Designer You by Sarahlyn Bruck
Pam Wheeler checked every box: Happy marriage? Check. Fantastic kid? Check. Booming career? Check.
So when her husband dies in a freak accident and their DIY empire goes on life support, Pam must fix the relationship with her troubled and grief-stricken daughter and save the family business.
Pam and Nate were a couple who just couldn’t get away from each other, sharing not only their bed, but also a successful lifestyle empire as DIY home renovators, bloggers, podcasters, and co-authors.
When Nate dies in a freak accident, Pam becomes a 44-year-old widow, at once too young and too old—too young to be thrust into widowhood and too old to rejoin the dating pool.
Now the single mother of a headstrong and grief-stricken teenager, Pam’s life becomes a juggling act between dealing with her loss and learning how to parent by herself. On top of all that she also must reinvent herself or lose the empire that she and Nate had built so carefully.
It is time for Pam to seize the opportunity to step up as a mother, come out from behind Nate’s shadow, and rise as the sole face of the Designer You brand, and maybe, possibly, hopefully, find love again.
Purchase Link - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DH6B38H/
Author Bio – Sarahlyn Bruck writes contemporary women's fiction and lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter. She is the author of DESIGNER YOU, published by Crooked Cat Books on August 31, 2018. Sarahlyn teaches writing and literature at a local community college and also coaches writers for Author Accelerator.
DESIGNER YOU is Sarahlyn's debut, and she is hard at work on her next book. Want the latest updates? Follow along for news, events, and announcements at sarahlynbruck.com. You can sign up for her monthly newsletter there, too.
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Q&A with Author!
Q: Please tell us how you came to be a writer.
A: Since childhood, I’ve always found ways to tells stories through writing and performing. But when I went back to grad school in the early 2000s, I returned to writing as a discipline. I wrote papers and my first long piece, a thesis on the playwright, Rachel Crothers. There was something about getting up and sitting at my dining room table all day just writing that felt completely right to me. But I wanted to tell my own stories instead of analyzing other people’s stories. So I started my first novel soon after I graduated.
Q: Is your day job a distraction or does it add another element to your writing?
A: I teach college writing and literature full time, and I find that my work adds to my own writing because I’m always thinking about it. No, I may not be thinking about my latest project 24/7, but I’m usually thinking about someone’s work. So I find that because I’m always either writing or evaluating someone else’s writing, my writer brain is always set to “on.”
Q: Has setting the novel in a place that is well known to you changed the way that you feel about that place?
A: I think it’s definitely made me more appreciative of Philadelphia than I’d ever felt before. I’m a relative newcomer to Philly—we moved here in 2007. I also grew up on the west coast, which has a very different energy than that of the east coast. So it’s taken a long time for me to not only get used to the east coast and more specifically, Philadelphia, but to really get to know it and feel comfortable. I have to say I love living in Philadelphia!
Q: Do you have a technique for keeping track of your fictional canvas?
A: I’m a big outliner, and I love to put together a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the entire novel and have it pinned to a corkboard in my office. That way, I can see the trajectory of the story and know what I’m writing toward.
Q: Did you incorporate any real life characters into your novel? If so how?
A: Ah, no. BUT, one minor character is based on a very real and somewhat famous Philadelphia politician.
Q: Julian Barnes says that one of the things he has learned as he grew older is how to manage time in a novel. Have you found an effective technique for this?
A: This is a process for me. Pacing is really hard and something I’m not always successful at in the first few drafts. But eventually, I just want the story to build in a way that keeps the reader glued to the page. I’ve been told that readers often finding themselves readingDesigner You in one or two days, which is exactly what I want.
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