Unfortunately, Home Is Where The Heart Is

My best friends and I (Missy, Sarah, me)

I can’t stop writing about the place I hate most in the world.

Every time I sit down to write a contemporary novel, it ends up being set in California’s Central Valley. The only exception is The Lexie Project, and that story begins in the Valley, so it counts. Maybe it’s because I went to high school there and so when I start writing stories about high schoolers, that’s where they end up living. Maybe it’s because I can’t seem to write a novel about a teen who doesn’t want to get the heck out of Dodge. It’s the way of being an adolescent that I understand the best.

This past spring I began work on my next contemporary work. Originally, it was pitched as a memoir, but my editor and I have decided for various reasons that it will be fiction instead. It’s set in my hometown. It’s called Bad Romance. It’s about an abusive boyfriend, a church that sucks the life right out of you, a home life that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. In order to prepare for this book I read through the journals I kept in high school, a painful excursion through my past that I won’t be doing again anytime…