On Writing Loss...

So MJ and I have drafted and edited a book called LOVE BLIND. It's a book I wanted to write for a long time, but didn't think I could. Which makes me feel very proud of it. I don't think I could have written it alone. There's something about passing a difficult book back and forth between people. Like when it becomes too much, it is so nice to send it along and say, "Okay, your turn."

The book is about two friends who never get their timing right. I call it my anti-love story. At the heart of this book is the loss of a very good friend. Though the book is not my story and the character is not him, the sentiment behind it belongs to him. Losing someone too early, not being able to say goodbye, these are things I understand. I imagine that many of you feel the same way.

There is something about writing through grief that is amazingly therapeutic. For me, it is better when I am far away enough from an experience that I can incorporate the feelings, but also know that I've worked my way through them. All of what I write is fiction. But at the same time, there is an element of truth in the feelings that cannot be fictionalized. Grief cannot really be fictionalized.

So without further ado, here is our very unconventional WIP blurb for LOVE BLIND:

Hailey was fifteen when she met Kyle. Fifteen with a beautiful voice, two adoring moms, and eyes that never worked quite right. Eyes that got worse every year.

Kyle was sixteen when he met Hailey. Sixteen, painfully shy, and plagued by constant thoughts of how messed up his life was—with his mom, with his one friend.

Then Hailey told Kyle about her list: a catalogue of all of the things she feared. She wanted to cross them off before the end of high school. She insisted Kyle write a list of his own, and he couldn't tell her no.

For a while it was good, sort of. An odd friendship, but one they both counted on, and then it began to change into more. Until it started to crack.

But still, they had their lists. A tentative connection that held them together when nothing else did.

Hailey was seventeen when she lost Kyle. Seventeen and in love with a boy who’d become her best friend. A boy who left behind all the things he could never say to her as an unfinished task on his list.