Three sisters. One life-changing summer.

Back when Pure was finally sent off to the printer, my editor and I brainstormed some ideas for new projects. (Well, she sent me an email of ideas and I did some decoupage and thought about them.)  One of her suggestions (actually two of them, combined together) turned into After the Kiss. Her other suggestion — the one I sat on and kept quiet for awhile — was to write something about sisters.

I’m the oldest of three sisters, you see; she thought I might have something to say about that.

And I agreed that a sister YA book would be great to do. Because being part of a sister triangle is really interesting. And weird. And stupendous. And … hard sometimes. I wanted to explore the archetypes of eldest, middle, and youngest sister, and the connections between them. I wanted to show the different relationships between eldest-middle, middle-youngest, eldest-youngest and etc. To do this well though, I  decided the book had to be narrated by all three girls.

But what sort of environment would all three girls be in at the same time? I wasn’t sure. Home, certainly, but they’d each have their own things going on at school, right? They might not even be in the same school. Which is when I thought: summer camp! Forced togetherness! Of course!

After that I got to pile up all of my best camp fantasies, plus research on contemporary camp practices, interviews with former camp counselors, inspiration from movies like “Wet Hot American Summer,” and  “Little Darlings,” and a bunch of other novel-writing tricks and treats. The result is The Summer of Firsts and Lasts!

One tricky thing about writing a book about three sisters when you are, in fact, one of three sisters however, is making sure that your other two sisters — along with the rest of the world — understand that you are NOT WRITING A BOOK ABOUT THEM. When you have two awesome sisters like I do though, it’s really not that hard. In fact, mostly you get to sit on your porch and tell them the whole story of your novel in one sitting (while eating ice cream). For everyone else, I can say that, yes, some of the dynamics between the Winthrop girls are similar to ours, but it’s my guess that those are more universal ones. Those of you with same-sex siblings (or even just siblings) may see yourselves in the book!

Mainly, I hope that you have fun with this summer romp. I certainly had fun writing it, and will look forward to your thoughts!