(CC)-Doug8's

I’ve been asked many times about what inspired my new book, Bring Me Back. To that, I answer that it was a dream about my teenage rock star crush. It happened at the age of thirty-two, years after I’d had a single thought about him and yet, somehow, he managed to pop into my subconscious and give me an idea. What if a woman met and fell in love with the rock star crush of her youth, only later in life? I didn't realize it at the time, but that idea would change my life.

Bring Me Back is the first book I wrote, although it was the fourth to be published. Although I've always loved to write, I never set out to write fiction. It just happened. I realize how absurd that sounds. Ask any person at the grocery store or in line at the bank if they have an idea for a novel. Most will say “yes”. Most will never get around to writing it. Why? Because it’s really, really hard.

I was at a dinner party a few weeks ago and a dear friend of mine, Jim, went on about how proud he is of me for being able to not only start books, but actually finish them. My face instantly became flushed, and not just from the several glasses of wine I’d had at that point in the evening. It meant a lot coming from him—Jim’s absurdly well-read and so smart that virtually everything that comes out of his mouth is either fascinating or hilarious. He’s an excellent dinner-party guest. But there he was, legitimately in awe of something I did. Wow.

Jim asked me how I did it, what made me not only start the book, but finish it. The first part of the answer is easy. My family and I lost our house to a fire in the summer of 2008. As you can imagine, it was an enormous amount of upheaval—dealing with insurance, finding a place to live, getting our house rebuilt, and going about the business of replacing everything we’d lost. Our children were nine and seven at the time. It was really, really hard on them. I devoted my entire existence into showing them that when bad stuff happens, we hold on to each other and get through it. And that’s what we did.

But once the (construction) dust had settled and we were back in our house, with furniture and clothing and everything else we supposedly need, I realized that my job as crisis manager had come to an end. I’d done pretty well for myself. The kids were settled, my husband got up and went to work every day just as he had before the fire. But I’d put my at-home job and personal needs on hold to see our family through this. It was time to do something for myself.

That’s where we get back to the dream I had about my teenage crush. (For those of you keeping score, it was John Taylor from Duran Duran.) At this point, after the fire, the dream was nearly eight years behind me but still alive and kicking in my head. I’d had years to think about what might happen and since I’d decided to do something for myself, why not write a book? Finally get it out of my system, right? Seemed like a relatively sane idea.

I sat down at my computer and started to write, fully expecting that I would quit after twenty pages or so. My dear friend, Jim, told me he has the beginning of four different books on his computer. I expect that’s the way it goes for most people. For whatever reason, the stars seemed to align and Bring Me Back was quickly a snowball barreling down a hill with me in hot pursuit. It got bigger as it went, took on a life of its own, and became my obsession. I slept very little, ate even less (this is not the medically approved way to lose the baby weight, but it does work), and could do little more than write, write, write. I had my first completed draft in six months.

Of course, it took nearly a year to revise the damn thing, with the help of Karen Stivali, my critique partner and now one of my closest friends. The finished version of Bring Me Back is something I take great pride in, but a close second is the journey that brought me to this point.

But let’s get back to the dinner party and my talk with Jim. He enjoyed the story you just heard, but then he said that he was equally in awe of the fact that I've since finished four other books. I don’t really think that much about it any more, it’s just what I do, but I wondered, aloud and to him, what if Bring Me Back hadn't been the first book I’d sat down to write? I’m not entirely sure any other story would have consumed me in the way that one did. And perhaps I've only been able to write the other books because I had proven to myself that I could do it in the first place. Of course there’s no way to know, and the question will always be there for me, but I do know this much: it certainly changed my life.

Karen Booth is a Midwestern girl transplanted in the South, raised on 80s music, Judy Blume, and the films of John Hughes. An early preoccupation with rock ‘n’ roll led her to spend her twenties working her way from intern to executive in the music industry. Much of her writing revolves around the world of backstage passes and band dynamics. When she isn't creating fictional musicians, she's listening to music with her kids, honing her Southern cooking skills or sweet-talking her astoundingly supportive husband into whipping up a batch of cocktails.