2015 Debut Authors Bash : Jen Brooks

 

 

Today's Guest Post is brought to you by Jen Brooks who is the Debut Author of the YA Book " In a World Just Right" which can be found @ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24722498-in-a-world-just-right?from_search=true&search_version=service

Guest Post Topic:

What was it like writing parallel universes? Did you find the jumping back/forth - in between difficult?

In In A World Just Right, the settings of the parallel universes were pretty easy to write, because they were exactly the same. My main character, Jonathan, is so lonely in the real world that all he wants is human contact, and so his primary parallel world’s only difference is the love and attention he gets from others, specifically his girlfriend, Kylie.

The tricky part for me was in writing two different versions of Kylie—one in the real world, who is not Jonathan’s girlfriend, and one in the parallel world, who is. I wasn’t sure how different to make them, since the only real difference is each girl’s relationship to Jonathan. In the end, they had to be different enough to distinguish them when Jonathan switches back and forth between worlds. But then . . . Jonathan’s confusing of his world’s one day causes bits of each Kylie to bleed into the other across worlds. The changes in both of them as the novel progresses were probably the most intriguing elements to write.

Another part that I had to work at was the timing of Jonathan’s shifting between worlds. If he spent the morning in one world, he was not in the other, so I had to work out the consequences of his splitting time like that while also moving the plot around events that could never truly be parallel, since Jonathan is never in the same place at the same time.