Book Trivia
When I was sixteen, I was asked to babysit at a family party held on the Connecticut shoreline. The house was incredible, and decades later, when writing LIFE AND OTHER INCONVENIENCES, I remembered details and used them to create Sheerwater, Genevieve London's beautiful home.
The Tweety bird scene in NOW THAT YOU MENTION IT comes from my own family history. Fun fact; I used to have a bird phobia but got over it after being attacked by a bird.
My sister served as my advisor for design on a budget for SOMEBODY TO LOVE. I
I like to have a song that captures the mood of the book I’m writing. For the last book, it was a song suggested by a reader: Make You Feel My Love, sung by Adele, written by Bob Dylan.
Davey Dunn, the heroine's brother in ANYTHING FOR YOU, is loosely based on a kid I met while volunteering in a respite program for parents of special needs kids.
The car accident scene from IN YOUR DREAMS was written with technical advice from my husband, who's a rescue diver with the fire department.
I had a hard time picking the hero's name in THE PERFECT MATCH. I wanted a nice blue-collar name, none of this Jayden or Caeden stuff, and ended up going with Tom, named after my fierce crush on the actor Tom Hardy.
Finding a hero’s name is harder than finding a heroine’s name for me. As you might know, I gravitate toward the Irish/Anglo names (Liam, Ian, Callahan). Originally, Malone from CATCH OF THE DAY was going to be named Clancy. But then I made a friend whose last name was Clancy, and it just didn’t feel right.
UNTIL THERE WAS YOU is the first time I wrote from a male perspective.
Posey, the heroine of UNTIL THERE WAS YOU, lives in a half-restored church. My sister-in-law and nephew live in a fully restored church, and it’s gorgeous (been featured in a magazine and stuff). I got a lot of the details for the fictional house based on their experiences.
Picking out names is always hard for me—I use several baby name websites, including one from the Social Security Adminstration, so I can be accurate in choosing names of people born in a certain decade.
To get an idea of what it was like to design a wedding dress in IF YOU ONLY KNEW, I took my daughter to a wedding dress designer to be our practice bride. My Princess still has the sketch from the designer.
The title for SOMEBODY TO LOVE comes from the song by Queen. :