2nd Anniversary Celebration Featuring: Huntley Fitzpatrick (giveaway)

Next up is the one...the only, Huntley Fitzpatrick. She is here today to talk to us about her biggest writing challenge.

I did a lot of thinking about my biggest writing challenges….
The easy answer is time, and that nagging sense that there is never as much as I’d like there to be, never enough for me to spend the whole day writing as I’d ideally do without the household turning into chaos and the laundry never being done and all those endless not very fascinating tasks that keep life going smoothly falling into disrepair.
The harder answer is comparing. I’m a lifelong dedicated avid reader, and it is a struggle not to read the latest great YA and think “Wow…I will never be that good.” It is easy to tell my children that comparisons are odious and we always lose when we compare. It’s harder to remember that myself.
I think the hardest thing of all is being brave about writing, writing the deep and difficult things. We all have a tendency to protect ourselves, but the best writing, I think, is about not doing that—writing from the heart, from your deepest loves and your darkest thoughts and your toughest times. It took me a few completed novels before I got that.
Here is one of my favorite quotes about writing: “within the world of books there is no censure. In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets and lies. All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying I was too sensitive—as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsized emotions were well represented in books.” (Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees).
I’ve echoed this quote from Roald Dahl so many times because it is so true…. "So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone."
We lovers of words and stories all know this. My hardest job is remembering it.

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“One thing my mother never knew, and would disapprove of most of all,
was that I watched the Garretts.  All the time.”

The Garretts are everything the Reeds are not. Loud, numerous, messy, affectionate. And every day from her balcony perch, seventeen-year-old Samantha Reed wishes she was one of them…until one summer evening Jase Garrett climbs her trellis and changes everything. As the two fall fiercely in love and stumble through the awkwardness and awesomeness of first romance, Jase’s family makes Samantha one of their own—even as she keeps him a secret from her disapproving mother and critical best friend. Then the unthinkable happens, and the bottom drops out of Samantha’s world. She’s suddenly faced with an impossible decision. Which perfect family will save her? Or is it time she saved herself?
A debut novel about family, friendship, first romance, and how to be true to one person you love without betraying another.

To celebrate Huntley would like to give 1 lucky person a copy of My Life Next Door! 

This giveaway is International!

All giveaways this month end on October 7th.

a Rafflecopter giveaway