Interview with Christina Gonzalez (+Contest)

Christina Gonzalez is the author of the forthcoming THE RED UMBRELLA (May 11). This historical fiction YA novel uses Christina's own family history, as you'll see in the interview. Before becoming an author, Christina worked as a lawyer.

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1. Your novel THE RED UMBRELLA is historical fiction, loosely based on your parents' and mother-in-law's experiences leaving Cuba two years after the Communist revolution as part of Operation Pedro Pan. When did you first become interested in their stories? What kinds of research did you do in order to write the novel?

I don’t think there was a specific moment when I became interested in the story it was always part of my life. Ever since I was a little girl, I’d been hearing about how my parents came to the United States … so I guess it was really a part of me, too. As for research, I spoke to my family in great detail, spoke to other members of the Cuban community who were heavily involved with Operation Pedro Pan and I read newspaper accounts ( U.S. and Cuban) to see how the media was reporting the situation. In fact, I incorporated actual American newspaper headlines at the beginning of each chapter to give the reader an understanding of what was truly happening in Cuba (the newspaper dates follow the dates in the story).



2. Clearly this is a somewhat personal story. What is the hardest part about fictionalizing a true story? How has your family reacted to the book?

I think the hardest part is the worry that you’re not telling the story accurately enough. Since this story also “touched home” with me, I wanted to make sure to convey the pain, desperation and hope the characters felt.

My family’s reaction has been amazing and supportive. Then again, they are a pretty amazing bunch of people.

3. You grew up with a blend of cultures, Cuban and Southern. What are some of your favorite traditions from each?

Well, if we’re talking food (and I love talking about food) a couple of my Southern favorites are chicken fried steak and banana pudding. Cuban yumminess can be found in the basic dish of picadillo, white rice and black beans.

4. Was THE RED UMBRELLA your title? What were some other titles considered, by you or your publisher?

The Red Umbrella was my title and, once the book was written, nothing else was ever considered.

5. Apparently you love peanut butter and jelly with fried egg. How did your sister come up with that combination? What are some of your other favorite foods?

I guess you read that silly blogpost I made a while back, but yes, my sister and I do like dunking a PB&J sandwich into a fried egg. I know it sounds totally gross (we were little when we wanted to “invent” a crazy new sandwich that would slightly disgust our parents), but it’s actually really good. Other favorite foods include Oreos, doughnuts, brownies, chocolate chip muffins…man, I’m getting hungry!

6. I'll probably be guilty of asking this question a lot, since I'm interviewing a number of debut authors and it is such a tempting one to ask. What are your plans once THE RED UMBRELLA debuts? Do you have other novels in the works?

Lots of plans…BIG plans! I have a science fiction novel and historical fiction novel in the works. Hopefully, you’ll be hearing more about them later in the year. After that, who knows? I adore writing and hope to be doing this for a long time to come.

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To win a red umbrella and signed bookmarks, leave a relevant comment by April 13. I will only send the umbrella within the US, but if someone international wins I will send them the bookmarks and choose a second winner. You can earn a bonus entry by posting about the contest.

Leah Cypess: A Life in Diaries

Leah Cypess is the author of the recently released MISTWOOD, which has earned praise from two of my favorite authors: Tamora Pierce and Megan Whalen Turner. Before becoming a published author, she worked as a lawyer. But as you can see from her guest blog, she's been writing for a long time.

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Thanks for having me on your blog! I see from one of your earlier blog entries that you’re a fellow admirer of THE PILLOW BOOK OF SEI SHONAGAN, so I thought I’d talk about diaries. When I was younger, I was always trying to keep a diary. I was very into my identity as “a writer” and all the writers in books seemed to be keeping diaries. Besides, before facebook and twitter there was no other excuse for jotting down my day-to-day observations.

My first diary was written in fourth grade, and was part of a class assignment by one of my favorite teachers. I found it years later, when I was packing to move to Boston, and spent half a day reading it instead of packing. The diary was actually something of a dialogue, since I had my diary write responses to me (“Dear Leah, You’re right. Love, Diary”), an early suggestion that perhaps non-fiction wasn’t going to be my genre.



We had a diary-writing assignment in fifth grade, too, but that one didn’t go so well. I started one of my diary entries, “I’m not going to write the whole story about this, Ms. X, because I know you’re reading this even though you say you’re not.”

In high school, I wrote one diary during summer camp, focusing on the month-long battle with the girl who had the bunk bed right next to mine. One day toward the end of the summer there was a huge, pitched verbal battle involving our entire bunk, “my” followers vs. “her” followers. I think maybe we won. I was no longer keeping the diary by then; I had ended my last entry with, “Writing in this diary is interfering too much with writing books.”

My last diary was written when I was 18 and backpacking with a group of friends through Europe (if you can call it backpacking when one girl had a suitcase that required all four of us to lug it up and down the steps of the Metro, and another put on makeup Every. Single. Morning. Including the morning we woke up on a sleeper train in our destination-city, Paris, to discover that we had 15 minutes to get off before we’d end up in Germany). That diary was more of a writing exercise, since it consisted mostly of descriptions of the cities and places we saw, along with vignettes like, “I see that I’ll never live the tickets lost/passport forgotten incident down,” and, “I think we’re accidentally sleeping in a nunnery.”

About halfway through that trip, I realized how to make museum visits more fun: by making up stories about what was going on in the paintings. My diary quickly turned into a collection of mostly-unfinished short stories, along with notes like “must research the Medici and write a story about Lorenzo” or “Churchill was really cool, need to read more about him.”

So there you have it: snapshots of my life in diaries and, between the lines, the reason why, since that last attempt, I’ve never kept a diary again. When you write a diary, everything in there is true. More or less. It misses the best part of writing, which is the part where you get to make stuff up.

Alexandra Diaz's Inspiration

Alexandra Diaz is a Cuban-American author who splits her time between Bath, England and Sante Fe, NM, which makes me totally jealous as those are both wonderful cities. She wrote the recent release OF ALL THE STUPID THINGS and is here today to share her inspiration.

(Photo by Owen Benson.)

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The idea of the book came with the initial statement, “Brent Staple is such a banjo.” Now before you start thinking that the book was heading towards some folk version of High School Musical (hmm, maybe next time...) let me explain what I envisioned a “banjo” to be. A “banjo” was a term my friends and I coined in college and it pretty much referred to someone you would love to hate. My original title was even called The Banjo Diaries. But, sadly, no one other than my college friends knows what a banjo is and even though Pinkie, one of my protagonists, included a Banjo Lexicon with seven different entries for when it's acceptable to call someone a banjo, the idea didn't fly. So even though I think that's a brilliant opening line and it was what inspired the whole book, it was deleted before the book went out to publishers. Fortunately the phrase still worked to inspire the bases of the book. Even though the word was no longer there, the meaning was. Brent had done something wrong, something scandalous, so I had to figure out what, and why, and how the consequences of that action would effect my protagonists, Tara, Pinkie, and Whitney Blaire.

I knew from the start that I wanted three protagonists. I liked the challenge that would bring and liked how the friendship dynamic would change depending on how they each interpreted the banjo that is Brent. Each girl was going to have a different personality and a storyline as a result of that personality. Tara is the athlete focusing on her running instead of her personal life. Pinkie the worrier who likes to keep all her chicks in line. And Whitney Blaire is the drama queen trying hide the hurt she feels inside.

Trying to figure out how everything is going to work is a bit like playing god, You try out moving your characters in one direction only to realize that doesn't work so you try something else. It's half imagination and half luck. At some point, characters and situations just started moving on their own. Once that happened, I just let them take off, make their own choices, and try not to cringe when they occasionally became banjos themselves. I sometimes think they did most of the work of writing the story themselves. I just hit the computer keys, and came up with the original idea!

Holly Nicole Hoxter: You Couldn't Pay Me to be 21 Again

Holly Nicole Hoxter's debut novel, THE SNOWBALL EFFECT, comes out today. I've had my copy for a long time, so I'm excited to finally talk about it! But while this is a day of celebration, Holly's here to talk about some less than fun times. (Keep reading - there is a happy ending.)

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When Liviania asked me to write about what I was like at 21, I got excited at the prospect of sharing stories about my younger, carefree days. But then I started to REMEMBER 21. I'll divulge this upfront: It was a bad year.

A week after my birthday, I was fired from my job for insubordination. It would have been the perfect time to finish writing my novel, but then my grandmother died a few days after Christmas and I spent the next two months depressed and crying.

In March I found a job. It paid well and I felt like such a grownup. Unfortunately the job was 60 miles away in Rockville. On a good day, with no traffic and a blatant disregard for the posted speed limit, the drive took an hour. On a normal day it was more like 1.5 to 2 hours--each way.

Before long, my depression and the stress from the new job really killed my immune system. I was sick for an entire month. Some mornings I could barely lift my arms to shampoo my hair. I stopped going to the gym. I lived on convenient food--McDonald’s breakfast, Triscuits and cheese, BK Whoppers, and endless cans of Coke. I gained thirty pounds. Soon I was depressed, stressed out, lazy, and overweight.

That summer, at my parents’ urging, I bought a house. It needed extensive renovations so I spent my weekdays trekking to Rockville and my weekends tearing down walls and making trips to Home Depot with my dad. After a month, I thought I’d go insane if I didn’t take a break from the monotony. On Monday morning, I drove three hours to Ocean City and spent the day with my friend Scott, a volunteer firefighter who lived a block from the ocean. I admired and envied Scott because he was doing exactly what he wanted to do with his life. As I drove home that night, I looked at the gorgeous sunset over the Chesapeake Bay, and I felt optimistic that things would get better.

But they didn't. Every morning when I drove toward Rockville, I felt like I was betraying everything I'd ever believed in. I could feel my dreams shriveling up and dying. Every morning I parked next to the same car with a bumper stick that said, "Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life." I read that quote by Omar Khayyman every single morning and thought, I am not happy for this moment. I am not happy for ANY of my moments. I hated feeling that way. I wanted to feel hopeful again but I didn’t know how. I couldn't call in sick every day and go to the beach. I had a mortgage. I was a grownup.

But secretly I felt like a failure. I’d always dreamed I would be a literary prodigy and travel the world. I couldn’t figure out how I’d ended up with such a mediocre life.

I beat myself up for gaining so much weight, for buying a house I could barely afford, for getting stuck with a job that ate up all my time, for never writing. During my long commute, I would call a friend or my mother to distract myself from the isolation of the empty car. When no one answered, I would cry instead. 120 miles a day, five days a week. That’s a lot of crying.

My 22nd year was more of the same. But at 23, I decided this was no way to live. I gave myself permission to behave badly, and to fail. If I woke up and didn't feel like going to work, I didn’t go. I made no special effort to arrive on time. Once I took a two hour lunch break instead of thirty minutes. Sometimes I ignored my work and wrote query letters instead. It felt SO GOOD to not care anymore. So I decided to quit.

I had two months' worth of mortgage payments in the bank, no new job lined up, and blind faith that it would all work out. And if it didn't, so what? Even if I lost the house, ruined my credit score, and moved back in with my parents, it would be better than Rockville. At least I would have time to write. I already felt like a failure, so the prospect of financial ruin didn’t frighten me.

But after two weeks of blissful unemployment, I found a job in my neighborhood, where I earned about half of my Rockville salary. I still wasn’t exactly living the dream, and I knew that after I depleted my savings account, my salary wouldn't cover my bills. But I liked the low-stress environment and the location. I didn't want to find a "better" job.



So I knew that my writing would have to save me. Sadly, word on the street was that the novel I’d worked on for five years was "too quiet" to attract a publisher. I literally couldn't afford to spend five years writing something new. So that summer, I frantically wrote the novel which would become THE SNOWBALL EFFECT. In less than a year, I wrote it, edited it, got an agent, and found a publisher. I’d finally gotten where I’d always wanted to be.

21 was a year of wasted time but if I could go back and do it all again I wouldn’t change a thing. It was the rock-bottom desperation and fear of failure that motivated me to finally GO AFTER my dreams instead of trudging along and waiting to see if they would come true. In a way, I think that I needed to experience the soul-sucking joylessness of a mediocre life. If I hadn’t been so miserable and terrified, I’d probably still be slugging through Draft 27 of that first unpublished novel.

When I think about that Omar Khayyman bumper sticker now, it makes me smile. I am happy for this moment. And now I can appreciate all of those other moments, too.

Alisa Libby: Researching Those Crazy Tudors

Today I am kicking off Alisa Libby's Traveling to Teens tour with a guest post on her research for her newest novel, THE KING'S ROSE. Be sure to stop by later today for my review. I was going to add pictures to this post from my own trip to Hampton Court, but my laptop crashed last night. You'll have to imagine it for yourself, but believe me, it is well worth seeing if you're ever in the London area.

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(Clicking on the book cover to go to Amazon is a good idea - THE KING'S ROSE is currently bargain priced.)

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There are many different ways to research a historical novel. I spent many hours reading about the Tudor court for my novel The King's Rose, but I'll tell you about something more fun: ghost hunting. My husband(/research partner) and I took a trip to England. We visited Windsor Castle, Hampton Court, Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, among other places. A highlight of the trip was the night-time “ghost tour” of Hampton Court Palace. We were there to see a specific ghost: Catherine Howard, who supposedly haunts a particular gallery in the Palace.

Catherine Howard was a teenager when she was married to King Henry VIII of England. He was an incredibly powerful king and Catherine was his fifth wife—he had divorced two and beheaded one before her (the other had died shortly after giving birth to his long-awaited heir). Catherine was a youthful, pretty, fun-loving creature, which is perhaps why Henry found her so appealing. Unfortunately, she may have been a bit too fun-loving. After just over a year of marriage, the King was informed that Catherine was having an affair with one of his servants. Upon this revelation, Queen Catherine was imprisoned in her chambers at Hampton Court.

According to legend, Catherine broke free of the guards and ran from her chambers at Hampton, screaming “Henry! Henry! Henry!” It wasn't proper to use the first name of the king in public (even for a queen). She was desperate to see the king; perhaps she hoped that seeing his young, blushing bride would soften his actions against her. Supposedly his advisers thought the same, which is why Catherine never reached her goal. She was caught and dragged back to her apartments, screaming like a crazy person. She never saw Henry again. A few months later she was executed at the Tower of London. The legend follows that her ghost still haunts that gallery at Hampton, screaming Henry's name.

Hampton Court is a gorgeous palace. If you like macabre, gothic stuff like I do, it's even more stunning at night. The entire outside of the palace was lit in spooky, shadowy blue and purple. However, I have to admit that I didn't see Catherine's shrieking ghost in the spooky, “haunted” gallery. Perhaps this is for the best. Ghosts aside, it was amazing to visit the place where she experienced both her greatest triumphs (her first official presentation to the Court as queen was at Hampton) and her terrifying fall from grace.

One of the final stops on our trip was the Tower of London. Because I am a morbid individual, I made sure to schedule this visit on February 13th, the anniversary of Catherine's execution. We visited the site where she was executed (by beheading) and her burial place in the Chapel of Saint Peter ad Vincula. Catherine doesn't get many visitors. All the visitors and the roses go to Henry's infamous second wife, and Catherine's cousin, Anne Boleyn. Catherine is the far less famous beheaded bride—but I found her fascinating. I left a stone on her grave, a sign that I had paid her a visit. I like to think that she understood.

In case you are interested in reading more about those crazy Tudors, here are some titles you may enjoy. For more about The King's Rose and my first book, The Blood Confession, visit my website: www.alisalibby.com. You can also visit my blog: www.alisamlibby.wordpress.com.

THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII by Alison Weir
THE WIVES OF HENRY VIII by Antonia Fraser
A TUDOR TRAGEDY, the Life and Times of Catherine Howard by Lacey Baldwin Smith
KATHERINE HOWARD by Joanna Denny