Blog Tour: A Matter of Heart by Amy Fellner Dominy

Hi guys! I know I don't normally do blog tours, but this book was really personal to me and so I had to do the tour. I hope you enjoy my post as well as Amy's!

BOOK DETAILS

A Matter of Heart

by Amy Fellner Dominy

Publisher: Delacorte

Release Date: May 2015

BOOK LINKS: Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, The Book Depository, iTunes, Kobo

Synopsis:

Readers will happily sink into this emotionally grounded, contemporary young adult novel about the sudden end of one girl's Olympic swimming dreams and the struggles she endures before realizing there are many things that define who we are.

Sixteen-year-old Abby Lipman is on track to win the state swim championships and qualify for the Olympic trials when a fainting incident at a swim meet leads to the diagnosis of a deadly heart condition. Now Abby is forced to discover who she is without the one thing that's defined her entire life.

Excerpt

Swimming is who I am.

Winning is what I live for.

No one is going to stop me from becoming the fastest swimmer in the world.

Not my dad.

Not my boyfriend.

Not even my own heart.

My least favorite sport to play in PE

I am horribly uncoordinated, so I really wasn't a big fan of playing sports in PE class. Anything that required me to run, was something that I didn't enjoy. Plus I have balance issues along with some other health issues. So I struggled a lot. So I would definitely say anything that required me to run was my least favorite PE sport. Cross country running was hell on me and on my body. Yet I am so insanely competitive that I didn't "go easy" on myself. I pushed myself. 

When it came time to play baseball or soccer or basketball, I hated it too, although it wasn't as bad as running for me. At least I got to stand, shoot baskets and kick soccer balls. That was actual relief for me and my body. 

Believe me, I wish I was more coordinated and had better balance. Thankfully my teen brother has all the athleticism in the world.

Guest Post

I’m not the most athletic person in the world. My marching band director once yelled at me for being so uncoordinated that he told me to stop playing my Clarinet and just focus on moving my feet.  Ouch!  But, like most things I’m told I can’t do, I get stubborn. And I work harder. I ended up being able to march and play my instrument through four years of high school and three years of college. So there, Mr. Band Director! 

            Anyway, I’ve always loved sports and I’ve always wished I were more talented. I think that’s one of the reasons I really liked writing about Abby. It was one of my dreams to be the best of the best at something. Abby is that. She’s a top swimmer and blue ribbons are the only kind she collects. So while I wrote this book, at least in my imagination, I got to experience what it would be like to swim like a fish. 

So, with no further ado, here’s the scoop on me and sports:

  

TOP FIVE SPORTS LIST

FAVORITE SPORT TO PLAY: Doubles tennis. It’s a lot fun and you get to play with a friend.

FAVORITE SPORT TO WATCH: Men’s tennis. It’s not all about gawking at a bunch of very handsome men, but, um, that might be part of it.

FAVORITE SPORTS TEAM: Oberlin College baseball team. What can I say…my son is one of the starting pitchers. J Go Yeomen!!

FAVORITE SPORT FOR CURSING: Golf. I play every week with my hubby and there’s just something about that retched sport that brings out the potty mouth in me. But, I do love the challenge of golf—one day I’m going to figure the darn thing out.

MY GREATEST SPORTS VICTORY: Abby might beat my pants off in swimming, but there’s one sport where I was once crowned CHAMPION:

Hula hooping.

Yep—I was pretty darn good with a Hula hoop and thank heavens there’s no video of it now!  Though it’s not an Olympic sport yet, I really think it should be, don’t you?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Amy Fellner Dominy worked as a copywriter in the advertising business before leaving to earn her MFA in playwriting. Her plays for adults and children have been staged in various cities around the country. Amy's novels for teens include OyMG (Walker, 2011) and AUDITION & SUBTRACTION (Walker, 2012.) Amy's next book is a contemporary YA coming Spring, 2015 from Random House. It's called A MATTER OF HEART.

AUTHOR LINKS:

Website

Goodreads

Twitter

Facebook

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Guest Post from Corey Ann Haydu

Corey Ann Haydu is the author of two YA Contemporaries.

OCD Love Story- July 2013

Life By Committee- May 2014

Several weeks ago, Corey put the word out that she was willing to do a guest post on book blogs and I pounced on the opportunity for her to write one for this blog. Since I am working on 3 writing projects, I really wanted to hear about her writing process.

On Process and Doing What Works

The really wonderful thing about being a writer is the same as the really wonderful thing about being a person—you get to figure out who you are and what makes sense for you in your work and your writing and your life.

Here’s how a book happens for me:
I come up with an idea. It is vague. It is inspired by something else—a bit of my life or a documentary or a play or a podcast or another book. In the case of LIFE BY COMMITTEE I started with this French film I loved—Love Me If You Dare. I liked the structure, danger, and chaos of the film and I wanted to attempt that kind of arc in a book. 

That’s all I knew, when I started.

I write in cafes. I need a mocha or a chai. I have to have internet. I like to be chatting online with friends and looking at interesting articles and generally doing a sort of manic multitasking. I work best with a lot of chaos around me.

I write random scenes, out of order. I have only that one seed of an idea (“a YA novel sort of like that French film”) and nothing else. I play a lot. Slowly, I layer on ideas. At one point in writing LBC I realized the arc I wanted would intersect in an interesting way with bits of my own high school experience.

The first draft took me about a year. First drafts in general tend to take me about a year. It is a messy, messy process. I don’t have any chronology until very late in the game. Plot points occur to me sort of willy-nilly, and I’ll write a scene that seems like it could be interesting (Sasha Cotton on her porch at night, in LBC) and not have any idea why I’m writing it or where it will fit in. It’s a lot like leaving breadcrumbs for myself, Hansel and Gretl style, without actually knowing where I’m walking as I drop those breadcrumbs.

But miraculously a lot of things come together.

And unsurprisingly, a lot of other things fall apart.

I do not have strong first drafts. My revisions are complicated, structural, character and plot overhauls. They are not far from page one rewrites. I need readers (betas and above all else my agent and editor) to ask the right questions so that I can find the right answers.

When I’m revising I make insane, impossible choices. That’s when the book starts to work. I don’t solve a problem of not enough tension or a character’s journey being off by simply tweaking. I completely rethink the way I’m telling the story. I changed the entire way LBC-- the online group in the book-- functioned in between the second and third drafts. I cut a major character entirely after the first draft. I started the book in a whole new place. I added probably ten chapters in my last revision.

I stayed open to new and large and surprising changes. That’s the important part of the writing process for me—openness. Being open to ideas that seem impossible or exhausting. Taking risks. Writing scenes you may never use. Going in a direction that’s going to be hard to turn yourself around from. Making big and scary decisions, sticking with them, and then having the courage to give them up and undo them again if they’re not working.

And then the scariest—trusting your own instinct and following through even when it’s terrifying and hard.

And knowing how YOU write best, how a novel comes to be for YOU, and not judging that the process doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to. My process isn’t efficient. It requires me knowing when I have done as much as I can do on my own. It is filled with self-doubt and small moments of epiphanies. I am often shocked and appalled and dismayed and lost. My process involves post-it notes and scattered ideas and no outlines or calendars or spreadsheets. It doesn’t involve story arc, even though I know eventually I’ll need that. It doesn’t involve consistency or thinking through motivations, even though I know eventually I’ll need that. It means sometimes I give up halfway through or start over for the fiftieth time. It means for every 80,000 word book, there are 300,000 written words, beautiful scenes that will never be seen, characters I loved that no one else will meet. It means my phone is filled with one sentence idea descriptions that offer me little more than a feeling on which to build a whole novel.

And those little feelings sometimes turn into books.

And that’s mine. I can own that. Even though it’s messy.

Thank you so much Corey for volunteering to write a post for the blog. I loved reading all about your writing process. Keep writing those amazing books for us!