Hi Everyone!
With Love, Juniper is a magical story about love, mental health, and managing expectations. This is a special story that captured our hearts! Thank you Amanda for sharing your work with us! If you’re looking for a story that’s relatable, inspirational, and empowering, you will enjoy With Love, Juniper, coming out in 2024.
We like to sit down with every one of our new authors and share a little bit about them. We got to talk to Amanda about their writing, endless TBR list, and some sneak peeks of With Love, Juniper!
What inspired you to write With Love, Juniper?
Inspiration is funny. An idea never comes to me in full, it usually starts with a character dynamic or a visual aesthetic of some kind. For With Love, Juniper, I knew I wanted to write a childhood friends-to-lovers story, but I also knew I wanted to flip that trope on its head a little bit. I wanted to make the boy the one who had pined for years.
As I explored the conflicts in the story, the other parts became clearer. I quickly realized that this book was a letter of encouragement to a younger version of myself who thought they weren’t worthy of friends or respect because of how strange and emotional they were.
As an adult, I know better. I wanted this book to help teens and young adults learn that lesson a little faster.
Can you tell us a little about your writing process? What do you do when you confront that mischievous minion “writer’s block?”
I find the best way to keep writing is to just sit your butt down in your chair and write. I feel like the times I have felt blocked, it usually has to do with some expectation or pressure I’m putting on myself. The truth if the matter is that it’s important to just have a first draft. A really ugly, full of mistakes and problems for later me first draft.
My biggest hurdle, a lot of the time, is fatigue and boredom. When I am writing a slower part of the story, or when I am a little bit spent creatively, I try to jump to something that I’m excited to write with a note of where I need to come back to typed in the manuscript somewhere. When I am too fatigued to even write much at all, I tell myself just to write three sentences, I usually wind up with at least a hundred words that way, and often gain enough momentum to at least get half a page down!
Without any spoilers, is there a character who holds a special place in your heart?
Yes! His name is Dante, he is an important side character in the book! I don’t know if this is a spoiler, but he is an old familiar who was given a human form and can switch between that form and his cat form.
If your book had a soundtrack or theme song, what would it be?
Oooo, this one is always so hard! For theme song, it would probably be The Flower Garden by Jo Hisaishi. I actually have a playlist of all the music I listened to while writing this book, which is here.
What is your favorite trope?
It would probably have to be enemies-to-lovers or forced proximity. Both are so fun and fascinating for me. My third novel features both!
What other works have you published? Where can we find you?
I currently write The Hallowed Wilds on Substack! It’s a weekly serial about a pair of star crossed lovers in the 1800’s! You can read it for free on my Substack!
I am also in the process of rewriting a novel involving a very handsome, snarky pirate and a bride he’s decided to steal.
So what are you reading now? What’s on your TBR List?
I’ve been reading a lot of serials lately! My favorites right now are The Changeling Exchange by K. Thomas and We Were Embers by R. Raeta on Kindle Vella.
I also have been slowly picking my way through Dark Rise by CS Pacat. I loved their debut series The Captive Prince.
Some recent books that were important and inspiring to me were Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo!
About Amanda Cessor
Amanda Cessor is a queer and neurodivergent writer that cut their teeth on fanfiction and ghostwriting and now spends her time escaping into worlds of her own making. They live in southern California with their husband, their two dogs and their cat.
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