Fiction Scribe

Every night over the past few weeks when I started my bath, lit the candles, and poured in the bubble bath, there was an important thing I never forgot to take with me on my special relaxation trips away from the outside world:

A Piece of Normal, by Sandi Kahn Shelton.

This novel was out of my normal reading sphere, but I loved every minute of it. Sandi will tell you a little about her novel in the interview I had with her.

Sandi has done me the honor of stopping at Fiction Scribe on her internet book tour of A Piece of Normal, and I’m pleased to have her as my guest.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy. Also, please keep Sandi and her mother in your thoughts as Sandi spends time with her mother, who was recently diagnosed with colon cancer.

Hello Sandi and welcome back to Fiction Scribe. Tell the readers a little about yourself.

Hi, Jaime! I’m delighted to be here on your wonderful site. Honestly, I don’t go a day without reading all the tidbits of information you’ve gathered from all over the web. And congratulations on your wedding, by the way!

Let’s see…about me…well, I’ve always wanted to be a fiction writer from the time I was a little girl and would make up stories. In fact, I “sold� my first book when I was six years old and my mother wouldn’t give me money for the ice cream man, so I went in the house, wrote a story about a king who slept three hours and forty-five seconds, and sold it to the neighbors for the price of a banana popsicle. My mother was mortified and had to go and buy the story back!

Since then, I’ve written lots and lots of stories—though not always with such immediate, tangible and delicious results. I married young and had two kids and always planned that if and when all the laundry was done, I’d write a novel. But life doesn’t always go the way you plan, and when my marriage ended when my kids were ages four and one, I instead got a job as a reporter and then editor of a local newspaper. Nothing like learning a skill like journalism on the job!

To keep myself amused between covering Planning and Zoning meetings, I started writing a column about my daily life as a single working mom. I didn’t know at first that this was a humor column, but people seemed to feel it was funny, and then Working Mother magazine started running it…and then a publisher discovered it and offered me a book deal. Which led to a larger publisher offering me two larger book deals to write humor books about babies and toddlers.

In the meantime, I had remarried, had a third child, and had started writing for magazines in addition to my day job, which was then as a feature reporter. I had started a novel, which I took out and worked on whenever I had even one spare moment…and seventeen years later, much to my surprise and delight, it (What Comes After Crazy) was bought by Shaye Areheart books (a division of Random House.) I then wrote a second novel, A Piece of Normal, and am now at work on a third, which will come out in the summer of 2008.

You’re currently on tour for your book A Piece of Normal. Tell us a little about your book.

A Piece of Normal is the funny, poignant story of two estranged sisters–one a very together, hip advice columnist and the other a runaway punk rocker–who have to figure out what it means to forgive their quirky pasts and embrace the craziness and chaos that can lead them to both to love and grace and healing.

Lily Brown is an advice columnist who has life so together, she’s the envy (and caretaker) of all her friends: she’s a divorced 34-year-old woman whose ex-husband still depends on her to find dates for him. She lives in her childhood home, a beach cottage in a little colony on the Connecticut coast, with her 4-year-old son and the lovely neighbors who were friends of her parents. Lily’s a wee bit stuck; in fact, she hasn’t so much as moved the furniture around in that house; it’s exactly the way her gifted, artistic mother had left it.

But even though she seems to have it all together, there is a tragedy at the core of Lily’s life: 12 years ago her eccentric, flamboyant mother and lawyer dad were killed suddenly in an auto accident, and Lily came home from college to raise her 16-year old sister, Dana. Lily imagined a life of closeness and compassion between the two grief-stricken sisters–but, instead, Dana acted out, took drugs, slept with every guy she could find, and ended up running away to be a tambourine girl in a punk rock band.

Lily, left alone, had something of a nervous breakdown, with only the colony neighbors there to help her regain her balance. She ended up meeting a nice, neurotic New Age therapist named Teddy, and they married and had little Simon–and when the marriage ended in divorce, Teddy remained in the area because he and Lily were better friends than spouses. She still feels responsible for the hapless Teddy, and tries to fix him up on dates with her friends, so that she can at last feel less guilty about leaving him and can find love herself.

But when Dana suddenly returns to town after ten years on the road, she brings with her all the life and hell-raising spontaneity that Lily’s settled-down, buttoned-up life has been missing. Yet she also brings back the memories of the grief they suffered so many years ago, as well as an explosive secret about their mother’s double life. But even more importantly, Dana develops a crush on Teddy and leads him on into a passionate relationship that threatens to crush hers and Lily’s newfound bond of trust.

It’s only when Lily goes through a series of losses–her “second” dad, her job at the paper, as well as her role as emotional caretaker for her ex-husband–that she comes to face the fact that control is really all an illusion anyway, and that the best lives are lived with risk and spontaneity and learning to embrace the past rather than shut it away.

Between not dating until she finds a girlfriend for her ex-husband and the sudden appearance of her ten-years-gone sister Dana, Lily Brown’s life is certainly an interesting one! How much of her life and personality comes from your life and the lives of those around you?

Hmm. Well, as all you fiction writers know, characters may come from a little kernel of an idea that you get from people you know or see out in public, or are possibly related to…but then they take on personalities of their own and become completely different from anyone you already know. I think I wanted to write about sisters because there always seems to be one sister who “has it all together� while the other sister is seen as more spontaneous and flaky. I wanted to know what would happen when those two sisters have to find out that each of them has something the other one needs and wants…and how they can figure out how to forgive each other when one has betrayed the other.

Finally, you are not only a successful novelist but a single mother. You also had an interesting line written in your writing contract – another book due within ten months. We all want to know: How did you do it?

LOL. Well, I’m not a single mother anymore, thank goodness! And luckily I wasn’t when I had only ten months to write the second book, or I don’t know how I ever would have done it. But seriously, it was something of a shock. I said to my agent when I saw the contract: “Did I ever say or do ANYTHING that indicated that I could write a book in ten months?!� She just laughed and said she was sure I could do it…and you know something? I did.

When you have something that you HAVE to do, it makes all your priorities somehow much clearer in a very excellent way. I decided early on, with a piece of advice from a friend of mine who has written one book a year for the past 11 years, that I would do three pages a day, no excuses. They didn’t have to be good, they didn’t have to be finished-draft stuff; there just had to be three of them. That gave me a lot of freedom. Even when I wasn’t “inspired,� I could do the three pages. And the most amazing thing about that to me was that at the end of the book, I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between the pages I had done when I had to drag my lazy self over to the computer, and those I had done when I was just zinging with enthusiasm. NO DIFFERENCE. And the best part was: the pages piled up, the book got done, and after a while, I was wanting to write 10 or 12 pages a day, just because I was so into the book.

To tell you the truth, when you’re writing a novel and no one is waiting for it, it seems to be the thing that always has to be put on hold, always put away—whenever anything else is going on. Laundry? Time for vacation? In-laws coming to visit? The novel has to disappear for a while. But when somebody has said, “HAND THIS IN BY MARCH FIRST,� it gives you the excuse you’ve always been waiting for. It was almost a dream come true!

Thank you so much for your time.

Oh, Jaime—thank YOU so much! It was a pleasure.