Thursday, November 7, 2013

Guest Post: Stacy Lynn Carroll

I am very pleased to welcome the talented Stacy Lynn Carroll to my blog today. She is celebrating the release of her second book, Frogs and Toads. She has agreed to write a guest post on how she came up with her fabulous idea for her book. Check that below:



The Idea behind My Book
 
First I’d like to thank Mikey for having me on his blog today! It’s an honor to be here! Let me introduce myself. I’m Stacy Lynn Carroll. I write Young Adult Contemporary Fiction. I like to add a little romance into my books as well, but not the over-the-top mushy stuff. By day, I am a Mommy to three little munchkins who keep me very busy. Once they’re all safely in dreamland, I slip on my fuzzy slippers, grab some chocolate covered almonds, and the occasional coke (real, not diet, that’s yucky) and I turn into Night Writer! (Insert cool theme music here.) I love movies, dancing shows, and I’m strangely obsessed with the color pink.

My debut novel: The Princess Sisters came out three years ago.  I was pregnant with my first child and we had just found out we were having a little girl. Yay! Someone to pour my pink obsession upon. As new parents do, my husband and I were discussing names one night. We started talking about when we were younger and what names we were sure we’d name our kids when we grew up. Thank goodness we weren’t having a boy or his name would have been Thadeus, according to my husband. Being a typical, young girl, I was in love with the Disney princesses and knew someday I would have a daughter and name her after my favorite princess, Aurora. Then as I got a little older, I also loved the name Belle. But after marrying a man named Carroll, Belle just didn’t sound very good anymore.

As I told him this, the wheels began turning. I started to wonder what would happen if a mom really named all of her daughters after fairy tale princesses? How would that affect those girls in their everyday life?  How would they be treated at school?  And how would they relate to their names? That night, after we got home, I sat down and wrote the prologue. It quickly shifted from one mom with several daughters, to sisters naming all the girl cousins after princesses. Once I started writing the prologue I realized I needed a reason for the sisters to all give their daughters princess names. So that is when I decided that the moms had all struck out with men. And when women are pregnant, extra hormonal, emotional over something, and together in a group, they probably don’t make the best of decisions. The moms decide the only way their daughters will ever meet real life, charming “princes” is if they have names suited for real princesses. And…ta da! A new book was born. 

Once I got further into the book and the ideas started flowing, I realized everything wasn’t going to fit into one novel, unless I wanted it to be like 700 pages. So that is when I knew that Frogs & Toads also needed to be written. The sequel focuses on the girls’ pasts and discovering where they came from. They get to learn about the fathers they’ve never known and some pretty big secrets are revealed. Then the final book in the trilogy: Forever After will be out next year. (Crossing fingers, knocking on wood, and rubbing my lucky rabbits foot that everything goes according to plan and it doesn’t take another three years.)


Blurb:
One kiss can change the future...for better or for worse.
Belle and her cousins have conquered their fears. Now as they navigate their way through the dating world, they start to see a "happily ever after" on the horizon. But when an unexpected school assignment forces them to examine their past, the Princess sisters realize they have a lot of questions about the fathers they've never met. Secrets are revealed, long lost family members are discovered, and now the girls must decide who belongs in their future and who should be kept in the past.

Author Bio:
Stacy Lynn Carroll has always loved telling stories.  She started out at Utah State University where she pursued a degree in English, learned how to western swing, and watched as many of her fellow students became ‘True Aggies’.  She then finished her BA at the University of Utah where she got an emphasis in creative writing.  After college she worked as an administrative assistant, where she continued to write stories for the amusement of her co-workers.  When her first daughter was born, and with the encouragement of a fortune cookie, she quit her job and became a full-time mommy and writer.  She and her husband have three children, two Corgis, and a fish named Don.

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