The Trail
Rules
(The Rules Series #2)
Genre: YA Contemporary Romance
Release Date: March 9th 2018
Summary:
Junior year’s looking up for sixteen-year old
Mike. Her new BFF isn’t a sadistic control freak, her boyfriend adores her, and
she’s learning to bike in the mountains without decapitating herself on a
tree.
Well, almost.
When she meets a group of riders who welcome her into their pack, she feels
like she’s finally found where she belongs. One particular rider—a boy with an
amazing smile and an even more amazing ability to see what she’s truly capable
of—gives her the confidence to go after what she wants: her own life with her
own rules.
There’s only one problem—he’s not her boyfriend.
Just as things seem to be falling into place, her parents put on the pressure
to figure out her future—one that doesn’t include riding. Mike soon realizes
that having everything isn’t that great when she’s not the one choosing it. She
needs to decide if she’s going to continue to be a follower or step out of the
shadows and find her own trail.
The
Slope Rules (The Rules series #1) on Goodreads
AMAZON
I’ve written eight novels and the idea for all
but one of them started with me thinking, “Ooh, what if there’s this girl
who….” (the eighth is about a boy so I thought, “what if there’s this boy…”). I
take that spark of an idea, let it germinate in my mind for days or weeks, then
form a story around that initial idea.
AMAZON
Creating Characters
As my characters come to life, I track every
little detail in a word document, and I continue adding to it as I write the
story. If they off-handedly comment that their favorite breakfast food is
oatmeal, it gets added to the list. But the one thing I don’t spend much time
on is their physical appearance. I briefly cover hair and eye color, maybe make
references to their height and body size, and might possibly mention a favorite
piece of clothing—otherwise I leave it up to the reader to fill in the gaps.
As a reader, I hate it when writers describe
every last detail of how a character looks, especially in the love interest. We
all prefer something different, and if you give that character a color hair
that isn’t my preference, I mentally change it to what I want. Which means if
they keep mentioning the ACTUAL hair color, it’s very jarring. (Yes, I
recognize this is a personal problem.) Because of this, I leave the descriptions
to a minimum and let my readers’ imaginations do the rest.
(An unexpected side effect of this is I once
polled my readers to ask who they imagined a certain character looked like, and
a surprising number of them said they pictured her looking like me. Even though
she’s got long dark hair.)
The downside of this is I don’t create
Pinterest boards with my dream casts, and I can’t swap tales of which actor
would be PERFECT to play Cally or Mike. The one time I created a board for my
book Flicker, I chose one of the Jonas brothers and Selena Gomez, and within a
couple years they became far too old to play teenagers. It can also make it
tough to choose covers because I only have a vague idea of my characters’ faces
while writing. When I found the cover for The Slope Rules, I gasped because
THAT’S WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE! (Yes, I design my own covers.)
Have I been tempted to troll the internet for
celebrities who look like my characters? Sure. But I’d rather spend time
creating characters with depth and focus on what makes them tick, and leave the
rest to you, the reader.
About the Author
While not a fan of matching Day-Glo outfits, Melanie’s been skiing
since she was five and always points her tips up while exiting the chairlift.
She lives in the land of lake effect snow—also known as west Michigan—with her
husband Jeremy and Miniature Schnauzer Owen, and is always looking for ways to
enjoy the outdoors. This novel, her fourth, inspired her to purchase her
first helmet.
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