Reading, Writing, and Me

Today, Lillian Clark, author of Immoral Code, is here to chat about writing heist stories, multiple POVs, and what's coming next. She has plenty of tips and lots of fun behind the scenes information about the making of her debut book. If you aren't familiar with Immoral Code , my review and summary of the book is linked below. 1. Your book is a heist story, so you had to plot the crime along with your characters. Does that mean you did lots of outlining or did you just figure it out as you went? Yes! So much outlining. Especially since I was writing in five POVs. I needed to plan out the whole book, including deciding who should say what, when. It was a lot of work, but it was so helpful once I started drafting and editing. By that point, I had a fairly solid idea of how the book’s structure was going to work, which made the drafting go smoother (if not faster, haha). 2. Many of you characters like Bells and Nari have very specialized interests like physics/astronomy and...

Immoral Code  by Lillian Clark (February 19) Overview:  Five teens- one big heist. A group of friends band together to commit the ultimate in hacking to siphon off enough money to send their friend Bell to college at MIT. Because of her absent father's immense wealth, Bell gets rejected for financial aid at the school of her dreams. Not that her father is agreeing to pay any part of tuition, or even acknowledge her existence. Outraged at this, Nari, coding genius, creates a plan to play Robin Hood and ropes their other friends into risking jail time for Bell's dream. Will they pull off a job that would be ambitious for a team of professional hackers and con men or will they face the steep consequences and ruin five lives?  Overall: 4 Characters: 4  There's a crowded stage when it comes to characters, but that doesn't mean that their individuality gets sacrificed. Bells is a science genius with a bright future despite having to fight against the near poverty her...

Tash Hearts Tolstoy  by Kathryn Ormsbee (372 pages) Overview: Tash has a lot going on. Her family is unsettled with impending arrivals and sisters leaving the nest. She's co-running a You Tube production company that explodes with her best friend Jack, and she's grappling with her sexuality and the possibility that she's ace. New fame, new family, and possibly new romance all threaten to make Tash's world explode, but, somehow, she's keeping it all together. Overall: 5  Characters: 5 Tash is so amazing! She's a real human being that springs to life and invites you to see the world through her eyes. One thing that I particularly love is that, even though Tash doesn't believe it, you know she's smart by the way Ormsbee chooses the perfect words and mature sentence structure. Trying too hard to make characters smart is something a lot of authors falter with, but the execution of presenting Tash's personality is perfect. The way that Tash deals wit...