Heather Demetrios's Blog, page 14
February 9, 2015
The I'll Meet You There Journey
Writing I’ll Meet You There has been the most intense and fulfilling artistic experience I’ve ever had. When I started working on the book, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I’d started with a story about a girl named Skylar who worked at a crappy roadside motel in Central California, not too far from where I went to high school in the Central Valley. I’d spent most of my adolescence driving up and down Highway 99, from Fresno to LA and back. I suppose the landscape had inched its way under my skin after years of staring out the window of my mom’s mini van, listening to my Discman, wishing we could move back to LA, making up stories in my head. Every now and then we’d pass a collection of run down houses around a motel and a derelict gas station and convenience store and I’d wonder how the heck anyone could survive in such a cultural wasteland. Fast forward to summer 2011. I’m now living in Boston and part of an amazing writer’s group. I decide to write a story about a girl who works at one of those motels and lives in one of those towns. I thought the motel would be a cool setting for a YA and the Paradise popped into my head. Originally, I riffed off a local story, when the actress Anne Heche showed up on someone’s doorstep in the Central Valley, on drugs. I created a Lindsay Lohan kind of actress on the run from scandal and Sky was supposed to be hiding her while she recuperated. I also had…
February 5, 2015
A Breadcrumb Trail to the Heart: Getting Personal and Giving Back
People often want to know how much of myself I put into my books. This question always makes me nervous. If there’s a lot of me, is that cheating? Is it somehow gauche? Reading is such an intimate experience, and it can be a little terrifying to bare your soul on the page and then talk about it after. I know other writers get this question a lot, too. When you write something that’s deeply personal, you can’t help but feel as though readers are going on an Easter egg hunt through your emotional landscape, combing over the terrain for the bits and pieces of you that have fallen into the novel—a breadcrumb trail to your heart. I think we can’t help but leave that trail, especially when a particular work originates from the deepest parts of ourselves.
I care about all my books, of course, but my most recent, I’ll Meet You There, is particularly special to me. It’s a love story about two broken kids, both battling to defeat the hopelessness in and around them. Josh is a nineteen-year-old Marine who’s just returned from Afghanistan. He’s lost his leg and a bit of his mind. He has PTSD and is grieving the loss of his buddies. Then there’s toughly tender Skylar, an artist who may have to give up her dream of college in order to take care of her unstable mother. She works at a quirky roadside motel with Josh the…
Life Rafts and Safety Nets: On The Friends That Keep Us
Though I’ll Meet You There is first and foremost a love story, the relationships that Skylar, the protagonist, has with her two best friends, Dylan and Chris, is an essential part of Sky’s journey. When we meet her, we see that Sky’s father has been dead for several years and that her mother’s alcoholism and depression have forced Sky to take on a very adult role in her home. In many ways, she is the parent and her mother the wayward teenager. Her friends provide a necessary balance between work and play in her life. The only time Sky has a chance to be a teen is when she’s with her best friends—and even then, the trio is often dealing with adult concerns. Dylan is a teen mom and it was only through Sky and Chris’s help that she was able to graduate on time. All three come from the same socio-economic class and their poverty is part of their bond. My best friend in high school was as poor as I was and I can’t even begin to describe what a comfort that was, to be known and to have someone you didn’t have to pretend with.
The summer over which the novel takes place is a time of transition for all three of them, as they have just graduated from high school. Skylar and Chris are equally ambitious and have received scholarships to study at good schools. Dylan is just grateful she graduated—her plans are limited to taking care of her son and continuing as a waitress at the local diner, with…
February 4, 2015
Dear Josh / Love Heather
Dear Josh-
Thank you for letting me write you. Thank you for telling your story through me. Before I met you, I would have felt sorry for you, and angry at the war for taking away your leg. But I wouldn’t have really seen you. You would have been another nameless Marine caught up in the complicated War on Terror. I would have been angry for you, especially after I learned you were only nineteen years old. I would have shook my fist at the heavens. But after that, I would have just gone back to my life and forgotten about you. But because I had to get in your head and your heart, I couldn’t forget you if I tried.
I spent over two years bringing your story to the world. I hope I did right by you. I hope you feel like I left it all out on the field. I have to be honest, I wasn’t sure if I could write you honestly. I mean, you burp and drink too much beer and stare at girls’ boobs. Gross! But you also have nightmares about the bomb that took your leg away and about your friends you lost in Afghanistan. That stuff made me forget you were a dude and made me realize you’re a real person, complicated and hurt and hopeful.
To read the rest of the letter, head on over to Bewitched Bookworms.To learn more abotu I'll Meet You There, click on the book below.
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February 3, 2015
Getting Inside The Skin of a Marine with PTSD
Whenever I sit down to write, I can hear the voice of one of my mentors, YA author A.M. Jenkins, in my head: get in his skin. This is a constant refrain of hers, a way of reminding me to stop narrating. Slipping inside your character’s skin is you, the writer, getting into the trenches with your protagonist and not leaving until your novel goes to print. Being inside someone’s skin is incredibly intimate, a blurring of the lines between reality and fiction, writer and creation. When you slip into your character’s skin, you’re crossing borders you never thought would be possible.
When I began working on Josh Mitchell, the Marine in my novel I’ll Meet You There, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Other than the fact that he’s a very masculine kind of guy, he’s also a Marine who just got back from a tour in Afghanistan where he lost his leg and several of his gun buddies. Josh has PTSD, phantom limb pain, and is now disabled. I have two working legs and would probably never make it through boot camp, let alone a tour of duty in a war zone. Both of my parents were Marines and my dad suffers from PTSD, but that’s about where my knowledge of Josh ended.
I was terrified to write this book.
Getting into Josh’s skin meant I’d have to go down memory lane with him and recreate some horrifying, heartbreaking incidents. It meant I’d have to face…
February 2, 2015
Pub Day Joy!
Pub days are surreal. I wish I had some beautiful ritual, but the truth is I sit at my desk and stay on Twitter all day. It is so amazing to see the onslaught of support from the YA community of readers and writers and bloggers, to celebrate such a huge effort and enjoy the fruits of your labor. To say that I feel blessed would be a huge understatement. On my pub day for I'll Meet You There, I decided to do something a little extra special to celebrate the book and give back. I'll be donating $1 to the Wounded Warrior Project for every book purchased, as long as readers send me a copy of the receipt and follow WWP on the social media of their choice. More on that here. This book is so close to my heart and I felt like I needed to do more than just squeal and eat chcolate.
By the end of the day, I was ecstatic. I'd gotten loads of emails from people who supported WWP and I got two amazing reviews, which I've put the links for below. One is from Huffpost, the other from Forever YA. I know we're only supposed to put so much stock in reviews, but it just feels so good when they do get your book. When you feel a little known.
My pub day ended in just the right way: writing at a cafe, then drinks with my husband, my life slowly slipping back into its old, beloved routine. Until the next pub day, of course (pssst...September 15th…
Interview Round-Up
Below are links to interviews I've given about I'll Meet You There. I'll update as the blog tour continues. We talk about everything from how I created a character like Josh Mitchell to swoon to finding beauty in the small hometowns we think we hate and, of course, why the Tom Cruise room in the Paradise Motel is the best of the motel's themed rooms.
For more on I'll Meet You There, click the cover below!
February 1, 2015
School Library Journal #SVYALit Collaboration
Skylar and Josh, the two main characters in I’ll Meet You There, have very different sexual histories. Skylar is a straight-edge girl whose most formative sexual experience was during spring break of her senior year of high school, where she acknowledges: “we didn’t go very far or anything. It just felt far to me.” She and her best friend, Chris, have made a pact in which they keep one another accountable in order to ensure they can escape their small town after high school and go to college. Part of the pact is an inferred commitment to celibacy, their logic being that sex and romantic relationships are part of what anchor their peers to Creek View. In the opening chapter, Sky describes the older teens in the town as people whose routine was, “Drink. Smoke. Screw. Repeat.” The last thing she wants is to be like them. Despite her commitment to remaining a virgin, Skylar isn’t a prude. This is, in part, because her choice not to have sex is rooted in her desire to eliminate anything in her life that could potentially hold her back, rather than a conservative mindset. Sky isn’t afraid of sex or being seen as a girl who has sex, she’s afraid of winding up like her other best friend, Dylan, a teen mom who gave birth to her son during their senior year of high…
Peeta and Gus Ain't Got Nothin' on Josh Mitchell: Sex and the One-Legged Boy
There is nothing more awkward than having your husband come home to find you watching a YouTube video of a dude taking off his prosthetic leg. Even though I knew I was doing research for my novel, I’ll Meet You There, and he knew I was doing the research, it still looked bad. I mean, it was no secret I’d fallen head over heels for Josh, the Marine in my novel. Clearly I was in a place where the lack of leg wasn’t necessarily a mood killer. So I couldn’t help but feel a little dirty, like I was some kind of Internet Peeping Tom at worst, a girl foraying into the kinky, at best. But even before my husband came in, I kept looking over my shoulder like the creep I’d become. I couldn’t write an amputee love interest without knowing how prosthetics worked, I got that. But there are few things more intimate than watching a stranger take off their leg, and my paranoia kicked in, me imagining scenarios in which I’d get caught: the feds would come in with a warrant for I-don’t-know-what, my neighbor would want a cup of sugar, my friend would stop by for a drink.
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