There is no way that I could have prepared myself for the reaction PS I Love You received. You cross your fingers and hope that it will be a success of some sort but never in a million years did I expect it to take off how it did. So yes, I was surprised, still am surprised. With regard to my most memorable aspects, there have been so many. As a result of writing PS, I have travelled more in a year than I have in a lifetime, my life has changed because before I wrote PS I was just out of college and it helped me take that first step into the world on my own. On a pre-promo tour of the US I ended up travelling to four different states in one day. After travelling from Chicago , I woke up and had breakfast in Milwaukee , had lunch in Mississippi , dinner in Memphis and fell asleep in a bed in New York . That was one long day and I won't ever forget that! Meeting readers at my events is very special, I met men and women of all ages, some came to me in tears as they had lost loved ones and found PS I Love You to really have helped them. And then there are more humorous moments like when I was in Chicago and one woman's question to me was if she could adopt me. People always manage to surprise me with their questions and moments like that are extremely memorable!
I completed my second book before my first book had even been published so there wasn't that pressure to live up to its success. In terms of publishing deals around the world I knew it was a success but those deals gave me more confidence rather than knocking me back. For me, writing is extremely enjoyable and I would never allow myself to feel pressured about it. It's a vicious circle and I believe the more pressure you put on yourself, the harder it is to write and so I remain calm with the hope that my bursting head of ideas won't empty itself anytime soon.
I'm a hoarder of letters, postcards, old school journals, exam results, bank letters and just about anything that marks an important time in my life. At least once a year I go through these shoe boxes and the last time I did this I realised that the letters themselves were telling the story all by themselves. I could hear so many voices, people growing up, there were many locations and without having to do a thing I knew I was reading the story of a period in my life. During the early days of PS I printed off each email and kept them in a folder. I have the first email where my agent introduces herself to me, where I send off the first few chapters, her asking me for more; I have every single email leading up to when I got my first publishing deal, my editors congratulating me and introducing themselves. Well there are far too many emails to keep now but when I read back over them and I realised you could just make a book of letters and emails and they would tell the story themselves. So that's what I did. I had never seen it done before and I immediately knew that I wanted it to be two characters over the course of their life. I wanted to include spelling mistakes, bad grammar to really make it feel realistic. Two people's lives all in their own words really excited me. The characters weren't really a trial and error process, they just came to me. Because I had begun writing in their words as children, it was easy to create where they would go in future. Because in creating people with wishes and dreams as children, you can take them anywhere you want. Ruby is the character that offers comic relief. She listens to Rosie moaning about her life and tells her to do something about it, makes a joke and tries to lift her out of her misery. And while they may seem two very different people they are both are alike in many ways. They are two people who feel alone, who can't really connect with others in the world, leading them to feel like outsiders.
My aim wasn't to have it as a "will-they-won't-they" type book, all I knew was that I wanted to write a book in this format, that I wanted to begin the story in the words of two children, two children we would see grow together for generations and despite beginning in the same place in life and maintaining contact I wanted to show how their lives go in very different directions. And because of these different directions they seemed to keep missing each other, their lives were moving at different paces. Whenever I wanted them to get together I knew it wasn't possible and so it would go on. The story really wrote itself, all I felt I did was held the pen!
Obviously I have a love for the written word, all my work is about words; I write words for a living, when I'm doing interviews many of them are done via emails and all my correspondence with publishing companies around the world is done via emails and so everything we say and do is written, kept and documented. While I stay in touch with distant friends through emails, I wouldn't be anything like Rosie's constant email/letter communication with family and friends. As a storyteller I found the device fit perfectly as people tend to say more in letters and emails, there isn't that immediate embarrassment in admitting something as your email is sent off into the cosmic world where you can wait a few hours, sometimes days for a response. People tend to admit more and find it easier to express themselves and so for a novel about two people to be explained entirely in their own words, more secrets can be learned and you get to see both sides of the story all of the time.
No it wasn't because like creating any other character, that of a child, an older woman or a teenager, you just get into the head of the character and become them and imagine what it would be like in their position. As I've created their character and know what place they're coming from, it's a similar process to creating all the other characters.
I've done two book tours around America and have been to Boston twice. My sister lived in Boston for an entire summer and I have family and friends that live there and so any questions I had about any specific areas, all I had to do was pick up the phone. It wasn't a difficult area to write about and I didn't need to trowel through piles of research to understand the place and the people, I merely used it as a setting, a base for Alex and a place of unattainable dreams for Rosie.
I wrote PS I Love You when I had finished college, I couldn't have dedicated so much time to it if I was still studying. So when I finished college, I wrote the book full time. It's difficult to know what you want to do when you're young, in fact it's difficult to know what you want to do at any age unless you have a particular passion for something. The parts of school that I enjoyed most were the creative writing aspects, it's what I enjoyed most, it's what I was best at and so I thought that would be the best thing for me to study. I had no ambitions to be a print journalist but I was interested in TV, radio and film production and I did the course as it focused on the more practical side of journalism. Becoming a writer was never an ambition or a dream, just a hobby, which makes it all the better.
To continue writing for as long as I'm enjoying it. I've just finished my third book, I just completed a novella and I'm continually contributing to books of short stories and I'd like to experiment with different types of writing, such as screenplays and plays. I never really make any plans, they never tend to work out anyway, I find the best thing to do is to go with the flow and so far it's taken me to a very good place.
I would love to tell you about my third book but I hate to reveal storylines before the book has even been printed. This third book was hugely satisfying and I loved, loved, loved every single moment spent working on it. Like reading a book that I'm hugely enjoying, I really didn't want to finish it but then there's that side of you that's on overdrive to get to the end. It's a very special story for me and I really hope people love it as much as I do.
The term "chick-lit" isn't one I'm particularly keen on. I think it limits readers to a certain age and sex when that should never be the case. I've received letters from men and women with ages ranging from people 9 to 90 and "chick-lit" doesn't represent that broad readership. However I don't buy books because of their genre but because of their stories and obviously others do the same. I take real life, ordinary situations and give them heart and feeling.