Blog Tour Guest Post: My Life with the Walter Boys by

On tour with Sourcebooks.

Thanks for stopping by for the tour for My Life with the Walter Boys! The author, Ali Novak, is stopping by to share with us her inspiration for her book, so check that out below. First the info on the book...

My Life With The Walter BoysMy Life with the Walter Boys
(My Life with the Walter Boys #1)
by Ali Novak
YA Contemporary
Paperback368 Pages
March 1st 2014 by Sourcebooks Fire                  

Summary

Sixteen-year-old Jackie Howard is devastated when her parents are killed in a car accident. She has no one to turn to except for her mom's best friend Katherine Walter. Jackie quickly discovers that Katherine is no stranger to being a mom-she's got twelve boys! And every single one is a handful...

Adjusting to life with the Walter boys is not going to be easy, especially when two of them start to show an interest that definitely goes beyond brotherly.

   


Guest Post

So, I asked Ali: "What was your inspiration behind creating a story about a girl who has to live in a house full of boys?" This is what she said:

Let me start by saying that after reading this question, I stared at a blank word document for more than an hour. It was so much harder to answer than I thought it would be, and I had no clue what to write about. After a few crinkled up pieces of notebook paper, I realized that my story was never inspired by one individual idea. Instead, I found inspiration from all different types of sources.

Here’s a list of all the things that inspired me to write My Life with the Walter Boys in no particular order:
  • My obnoxiously large family—seriously, there are enough of us start our own country! 
  • Romance novels with swoon worthy love interests—who doesn’t love a good six-pack?
  • The movies Cheaper by the Dozen and Yours, Mine and Ours—two of my absolute favorites growing up. I watched them so many times that the tape in the VCR cassettes wore out (yes, I’m old enough to remember what a VCR is).
  • My inner girly side.
  • Country music—the twangy kind.
  • The outdoors. 
  • My fascination/fear of horses—they’re so pretty, but also so big!
  • Blair Waldorf, my favorite Gossip Girl—Jackie’s personality is nothing like Blair’s, but she definitely has the Queen Bee’s sense of style.
  • An unexplainable desire to vacation in Colorado.
  • My guilty pleasure while reading—love triangles. 

Of course, I also found inspiration from darker places:
  • The battle my father lost to cancer when I was still in high school
  • My best friend’s struggle with severe ODC
  • The mean girls at school who taught me the feeling of rejection

Added together, these small snippets became the ingredients for my novel. My Life with the Walter Boys is not based on any specific experience of mine. Instead, bits and pieces of my life were what ultimately inspired me to write the story.

Thank you, Ali, for being so honest and for stopping by! 


About the Author

Ali NovakAli Novak is twenty-two-year-old debut author and a recent graduate from University of Madison Wisconsin's creative writing program. She wrote her first full-length novel My Life with the Walter Boys at the age of fifteen. Since posting the story online, it has received more than 24 million reads and will be published by Sourcebooks Fire in March 2014. 

When she isn't writing, Ali enjoys watching Food Network shows even though she can't cook, and reading any type of fantasy novel she can get her hands on. She is a Wisconsin native and hopes to make a career out of writing.

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