This book is very personal to me because the world it’s set in is very personal to me. After I wrote the first draft of Valentine, I went back and rewrote this one again – and then again after I’d written Ironheart and Misrule. I’d written it and rewritten it twice before Valentine was even a glint in my eye. Although the Valentine series has been out for several years now and Valentine is the first book I ever had published, Libby Lawrence is really the book that taught me how to write. I will never write another book as close to my heart as this one. Jodi McAlisterĭo you have a personal connection to the story you chose to tell in your book?Īre you prepared for me to write a novel in response to this question? Because you might well get one. …or, basically, I got the idea to write a community theatre book because that’s what I spent a lot of my time doing. Sometimes it helps you find the words to articulate what you really want or you really feel.

Sometimes it means people push boundaries that really shouldn’t be pushed. It’s a real pressure cooker world, where emotions are intensified and you can play and experiment with all kinds of things – because, hey, it’s just pretend, right? Sometimes it can make you brave. I grew up on community theatre stages, and that persisted well into my young adulthood. This book isn’t about theatre kid me, but the theatre kid world that it’s set in was one I lived in for a long time. I’ve since rewritten it from the ground up four times, but every so often, a sentence that baby writer Jodi wrote in that very first draft will pop up, and it warms my heart.

I was twenty and a third-year undergrad when I wrote the first draft. In the book, Libby is nineteen and a second-year undergrad. This is a book about theatre kids with too many emotions, and I wrote the first draft of it many, many years ago, when I was a theatre kid with too many emotions. Hey Jodi! Tell us a bit about the backstory for Libby Lawrence, and how the idea came to you

Jodi mcalister valentine series