A warm welcome to author Laura Lascarso joining us today to talk about new release “When Everything is Blue”.

Laura talks to us about her experience writing this book and brought with her a giveaway you can participate in!

Welcome Laura 🙂

Mary Sue or Gary Stu?

 

When I set out to write When Everything Is Blue, I wanted to write a story about firsts—first job, first car, first foray into relationships. What I didn’t expect to find was that so much of the story came from my own personal life experiences. I certainly didn’t set out to insert myself so thoroughly into the story, but by the end, there were more than a couple elements that I recognized as being true to my own life.

 

Christian Mitcham. You could change a couple letters in this name and you’d have my high school crush. Blond, tanned, athletic. Abs for days. Did I mention the abs? I actually had the pleasure of counting them once. There were eight. He was so sweet, too. A really wonderful guy. Unfortunately our timing was never right and we were always dating other people. Side note: I saw him at my ten-year-reunion and he was still a total babe and nice as can be. Of course my plan was to play it cool, but I got so tongue-tied that I could hardly talk to him all night. Typical.

 

Single moms. Readers sometimes comment about the relationships between my characters and their mothers. It’s probably because I was raised by a single mom—a fierce, loving, protective mom, who didn’t take shit from anyone, who knew how to fix a toilet and do her own taxes and taught me that I should never, ever rely on a man for the things I can do myself. Go moms!

 

Deadbeat dads. Yeah, so, as I was writing some of these scenes, it actually dredged up a lot of feelings of abandonment I thought I’d laid to rest. One of the cool (or not so cool) things about writing is you can be humming along, not really thinking about yourself, when a character says something or does something that affects you in a surprising way. Maybe I was a little mean to Theo’s dad in this one, but maybe he deserved it.

 

Anxiety/panic attacks. Ugh, they’re the worst. And the worst part is once you’ve had one, any little flutter in your chest makes you worry that you’re about to have one, so then you’re, like, anxious about being anxious. They suck! And poor Theo is still figuring out what’s going on. Someone should tell him to take a Xanax and go to bed.

 

Skater/surfer culture. I grew up in Largo (not Key Largo, but the St. Petersburg area of coastal Florida) where surfing and skating were popular past times, though most of the time surfers were crossing over to the Atlantic to surf. And just like soccer, football, baseball and basketball players all have a particular hive mentality, so do surfers and skaters. They’re all “yeah, brah” and “surf’s up” and “how’s the waves?” And skaters are all “bitchin” and “sk8 or die, man” and “didn’t hurt.” I’m not even stereotyping. Well, maybe a little. And if you’ve ever dated a surfer, you know they will drop all plans they made with you if there happens to be waves.

 

So, that’s my Mary Sue for you. All in all, When Everything Is Blue was a real pleasure for me to write and I loved spending time with Chris and Theo. They’re friendship is a really special one, and one that I will perhaps expand upon in a later book, when they’ve had a few more life experiences and can engage with each other as adults. Perhaps I’ll even write it from Chris’s perspective…if you can convince me!

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