by LJ Evans
Thank you to my new and lovely publicists Lauren Helms and Dani Barclay at Barclay Publicity. I can’t imagine having put this final book in the series out without you. Lauren, I so appreciate your friendship, your support, and your strength in telling me DON’T DO IT. And then just rolling your eyes when I do it anyway. Your opinions and strength mean the world to me. Please don’t ever stop telling me the truth.
To the bloggers who have shared my stories with the world on your own time and your own dime, I cannot say enough. The independent book world would not be where it is today without your love and support. I’m afraid to name any of you in fear that I’ll forget someone because you have all made such a difference in my life. But with a deep breath, here are some of you that I know I need to include: Kate Olson at Kate Olson Reads, Stacie at Boren Books, Heather at Books and a Blanket, Jenn at Stories and Coffee, Rachel at NovelMomma, Natasha at Dreamland Book Blog, Paige at Pop the Butterfly, and Sani at iPearlUnicorn.
I couldn’t have published three books this year without the love and support of some amazing author friends that I’ve made. I didn’t know when I hit “publish” in April of 2017 that one of the best things to come from it would be the fact that I got to meet other authors who would change my world for the better. Thank you to Kelsey Kingsley for not only keeping me sane, but for being the biggest promoter of COUNTRY ALBUM that I’ve ever had. Thank you to Katy Ames and Autumn Ruby for listening, reading my stories, teaching me, and making me feel normal. Thank you to Sophia Peony, SJ Sylvis, Harmony Williams, and all the ladies of Romancing the Manuscript for understanding the creative process, sharing what you know about this crazy book world, and always supporting each other in ways that I never thought possible…without jealousy and while truly holding each other’s crowns up when they fall. Hugs to all of you.
Thank you to some of the authors who have inspired me to write and then continued to inspire me as I got to know them on social media. Not only their own words in their own books, but the kindness they show to the world and to fledgling authors like me, have moved me. Amy Harmon, Jessica Park, and Mariana Zapata, you’ve made all the difference to me in my writing and my career.
Finally, but certainly not least, thank you to my readers. To those of you that I’ve come to know personally and those that I have not. Michelle Fritz, you are selfless and beautiful in all you do for me and other authors. Michelle Odland, you gave me hope when I’d kind of given up. Thank you to my down-under champion, Sam McIntyre, for spreading my stories in Australia. To every one of you who have read even one of my stories, THANK YOU!
About the Author
Award winning author, LJ Evans, lives in the California Central Valley with her husband, daughter, and the three terrors called cats. She's been writing, almost as a compulsion, since she was a little girl and will often pull the car over to write when a song lyric strikes her. While she currently spends her days teaching 1st grade in a local public school, she spends her free time reading and writing, as well as binge-watching original shows like The Crown, Victoria, and Stranger Things.
If you ask her the one thing she won’t do, it’s pretty much anything that involves dirt—sports, gardening, or otherwise. But she loves to write about all of those things, and her first published heroine was pretty much involved with dirt on a daily basis, which is exactly why LJ loves fiction novels—the characters can be everything you’re not and still make their way into your heart.
Her debut novel, MY LIFE AS A COUNTRY ALBUM, was the 2017 Young Adult Book of the Year in the Independent Author Network's Book Awards. Almost all the books in the MY LIFE AS AN ALBUM series have been nominated for, or a finalist in, national book awards. For more information, follow LJ at www.ljevansbooks.com.
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Books by LJ Evans
MY LIFE AS AN ALBUM SERIES
my life as a country album – April 2017
my life as a pop album – January 2018
my life as a rock album – July 2018
my life as a mixtape – November 2018
Stand Alone Novels
Sunshine & Elm – contemporary women’s fiction – coming soon
Untitled, Ezra and Elara– urban fantasy duet – coming soon
Continue reading for a preview of another novel in the
my life as an album series
my life as a pop album
Hello
H
ello. I’m Good Girl Mia. Mia Andrea Phillips. You probably don’t know me, but you might know my brother, Jake. You might know Jake because, for a short while, he was plastered all over the sports channels and magazines as the future of the NFL. That was when he was the superstar quarterback for the University of Tennessee, and before his diabetes and his bad kidneys forced him to quit.
My brother, Jake, was the first one to call me Good Girl Mia. It was his way of teasing me about never getting in trouble. And it’s the truth. I am a good girl. There’s nothing I can do about it. I have always been the good girl. I’ve been the friend, the helper, the one you could count on. The one to drive you home if you drank too much. The one to stop you from making monumental mistakes. The one who never gave her parents any problems because her brother and his girlfriend gave them enough.
In fact, I’ve been so good at helping others that I actually gave Jake a kidney. Yep. An actual body part. Unfortunately, that didn’t end very well, so maybe I’m not as good at helping out as I’d like to be…
If you are a good girl also, then you know how it goes. You know that good girls never break rules and that they never, ever run off with the bad boy.
Well then, how in holy potato peels did I end up here, with a sexy-as-all-get-out musician laying naked next to me? Well, that’s the real story, isn’t it?
I’M A MESS: The Meet
“I’m a mess right now, searching for sweet surrender.”
-Ed Sheeran
M
y best friend, neighbor, and almost sister, Cam, once told me that her life could be played out in a series of Taylor Swift songs. And I understood what she meant because her life with Jake was like all the old Taylor songs. Angst and heartache and yearning.
After I had graduated from the University of Tennessee and moved back home to run the family business, my life became a series of Ed Sheeran songs. “I’m a Mess” seemed to resonate with me at first because I felt like I was just going through the motions while secretly looking for a sweet surrender. And I definitely couldn’t figure out how everything was all going to work out.
I guess that wasn’t completely true as I did have one thing going right for me and that was working at my daddy’s car dealership. The one he planned on handing over to me in the fall. Contrary to most people’s opinion of me, I liked running the dealership. And I loved the vague idea that we might be starting a tradition where someday I would pass the dealership on to my kids. Not that there was any chance in the near future of me having children.
Because, let’s face it, my personal life was the part of my life in all sorts of disarray. You’d never know that by looking at me. I prided myself on the fact that very few people knew about the emotional turmoil that rolled like waves through me on an almost daily basis. My mama once told me that if you went into someone’s house and the place was nice and tidy but the cupboards were a disaster, that it said something about them. And I knew exactly what she meant because that described me to a T. Neat and tidy outside, chaos on the inside.
My life wasn’t going to get any easier that July because that’s when HE entered my world, flipping it on its axis even more.
That day, it was hotter than blue blazes with the humidity like a wall you could almost see if you squinted hard enough, and I contemplated lying down on the tile showroom floor to cool off like our dog, Sparky. But instead, I lifted up every last hair on my head and stood under the air
conditioning vent trying to dry the sweat off my neck.
And, of course, it was then, when I had my hair, bangs and all, swept up like a Conehead that he sauntered into our dealership. While I was a sweaty puddle, he looked like a Jamie McGuire book boyfriend come to life.
He was lean and muscular in a blue t-shirt and just-tight-enough ripped jeans that accentuated every sculpted line. Lines of gorgeous muscles that belonged in an underwear ad. He was tall, but not too tall, around about six feet, and had sexy, bed-tousled looking brown hair that highlighted his pale gray eyes. Eyes that were the color of the winter skies right before a tornado. I was a sucker for a boy with tattoos even if I thought I’d never date someone who had them. And this piece of gorgeousness had them.
There were words wrapped around each wrist and some sort of bird on his neck. None of it was easy to make out over a distance, but that made me think about how, if I was close enough, I could brush aside those curling ends and investigate more. And I suddenly wanted to do that very much. Every fiber in my body was aching to drop my grossly sweaty hair and sweep up his, just so I could get a good look at him and his tattoos.
my life as a pop album
(my life as an album series volume II)
available now
http://bit.ly/MLAAPAlje
