Day 6 with Lauren Baratz-Logsted

This competition is now closed!




My next guest is the one and only Lauren Baratz-Logsted who is a complete writing machine! She is also an incredibly generous author who never fails to help out newbie and vetern authors alike with her wise words. In fact, as Randy Jackson would say, Lauren is the bomb (please picture me doing some cool Randy hand actions at this stage and perhaps saying the word 'dog' a few times, because seriously, that's just the way I roll).

The other thing about Lauren is that she defies genres! She has written women's fiction, literary fiction, young adult, mid grade and her latest release which is a collaboration with her husband and her gorgeous daughter Jackie is the Sisters Eight books (which I still can't get off my own little angel since she squirrelled them off me the minute I opened the package!). Anyway, enough from me and over to Lauren:

Congratulations, Amanda, on the release of ZOMBIE QUEEN OF NEWBURY HIGH!

My characters have never done anything quite so wide-ranging as Mia's love spell with the, um, zombie side effects, but my characters have done some pretty dumb/weird/ridiculous things. (Keep in mind, I'm the woman who launched her writing career with the adult novel THE THIN PINK LINE, a dark comedy about a woman who fakes an entire pregnancy - so yeah, I know dumb/weird/ridiculous.)

If I had to pick one of the stranger extreme things that one of the characters in my novels for teens do it'd have to be Lacey Underhill in the tween novel ME, IN BETWEEN. Lacey is a generously well-breasted twelve-year-old - size 36C, to be exact - who feels conflicted about her assets. She really doesn't appreciate the boys in her class calling her Lacey Underwire or, when she takes up cheerleading, Lacey Pom-Poms.

When she meets older boy Chad Wilcox while playing her favorite pinball machine at the mall - Chad's old enough to drive - Lacey decides it's not so bad looking more mature than her years, so she plays that up. But then her childhood best friend Sam moves back to town and, longing for the simpler days they shared together, Lacey binds her breasts like a geisha so Sam won't be able to tell how much she's changed. Cleavage-boasting shirts here, tape-bound breasts there - it's enough to make a girl crazy!

So, no zombies here but...pretty drastically insane!If you want a chance to win a signed copy of ME, IN BETWEEN, leave a comment below. Amanda will choose a winner, let me know, and then I'll mail the book to you. And if you want to read more about my own life and work, please visit http://www.laurenbaratzlogsted.com/ and http://www.sisterseight.com/.

Finally, most important of all: Congratulations again, Amanda, on ZOMBIE QUEEN OF NEWBURY HIGH!

Thanks Lauren - isn't she just the best? And I actually just finished reading Me, In Between and I can assure you that whoever wins it will be very, very lucky, so what are you waiting for? Get commenting already! And don't forget, it's not too late to leave a comment for Sara Hantz, Stephanie Keuhnert and Vanessa Barneveld. Retweet this button on every post blogger