Please welcome author Mela Remington, who is promoting her new book, Like You Read About. Her guest post today is about her
NaNoWriMo/40th birthday challenge.
Giveaway details: Want to win an e-copy? Leave comment with a valid e-mail to enter. The winner will be chosen on July 25.
Giveaway details: Want to win an e-copy? Leave comment with a valid e-mail to enter. The winner will be chosen on July 25.
Publisher: Smashwords
Date of publication: April
2013
What if your soul mate has
been sitting across from you at a conference room table for the last two years?
Cora O'Malley is a shy accountant for a small pharmaceutical company in the Boston area. After years of being single, struggling with her self image and self confidence she finds out that the IT guy she's been crushing on is single and also looking for possibilities.
Cora decides to take life by the email and see if she and Daniel Santagata, the IT man have anything in common, if there really are sparks between them...
Cora O'Malley is a shy accountant for a small pharmaceutical company in the Boston area. After years of being single, struggling with her self image and self confidence she finds out that the IT guy she's been crushing on is single and also looking for possibilities.
Cora decides to take life by the email and see if she and Daniel Santagata, the IT man have anything in common, if there really are sparks between them...
My thoughts:
Like You Read about is the debut offering by author
Mela Remington. It was a pretty cute story about two lonely people who
find each other in the least likely place, work. Cora has had a crush on
Daniel for a long time. The past 2 years, she has worked hard to lose
weight and build up her confidence. When she finally gets up the guts to
talk to Dan, she realizes there is a mutual interest.
I enjoyed the journey these two took together. The
e-mails that they exchanged were fun and flirty. They say that the best
way to get to know someone if through letters. I really felt like Cora
and Dan got to know each other pretty well. Their HEA was very
sweet. I liked that Cora had problems with her body image and self
confidence. That made her more real to me and I felt like I could really
relate to her.
Hi all, thanks so much for having me here at From the TBR
Pile. As an avid reader my own TBR pile is insane and it always comforts
me to know that there are others like me out there in the world.
My 40th birthday loomed large, I’d been working
on my review blog for a few months, and had been reading voraciously, but
something was missing, I had so much stuff rolling around in my head and really
didn’t know what to do. As November approached a number of my friends
were posting all over Facebook about getting ready for NaNoWriMo, in years past
I’d laughed at their insanity… write a book in a month, ok crazypants, you go
ahead and do that.
Then I really thought about it and thought, well I have this
story in my head, about how I met my husband, maybe this challenge would force
me to spew it out in a way I could share it with others. As my birthday
is in early November my wonderful husband decided to buy me a laptop. It
was a wonderful gift, it’s a trusty Lenovo, and I’ve made it all pretty with
stickers from Vera Bradley. Anyhow, on November 1 I created a word
document, and I had the title already. Let’s keep in mind I haven’t
written a word of fiction since I was in high school, so it’d been about 25
years, I thought I was out of my ever loving mind.
‘Like you read about’ is a phrase my husband uses all the
time, and I knew it was the perfect title. I started writing, and kept
writing and didn’t stop. I kept entering my word count into the NaNoWriMo
and watching the graph rise and getting my projected finish date. Every
time I saw the projected finish date I laughed, thinking ‘There’s no way in
hell I’ll finish by X date.’ Well I did finish, much sooner than I
thought I would and by November 21 I had 56k words and a story I was pretty
happy with, although I tinkered a little here and there. Then I walked
away from it for at least a month. I wanted to let it set and settle
before I did some additional editing.
I had talked to some friends and they were interested and
supportive. I had some friends, and some strangers Beta read for me, and
asked them to give me honest feedback and not worry about hurting my
feelings. The responses were a mixed bag of goodies and I spent a lot of
time going through them and editing my book even more. Then I bit the
bullet and hired a professional editor. She and I worked together for
about a month to get the book ready, and in the end we had the final product that
you can read today… with one small exception. Even though it was finished
I felt like I missed something.
In the last few weeks before publishing I had been dreaming
about my friend dear Kaelyn, she died six years earlier from metastatic breast
cancer, but she was in my dreams, almost nightly nagging me about something
that I still can’t remember. One morning I woke up, opened the Word doc
of the edited book and did a global find and replace, initially the best friend
character was called Amy, but I knew that wasn’t really her name. Once I
fixed the odd words that contained “amy” that ended up with Kaelyn stuck in the
middle I knew the book was done and I was ready to publish.
What started out as a fun way to tell the story of how my
husband and I met turned into a life altering experience. Being 40 isn’t
nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and NaNoWriMo and this book have
sparked my creative side and fed my soul. I hope you enjoy reading the
book half as much as I enjoyed writing it, and thank you so much for having me
on your blog!
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