Hello! Happy Summer!
Because it IS officially summer - it’s SO light out so late; my favorite thing. I have yet to make it to a beach but I did spend Memorial Day with dear friends Maurene and Sarah in Palm Springs, and we had a pool! and! hot tub!
They both made fun of me for being in a hot tub when it was 89 degrees out, but I looove a hot tub. I read most of the 5th Hawthorne and Horowitz book, Close to Death, in said hot tub. It was great.
So I feel like I’m just starting to get into summer here - making plans and buying up beach reads and acquiring new flip flops and woven summer bags. It’s gonna be great.
I’m ALSO starting to sketch out a new book. This hasn’t been sold - I only have about 5 pages written - so it’s very much in the nascent stages. I’m just seeing what this is, what the shape is, if it wants to be a book. On tour/ at events one of the questions you always get is about your process. I always want to know other writers’ processes too! It’s something I find endlessly fascinating.
And a big part of my process is that I spend a LOT of time in notebooks, in word docs, just doing character work and thinking about what might happen. A lot of this stuff never makes it into the book, but I need to know if before I feel like I can actually start writing. When I draft, I tend to go fast and straight through, so it’s like I have to have all the backstory and details worked out first.
I was a theater kid and a theater major in college (acting before I switched to playwriting) and my editor is a former actor - and so this process makes sense to both of us. Because this is what you do when you’re an actor - you work out SO much backstory and fill in your character. And so I basically took that same training and applied it to books. And I also feel like no work is ever wasted - if you write a whole backstory about the characters going to Six Flags, but that doesn’t make it in the book, a reference one of them has to their trip to Six Flags then somehow carries more weight for me. Because I know exactly what happened on that trip, because I wrote it all out.
One of the fun things about starting a book is the NAMES. I did an event with Rachel Lynn Solomon and Marisa Kantor last week, and they both commented on my tendency toward uncool, older names for my love interests.
It’s true! It started with Roger in Amy & Roger, and then very much became a thing. I used to say I wanted girls’ names from the 70s and boys’ names from the 30s which was pretty much what I did for a while -
Amy/ Roger
Taylor/Henry
Emily/Frank1 (and bonus Gideon)
Andie/Clark
Charlie/Bill
Kat/Cary and Stevie/ Beckett
Darcy/ Russell
There were a few reasons I was drawn to this. The first is that I’ve never loved trendy names for my heroines or love interests. I don’t want something to be dated, and I want the names to seem very classic and timeless. I also think if a love interest has a too-trendy name I find him untrustworthy? I don’t know why!! I feel like there is something about a guy with an old fashioned name that makes you trust him more. AND then it’s a real feat if I can get you, the reader, to fall for a guy named Frank2.
And so right now I’m trying on names for these characters. I know the heroine’s name - that’s locked in. And I think one of her friends. But all the other characters are kind of up for grabs at the moment. It’s always fun to look back at my old notebooks and notes and see what I was trying on for people before I settled on them.
VERY MINOR SPOILERS FOR D&R AHEAD BUT JUST SKIP THIS NEXT SECTION IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED
I found this note from when I was just beginning to work out Darcy & Russell. I was in the Poconos, and I took a bike ride to a deserted beach. My mind had been working on the story on the ride, and then I sat down on the sand and wrote this:
Since I keep a schedule when I’m writing my first drafts, I can see that I didn’t start actually writing the book until November of 21. But that’s how long I sometimes marinate on things. Also I think in that note you can see me finding the book title? Amazing. Most of my projects have these long notes app rambles about them - and I love seeing what makes it through.
So right now I’m doing a lot of notebooking, and a lot of notes app-ing, and a lot of word documents where I try and sort out who these people and what they want and what their story is going to look like. It’s a really fun part of the process, and I always need the time and space to make sure I’ve figured things out before I jump in. Like my second MG book, which I have been thinking about for LITERAL years. Lots of things have changed since my first scribbles on it - the main character’s name changed, which I was NOT expecting - but a lot of things have remained the same, which I also love.
So that’s a long way of telling you what I’m up to at the moment! My MG is another full summer book, and this one will be a full summer book, which I’m looking forward to after D&R taking place over one day.
And if you are looking for a book to read, Darcy & Russell is out everywhere now! Same with Promchanted. And Firefly is out in PB and it is SO CUTE I can’t even believe it.
I hope you all are having excellent starts to your summers!
xoxo
MM
A tiny note about the names of the couples in SYBG - they’re all alphabetical. Collins/ Dawn. Emily/ Frank. Even Emily’s brother Beckett and his friend Annabel. And even the kind of love triangle in the book is alphabetical - Emily/ Frank/ Gideon. These are the things you do to amuse yourself when you’re writing!
But Frank also didn’t come out of nowhere! I feel like I said this in a bonus edition of SYBG, but Frank’s parents are an architect/ designer couple. And so he was named for Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, two of the best to do it.