What Happens When Your Worst Enemy Has The Life You Want | Episode 160

Hey Bookaholics! Today I am joined by debut novelist Elizabeth who has written a dark comedy called Fully Average. Now, so if you like interviews with authors, book news, and book recommendations, this is the spot for you. And please like and subscribe to my channel and so that you can see all the things that are made just for you. So let's dive right into it. Hello Elizabeth! How are you doing? I'm doing great and yourself? I'm doing just fine, ready to interview you. Now you're an indie author and you came to me through my website and you introduced yourself and told me a little bit about your book and I was like okay let's see if I can vibe with this chick and get her onto my show and vibe we did and here you are. Here I am. Yeah no it was it was very exciting um as an indie author you know you're trying to just get your book as much exposure as possible and I saw I saw your podcast and what you were doing I was like you know what I think I think this would work and so I reached out. Yep yes and I'm glad you did I am absolutely glad you did. So this is your debut novel so tell everyone a little bit about yourself about what it is you've done before and what made you want to become an author how did all of this come about? I mean do we want to start back at the beginning when I was just a wee baby writing short stories and it was about a teddy bear that I still oh no uh I mean it's true I actually did write a short story about my teddy bear uh but um when I really fell in love with writing it was actually when I was about 15 16 I started writing screenplays I was really interested in writing screenplays I dove headfirst I I found some free software and I just started writing scripts I think my first script that I had finished was called the perfect prom date which um you know honestly for a 15 year old solid work solid like I knew my way and I was like you're you're going straight to high school um but it was um it was a lot of fun and I you know just continued to write screenplays on and off um throughout my 20s and then I I wrote a screenplay recently called um uh three ace life crisis I think was the original title and I sent it out to some friends and one of my friends uh her name is babe uh we met up and I was like hey so did you get a chance to read it and she had already had a few adult beverages and she grabbed me by my my my sweater and said Elizabeth you have to make this into a novel and I said babe you need to start drinking water um and uh you know I I really I kind of pushed her off that first I was like I don't I don't I don't write no that's not what I do and then I just the idea just kept floating in my brain and kept floating and then suddenly I was staying up until like 2 a.m. like writing it out and it was so interesting developing a book from a script because I already had certain plot points and beats woven in but then I realized within the novel that I got to explore uh Melissa's inner monologue far more and I got to develop how like crushing and crippling that depression can be and how it really does truly lead you to make some wackadoodle choices which she does make yeah yeah absolutely absolutely and so let's pop over here you know um why did you you know as a debut novelist why did you want to start with something um such as a flawed female protagonist you would think that that would be more of an advanced writer's maybe road to go down or maybe I'm wrong but why did you choose a flawed female oh gosh that's that's a great question I I don't think I ever saw Melissa as flawed I just saw her as human and I think all great stories start with someone who is innately real and so when I was writing Melissa like she was like she's not me and I'm not her like there's qualities I'm sure that overlap and I'm sure my friend will be like oh that's a little bit Elizabeth right there but um in in general like Melissa just is this human who had a bunch of terrible things happen to her and then she just tries to rebound in the wrong way but she's doing it from a place of like no this is this is this is what will work this is we've all been in that situation where we're talking to a friend and we're like girl what are you doing and she's like no no hear me out it'll work and like I don't think it will they're like no no just watch it's gonna work and then you watch it not work um and I that's how I felt when I was writing Melissa it was just like that person that you're like no we're friends listen to me please stop and she's like no I'm not yeah yes absolutely well um let's see here that is not there we go I do like that cover though I know now uh a lot of times I ask people how did you come about the cover um well I am incredibly blessed um I happen to know a um a designer her name is Alexandra Fernandez and uh she and I were talking about my book and I gave her um a copy of it and when it was still very much a baby book like very much not ready for public consumption uh but uh I gave it to her and she was like you know I'm doing you a huge favor right now because I have a baby running around my house and I was like what what she meant it with love but she's like all the books I consume right now are audiobooks and now I have to sit down and physically read um and I was like respect her baby is adorable absolutely but you know babies take time and energy um so I was very lucky that she read it she loved it and she's like I'm doing the cover art you don't have a choice and I said thank god and uh and then and then uh we went back and forth a few times on some ideas and um the sequence that uh is on the the cover right there uh that was the the moment in my mind where like everything comes to a head she's you know she's going outside of where she should be she's taking photos like you can kind of see in the lens of of a blonde woman and a man who is this man that she's taking a photo of well you're gonna find out in the book I'm not gonna right not gonna spoil that but um yeah it's it's Melissa's story she's she's the focus of it but she's looking somewhere else absolutely well let's you know I think I got a little bit of a head with myself so let me fill the audience in on uh what the book is about so I'm reading a blurb from you after losing both her job and long-term relationship in a single day that's enough to make anybody crazy temporarily Melissa is forced to move back in with her mother while trying to figure out what comes next but when she runs into Rachel Moore the girl who made her middle school years miserable old insecurities quickly spiral into obsession emotional chaos and increasingly questionable decisions once you which you have hinted at blending dark humor with emotional vulnerability fully average explores identity loneliness friendship wounds and the messy ways people try to rebuild themselves after their lives fall apart now it's a mouthful it's a mouthful but but it that is the premise of the book so there in you kind of get more of context of her why she's got that camera up to her face and you know so so basically our protagonist Melissa she just kind of spirals out of control due to two things really bad things happening at once you know at least if you lose your job if you've got a partner of some sort they can help fortify you in a lot of different ways you know and you have the right partner right right right exactly and then if you lose your partner but you still have your job I mean you know so you can still eat yeah you still have that option oh gosh so so you know many people are played by frenemies from the past you know or people that bully them slightly or fully in school we all have I mean I say all I have had you know those flashbacks and from those from those type of folks so Melissa is fighting that with her nemesis why does she feel oh her her frenemy is successful oh yes well so basically how I got there this idea that sparked in my brain was my friend and I we were you know just chatting one day and somehow the topic of middle school came up and then of course middle school bullies came up and then we were both like oh man I wonder what happened to ours and so we both kind of did very light like I want to say less than 30 minutes of gentle Facebook stalking and we found our middle school bullies and hers was fine mine was fine we're like huh all right you know end of story but then I was like oh man what if I found out my bully was doing crazy well and then what if I was like oh I don't feel good about myself like what if like what if I just made it like the two most far extremes possible where she's like hit her pinnacle and I'm at my bottom and then I kind of started working on the story from there like and you know slowly I started getting out of the story and Melissa started growing into the story and Rachel Moore in my mind you know she's like an amalgamation of like every mean girl you can think of you know that perfect like walks through the hallway she knows she owns the place and no one's gonna say boo about it and yeah and so that that's yeah that's Rachel she's just living her best life with a trophy husband as a CEO of her own company where she just makes a bunch of money and Melissa is not there Melissa's as far away from that as possible she you know like not not to like this happens very early on obviously it's in the back of the book but she loses her her long-term relationship because the guy is cheating on her and like says horrible things to her like it's already knocked up some 20 something like he's just he's gross he's terrible we hate Jeremy like don't worry you're gonna hate him through and terrible we all know a Jeremy yeah we've all either dated a Jeremy or known someone to date a Jeremy or like a Jeremy absolutely I know somebody that married a Jeremy oh no that's the worst oh yeah that is it's really really really so why did you want to write a dark comedy because you knew that uh you wanted your protagonist to be a little weird is sort of so to speak how did that come about well for me I always default to comedy I think comedy is one of the greatest ways to handle bad situations like I I'm one of those people personally who makes jokes while I am mortally wounded like I I got a second degree burn once and as they were you know mending my arm from that burn I was cracking jokes was it appropriate for me yes I needed it um there's a whole story with that like at one point someone put um because I I was this was like when I was like 18 I was a teenager working like some some terrible job I got bumped onto a pizza oven and then one of the girls that was working there was like did you know toothpaste is a home remedy and I said no it's not don't do that and then she put toothpaste on my burn and I was like this is the worst pain I've ever experienced oh my gosh yeah it was terrible but anyways as it was happening like why would she do this I was like I don't know I don't know she was being helpful yeah she thought she was being helpful but I was like this is not the time on someone when they say no no absolutely not well I just want to point out to everybody there's a QR code on the screen and it's a to the book fully average and you can order it right now while we're here talking about it I'm going to leave it up for the rest of the interview but just to let you know um I do make a commission on affiliate links um it's a small commission but it is no cost extra cost to you as a consumer so anyway let's get back to our poor protagonist now give it give us don't give us any spoilers but is she gonna make it out all this mess she learned some real hard lessons she definitely doesn't know where she's gonna be by the end like she definitely has a journey that she has to go on she has to see what she's done through but then she also has to accept accountability and I I think that she does come out better for it and the reason that I named the book fully average was because that's what she thinks she is she thinks she's fully average she like she thinks that her life is average and that's that's enough for her she thinks that's enough for her and that's why she settles for Jeremy that's why she settles for the job that she settles for and and this this whole break that happens in the beginning it sets her on a journey to realize that maybe that's not what she wanted maybe she wanted something different than average and maybe that average just wasn't what like it was never actually attainable in the first place and you know everyone's happy ending is different yeah so absolutely I think she gets a version of a happy ending but I I won't say what got you got you got you 100 percent well um you've done a lot of different things um how do you like you said you wanted this to be this started out as a screenplay now I heard someone talking um maybe on YouTube a few weeks ago and he was a he's a filmmaker and he was talking about goodness uh children of blood and bone which that was a very successful book and now it's going to be a movie um and he was talking about the author of the book I forgot her name but anyway uh it's easy to look up but I think she was I think he was hinting at that she was disappointed a little bit in the screenplay you know and he was setting the premise of the fact that a movie and a book are so far apart they're two different things and that's why we as average readers will we'll read a book and we'll love it and then you go to a theater uh watch a movie that was based on a book um and watch it and it's like that's not what happened in the book that's not but it's because the structures of both are so different so tell us you know what would you use like I said started out as a screenplay now it's a book what if you got so fortunate lucky that somebody wanted to make it into a film tell us about that process and how you would handle that as a writer well the the good news is I already have a script written so uh they wouldn't have to fight really hard for it um you know I I actually have been working in production since I've been out of college and I understand that adaptions are adaptions and certain things they like you know barring something astronomically important like you know the the the protagonist meeting like Rachel Moore like if you took out that whole part then there's no movie so that doesn't make sense but like everything it's the kill your baby the kill your darling um you have to be willing to kill your darlings if it's for the sake of the story um do I love it no I hate it passionately but you know there there have been successful um adaptations like um the one that I I always revert back to is that perks of being a wallflower and uh I I believe his name's pronounced Steven Shabosky um but he actually wrote the screenplay to his own film um he wrote the book first and then he wrote the screenplay but it's it's a great film and honestly I think that it's almost like they can go together because you learn a little of other things from the movie than you do the book and vice versa um I think that Project Hail Mary is very similar um like you do learn bits and pieces from the book but you also learn something new from the movie so it's just you know you you can they can they can go together um it may never be perfect for everybody but if your goal is to make everybody on the earth happy you're never going to reach your goal oh no absolutely not absolutely not well you know you're an independent publisher um tell us about that journey it's different for everyone who does well for me I went into it exceptionally green I was you know how do I phrase this I I was a little bit naive I guess I thought that the hardest part was going to be writing and formatting I was incredibly wrong it is after you got your baby out you know you got your your book holding in your hand you're like it's done and then you're like world accept my book and the world's like we don't know you um and so you really have to go on the offensive immediately and I I started making lists of like um creators I started making lists of uh potential podcasts uh and I just went through and I was like okay who who makes the most sense to reach out to and then you reach out to them and then you just wait waiting is maybe the hardest thing um yes and you know I I I've mentioned this a few times but they're like well what would you tell other writers like you have to love your book more than anyone else loves your book and you have to sell it like that and I love Melissa I love her story and I'm so excited to hopefully get more people to read it and look at it and uh you know give Melissa a chance and I think she deserves it after all she's yes well I think there's a little bit of Melissa and everybody at some time in their life and uh you're doing all the right things I think a lot of people write books and expect readers to come and it does take once you finish that book it does take what can be for some people uncomfortable marketing like door to door and that's kind of like what you did with me you kind of like knocked on my email door uh and I opened the door you know not all people are going to open the door but you got to try so yeah that's that's the deal and hopefully you being on this podcast should help you a little bit I think it will I have faith in it yeah no I like I said I just want to make sure that I I give this book the best chance it can and you know you've been so gracious to let me on your podcast so thank you well you're so welcome and everyone once again the QR code that's on your screen is a link to the book Fully Average just to let you know if you purchase this book I do receive a small commission but it is of no additional cost to you Elizabeth Adams thank you so much for bringing Fully Average to our attention and I think you will go bold and strong and I see you coming back on the show once again with another book I mean I have something in the works right now so hopefully soon yeah all right original no script first this one's just straight to novel okay okay all right we'll keep that in mind well Elizabeth thank you so much for joining me today thank you so much have a good one