Megan Kelley Hall is the author for this Thursday's Author Tales. Megan is the author of Sisters of Misery, which will be released July 29th! I loved it! It is definitely on of the great in '08 books. You can check out my review here! Remember to leave a comment to be entered in the Monthly Contest!
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I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. And for some reason, most of my stories always had an unusual angle. For instance, in the fourth grade the girls were supposed to write a short story about a rose, the boys were supposed to write about a train. Sounds simple enough, right? Most girls in my class wrote about princesses weaving magical roses through their hair or brides walking down the aisle with arms filled with roses. Boys wrote superhero stories about trains that traveled at the speed of light or in-depth descriptions of steam engines (who knows where boys get this wealth of information on trains and cars and trucks? I think they’re born with it.) Well, I decided to combine the two stories and I wrote a story about a man who fell off the train and saw his whole life flash before his eyes. He realized how horrible he’d been to his friends and family, especially his wife. He screamed as he fell and by the time he landed on the ground, his whole body had transformed into a rose, his arms stretched out into wide, green leaves, his legs were thorns, his body an awkward arch of a green stem. And when his wife walked sadly from the platform, unaware that her husband had transformed into the dying flower, she stepped on the rose (her husband) and crushed it into the winter ground. I know what you’re thinking (and what my teachers must have thought at the time)….THERAPY! ASAP!
The truth is that I’ve always been drawn to stories and authors that provide that unusual twist. In high school, I loved anything by Christopher Pike, Lois Duncan, Stephen King, and even V.C. Andrews. In college, I loved short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” I loved that eerie unexpected ending, the gothic elements, a great ghost story. This is where I got my inspiration for my debut novel, SISTERS OF MISERY. I had originally written it as an adult novel (entitled MISERY ISLAND), but I remembered how novels like “Stranger with my Face” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” really stuck with me as a teen, and I wanted to give teen readers the same experience that I treasured. Now, I still recommend reading those classic teen suspense novels, but I would be thrilled if Maddie, Cordelia and Kate and the other SISTERS OF MISERY were welcomed into that clique of great YA suspense characters.
The way that I became a published author is kind of a dark, gothic story in and of itself. I remember walking down the beach near my house one afternoon and suddenly my vision became blurry. I ran up the hill to my house and luckily my mother, my husband and my baby girl were there. They rushed me to the hospital only to discover that I’d had a series of mini-strokes (resulting in losing partial vision in one eye). This is not common for a 32-year old. So, for the next two years I had numerous medical procedures (carotid stent, CAT scans, MRIs, MRAs) and eventually I had open heart surgery. And I died. For 96 minutes. And then I came back. After I was “fixed” (turns out the medical problems stemmed from radiation treatment I received when I was a baby with cancer), I was forced to do basically nothing for three months because I had to let my sternotomy wounds heal. It was at that time that I realized that even though I had written for some national magazines like American Baby, Parenting, Working Mother and even Boston Magazine, I’d never written for a major women’s magazine and I’d never published a book. So I used that time to revamp the book I’d been toying with for years and turned the adult suspense MISERY ISLAND into the YA suspense novel, SISTERS OF MISERY. I realized how precious life was and how if you want something, you really have to go after it (it’s not going to come to you). Using those three housebound (more like chairbound) months as “work” time, I was able to accomplish the following things within the next year: I finally had a feature article run in Glamour magazine, I got a literary agent from one of the largest agencies in New York, and I got a two-book deal from Kensington Books for the SISTERS OF MISERY series. And to top it all off, my essay about overcoming obstacles was included in former CNN Anchor Daryn Kagan’s anthology entitled, “What’s Possible!” Truly amazing!
The moral of this story is this: don’t ever give up! Please excuse the following cheesy clichés, but they kind of apply to what I’m saying. Sometimes the darkest times can bring about the brightest and most amazing days. Things that may appear to be setbacks, may actually turn out to be blessings in disguise. And most importantly, don’t wait for things to happen to you. If you want to be a writer (or a nuclear physicist or an astronaut or a rock star---whatever), do it now. Don’t wait for your life to get more exciting or wait until someone tells you it’s okay to be whatever you want to be. Do it for yourself! Think of Nike and JUST DO IT!
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Thanks Megan for that inspiring guest post! For more information on Megan and Sisters of Misery visit the following links:
http://www.sistersofmisery.com/
http://www.megankelleyhall.com/
http://www.kelleyandhall.com/