INSTA-LOVE. It’s a term that I never heard before last year, when I started seeing it pop up in reviews of YA novels. Girl meets boy and lightening strikes. The critics are right—it’s all over the place in YA literature. For example:

• TWILIGHT – Bella and Edward’s eyes meet in that school cafeteria and YA history is made.



• STAR WARS – one look at Leia’s image projected by R2D2’s faulty disk drive, and Luke’s ready to take on the Dark Side of the Force to rescue her.



• ROMEO AND JULIET – a fleeting glimpse of each other at a costume party, and they’re practically sprinting to Friar Lawrence’s cell to tie the knot.

Oh wait, sorry. We’re talking about YA novels. Not classic films. Or Shakespeare. But we might as well be, because from WESTSIDE STORY’s Tony and Maria to Arthurian literature’s Lancelot and Guinevere, Insta-Love is a theme that has permeated storytelling for centuries. (Or millennia, even, if I can get Biblical and mention David and Bathsheba.)

So now that we’ve established that Insta-Love is neither a purely Young Adult phenomenon, nor even that new of a concept, let’s take the discussion past TWILIGHT and into real life. Does love-at-first-sight actually exist outside of the minds of writers, filmmakers and musicians?

And what is the difference between Insta-Love and Insta-Interest? I, personally, have never had anyone grow on me, although it has happened to friends of mine so I know it exists. I see. I like. I conquer. (Or fail to conquer, after making a total idiot of myself. Or chickening out after first making a total idiot of myself.)

Some authors give good reasons for there to be an Insta-Attraction. Bella’s a “shield.” Sookie’s part-fairy. But does there even need to be a reason?

Because to those who say, “Love-at-first-sight just isn’t believable,” I have to say…

Really? I mean…REALLY?

You’ve never had that moment where you walk into a room and you see him/her, or even get as far as exchanging a few words, and suddenly it’s crashing down on you like a car wash—buffeting you from all sides? Never?

I’m not saying that love-at-first-sight is the healthiest basis for a long-term relationship. The French call it a coup de foudre—a lightning strike. Which is a good metaphor: it electrifies you, but it sure does leave your hair a mess. (As well as the rest of your life.) That isn’t to say that it isn’t realistic. And might actually, on the rare occasion, work out. But is it to be trusted? That’s a whole other question.

The fact that it is such a powerful and sometimes devastating force is exactly why writers and poets and musicians and artists choose it as a topic. And why we, as readers, listeners and spectators just eat it up. It’s crazy. It’s dangerous. It’s thrilling. It’s tragic. Just turn on WESTSIDE STORY and hand me a box of tissues. I, for one, am not afraid to say that Insta-Love exists and when it comes to well-written love-at-first-sight, I am a complete sucker.

If you are looking for something unique to give for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzai, or any other December celebration, I have a fun idea.

With every purchase of DIE FOR ME from today (Nov. 21) until December 25, I will send a signed bookplate directly to the person you’re giving the book to. Not only will your friend, niece, daughter, crazy Aunt Edna have a romance set in Paris to read during the holidays, but they will get a little unexpected surprise in the mail straight from the book’s author!

Just send your proof of purchase (either scanned or forward the online sales receipt) to me at katieloumercier at gmail dot com and give me the mailing address of the person you’re gifting. (Or if you want to give it with the book, give me your mailing address.)

DIE FOR ME is continuing to sell, even in the long-haul between books. This is my little “thank you” for making it the success that it has been. Merci, and ho ho ho!

My office is a tiny 200+ year old building that used to be a bakery, standing across our yard from my house.

I wrote my first two books in bed. Not because I found it tiring or needed frequent naps in between chapters or anything. It’s just that there wasn’t a better place to do it. From time to time I would run away to a friend’s empty home and spend an intensive four or five days typing my fingers off. But usually it was me, propped up with my laptop in the upstairs guest bedroom, waving to my father-in-law and other construction workers through the glass panes in the door as they came and went doing renovations on our farmhouse. I could see them shaking their heads, wondering what the strange foreigner was doing acting like an invalid on her days off from teaching at the university.

And then I got published. And they stopped shaking their heads and got to work renovating a little house on our property for me to use as my writing hideout. The building served as the neighborhood bakery (boulangerie, in French) a couple of hundred years ago, and then was used as a shelter for seasonal field workers…and their horses. (Half of the floor is in earthen tiles, the other half is dirt, and embedded in the wall over the dirt part is a metal ring to tether a horse.) Then, for at least the last half-century, it was used as a storage shed.

I had to wait until a family of birds moved out and shoo away a lot of mice before it was even usable. But now I’ve got electricity and a wireless connection (beamed over from our house) and a wood-burning stove to keep the place reasonably warm – if I sit directly in front of it with my laptop on my lap – during the winter.

It is a haven for me. It is the place I come to conceive ideas. As well as carry them to term and give birth to them. (To push the metaphor right over the edge of acceptability, the two drawings to the left of my desk are me when I was pregnant, sketched by the amazing Chuck Bowdish.) It is a womblike place. Especially when I draw the black-out curtains over the door and window and get the fire roaring.

There is a book on writing that I really love entitled, appropriately, “On Writing” by Stephen King. I had read a couple of other guides to writing over the years, but found them either too worryingly melodramatic or transcendentally vague. Stephen King actually gives specific advice about how to write, where to write, how much to try to produce, and other concrete tips. He told me what I really wanted to know – facts that other writers either thought were too trivial or too personal to divulge.

And what he said about “place” really made sense to me. He suggests writing in the same place every day. “The space can be humble…and it really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut.” He suggests no telephone, TV or video games in the room, and drawing the curtains or pulling the shades unless the window looks out at a blank wall. Check, check, and check.

I admit it would be nice to have a bathroom handy instead of having to run across the yard through the elements, but I’m not complaining because I am so grateful for what I already have. King said he wrote his first two published novels “in the laundry room of a doublewide trailer, pounding away on my wife’s portable Olivetti typewriter and balancing a child’s desk on my thighs.” He says that John Cheever wrote in the basement of his Park Avenue apartment building, near the furnace. After those examples, a toilet doesn’t seen terribly important.

For me, it’s all about getting away from The Everyday. If I’m in our house, I’m going to find a million little things — besides writing — that I really should be doing. In The Boulangerie I can sit at my desk or lay on the floor or lounge on the couch – but these are my only choices – there are no other distractions. All I can do is sit and think and write.

My couch with the horse-hook above it, black-out curtains and mat covering the dirt floor.

Since several people have asked me about it, I thought I’d blog about Kate’s name. She has lots of them. Or, rather, she has lots of nicknames.

I love nicknames. I think my using them is a wish fulfillment thing, because I never had one when I was a kid—you can’t do much with Amy. And since that left me with a weird sense of deprivation, I piled nicknames on my characters. For me, a nickname is a term of endearment. So Vincent got a couple (Jules calls him “Vince” and Ambrose calls him “Vin” – a point that helped me clarify who was who when Jules possessed Ambrose’s body). And Kate got a lot.

Here is the deleted part of DIE FOR ME that explains that her name is actually just Kate, not Katya as some have guessed. (It was, as you will see, too long and explanatory, thus it’s deletedness!) So for the record…

My mom had named Georgia after the state she grew up in, and gave her the middle name “Frances” after her own Mom’s name. In the good old Southern tradition, I got my mom’s last name “Beaumont” as my middle name, but my first name was as normal-sounding as they came. “Kate.” Georgia got both the exotic name and the knockout looks.

However, besides my mom, no one actually called me Kate. Dad called me “princesse”, Georgia called me “Katie-Bean”, or just “Bean”, and Mamie called me “Katya.” All that to say, I answer to almost anything.

Hi all! This is a follow-up to this week’s CONTEST MONDAY, in which I asked what was the first book you remember loving. Several people asked afterward for a list of the results. So here they are, along with my first favorites.

The first book I remember loving that was read to me was “Old Hasdrubel and the Pirates.” I mean pirates, treasure, and a guy dressed up in an alligator skin saving the maiden who was tied to a tree? What more could you ask for?

And the first book I remember loving that I read myself was Pippi Longstocking. Oh, how I wanted to be Pippi and have her absolute freedom and independence. (And hair. And horse. And house. I wanted all of it!)

So what was the top choice?

But just one point beneath them was:

Check out all of the answers left on FB and Twitter. There are a lot of classics and some surprises!

2Young 2Go 4Boys
Tess of the D’urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
Miles to go, by Miley Cyrus
Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Hop on Pop, by Dr Seuss
The Secret Garden, (4 votes)
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
The Babysitters’ Club series (4 votes)
Fly Away Peter, by David Malouf
Matilda, by Roald Dahl (2 votes)
Harry Potter (13 votes)
Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
A book of letters that the reader’s grandfather wrote her grandfather while he was away at war. (sigh!)
Twilight (12 votes)
Aztec by Gary Jennings
Breaking Dawn
The Tales of Peter Rabbit
Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare
The Fever series, by Karen Marie Moning
Super Fudge by Judy Blume
Moby Dick & collection of Jules Verne lesser known stories
Othello, by Shakespeare
Key of Light, by Norah Roberts
Tomorrow When the War Began, by John Marsden
The Worst Witch
The Magic Faraway Tree series, by Enid Blyton (4 votes)
Mio my Mio, by Astrid Lindgren
The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, by Eleanor Coerr
The Old Man And The Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
The Monster at the end of this book, starring Grover
Battle Royale, by Koushun Takami
Iron King, by Julie Kagawa (2 votes)
Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl (2 votes)
Keeper, by Mal Peet
Charlotte’s Web (2 votes)
Alice in Wonderland (2 votes)
Anne of Green Gables (3 votes)
When Ghosts Speak, by Mary Ann Winkowski
The Devil Rides, by Dennis Wheatley
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (5 votes)
Careless Whispers (A Sweet Dreams book, no. 216)
Way of the Peaceful Warrior, by Dan Millman
Die For Me (3 votes. ah, flattery)
The Thief Lord, by Cornelia Funke
A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle (2 votes)
The Eleventh Hour
Guitar Girl, by Sarra Manning
The Stars are Upside Down, by Gabriel Alington
Avi The Good Dog
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis (2 votes)
The Nancy Drew mysteries (2 votes)
The Wicked Lovely series, by Melissa Marr
The Little Creature series
If You Loved Me by Marilyn Reynolds
The Pokey Little Puppy
The Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snickett
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lingrin
This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen
Gone with the Wind
R.L. Stine’s books
The Little House on the Prairie series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (2 votes)
The Giving Tree by Shel Sliverstein (3 votes)
Vampire Academy, by Richelle Mead
The Outcast, by Louise Cooper
Summer of My German Soldier
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Tiger Who Came for Tea
A Summer to Die
The Brothers Lionheart
The Lord of the Rings
Ella Enchanted (2 votes)
The Bearenstein Bears (2 votes)
The Replacement, by Brenna Yovanoff
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Never Spit on Your Shoes by Denys Cazet
The Diary of Anne Frank
The Outsiders by S.E Hinton
Dragon Rider By Cornelia Funke
The Land of the Unicorns by Bruce Coville
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi
Vampire Diaries
The original Winnie the Pooh series
The Count Of Monte Cristo
Red Riding Hood Puffin Books Edition
The Magicians’ Guild by trudi canavan
Blister Lamb by Ethel Barrett
Georges Marvelous Medicine by Roald Dahl
She’s Come Undone by Waly Lamb
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
The Foot Book by Dr. Seuss
Start Girl by Jerry Spinelli
Peter Pan and Wendy
I love you this much
Tubby and the Lantern by Al Perkins
The Velveteen Rabbit
Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish
Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging
The Mediator Series by Meg Cabot
Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
The Witches by Roald Dahl
Emily of New Moon
Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey
Clifford the Big Red Dog
The Last Unicorn
THE GOLDEN COMPASS by Phillip Pullman
The Percy Jackson Books
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Harriet the Spy
Battle Royale