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Melissa, OCD BFF
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Jul 11, 2013 03:23PM
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What was the inspiration for this book? Did one particular thing(like the journal) or character come to you first?
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2. Why did you choose to write Julianna's journal entries as a story narrative rather than a diary entry?
3. Why is the title Golden? Is it bc they were the golden couple of the town? Or because gold is the color of dawn and dusk which represents beginning and endings like Julianna's relationship with Orion?
4. If you were Juliana would you have called Orion?
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Did you have an assignment like the journal when you were in high school? I'd love to know the inspiration behind it.
The assignment for the journal actually came from one that I gave when I was an English teacher. My 8th grade students worked on poetry anthologies for the entire 4th quarter. The poems in them were supposed to represent who they were at that point in time, and it was a big project they spent a lot of time on. At the end of the year, I collected them and packed them away until their Senior year. Not quite the 10 years that Mr Kinney gave his students, but that's where the initial idea came from!
Did you have a golden couple that you went to school with like Julianna and Shane?
Not that I remember, but there was one girl who was a senior when I was a freshman, and I admired her in the same way that Parker did with Julianna, so I kind of modeled Julianna after her.
Who is your favorite poet?
Haha! Do you even have to ask? Robert Frost, of course. :-) My grandma started me on his poems when I was quite little, and I grew up loving them.
Is your life where you expected/hoped it to be 10 years ago or when you were a senior in HS, or did your path take you somewhere completely unexpected?
It's actually even better! I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but 10 years ago I wouldn't have thought it a reality.
What was the inspiration for this book? Did one particular thing(like the journal) or character come to you first?
It's always hard to pinpoint the exact inspiration for an idea because it comes from so many places, but one thing I remember being inspired by early on is a billboard that's actually still up in the town where I went to college. It's of a girl who disappeared after a party over 15 years ago now, and her parents STILL have it up, and it still says 'Missing'. It's so sad, but every time I see it, a tiny little part of me wonders "What if she was still alive???"
How did you choose the poems that started the chapters?
I went over and over my Frost anthology, picking and choosing lines and titles that I liked, or that I thought were thematically fitting, then I compared them with my outline of what happened in each chapter plot-wise and matched them up accordingly. Once an English teacher...
Why did you choose to write Julianna's journal entries as a story narrative rather than a diary entry?
I actually tried it both ways, and ended up doing them more as a narrative because I wanted her story and her voice to sound more dreamy and poetic than the diary entries allowed for, but it was tricky. Actually, those journal entries were the hardest part of writing the entire novel!
Why is the title Golden? Is it bc they were the golden couple of the town? Or because gold is the color of dawn and dusk which represents beginning and endings like Julianna's relationship with Orion?
I think GOLDEN fits for those reasons, as well as lots of others! I wanted to allude to Frost's poem, the fact that they were the "Golden Couple," the idea of all that glitters is not gold, etc.
If you were Juliana would you have called Orion?
Ooh, that's a tough one. My high school self is so much more Parker, so it's hard for me to imagine being Julianna. But if I actually *were* her, then yes, I probably would have. That's the choice she made in the story, after all. :-)
