Pretty Amy Blog Tour Guest Post with Lisa Burstein

Hey welcome to our stop on the Pretty Amy blog tour! We asked Lisa if there were any people in her life that inspired the characters in Pretty Amy and here’s what she had to say! 

 I think even as a fiction writer it is impossible to not include people from your life in your writing. We write what we know and sometimes that does include the people that we know. Here is how I got the inspiration for Aaron and Joe, Amy's love interests in PRETTY AMY. 

I dated a lot of crappy guys in high school. There were a few reasons for this: my self-esteem was terrible, I was the leftover girl in my group of friends and therefore got the leftover guys, and well, I pretty much dated anyone who wanted to date me that was cool. The guy I based Aaron off of was cool. Very.

He was tall, had a ponytail and could care less about me. Of course, as a stupid teenage girl I fought to make him care. He was a guy friend of one of my friends boyfriend's, and while they were madly in love, him and I just sat next to them and made out sometimes. I'm not even really sure I liked him, but the fact that he felt so indifferent towards me, kind of made me like him.

Did he ask me to do what Aaron asked Amy to do? No, but he was in trouble with the law and probably would have if given the opportunity. Did he make me feel the way Aaron made Amy feel? Yes, absolutely. Kissing him was like my proof that I was cool. Wow, I was dumb. I think about this boy sometimes. I wonder if he thinks about me, my guess is probably not. Now that he has become Aaron maybe I can finally let him go.

Joe is based a boy I dated early on in high school who for some very strange reason liked me. (He claimed after I broke up with him viciously because my friends thought he was a dork, that it was because he thought I would "put-out". But, I didn't believe that, because he was genuinely upset when I broke up with him, but that's another story). He was popular, Disney Channel cute and totally out of my league. To give you an idea of the level of his sweetness he would always walk me home from his house, 7 blocks away and actually laughed at my jokes. He did play volleyball. He did have hazel eyes. His hands did not shake. His parents were not divorced. He did not live across the street from me(but did live in my neighborhood). We were not friends as children.

But when I think of Joe, he is who I see. Maybe that was why I gave him to Amy, because I do wonder how my high school life would have turned out if I would have stuck with my "Joe", instead of picking my "Aaron" and my "bad-girl" friends.

The man I ended up with was nothing like either of these boys. He is wonderful, smart, funny and genuinely loves me. Will I write about him in a book? Probably not, for me my characters are people I feel the need to figure out. They are usually based off of people I have unfinished business with. Luckily for me however, I have a lot of unrequited love still left from high school.

Check out all the places you can find Lisa Burstein!

PRETTY AMY May 2012 Entangled Publishing
twitter: http://twitter.com/#%21/LisaBurstein
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lisa-Burstein/127805670672217
goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13375237-pretty-amy

blog: http://www.lisabursteinauthor.wordpress.com
website: http://www.lisaburstein.com

Thanks so much for stopping by and answering our question Lisa! Pretty Amy is available for purchase now so go pick up your copy!