Running With Pencils

A vignette from the Amazon best-selling author of Letters for Scarlet and Guest List.

A month before my fortieth birthday, under the influence of inspiration (not to mention half a pitcher of margaritas), I concocted a specific plan-one that offered an obvious starting line, a concrete ending and clearly digestible nuggets of achievement along the way. For the next five months I'd train for a race. Not just any race.

A midlife marathon.

While I convinced my forty-year-old legs they could run more than three miles at a time, I would also write a memoir chronicling tales of gladness and woe. Twenty weeks of running. Twenty weeks of writing. All I needed was a new pair of shoes, a couple of notebooks and a handful of pencils, and by springtime, I'd be ticking two big items off my bucket list: completing a marathon and a book. What could be simpler?

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Interview with the Author In addition to this vignette from your real life, you also write fiction, including Letters for Scarlet. What was your inspiration to write that novel? When I was teaching high school English, my seniors wrote letters to themselves, which I saved and sent to them five years after graduation. I imagined the impact of a tragedy happening in that time span and increased the period to ten years so the characters could be older and more established in their lives.

Guest List is a prequel novella to Letters for Scarlet. Should I read it first? Up to you! The books can be read in either order. I wrote Letters for Scarlet first, but realized there was a lot more backstory to my characters than could fit in just one book! Guest List takes us back a bit in time and delves a little deeper into some of the secondary characters from Letters for Scarlet. It's a short read but it covers a lot of ground, particularly the different ways female friendships play out over time.

There are lots of great women's fiction books to choose from these days! What makes Letters for Scarlet and Guest List fresh? I switch between narrators, sometimes employing first-person-present and sometimes third-person-past, to show my characters' lives from different points of view-both their strengths and flaws. Personally, I don't like characters who are all hero or all villain.

What do you enjoy reading? Primarily, I love women's fiction, literary fiction, and memoir. But any time spent reading is a good time!