In early 2019, I had just been accepted to grad school to earn my teaching credential. It was a 20-month master’s degree program at Washington State University that also included a year of student teaching. I would not be able to substitute teach, and I was a little worried how our family was going to pay the bills during that time.
And then I answered a call for young adult writers on a work-for-hire project. I’d never written for hire before, but as I looked into the opportunity, it seemed perfect for my situation. I would work with an editor and three other writers to help develop a four-book contemporary series for teen girls. The series would follow four friends, and we would each write a book in their point of view. The books only need be 50,000 words (which for me, is like a third of a book, right?), so I signed up, relieved and grateful and blessed to have an answer to my prayers of paying the bills in 2019.
The project took a lot longer than any of us anticipated, and was a bit harder to write while being in grad school that I had originally imagined. Also, my book was longer than 50K. True to Jill Williamson form, it came in at 70,000 words. (Hee hee. –guilty grin–) But I’m proud of this little story! It’s about a girl named Izzy, whose personality is almost fully my daughter Kaitlyn, who helped me immensely with this book. (The wild leggings and cupcake baking is all her.)
Mine is book three in the series. Books one and two come out this April. Books three and four come out August 3. Here is the book cover for my contribution to the Riverbend Friends.
AND HERE’S THE STORY: Winter break is usually Izzy’s favorite time of year, but this year all it does is make her feel lonely. She adores her brother Sebastian, but she’s stuck at home taking care of him ALL. THE. TIME. And her squad―her friends from Drama I―are too busy with their own exciting plans to get together with her. So of course her phone is her lifeline!
Izzy creates and posts videos of her amazing, to-die-for cupcake creations on her Instagram account. AND she stays connected with her squad. At least she would . . . if any of them bothered to text her back. Seriously, how hard is it to text back? But then school starts up again and Zac, the dreamy senior she’s been crushing on for months, starts texting her. But her friends are less than thrilled. If they could only see Zac like she does―he’s really a great guy! Then everything would be perfect.
I really did have fun writing Izzy and her family. A couple things about this series. Like I said, mine is book three, and while there are four books, they can stand alone on their own. So you can read the series in order, or you can pick up any of them and enjoy the stories. Click here for a link to the series page on Goodreads.
You can add The Me You See to your Goodreads TBR by clicking here.
And here is the link to The Me You See on Amazon.com.
What do you think? Do you read contemporary stories?
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