Fiction Scribe

Hello and welcome back to Fiction Scribe Ms. Shelton!

Why, thank you! It’s such a pleasure to be back. It’s always fun to come for a visit over to Fiction Scribe and see what you’ve been up to.

Tell us a bit about you – where you’ve been, how you got here, where you’re going.

Well, I think I’m one of those people who always knew she wanted to be a writer. As a kid, I was the one always forcing my friends into playing involved games of “house”—complete with love triangles, mystery, intrigue, and dysfunctional families. They wanted to play baseball and ride bikes all day: I was insisting they come in an help me wash the play dishes while we talked about our pretend husbands.

I majored in English in college, and then realized that most likely writing novels wasn’t going to pay off quite so immediately. So I minored in journalism and upon graduation, got a job as a reporter. That led to me writing a humor column for the paper for the next 10 years, all about family life and raising kids. It was picked up in Working Mother magazine, which then led to some of those columns being published as a collection called YOU MIGHT AS WELL LAUGH: SURVIVING THE JOYS OF PARENTHOOD.

I then wrote two other non-fiction humor books about parenting: SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT…AND OTHER LIES and PRESCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL, both published by St. Martin’s Press.

But the whole time I was writing non-fiction and newspaper stories, I was secretly working on a novel in my spare time. It took 17 years, but WHAT COMES AFTER CRAZY was finally published in 2005. (As my son pointed out, my hourly rate for writing that novel was probably about 3 cents—but who’s counting?!) Lucky me, my agent negotiated that contract to be for TWO books! What a merry little shock it was when I discovered I had a whole new novel due in a mere eleven months!

But there’s nothing like a good deadline for focusing the mind and putting one’s priorities in order—and A PIECE OF NORMAL came out on schedule. Or almost on schedule. Since then, I’ve written KISSING GAMES OF THE WORLD, a departure for me in that it’s written from two points of view—both the woman and man, both of whom dislike each other intensely but find themselves strangely drawn together, through their children and their connection to the past.

And now—well, I’m working on Novel #4. I’m calling it THE YEAR YOU THINK OF NOTHING ELSE, and it’s due in a little over a month. Which is going to be only a little bit insane. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that I’ll make the deadline.

Tell us about Kissing Games of the World and how it went from idea to published book.

KISSING GAMES OF THE WORLD came to me when I realized I wanted to write a love story—and not make it all soupy and sentimental. My stories always tend to be about families and love, and the way we are both damaged and then healed by our relationships with other people, but I use humor in creating the characters and their situations.

I love writing about edgy people who live non-traditional lives and might be just a little bit suspicious and grouchy. So when I decided to write a love story, I really wanted to incorporate humor into the way two unlikely people—people like me and my friends—might fall in love. So I picked two single parents who have a lot of baggage and troubles and who, as the best-selling author Patricia Gaffney put it in her blurb for the book, “find the rest of themselves in each other.”

Tell us about Harris, Nate and Jamie.

Harris Goddard is a lovable old geezer in a small town in Connecticut, a former womanizer and the official town rascal, who is now a grandfather raising his son Nate’s five-year-old little boy, Christopher. Nate left town after his wife was killed in a car accident when the baby was four days old, and Harris encouraged him to go away and find himself and come back for the baby when he was ready. But then Harris, who had been not so good as a dad himself, finds out that he kind of likes raising this little boy; he sees it as a second chance for him to redeem himself. Who knew grandparenthood could be such fun?

So he makes it impossible for Nate to ever come back. Harris even invites a woman, Jamie, to come and live with him in his farmhouse—and the two live there as platonic housemates, sharing cooking and child care and long, irreverent talks in the evenings out on the porch.

Jamie is an artist who has major trust issues. She’s the single mom of five-year-old Arley, Christopher’s best friend. She moves in with Harris to save expenses, and so she can try to make a go of her painting career. Arley has asthma, and Jamie is a little bit overprotective of him and more concerned with waking up four times a night to monitor his breathing than she is with finding a new romantic relationship for herself. She drives men away, and insists she likes life just fine at its most simple: good food, gluing glitter on pinecones, talking to Harris, and playing with their two little boys.

Everything is just hunky-dory until Harris dies of a heart attack, and Nate comes back to claim the farmhouse and his child. That’s when life takes a turn for the disastrous. Nate is one of the walking wounded, a man still damaged by his father’s abandonment of him as a child, his mother’s death by cancer, and then his wife’s car accident that left him a widower.

He’s finally found success as a salesman, traveling all over the world, running from his problems, and even getting engaged to a pointy-haired woman who is as much of a workaholic as he is—and the last thing he wants is to go back to his small town life or to let himself feel anything real. He thinks that he can just pick up Christopher and take him on the road with him, educate him in museums and entertain him in boardrooms, and that this will work out just fine.

But both he and Jamie find that the paths they’ve picked for themselves just aren’t that easy, and sometimes the person you can’t stand is the one person you can’t stand to be without.

Which character did you have the most fun with when writing Kissing Games of the World?

Nate, by far! At first I was telling the story from Jamie’s point of view—and boy, she did not have any sympathy for Nate at all. Harris had told her so many mean things about him, and she was dead-sure he was a dreadful parent. All she wanted was for him to leave Christopher with her and disappear again on some airplane, preferably never to return.

But then Nate started whispering in my ear, telling me HIS take on things—and he had a wonderful, edgy sense of humor and a much deeper story than I had at first imagined. He tried hard to take over the book—but in the end I managed to wrestle it back from him, and limit him to simply telling the story in every other chapter and letting Jamie tell the rest. He kept both Jamie and me on our toes!

How did you become a writer?

I’m afraid I was born this way. The older I got, the more clear it was that writing was where all my energy goes. In seventh grade, my English teacher took me aside and said to me, “Did you know you’re a writer?” and I remember nodding, because I did already know.

In eighth grade, I took a creative writing class and wrote a short story that the teacher accused me of plagiarizing. I hadn’t; I’d made the whole thing up, but it gave me an inkling that maybe this was what I was meant to be doing.

What would you say is the most difficult thing about being a writer?

Wow, there are a lot of candidates lining up to be the right answer to this question! Should I pick the isolation, the second-guessing one does of oneself, the fear of not getting the words down just right, the tendency to read the entire world wide web instead of getting down to work? There can be a lot of demons for writers who are serious about their craft—but the worst is probably when the words don’t seem to be able to express all that you hoped they would.

Someone famous said, “Books aren’t ever finished; they’re just abandoned.” And I think the hardest part is realizing how far from perfect each book really is—how it doesn’t quite say all that you hoped it would. But you get better and better as you go along. And that striving is also what makes writing the most satisfying thing you will ever do.

If you could pick any author to collaborate with, who would it be?

Oh, I’m afraid I’m not much of a collaborator. I really work best when I’m alone with my story. I wouldn’t want to have to duke it out with another real human when I’m already duking it out with my characters.

Do you have any interesting writing habits/quirks?

Just that stories often reveal themselves to me at the very times when I’m not available for writing them down—such as when I’m driving down the road or about to fall asleep. I often wake up in the middle of the night, to see an entire scene of the book playing itself out in front of me. I’ve learned to get up QUICK and write as much of it down as is appearing…no more will I assume I’ll always remember it in the morning.

What is the most valuable piece of advice you have been given/learned in your life as a writer?

Just that: WRITE THE STORY WHEN IT WANTS TO BE WRITTEN. Don’t wait for the perfect circumstances. If the character is talking to you in the middle of the night, get up and take the call!

When you’re not writing, what are you doing?

Talking to friends. I love going out to lunch. And reading, cooking, knitting. I’m always in the process of bringing some story together. I get so many of my ideas from talking to people.

Where can we find you on the internet?

I have a blog at www.sandishelton.com/blog.

Thank you very much for coming by this blog. I wish you great successes with Kissing Games of the World.