by Sandy Hall
A bucket of gratitude to my editor, Holly West, whose help and patience through the editing process has been nothing short of amazing. This novel would only be half as good without her insights. Also thanks to Molly Brouillette, Allison Verost, and Kathryn Little for a variety of things along the way. And to the Swoon Reads community for all of their reading, rating, and reviewing.
Boatloads of appreciation to my friends and coworkers at the Morristown and Morris Township Library for their flexibility and support: Maria Norton, Chad Leinaweaver, Arlene Sprague, Kelly Simms, Virginia Lee, and Anne Ryan Dello Russo, in particular. Also Jim Collins, for listening to every outrageous book idea I’ve had during the past four years. Someday, I’m going to write that zombie-mermaid saga.
Endless thanks to the online contingent: Kandra Rivers for her draft reading and encouragement to keep going, Hanna Nowinski for not blocking my e-mail address after the 5,000th message I sent about trying to find the perfect “aw” moment, and Adi Lubotzki for having a thoroughly intriguing answer to the question “What kind of romance novel do you want to read?” And to all my Tumblr friends and followers, you gave me the courage to post my writing in the first place.
Eternally indebted to Lauren Velella, because every time I say, “Hey, I wrote some junk, you wanna read it?” she answers, “Always!” To Michelle Petrasek for being a dynamite reader, editor, gambling buddy, and IHOP enthusiast. To Chrissy George for being my first beta and favorite person to shop with. And a quick shout-out to the FRLK girls—Kate Vasilik, Katie Nellen, Chelsea Reichert, and Melanie Moffitt—for listening and for making me cry using only a call number and an ISBN.
Major props and nothing but love to my sister and brothers: Karen, Scott, and Sean, because a little bit of you leaks into everything I write. You have far more influence on me than you could imagine. Also thanks to Bill, Billy, Zak, Sandra, Brianna, and Kathleen for being a part of this big old family.
Forever grateful to my mom, Pat, for a million reasons, far too many to enumerate here. I would also like to apologize for the foul language. Finally, to my dad, Wayne, whom I miss every day. I like to imagine when he found out this news, he would have said something along the lines of “Way to be, Sandra Jean!” and then bought me a cake.
A Coffee Date
with author Sandy Hall and her editor, Holly West
“About the Author”
Holly West (HW): Do you have a favorite fictional couple? Who is your OTP?
Sandy Hall (SH): My One True Pairing, forever, is Kurt and Blaine from Glee. Always, yes.
HW: What’s your favorite way to spend a rainy day?
SW: This is so dorky, and I know I’m probably supposed to say something like “reading, curled up,” but I love to clean. I hate cleaning any other time, but if it’s raining and I’m not going anywhere, I’m going to clean.
HW: Do you have any hobbies that you’re really into?
SH: Just reading.
HW: Reading takes up so much time.
SH: It does! It takes up a lot of time, and then you know, watching TV takes up a lot of time … being in fandom, stuff like that. It’s busy, busy work.
HW: It really is. But you can’t write properly if you don’t know what’s going on.
SH: No, you need to be up on things. Pop culture, the news, you never know where your next inspiration’s going to come from.
“The Swoon Reads Experience”
HW: How did you learn about Swoon Reads?
SH: I saw a Huffington Post article linked on Tumblr about it. I read it and thought “This is interesting. I should tell the kids about this at work.” Because the librarian always kicks in, and then I thought, “No, I am going to write a book for them. And I’m not going to tell anyone about it because I don’t want the kids to read it. Yet.”
HW: I love that the first manuscript we chose was one written specifically for our site.
SH: Obviously, I talk to a lot of teens, and I figured I would see what a teen wanted to read, so I wrote an e-mail to one of my online friends that lives in Israel. She’s 18, and I said, “Adi, what kind of romance novel do you want to read?” And she came back with this gigantic paragraph, “And they live side-by-side, and they go to the same restaurant, and they…” At first, I was like, “Alright, alright…” Then I said, “Wait. And then I tell it from everyone else’s point of view.” It’s just a real simple romance, from everybody else’s point of view.
HW: What was it like being part of the Swoon Reads site?
SH: I loved reading everyone’s comments and feedback. Not only on mine, but on everyone’s. November and December are very busy for me professionally, so I didn’t have a lot of time to read each and every manuscript, but I feel like I got a really good taste of them by reading other people’s comments. And there was a lot of great writing advice like, “Oh you know, as I read this, I was thinking.…” It’s just a really nice community, and a lot of serious writers.
HW: So, once you were chosen, you had that great story that you told us about your mom…?
SH: Oh, my mom! So, it was a snow day and I was home, so I told my mom and she said, “Sandra, if they’re asking you for $15,000, you should not give it to them.” And I had to explain, “No, Mom, Mom, it’s a real thing, it’s Macmillan, this is the advance.” She replied, “It’s a scam, be careful!” And I was like, “Mom, Macmillan.” Finally, she says, “Oh right, yes. I’ve heard of them.” So, she’s always on the lookout for scams apparently. She worries about these things.
HW: It’s her job. She is your mother.
“About the Book”
HW: The version that was published is very different from the one originally posted on the site. What in your opinion was the biggest change, and which one was the hardest?
SH: I think the biggest and the hardest are the same—making Lea younger was really hard for me. I think in part because I wrote them both as juniors because I LOVED my junior year of college, like I just had so much fun my junior year. And then to take her back to being a freshman was hard because I had to, you know, make her a little more naïve and a fish out of water. And I really did like that stuff, but it was hard because I was like, “I know what you will be in two years.You have such potential Lea, I love you! You’re going to be okay, we’ll just make you young.”
HW: Just because this always amazes me, exactly how long did it take you to write this book?
SH: It took me six days.
HW: Which is the shortest answer I have ever heard.
SH: I planned for weeks, the planning started early October, with all of my index cards and spreadsheets and yada yada. And I had dialogue planned out, I had a lot of stuff to grow from, and I had a long weekend—I had a Thursday to a Tuesday off, and I just wrote the heck out of everything. There were days when I wrote like, 12,000 words. It just flowed. I think it was the format of the book, writing from all of those different perspectives. I didn’t have to get mired down in anything. The plot just kind of kept moving along, and when something wasn’t working, I could just say, “Next!”
HW: Okay, this is your chance to tell me what a terrible person I am. What was it like getting the edit letter?
SH: Oh my God, no. It was amazing! It was like terrifying, and then I read it and I said, “What was I afraid of?” And you were so apologetic, and I was like, “About what?” For starters, I wrote this thing in six days, and then I put it on the Internet for people to read—of course, there’s going to be stuff that needs to get changed!
HW: I didn’t know that. There were some big changes—including going from 23 viewpoints down to only 14, which was going to require you to basically rewrite half the book—and I didn’t want to inadvertently crush your soul.
SH: I promise my soul was not crushed. My index cards totally saved the day here. In the first draft, I had an index card for each scene. And they were all color coded. Scenes with Gabe and Lea were white cards, just Gabe was yellow, just Lea was pink, and if neither of them were in the sce
ne the card was orange. Green cards marked the months. So basically I went through and looked at the cards that were for the POVs we were eliminating and I thought about who could sort of take over those moments and then pretty much just made a new card. I ended up making a whole new stack of cards because I needed to switch some other scenes and POVs around, but the index card system really lends itself to edits. It was definitely a major help.
HW: Right, and after that it was just giant outlines—I feel like your writing style and my editing style line up really closely.
SH: Yes, it was really, really easy in that respect. And like I said, wrapping my head around making Lea younger was the hardest part, and once I got over that—oh, and once I added Sam.
HW: Sam is awesome!
SH: Yeah, making Gabe a little younger, I needed to give him another connection. This way, his friends are his brother’s friends, and everybody’s sort of a group as opposed to Gabe being a loner. Sam really brings him into everything. And I really love Sam—he was my eureka moment. I was sitting at work, totally normal, and all of a sudden, I was like, “He has a brother!”
HW: Brilliant. And I love Sam’s voice, too. He’s just such a great older brother and I keep having visions of him putting his hand right in the middle of Gabe’s back and pushing him forward, saying, “Talk to her!” Just shoving.
SH: Which is basically what he’s always wanted to do. It’s funny, you know. I think Sam’s always wanted to do that, but I don’t think Gabe ever really liked a girl as much as he likes Lea. I mean, yeah, he liked girls—but before Lea, it was sort of like, “Eh, I don’t think I really want to put myself out there enough to even say that I like this girl.”
“The Writing Life”
HW: When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
SH: Like last summer. I feel like such a jerk sometimes, talking about this, but I think it always kind of was in the back of my head. I kept a journal as a kid, but it was usually just, “Today, I talked to that boy” or “Mom is being mean.” I never really wrote anything creatively. I joined Fandom and I wrote some fan fiction, and I realized, “I really love to write. I had no idea I love to write. I failed writing in college. I can’t believe how much I love to write!” So, I feel like I have a lot of novels in me now, it’s kind of amazing.
HW: Do you have any writing rituals?
SH: I actually have a great writing ritual I have to tell you about. Sometimes when I’m a little bit blocked and I don’t know what I’m doing, I just need to settle down and get writing. So, I’ll lay out ten wintergreen Life Savers, the individually wrapped ones, or jelly beans or Skittles or whatever. And I can only have one after I’ve written a certain number of words. And it works. The next thing I know, I have 2,000 words because I just really wanted the candy.
HW: That’s great, and it’s such a little thing. Let’s talk a little bit about your process. Some people just kind of make it up as they go, some people do outlines. What about you?
SH: I do everything. I plan, down to the nitty-gritty. I love my index cards, I love spreadsheets, I dabble with the snowflake method.
HW: What is the snowflake method?
SH: That is where you start off with a sentence, and then you grow that to five sentences. And then you take those five sentences and you grow them to five paragraphs. And then you work on your characters a little bit, and start incorporating them together until it grows and grows and gets more detailed, like a snowflake.
And that’s what I put into the spreadsheet, one scene on each line of the spreadsheet. People often tell me, “Spreadsheets don’t go with writing,” and I’m like, “You don’t understand!” I like having a projected word count for a scene and trying to hit that. I don’t know! I just really like spreadsheets. And index cards!
HW: I loved looking at your index cards.
SH: They’re like my security object now. Like, “Look, I turned these into a book!”
HW: One last question. What is the best writing advice that you’ve ever heard?
SH: I love Chuck Wendig's blog Terrible Minds, and I was reading a post from a guest writer named Delilah Dawson, who has a very funny little take on “You just have to get it out there.” Just write the thing. Stop worrying about it, stop thinking about what it should be or it should look like, and just write it.
And from that moment on, I felt, “I know how to write this. I just need to stop self-editing and thinking, and just write it.” And I think that’s why, with Gabe and Lea, I wrote it so fast. I had no choice, because if I stop, I start to second-guess myself. I have to get it out. If I stop and think about it for too long, nothing is going to happen.
Discussion Questions
1. Did you enjoy the multiple points of view? Would this story have worked as well if it had been told in a more traditional format?
2. What are your feelings about Gabe and Lea? Do you think you would have seen them differently if you had been inside their heads?
3. Which scenes from the book would you have liked to have read from Gabe’s point of view? Which scenes from Lea’s?
4. Which character had your favorite point of view? Which was your least favorite?
5. Why do you think extremely untraditional viewpoints like the bench and the squirrel were included?
6. Do you feel that all of the narrators were reliable, or did their various personal filters change the way you saw different events?
7. At one point, Gabe makes a list of things he should have said to Lea, but didn’t. One of them was “And there’s a lot of stuff I should tell you, because you might not like me as much if you know the other stuff, but maybe you still would.” Why do you think he believes that? Has there been any indication on Lea’s part that she might not like him if she really got to know him?
8. What do you think of Inga’s creative writing assignments? Would you be able to write a description of someone without using adjectives?
9. Have you ever been in this situation of watching two people try to fall in love? If you were friends with Gabe and Lea, what advice would you have given them?
10. If you could pick any of the characters in this novel to have their own story, which would you choose?
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“Unbelievable,” Cara said.
She’d gone on dozens of whale-watching tours, but had never before seen a whale spyhop this close. The crisscrossed markings on the back of the large whale’s head told her this was Crossback, a gray migrating through the area with her baby, Bobbi.
“I can’t believe she’s letting you touch her,” Cara said to David.
“It’s amazing,” he said.
She readied her camera and snapped shots of Crossback, and then Bobbi, who poked his smaller head out of the water behind his mother.
“What brings you so close today, Crossback?” she asked.
“You know this whale?” David asked.
In the excitement of the moment, she ignored the impulse to lean away from him. She inched closer, until her arm brushed his, and spoke in his ear. “This is Crossback. And that’s her baby, Bobbi.”
She reached out to smooth a hand over Crossback’s face and savored the cold, slippery sensation. An instant later, even though her fingers didn’t touch David’s, a warm tingle tickled her fingers where they met Crossback’s skin. The warmth trickled up her arm, spread through her chest, and exploded outward, toward David.
With both their hands still touching Crossback, Cara and David turned to look at each other. The intensity of his gaze told her he also sensed the warmth that wrapped around them, the invisible energy radiating between them, connecting them.
Unsure of what was happening, and just as unsure of how she felt about it, she pulled her hand away from Crossback. She stood, and David did the same. Crossback and Bobbi dipped beneath the surface of the water and disappeared.
Cara tried to disappear too, heading back to her seat to stash the camera and binoculars. No way was she going to crush on
a tourist.
Just then she heard a loud thump, and the boat rocked. Off balance, she scrambled to find her footing. Over her shoulder, she spotted shiny black whale skin and two rows of gigantic, cone-shaped white teeth as the orca again bumped the boat.
Reaching for something to hold onto, she only grasped air as she fell over The Lookout’s side.
This can’t be happening. The thought played over and over as frigid water hit her face and chest, lapping at her cheeks and biting her skin. She gasped reflexively, thankful her head was above water. Her breaths came hard and fast as she shivered.
“I’ll throw you a life ring!” Rick hollered.
The freezing water pierced Cara’s fingers, and swell after swell washed over her face. Gasping for breath, she choked on a mouthful of seawater. Her life jacket pulled from her arms and sprang up over her head. Somehow, she’d forgotten to fasten it.
Her arms and legs flailed as she sank beneath the surface. The water was black as tar, the only visible light shining from a spot above that grew more distant with each second.
Something bumped her leg. Opening her mouth to scream, a stream of salt water rushed down her throat. Her lungs heaved and demanded air. She pressed her lips together and struggled harder to flap and kick with her heavy limbs.
From beneath, she was lifted and thrust upward. Above, the muted glow grew brighter. A pair of strong hands reached down and pulled her up.
As her head cleared the surface, her vision blurred. Her chest convulsed and she coughed, forcing the water she’d inhaled out of her lungs. Salt water burned her throat and nose until she finally drew in long, rasping breaths.
She caught a glimpse of Crossback’s markings as the gray surfaced for air, then dove back underwater.
“I got you. We need to get back on the boat,” an urgent, yet soothing, voice told her.
