Author Interview With Sandi Kahn Shelton

My name is Sandi Kahn Shelton, and I’m the author of three novels—Kissing Games of the World, A Piece of Normal, and What Comes After Crazy, all published by Shaye Areheart books, a division of Crown, which is a division of Random House. I’ve also written three non-fiction humor books about parenting and family life and lots of newspaper and magazine articles. I wrote a humor column for Working Mother magazine for ten years, and my work has appeared in Redbook, Salon, Readers Digest, and also several anthologies. These days I write fiction every day, and I’m also a feature reporter for the New Haven Register in Connecticut, and I teach writing workshops as well. I’m married to a journalist, Jim Shelton, and we have three children, the youngest of whom is in college.

Author Interview: Sandi Kahn Shelton

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

Sandi Shelton: Yes, I wanted to be a writer from the time I was a young child. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making up stories and situations, creating plots from overhearing people’s conversations. When I was six years old, I sold my first story when my mother wouldn’t give me money for the ice cream man, so I went into the house, wrote a story, glued the pages together, and sold it to a neighbor for twenty cents, enough for a banana popsicle. I think that’s when it dawned on me that this could be something I would always love to do—and it would keep me in frozen desserts, besides.

Tell us a little bit about your book/s.

Sandi Shelton: Kissing Games of the World is my current, and third book. It’s a love story between two very unlikely people, Jamie McClintock and Nate Goddard, who could not be more wrong for each other. Jamie is a free- spirited single mother who would much rather crochet a vest for her 5-year-old son Arley or glue glitter onto pinecones than go out on a date. Nate spends all of his time criss-crossing the country on business, wooing clients with his effortless charm and good looks. This keeps him from having to dwell on the tragedy of his life, which is that his wife died soon after giving birth and his son is being raised by his estranged father, who just happens to be Jamie’s roommate. When Nate’s father, Harris, dies suddenly of a heart attack, Jamie and Nate are thrown together. Nate, who is engaged to be married to a fellow workaholic, is positive that parenthood is going to be a snap: he decides to take his son Christopher along with him on his worldly travels, educating him in hotels and conference board rooms. Jamie, who knows a thing or two about little boys, knows that can never work—and in the few days they spend together planning Harris’s funeral and packing up the house, they fight passionately about that and nearly everything else: children's games, nicknames, art, his father's possessions, and even the questionable value of the numerous tuna noodle casseroles brought over by the neighbors.

Once they’ve gone their separate ways, however, life throws them the biggest surprise of all: they may actually need each other. Nate, stunned by the sometimes hilarious difficulties of being a single parent, sees what he's thrown away by leaving his old home town. He even begins to come to terms with the resentment he feels toward his father for abandoning him. Jamie learns to put aside her past dismal romantic history and let herself trust in love again. Eventually, these two flawed and frightened people come to realize that the missing parts of themselves just might be found in each other.

What Comes After Crazy, my first book, is a funny/sad novel about Maz Lombard, a single mom who was raised by a crazy, larger-than-life mother, “Madame Lucille,” the fortune-teller to the stars. Maz, whose husband Lenny just left her after his affair with the daycare teacher imploded, now is looking for the way to find sanity and stability in her life, and she’d do it, too---except that every time she tries, Madame Lucille and Lenny both land on her doorstep, pleading for another chance. It’s the story of a woman coming to terms with a difficult past and finding her way toward being a grownup on her own.

A Piece of Normal is a story about two sisters who couldn’t be more opposite. Lily is an advice columnist who has life just the way she likes it---simple, unchanging, and with no risks. Her ex-husband even thinks she’s wonderful! But then her little sister blows into town with a family secret that Lily never even knew existed, and suddenly she realizes that she might need to break out of her safe little cocoon and take some real chances. She has to learn to heed the advice she’s been doling out to strangers, mainly that life isn’t really living if you never let yourself feel anything.

Are you currently working on any writing projects our readers should watch for release soon?

Sandi Shelton: I’m on deadline for my fourth novel, which I am calling The Year You Think of Nothing Else. It should be released early in 2010.

How did you feel the day you held the copy of your first book in your hands?

Sandi Shelton: Amazed, stunned, humbled. After all the hours of writing, revising, and then negotiating about the cover, the typeface, the photos, the copyediting—suddenly, there is this BOOK! That people will know about and see. Suddenly the characters don’t just belong to you anymore. They’re going out in the world, just like children you’ve given birth to and nurtured. You feel such a mixture of pride and fear that it almost stops your heart.

What type of music, if any, do you listen to while you write?

Sandi Shelton: I may be alone in this, but I love listening to music while I write. Once I’m going on a book and know who the characters are, I make up a playlist of songs that help me stay in the mood while I’m writing. For Kissing Games of the World, for instance, I listened to “Desperado” by the Eagles about 2,578 times, because it expressed exactly the sentiments of Nate. “The Hard Way” by Mary Chapin Carpenter reminded me of Jamie, and when they finally got together, “Halleleuia” by Rufus Wainwright was the song that helped me get to the emotion they felt.

Location and life experience can sprinkle their influence in your writing. Tell us about where you grew up and a little about where you live now.

Sandi Shelton: I grew up in northern Florida, in a small community that was still considered the “deep South” in those days. When I was twelve, my parents divorced, and my mother remarried and moved us to Southern California, where I lived for many years. For the past years, I’ve lived in a small town in Connecticut, where I’ve learned to appreciate town greens, ponds you can ice-skate on, and the need for fleece jackets.

Do you have any pets? What are they? Tell us about them.

Sandi Shelton: Oh, this is a sad question for me! Three weeks ago, we had to put down our very ill 13-year old golden retriever, Jordie, who was my “writing dog.” He faithfully sat by me through the writing of all of my books and magazine articles, and he was a very good listener and never criticized my prose, even if it wasn’t perfect. I still miss his tail-wagging approval.

Bring us into your home and set the scene for us when you are writing. What does it look like? On the couch, laptop, desk? Music? Lighting, handwriting?

Sandi Shelton: I write all over the place! Some stories come to me best when I’m snuggled on our sectional couch, with my laptop on my lap. Other times I do better sitting at the dining room table, or even downstairs in my designated “office,” where the printer, fax machine, telephone and all my books are. In the summer, I take my laptop outside on our screened porch that looks out over the woods and the dogwood tree. But lately, with being on a tight deadline, I find I do better in Starbucks, where they not only have comfy armchairs and lots of iced tea, but best of all, they have NO internet! I fear I’ve become hopelessly addicted to checking my email and comments on my blog, and so I do better when I can’t possibly go there and must stay inside my book.

How long did it take you to write your most recent (or first) book? When you started writing, did you think it would take that long (or short)?

Sandi Shelton: My first novel, What Comes After Crazy, actually took me 17 years to write. Not that I was writing it every day—or even every year, you understand. It spent lots of time in a drawer, waiting for me to return to it and whispering to me when I was trying to sleep. It took so long because during those years, I had three young kids at home, a full-time job, a couple of part-time jobs, free-lance articles due, and endless numbers of school projects to help with and carpools to drive. Also, I didn’t really know HOW to write a novel. I must have completed that book four or five times, only to start writing it again…and when I finally finished it, it sold in two weeks. My family nearly fell over dead when they heard the news. I think they always considered that book something that “Mom always worked on whenever she didn’t have to be anywhere else.” (The truth? I had years of thinking of it that way, too.) But its publication turned me into a novelist, and with my next book due in eleven months after the publication of What Comes After Crazy, I finally had the mandate to do what I’d been wanting to do all along: write fiction! It became suddenly easy to say no to things that didn’t really have to be done.

Many authors have said that naming their characters is a difficult process, almost like choosing a name for their own child. How did you select the names of some of your lead characters in your book/s?

Sandi Shelton: I love naming characters, and I often start out knowing one name for them and then, halfway through the book, realize that wasn’t who they were at all! It’s funny how names tell us so much about a character’s disposition and personality…and when you change their names, they take on other attributes. I always like to go to the website, Baby Name Voyager, which not only lists practically every name in the universe but lets you know how popular it was in different decades since the early 1900’s. After all, you can’t be writing about a mother born in the 1930’s and give her a name like Britney or Heather.

Have you ever had a character take over a story and move it in a different direction than you had originally intended? How did you handle it?

Sandi Shelton: Oh, my characters are always trying to do this, and I have often had to put a stop to it. With Kissing Games of the World, however, I didn’t put a stop to it, and it turned out to be just the right thing. At first I was hearing the story from the point of view of the main character, Jamie McClintock, which felt exactly right, since I had a contract to write a book of “women’s fiction.” But suddenly, Nate’s character just announced itself and wanted to take over the whole book. I did not see how I was going to be able to face my editor and tell her that I’d allowed a guy to hijack my book. Still, he persisted, claiming that Jamie wasn’t able to tell his part of the story since she was so biased against him. I ended up agreeing that he made the story much livelier and much stronger. I wrote the book in alternating chapters, from the two points of view, and I’m so glad I did. Nate’s voice was vibrant, sexy, and alive—and his chapters really engaged me and moved the story along. Jamie actually had to step up to the plate and get herself to be more interesting!

Anything else you want your readers to know? I have a website at www.sandishelton.com, and I keep a blog that I try to keep up to date. I love receiving comments and answer every one. My books are available from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and in bookstores. I also have recently been visiting readers who are enrolled in reading groups. If you’d like to have me phone in to a reading group, you can reach me at www.sandishelton.com/group/.