Yesterday, in class, Sam whisper-said to me, and I’m paraphrasing, “post about your book!”

I wrote a YA novel called Getting Over Max Cooper.

What is it to write a work of fiction? Create a world that is filled with characters that have engines that drive them? Work within a paradigm of writing that is unique to the voice of the character? That was my challenge. To write from a sixteen year old’s perspective, this nuanced and complicated story, that delved into the unbridled tension of the heart but also stay inside the parameters I’d established for those characters—being true to their voice. In some ways, I did not control where the story went, I followed it as I wrote it. So the actions of the primary characters were fueled by their personalities: their pain, their laughter, their mischievousness, their ambitions. All of it plays out in an idyllic and very real setting, in Fire Island. Which as a child and as a teenager, I didn’t experience. But as an adult, was able to with my daughter. To watch how freeing it is to being a child, how much autonomy they are empowered with, was such a wonder to me as a parent. I often imagined the fun I would have had as a teenager. The sex I would have had and where. The towns I would have gotten high in. The friends I would have made and had for life. It’s that, those daydreams, that lead me to writing this story. This work of fiction. What it is to have written it, to have created these disparate lives. To continue to write, write in ways unfamiliar and yet natural to me. To speak to an audience, to create for them.

Below is what the jacket wrap looks like. I’ll do a breakdown of each bit in my next post.