all of this.
And the reason that my mind immediately went to “stranded at a bus station post-music festival” - not a common thing to think - was because it had happened to me.
It happened to me, in fact, the summer before I went to college. When I was 17, I went to Woodstock 99. I had not been planning on going to Woodstock 99. Two days before the concert, I got a call from my friend Annie inviting me to go to Woodstock with her in 48 hours. Annie was the best, and I really liked her, but we weren’t close. We would chat in the halls, but we’d never hung out, one on one.
So it was VERY clear to me that someone had bailed on her, and I tried not to think about just how many people she’d had to call before she got to me. But it sounded like fun - and so I was in.
And we had a great time!
Everyone who knows anything about Woodstock 99 is always shocked to hear this - people who’ve seen the documentaries or read about it or seen the pictures. But until the very end when people were literally lighting things on fire, we had no idea that anything was happening other than a music festival, albeit an over-priced one. This was a pre-cell phone, pre-internet age, so we weren’t hearing about anything worrying that was happening. We were just having fun and getting sunburned and listening to Dave Matthews Band4.
At the end of the festival, when lots of stuff was suddenly being set ablaze, Annie and I were like, time to go. We grabbed our tent and our stuff and boarded a bus that would eventually get us back home to Connecticut5. And then a few hours into the ride, the bus broke down. We ended up having to sleep overnight in a bus station until the replacement bus came. I honestly don’t even know the name of the town we were in. My biggest concern was that I was going to get fired because this meant I was going to be late to work the next day.
Annie and I slept, with the rest of the people from our bus, on the cold floors of the bus station in some unknown town in upstate New York. And then in the morning, the new bus came, and we went home. And I nearly got fired - but I didn’t!!
This was just a story I’d tell people sometimes, but for the most part, it just went into the back of my mind…until I suddenly, just like that, I knew exactly what to do with it. And how I could use that experience for two characters who suddenly find themselves stranded in a similar situation.
Unlike Darcy, I didn’t meet a cute guy and walk around and fall in love. But that’s the whole point of fiction, right? You take your experience - cold bus station floors, worried about getting fired - and turn it into an epic love story.
In a few weeks, I’ll share the second part of the inspiration! Promise.
AAAGH TTPD is so good? Like SO GOOD?? I haven’t been able to stop listening to it. I can’t believe it only came out FRIDAY? I’ve lived a thousand years since then. Right now my faves - black dog/ clara bow/ down bad/ fortnight/ ttpd/ florida!!!/ CSSM/ the alchemy/ so high school - and suddenly I look in people’s windows is creeping (lol) up?? I LOVE IT SO.
Many years later, this turned into Promchanted! Available everywhere now!!
This is a lie. This is SUCH a lie. I’m procrastinating right now, writing this.
I tried very hard to get a tattoo - there were a couple tattoo booths - but since I wasn’t 18, they wouldn’t let me. And THANK GOD. I would have gotten like, a dolphin on my ankle and it would have been terrible. I did buy a shirt that I got rid of at some point and now I’m SO mad that I did.
I think we had to go into Manhattan and then get a different bus back to CT? No idea. Honestly, the fact that I did all of this without a cell phone or internet seems impossible now. But somehow we got by!
OMG, what an epic story. I can't wait for your new book!