This is my second Behind The Pages post! You can find the first post of this feature with The Spindlers by Lauren Oliver here.
What is Behind The Pages all
about? I asked some of my favourite authors and a bunch of promising
2014 debut authors to annotate a scene, page or more of one of their
books. I see the feature as a chance to show readers what's behind a
page. Authors can share their favourite writing memories, the music that
influenced a certain scene or anything else that comes to their mind.
We might get hints to what the characters were thinking and feeling that
exact moment or other fun details about their story.
Hope you enjoy Behind The Pages as much as I do. I'm intending this feature to be a monthly post here on the blog. Today I'm happy to have Trish Doller sharing a page of her second novel, WHERE THE STARS STILL SHINE. Plus she wrote an awesome guest post about girl friendships in her story. Thanks to all the fabulous authors who took the time to annotate a page or scene for us, your comments are always so insightful and fun to read. When readers can't get enough of a book and its characters it only shows how much the author's work means to them, to us. Thank you!
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Stolen as a child from her large and loving family, and on the run with her mom for more than ten years, Callie has only the barest idea of what normal life might be like. She's never had a home, never gone to school, and has gotten most of her meals from laundromat vending machines. Her dreams are haunted by memories she’d like to forget completely. But when Callie’s mom is finally arrested for kidnapping her, and Callie’s real dad whisks her back to what would have been her life, in a small town in Florida, Callie must find a way to leave the past behind. She must learn to be part of a family. And she must believe that love--even with someone who seems an improbable choice--is more than just a possibility.
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About Trish Doller: I've been a writer as long as I've been able to write, but I didn't make a conscious decision to "be" a writer until fairly recently. For that you should probably be thankful.
I was born in Germany, grew up in Ohio, went to college at Ohio State University, got married to someone really excellent, bounced from Maine to Michigan and back to Ohio for awhile. Now I live in Florida with my two mostly grown kids, two dogs, and a pirate. For real.
I've worked as a morning radio personality, a newspaper reporter, and spent all my summers in college working at an amusement park. There I gained valuable life skills, including counting money really fast, directing traffic, jumping off a moving train, and making cheese-on-a-stick. Also, I can still welcome you to Frontier Town. Ask me sometime.
These days I work as a bookseller at a Very Big Bookstore. And, you know, write.
I was born in Germany, grew up in Ohio, went to college at Ohio State University, got married to someone really excellent, bounced from Maine to Michigan and back to Ohio for awhile. Now I live in Florida with my two mostly grown kids, two dogs, and a pirate. For real.
I've worked as a morning radio personality, a newspaper reporter, and spent all my summers in college working at an amusement park. There I gained valuable life skills, including counting money really fast, directing traffic, jumping off a moving train, and making cheese-on-a-stick. Also, I can still welcome you to Frontier Town. Ask me sometime.
These days I work as a bookseller at a Very Big Bookstore. And, you know, write.
Book Summary from Goodreads, Find Trish's author bio and her picture here.
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Where the Stars Still Shine by Trish Doller
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Trish Doller's Guest Post on Girl Friendships in WHERE THE STARS STILL SHINE
When I started writing the book that
would become Where the Stars Still Shine I knew there were
going to be a lot of issues to unpack. Callie, the main character, is
the victim of parental abduction, neglect, and sexual abuse—big
issues in their own right. I also knew issues would arise over being
reunited with a parent she doesn’t remember and tension within her
new blended family. But when I sat down to write, I didn’t know
that girl friendships would play an important role in the book.
Kat—we learn in the scene that begins
on the page I’ve shared—is Callie’s second cousin and they
played together when they were little girls. Except when I began the
scene that would introduce Kat, I had no idea that she was Callie’s
cousin. I imagined her as a Greek-American girl who worked at one of
the local shops who would take Callie under her wing, but when I
realized they could be related it just felt...right.
Once Kat started taking shape in my
mind, I knew I wanted her to be different than Callie. There is an
unabashedly “girly” side to Kat—she likes clothes, jewelry, and
makeup—but she owns it. And that was something I felt was
incredibly important. Girls can like makeup and be kind to
little old ladies. They can enjoy shopping for shoes and be
fiercely loyal to their friends. They can whip on eyeliner like a pro
and like to laugh. None of these things are mutually exclusive
and girls can enjoy whatever they want. Kat’s “girlyness”
doesn’t make her a throwaway character any more than an actual
teenage girl’s “girlyness” makes her a throwaway girl.
When I understood that Kat was
comfortable with herself, I realized she made the best kind of friend
for Callie. Kat is optimistic. She’s buoyant, even when Callie is
awful. But friendship is not innate and Callie’s mom robbed her of
the skills the rest of us learn when we’re young. Callie has never
had a friend so she doesn’t know how to be a friend, but Kat is
strong enough to handle it. She teaches Callie what a real friend
looks like. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know any best
friendship that haven’t included fights, hurt feelings, or
misunderstandings—even for girls who carry less emotional baggage
than Callie. And if Callie’s and Kat’s road to friendship had
been smooth, how boring and unrealistic would that have been?
I sometimes joke that if Kat is the
friend who would bail Callie out of jail, Ariel is the friend who’d
be in jail with her. The similarity between them is that I had no
idea Ariel existed, either.
When I first wrote the bookshop, the
person who worked there was Ariel’s male counterpart. But I
realized that Callie had spent so much time—and not much of it
good—in the company of men. I toyed with the idea that she need a
male friend who was not a romantic interest, but she kind of had Nick
and Connor, so in the end I decided I wanted Callie to have another
girl friend.
With Ariel, I kind of wanted to poke at
how we judge people by...well, everything under the sun. Callie sees
tattoos and plugs and black-rimmed glasses and thinks pretentious
hipster (which: see above about how girls can like anything they
want) but later learns that Ariel is a is a
drop-everything-and-get-the-keys type of friend. No question asked.
She was only meant to be the girl who worked at the bookshop, but she
turned into something so much more than that.
I think, to me, what sums up the girl
friendships in Where the Stars Still Shine is the scene in
which Kat presents Callie with a string of fairy lights.
“Thanks. For—everything,” I
say. “And I’m sorry about what I said earlier.”
“Ooh! That reminds me.” Kat
ignores my apology and rummages through the pile of bags for the
small one she said was a surprise. Inside is a box of tiny white
star-shaped Christmas lights. “Every girl needs a string of these
for her room,” she says. “Not only are they beautiful, but when
you have fairy lights, you’re never completely in the dark.”
The lump in my throat won’t let me
speak, but she doesn’t wait for a reply. Instead she hands me one
end of the string. “Let’s hang them now.”
We loop them around the curtain rod
on the window beside my bed. It takes only a minute and when we
finish, Kat plugs her end into the outlet. With daylight still
streaming in through the window, the stars are pale yellow and weak.
“Well, okay, they don’t seem
very special at the moment,” she says. “But later? They’ll be
spectacular.”
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Click on the picture to see Trish's Pinterest inspiration board for WHERE THE STARS STILL SHINE.
