Kristyn - Delightfullybooked

Q&A with Author Sophie Sullivan

December 20, 2021

Today I’m SO EXCITED to feature Sophie (aka Jody Holford) on my blog! She truly is a gem and I have been so thankful to get to know her over the past several months. I pretty much latched onto her when I found out we’re both obsessed with Friends and she and a few other authors did a live online event using trivia about the show! She writes the best books and I’m so thrilled to share a little bit about them and her with you- Check it out below!

Hey Sophie! Thank you so much for participating in my Q&A! When I read Ten Rules for Faking It and you made a Friends reference, I knew you’d be one of my favorites, ha! Tell us how you became interested in writing romcoms!

Thank you for asking me! It’s so fun to meet people who love what you love. Or, you know, are obsessed with your obsessions. I love writing romance and realized that some of the things that feel mortifying to me also have the capacity to be humorous if presented in the right way. In a human way, if that makes sense. So you can laugh but you also feel that empathy. I think it was just a natural extension of writing romance.

2. As much as I talk to you, I just RECENTLY found out that you also write under the name Jody Holford (cue the open-mouth face emoji). How did I not know this?! Tell us how these books are different.

Even though it’s in my bio, several people were surprised by this when I began sharing my Jody Holford Christmas novel this year. It’s such a surreal thing, having this second name. Under my real name, I write cozy mysteries and sweet, contemporary romance. I think the key difference is there is more internal conflict in the romcom. There’s more of a journey for the heroine. Like in my other romances, my Sophie books have that conflict between the hero and heroine but there’s more beneath the surface. Everly’s anxiety for example or Chris’ relationship with his father. I think, and I could be wrong, my romcoms have more layers.

3. Tell us a little bit about your writing process in between being a mom, a wife, and a teacher.

I am actually a really fast writer if I know where I’m going with the story. Lately, I feel like I’ve slowed down which I don’t really love but it’s more manageable. I write a lot while my husband is making dinner. So, I come home from work, get some words out. Plus on weekends and breaks. Basically, instead of working out, cooking, shopping for groceries, or doing laundry, I write. My husband and daughters are very supportive so it allows me to focus on the words when I’m home.

4. Does writing energize you or exhaust you?

Writing energizes me, editing exhausts and stresses me. I’m very hard on myself so when I get edits back I tend to feel overwhelmed at not getting it right the first time.

5. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer?

I want to answer this question, I really do but it makes me nervous for reasons I will share. My reasons are three fold (see what I did there?) One, I’m terrified I’ll forget someone and then I’ll feel guilty. Two, I’ll say I’m friends with someone and they’ll be surprised by this and I’ll feel like a fangirl dork. Three…I didn’t really have a third but wanted to use the Friends reference. I would like to be besties with Nora Roberts though. The second part of this question is really important because I’m so lucky to have been lifted up and supported by so many writers. I could give you pages full of names of writers who’ve shown me kindness and my hope is that I give some of this back and people know how much it means to me.

6. You’re a teacher by day! What do you teach?

Teacher by day, yes. I teach grade six literacy and social studies. I’ve been teaching a long time. 21 years.

7. I know you’re a Disney fan! Do you have a favorite movie?

Your questions are making me smile. I’m a HUGE Disney fan. I love Beauty and the Beast, animated and live action. I love Tangled and The Little Mermaid.

8. Which FRIENDS character are you most like? Who is your favorite?

Wow. I think I’m probably most like Rachel. Or maybe that’s just who I want to be like because she’s my favorite. I’d actually like to be Jennifer Aniston’s bestie too because she’s inspiring and I just think she’s amazing. Note: I polled my family and they all agreed. I think it’s the ‘stick to the list’ thing.

9. With the holidays surrounding us, what are some traditions you have?

We always open one gift on Christmas Eve which I love. It’s always pajamas but it’s still fun. We also read The Night Before Christmas. I used to read it but now my girls do. My mom used to recite it because she knows it by heart. It’s a sweet way to end the evening.

10. For those who may not know, you have a new book coming out in 2022! (Yes, I’ve already read it and I LOVED it.) Tell us more about it!

I’m so thrilled you loved it. Grace and Noah from How to Love Your Neighbor are so much fun. On the outside, they’re different but at their cores, they both crave acceptance, love, and a feeling of belonging. I got to use my love of home reno shows and my love of the enemies to lovers trope to throw these two into a bunch of fun situations. I really hope people will enjoy it. Second books can be scary to release.

11. Last question, I promise! If you could recommend one book everyone should read, what would it be?

One book? Can anyone actually do that? Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, The Search by Nora Roberts, Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle, The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary. I can’t do it. I’m sorry. There’s so many.

This was so fun! Thank you!

Thank you so much Jody/Sophie (I never know what to call you!) for being a part of today’s blog! I know readers love getting to hear more about you! Oh and P.S.- The Search is also one of my favorite books- and I totes think Nora Roberts should be your bestie!

If you want to check out more on Sophie then head on over to her Instagram! Ten Rules for Faking It is out now and How to Love your Neighbor releases January 18, 2022!

Q & A with Author Maddie Dawson

December 13, 2021

Have you met Maddie Dawson yet?! If you haven’t then you’re in for a treat! She is the author of 10 novels- the most recent being The Magic of Found Objects. I first found out about Maddie’s books when I signed up to do a book tour for A Happy Catastrophe a couple of years ago. When I started reading, I quickly realized it was the follow-up book to Matchmaking for Beginners and decided to stop and read that one first. I’m so glad I did, because it became one of my all time favorite reads! Maddie has this extraordinary way of writing and creating characters that will worm their way into your heart and stay there.💕

1. I fell in love with your writing when I read Matchmaking for Beginners! The magic, the quirky characters, the charm, and the messiness that is life and love. I followed that up with A Happy Catastrophe & The Magic of Found Objects, which I loved equally as much! How do you come up with the originality of your stories?

Wow, thank you so much for such kind words! I wish there was a simple answer to your very intriguing question. Where do stories come from? To be perfectly honest, they seem to spring from out of nowhere (and never when I’m sitting at the laptop with my fingers on the keyboard, waiting patiently.) Nope, they come when I’m falling asleep or driving in the car or getting ready to give a talk on some other subject altogether—and BAM! There’s suddenly a story tugging at my brain, and refusing to let go. Usually it starts with a character who has a “what if” question. For Matchmaking for Beginners, the question was, “What if your whole life could change if you just trusted one unlikely person and let yourself follow your heart?”

2. I hear that you come from a long line of story tellers. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Ha! I think I was born knowing I wanted to tell stories. I talked very early, apparently, and at the age of four, my mother said, I talked incessantly about my life in the Navy. Yep, the Navy. No one in our family had been in the Navy, and as far as she knew, I’d never even heard of the Navy. But there I was, correcting the way she vacuumed the floor or planted flowers in the garden. “That’s not how we did it in the Navy!” I’d say. At six, I wrote my first story when my mother wouldn’t give me money for the Good Humor truck, and I went door to door until I sold it to the neighbors for twenty-five cents—enough to buy myself and my sister a popsicle. THAT may be when I decided I wanted to be a writer: it looked like a sure-fire way to have ice cream for the rest of my life!

3. You have some amazing character names in your books- Marnie, Blix, Phronsie, Tenaj. How did you come up with these?

Thank you for saying this. I love naming characters. It’s one of my favorite things—and is also possibly (besides ice cream acquisition) one of the best reasons for becoming a writer. After all, in your regular life, how often do you get to name things? Sure, if you have kids and pets, you get a few chances (but even then you have to negotiate with another person usually.) Quite often the characters themselves sort of “tell” me their names, and I just go along. The name always suits their personality, at least in my head.

4. What is your favorite type of scene to write?

I love all of it! Mostly I love to write scenes where there is growing intensity between the characters and plenty of humor. I love scenes that express their personalities, and make me laugh.

5. How many books have you written? Do you tend to stick to writing the same genre?

I’ve written ten novels (just finished the tenth one yesterday!) and three books of non-fiction.

6. Who is your biggest cheerleader while you are writing your books?

I’m so lucky to have a community of writer friends, and we all hold each other up while we’re writing. It’s so handy to be able to pick up the phone and groan in a certain way and have the person on the other end know instantly that this means you’ve lost the plot and need a new motivation for the main character. (This is different from the moan you do when your computer has crashed and you just lost the first four chapters.) Family members try to be sympathetic—they really do—but often they can’t help saying things like, “Just think up a new plot!”

6. What are you currently reading/listening to/watching?

I’m reading about four different books just now, because for some reason I need to have a book to read in every room of the house. One is The Museum of Broken Relationships: Modern Love in 203 Everyday Objects by Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic; Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life, by Abigail Thomas; The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler (for the fifth time!), and Untamed, by Glennon Doyle. As for television, I just finished watching Ted Lasso and Hacks, both of which made me a better person.

7. I always hate getting asked this question because I can never decide, but I’ll ask anyway…What’s your favorite book/ or who is your favorite author?

Ha! NO ONE likes this question, because it’s constantly changing—with moods, with time in life, even with wind currents. Over time, though, I guess I’d say mostly my favorite author is Alice Munro, who has such a fantastic body of work. Her short stories have stayed in my head over many, many years, and I’m always wanting to go back and admire how she manages to create such depth and such feeling with just a few lovely brushstrokes.

8. How do you celebrate when you finish a writing a book?!

Champagne? Beating a drum outside at midnight? Nope, I’m afraid not. When I finish writing a book, I find that I’m kind of pensive for a few days. It’s an ending, after all. The characters are packing up their suitcases and we are bidding each other farewell. I thank them for moving into my head and telling me the story, and they thank me for trying to get it all down while they dictated it. Sometimes there are a few hard feelings we have to work on: I think they could have been more forthcoming at times, and also could have respected my sleep schedule, even when they had a brand new idea to tell me (couldn’t it have waited for morning, Phronsie??) And they always think I maybe left out some details they thought were important but which had to get dashed due to length. It takes a while for the dust to settle and for me to really feel the exhilaration of I’M DONE! I’M DONE!! For me, the true celebration comes when the galleys arrive in the mail—touching and turning the real pages of the book does something to my heart that I can’t quite put into words. It’s like magic.

9. Tell us all about your latest release The Magic of Found Objects, and PLEASE let us know how gnomes came to play a role in this book, I can’t see one without thinking of you and this story!

Ah! The Magic of Found Objects, my pandemic book, is still one of my favorites. It’s the story that answers the question: What if you get to be in your late thirties and your dating life sucks, and your best friend says, “Let’s get married even though we’re not in love!”? That’s what happens to Phronsie Linnelle, for whom nothing in life is exactly clear-cut. As soon as she makes up her mind to make her parents happy and accept the proposal of this childhood friend whom she talks to every single day, she meets a much younger new guy at work, a guy who collects gnomes, wears sandals to work, and calls everybody “dude.” Clearly not what anybody had in mind. When she looks back at her childhood—raised by two very different moms, her biological mom who’s a hippie artist and her stepmother, who’s more practical and stable and dependable—it becomes clear she has to go deep to figure out who she really is in order to know what to do.

The gnomes! Ahhh, the gnomes! My friends Beth and Bill have a whole colony of gnomes living at their house, and as soon as I “met” these little guys, I knew I had to have them in a book. I gave them to Adam, the young guy in my book, and he immediately placed them in his office windowsill and bought them a tractor.

9. Also, readers want to know-(and by readers, I mean ME) Do you have something new in the works for us?!

I do! I do! (jumping up and down here) I have a book that I just finished—Snap Out of It—which is a comic novel about a middle-aged, three-times-married, fun-loving woman who’s happily given up on love and now just wants to help other people steer clear of romantic agony, so she dresses up in a bunny costume and goes to their houses, where she helps them get rid of all the reminders of lost love so they can move on. When her business takes off and becomes a national phenomenon, all is well until love starts breaking out all around her. It’s coming out in January of 2023.

Thank you so much Maddie for participating in my Q&A and for all of the thought that clearly went into your answers-I can’t wait for Snap Out of It! I hope you all enjoyed getting to know Maddie as much as I did! She’s such a delightful person and if you haven’t yet, I hope you get the chance to check out her books. 💕 Here are links to a few of them below:

Matchmaking for Beginners

A Happy Catastrophe

The Magic of Found objects

Follow Maddie on IG & Twitter, or check out her website!

Bookstagrammer Feature @LiteraryHypeWoman

December 6, 2021

One thing I’ve wanted to do to make this blog unique is to feature not just authors, but bookstagrammers as well! I’ve made so many friends in this community over the past couple of years and I love how we all come together and support each other. We may have a lot in common, we may not. But one thing that brings us together is BOOKS! Everyone’s platform is different and unique to that individual which is what makes the bookstagram community such a special place!

If you aren’t familiar with what bookstagram is- It’s an Instagram platform where book lovers and authors discuss & review their favorite books! Just search the hashtag: #bookstagram and you will find thousands of people to follow and keep up with the latest reads!

Today, I am SO EXCITED to feature Stephanie @literaryhypewoman on the blog! Check out our Q&A!

Tell us how you got started on bookstagram! Do you have a particular niche?

I got started with bookstagram in March 2021. I’d worked as a bookseller for 7.5 years and didn’t transfer stores when I moved, so I missed talking to people about books all the time. It seemed like a fun way to blab about what I was reading to people who might be more interested in it than my coworkers and family.

What books did you grow up reading?

I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on as a kid. I was that kid who would press themselves against the window to use every last second of sunlight when my parents said I could read until dark. I plowed through every Henry and Mudge, Amelia Bedelia, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and American Girl book I could get my hands on. I also loved the Dear America series so much, I’m currently trying to collect all of them.

What’s your favorite/least favorite part about the bookstagram community?

My favorite part of bookstagram is the community itself. I’ve always enjoyed book festivals and pop culture conventions for the instant friends you make while waiting in line. Bookstagram is like that, but on a more broad scope, without angry feet. My least favorite part is the unfollowers. We all see it happening and know who is doing it, but it doesn’t make it any less irritating when it happens.

Tell us your top 5 books of 2021 so far!

Oh geez. This is hard. The ones that stand out to me, in no particular order: The Ex Talk by Rachel Lynn Solomon, Steelstriker by Marie Lu, The Sinful Lives of Trophy Wives by Kristin Miller, The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang, and for a little non-fiction, Everybody Fights by Penn and Kim Holderness. Oh! And The Soulmate Equation! And It Happened One Summer! And Heart And Seoul! Five is such a small number. It’s impossible. Lol.

I saw that you recently went to YALLFest (young adult book festival). Tell us who you got to meet so we can be jealous!

YALLFest was a BLAST. My main focus for that weekend was to get my boxed ARC of “Red Queen” signed by Victoria Aveyard, and that was successful. I now have all of her books signed, which makes me quite happy, but forgot to have her sign my festival poster, so that was a fail. I also met: Chloe Gong, Marie Lu, Tracy Deonn, E. Lockhart, Jordan Ifueko, Melissa De La Cruz, Grady Hendrix, David Levithan, Jonny Garza Villa, Dustin Thao, Stephanie Garber, Kwame Mbalia, Claribel A. Ortega, Neal Shusterman, Gayle Foreman, Eric Smith, and Rachel Lippincott. I met Ayana Gray and Lauren Blackwood while running to the bathroom, and they were so gracious with my interruption of their chill time. I’m also really pumped about getting to meet some YA authors who will debut in 2022. Susan Lee, Anna Gracia, and Naz Kutub, aka the MASTERS of book promotion. I’m so glad we saw the tweet and went to hang out with them. They are wonderfully fun people and I cannot wait to get my hands on their books!

Who are some of your favorite bookstagrammers that we should follow?

I must shout out the friend that got me to finally start a bookstagram, @WhimsicalNarratives first. She’s a real life friend from a book convention line and she’s wonderful. I love my Missouri squad: @literallybookedsolid, @kayckay_bookreviews, @alphabetsandaudiobooks, and @nomomstayandread. I also love the chats with @_toreadingandbeyond.

What’s your favorite time of day to read?

I work overnights and a second job during the day, so there’s no real set time. It’s usually during the day, whenever I’m not working and can keep my eyes open for more than a couple minutes.

How do you feel about cliffhangers?

It’s a love/hate relationship. When done well, I love them, but also hate them because I NEED ANSWERS. The longer I have to wait to know what’s next, the more annoying cliffhangers become.

What’s your favorite book to movie/tv adaption?

Oh geez. I’m currently wearing a Gone Girl t-shirt, so I’ll go with that. I thoroughly enjoyed watching my friends react to the twist since they hadn’t read the book.

Tell us something about yourself that we wouldn’t know by looking at your bookstagram!

I think I’ve alluded to my career in TV news on bookstagram, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I’m a four-time Emmy winner for it.

It was so fun connecting with Stephanie and hearing her answers! I feel like I have so many follow up questions now, haha! Congratulations for your awards in bookstagram TV news, that is amazing! You have a fantastic account and I appreciate you taking the time to chat and giving us a peek into the person behind @literaryhypewoman! Click here to follow Stephanie on IG!

Stay tuned for more Q&As coming up from my blog! Subscribe so you don’t miss one!

XoXo,

Kristyn