Bouncer Interview with Mary Elizabeth Summer!

Welcome! Welcome! It's Bouncer Mary Elizabeth! Mary Elizabeth's "Surprise Agent Invasion" entry for CATCH MY GRIFT was very popular! She then soon signed with Laura Bradford and became one of my first "Cupid's Connections". She is awesome, and I can't wait until fall of 2014 so I can read CATCH MY GRIFT for myself. I want! I want!

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Hi, Mary Elizabeth! Please share a little about yourself:

Well, right now I am typing on my computer while sitting in bed with six stuffed animals lined up against my leg. To clarify, they are not my stuffed animals. The half-pint owner of the animals is here, too, and lets me type about six words before interrupting. That's me in the evening. By day, I'm a cubicle farmer, a Twitter addict, and a waffle enthusiast. There's too much good TV for me to keep up with, and I listen to music everywhere I go. I live in the best town on the planet for wordslingers, the third most caffeinated city in America, Portland, Oregon. And, full disclosure, I do everything my cat tells me to.

Now tell us a little about your book(s) or what you like to write:

CATCH MY GRIFT (Delacorte, Fall 2014) is about a teenage girl con artist who must rescue her kidnapped father when his most recent con goes south. It's equal parts law-breaking, clever disguises, family secrets, and snark, with a little bit of romance on the side. I tend to write about delinquents saving the day, because sometimes it takes a bad guy to bring down a badder guy.

What MUST we read? And what's in your TBR pile? 

This is such a tough question for me. Everyone's so different. I recently read Anna Dressed in Blood and loved it. But most of my faves are books I fell in love with as a teenager myself--books by Christopher Pike, Richie Tankersley Cusick, Andre Norton, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, etc. At the moment, I'm reading Dante's Inferno for my current WIP and CODE NAME VERITY for fun, and I'll be reading Catcher in the Rye after that before diving into the first draft of CATCH MY GRIFT #2. I've also got THIS IS NOT A TEST, THE DIVINERS, and ADAPTATION on my Kindle cued up and ready to go. And there are a metric ton of amazing books coming out in 2014 that I cannot WAIT to read: HEXED, MONSTROUS, SPIN, STITCHING SNOW, NEARLY GONE and EXTRACTION, just to name a few.  

What are those crumbs around your computer? And what is that music I hear?

No crumbs around my computer right now, because I do not allow eating of any food in the bed. *shudders* I can't stand the idea of sleeping with food. But in the morning, I'll have a waffle. :-) And the music is everything from Marilyn Manson to Jessie J. On my CATCH MY GRIFT playlist alone, I have Kanye West, Scanners, Two Door Cinema Club, Taylor Swift, Sleepthief, Train, Metric, Eva Cassidy, Garbage, Travie McCoy, Silversun Pickups, Sara Bareilles, M.I.A., B.o.B., Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Cee Lo Green, Sarah McLachlan, Evanescence, Bruno Mars, The Killers, Cage the Elephant, Josh Ritter, and Eminem. I pick based on lyrics, beat, and harmonics--not so much genre. 

Is it all about the pants or all about the outline? 

A hybrid of both for me. I brainstorm using thinking maps (bubbles and lines and stuff), then I write till about halfway through, letting the story go where it wants for the most part. Then I make a timeline of where I think the story needs to go from there to wrap up all the loose ends. 

Any words of wisdom for our brave contest entrants? 

Yes! I actually wrote an entire blog post with five ways to make the most of your query contest. Pretty much all five of them can be summed up as FOLLOW DIRECTIONS and BE READY. If you don't end up getting an agent during BSD, don't give up! Query contests are just one route to the promised land.

Now give up your guilty pleasure!

Too many to list! Right now, it's homemade caramel corn. 

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Thank you, Mary Elizabeth!!!!!!

Thank you for reading! Questions and comments below....