Books for YA!: Dead Girl's Don't Lie Blog Tour: Author Interview + Giveaway

Hey, everyone! The Dead Girl's Don't Lie Blog Tour stops here today and we have the honor to interview the incredible, Jennifer Shaw Wolf on our blog. So without further ado, let's give our warmest welcome to, JENNIFER SHAW WOLF!!! *cue applause*

1. Tell us where the idea for Dead Girls Don't Lie came from.

When I was about 11 or 12 there was a murder in my little town where a girl was shot through her bedroom window. When I went home a couple of summers ago, I started thinking about case. The story I came up has few similarities to what really happened. It was just the seed of an idea that I ran with.

2. What's your writing schedule like? Do you plan things out of fly by the seat of your pants more?

My life is my family and chasing four busy kids, so having a writing schedule doesn’t always work for me, but I try to write a little bit every day. If I get too far away from it it’s hard to get back to.

As far as outlining or plotting I go back and forth. With BREAKING BEAUTIFUL it was all by the seat of my pants. With DEAD GIRLS I outlined and outlined and outlined, but when I started writing, I found that I had to keep revising my outline because things changed. I’m a writer who would love to have a set outline to follow and a plot that sticks to that, but sometimes the story takes over and I have to go with it.

3. If you had to choose to be one of the characters in DGDL, which would you choose and why?

I’m going to have to go with Jaycee. Rachel is crazy and fun and I love her, but Jaycee’s life is a bit more stable, and after all Rachel is dead. I really enjoyed Jaycee’s metamorphosis as I wrote the book. I think she finds her own place and her own strengths in the story. It took a lot of revision to get her to that point though.

4. Do you find naming characters difficult or easy?

Difficult. Often, I go to my teenage daughter and her friends and say, “I have this character and she’s like this, what should I name her?” I go through a bunch of names before I come up with the right one.

For DEAD GIRLS the one name I had to use was Areceli. I met a woman with that name and fell in love with it. I ended up using her daughter (who has the same name but goes by Sally) in my book trailer.

5. What can we expect next from you?

I always have a bunch of projects in the works, but I’m focusing on two main ones. One is a revision of a manuscript about a girl who is a Harvard-bound high school brainiac, but secretly joins a gang of street racers to find out what really to her older brother. The other one is a cold-case mystery about a girl who’s spending the summer in a lake house and trying to figure out what happened in the house next to hers seventeen years before, what it has to do with her family, and why the past is starting to repeat itself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jennifer Shaw Wolf grew up on a farm in the tiny town of St. Anthony, Idaho. She spent cold Idaho mornings milking cows in the dark and attended a school where Hunter’s Education was part of the sixth grade curriculum. She’s always been a writer, whether it was sewing together books to read to her little brothers or starting an underground newspaper in sixth grade. She met the love of her life at Ricks College, (now BYU Idaho), after he dropped her on her head. She graduated from Ricks and then Brigham Young University, Provo with a degree in Broadcast Communications. Now she lives in beautiful, green, (rainy) Lacey, Washington with her husband and four kids. She loves to produce videos, ski, ride horses, and read, but really all she has time for is chasing kids and writing.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jenniferswolf
Website: http://www.jennifershawwolf.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jennifer-Shaw-Wolf/186114384755483