I had the oddest conversation last night around the kitchen table. I have written two books that go together (not a series, just the two of them). I am hoping that after my agent sells my first book, they will eventually be published books #2 & #3. I am revising the first of these two now (I actually wrote the second one first, and then realized the back story in my head would make a good novel too, and the first one was born).

Anyway…we have a house guest right now and over the last year or so, she has read all my manuscripts. She doesn’t critique them or anything, but she likes to read, I like her, and she’s eighteen, so I thought it would be nice to have someone under thirty-five read them, since they’re YA. So last night I was sitting there with her (Chelsea) and my husband and she said to me, “You know, when I read these two books (KEEP THE FAITH & TRUE BLUE BABY – the names come from songs used in the books), I thought to myself, ‘this is what it would be like to have Joelle and Victor for parents and to be their daughter’.

We had to laugh at that one because while nothing in the books is autobiographical, I did get the whole spark of an idea by imagining what it might be like for a teenager to have such weird parents like us. That’s where the whole thing started! So I had to agree that Chelsea had nailed it. But then she asked us if we were really in the situation that’s in my book, would we actually let our daughter do the “big thing” in TBB that our character’s parents let her do. While I won’t say here what it is, it is a pretty big and unusual thing for parents to allow their seventeen year old daughter do, but Victor and I looked at each other and said, “Yeah…I think we would.”

We then had a long conversation about the characters in these books, who they are, what their values are, what each of them have to lose if she breeches the trust the parents give her, etc. What was so odd about it was that we were deep into this conversation before it even struck me how surreal the whole thing was! I know that many writers, myself included, think of their characters as real, but having a conversation about them like this was beyond any experience I’ve ever had with my characters. I think what it did was give me faith that these two manuscripts will eventually be books someday. And do you know what? I can hardly wait! Not because I have a huge desire to have shelves of books with my name on the spines, but because these characters are so cool…I want you to know them too.

Does it sound egotistical to say they’re cool right after I said the parents were based on us? Hmmm…well, my husband is cool. I’m maybe cool by association. Actually, I meant that Kami was cool (the daughter), but if you want to think of me as cool, I can live with that.

If you’d like to hear the two songs used in the books, click on the music tab above and you can listen to True Blue Baby (and some other music from that book) performed by my husband. And if you go to his myspace page you can hear Keep The Faith. Yes…he wrote the songs, but I’ve secured permission to use them in my books. I’m paying him in food.

P.S. The photo is of the instruments because both the guitar and mandolin feature prominently in the books.