Guest blog post | Lisa William Kline, author of One Week of You + One Week of the Heart

 

CREATIVE BLOG TOUR - ONE WEEK OF YOU & ONE WEEK OF THE HEART

Guest Post with Lisa Williams Kline for Diary of a Book Girl

 

Thanks so much for having me, Diary of a Book Girl!

 

When I was in second grade, I decided I wanted to be a writer, and wrote my first series --- The Adventures of Little Horse and Little Lamb – on the wide-ruled paper we used to have that left the spaces for illustration at the top. When I was in about fourth grade, I started writing a novel. It was about a brother and sister who go on a barefoot quest through the snow-filled mountains to get penicillin for a younger brother who was sick. Why did they have to trek through the snowy mountains barefoot, you ask? Why, indeed? This was an ever so small kink in my plot that I still needed to work out. Anyway, after this momentous literary achievement I became distracted by boys and socializing and didn’t find my way back to my real dream – writing – for many years.

 

Lizzy, the main character of One Week of the Heart and One Week of You, like me, has a dream. Hers is to be a doctor. She and her best friend Kelly share that dream. But while Kelly is laser-focused, Lizzy gets distracted. By cheerleading and by boys. Again, sort of like me when I was that age. Lizzy makes a lot of mistakes, but she is good-hearted, and she wants to do what’s right. And I do have faith that she will find her way back to her dream. But her distractions along the way are, I hope, entertaining!

The roots for the story of One Week of You were real events in our daughters’ lives during high school. They really did have to carry flour babies for health class. And one year there really were three bomb threats in one week at our daughter’s school. I had wanted to write about both of those events, one sort of funny and one very serious, and so I took on the challenge of combining them in One Week of You. I also added a memory from my own adolescence – my first crush. I tried to recapture that feeling of being absolutely swept away by the new guy at school.

 

And the germ for the story of my novella One Week of the Heart somewhat comes from a time when I attended a summer program in high school. My parents made me go, even though I wished I could stay home and hang out with my friends at the pool. I ended up having a fantastic experience at this summer program, though. It was a film program, with incredibly inspiring teachers, and everyone had to make a movie as their final project. I opted to try animation. I did an animated film of the Three Dog Night song “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” with a nerdy cartoon character going to a huge wild party and being overwhelmed. I drew probably a hundred cartoons for this three-minute song, and my dad helped me tape the film camera to the basement ceiling so we could take still single frames for the animation. I have such a wonderful memory of working together with my dad on that film. My parents kept it for a long time.

One Week of the Heart is totally fictionalized, but the germ of the story comes from that surprising and influential summer program many years ago.

 

I hope some of you are inspired to read One Week of You and One Week of the Heart. At least for a short time, One Week of the Heart is free!