Katherine Center - Guest Post

Yesterday, I had the extreme pleasure of reviewing Katherine Center's fantastic book, Everyone is Beautiful (click here if you missed it) while on her tour for Pump Up Your Book Promotion. Today I am delighted to share a wonderfully fun guest post by Katherine as she shares the fact that she wrote her first novel on a dare from her sister (bless her sister, lol) Now because Katherine took that dare, we are all graced with a wonderful talent!!

Thank you so much, Katherine, for taking the time to stop by Cafe of Dreams and sharing a bit of yourself with us!

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I wrote my first novel on a dare from my sister.

We were chatting on the phone. I was telling her that I hadn’t done any writing since I’d given birth to my daughter—a year-and-a-half to be exact—and that I missed it. A lot.

And she just said, in that way she has, "You should write a novel about being a mom." And then: "How hard can that be?"

It was a perfect idea. She’s had many perfect ideas for me over the years, and I’ve hardly ever listened to any. But this time, I listened. The very next morning, I woke up with a story in my head. And that night, I started writing. Six weeks later, I had a first draft, and a year after that, I had a polished manuscript.

And the writing! I wrote like I was on fire. I wrote like I was burning across a dry prairie. I had been a writer—of essays, of short stories, of poems about heartbreak—my whole life. It was how I dealt with every challenge that ever came my way: I wrote about it. And yet, since becoming a mom—possibly the biggest challenge I’d ever faced—I hadn’t written a word. I was too busy, too sleep-deprived, and too exhausted.

But the dare worked. When I sat down to write, I found I really had some things to say.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my sisters today because we’ve been traveling together. For the first time in years and years, my sisters and my mom and I are traveling as a group with no spouses or kids. We’re just hanging out, the way we always used to when we were younger and had no other responsibilities to press on our time. It’s been so fun to travel with them today and get a little taste of the family we used to be together back before we had families of our own.

Growing up, I focused on how my sisters and I were different. But now, so much older and well into the course of our lives, all I see is similarities. I find myself marveling at their red hair, and freckles, and hands. There are words we pronounce the same and funny little hand gestures that mimic each other.

We are not the same, but we are variations on a family theme and, especially today, I feel so grateful for them. Sometimes only the people who’ve known you your whole life can tell you who you really are.

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If you have not done so already, be sure to pick up a copy of Katherine's book Everyone is Beautiful - it is a delightfully down to earth story that any woman will be able to relate to in some aspect or another (or if you are like me, in many aspects). This is a story that is fun and perfect for a few hours of unwinding.

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About Everyone is Beautiful:

Lanie Coates’s life is spinning out of control. She’s piled everything she owns into a U-Haul and driven with her husband, Peter, and their three little boys from their cozy Texas home to a multiflight walkup in the Northeast. She’s left behind family, friends, and a comfortable life–all so her husband can realize his dream of becoming a professional musician. But somewhere in the eye of her personal hurricane, it hits Lanie that she once had dreams too. If only she could remember what they were.

These days, Lanie always seems to rank herself dead last–and when another mom accidentally criticizes her appearance, it’s the final straw. Fifteen years, three babies, and more pounds than she’s willing to count since the day she said "I do," Lanie longs desperately to feel like her old self again. It’s time to rise up, fish her moxie out of the diaper pail, and find the woman she was before motherhood capsized her entire existence.

Lanie sets change in motion–joining a gym, signing up for photography classes, and finding a new best friend. But she also creates waves that come to threaten her whole life. In the end, Lanie must figure out once and for all how to find herself without losing everything else in the process.
Katherine Center’s Everyone Is Beautiful is a hugely entertaining, poignant, and charming new novel about what happens after happily ever after: how a woman learns to fall in love with her husband–and her entire life–all over again.

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About Katherine Center:

Katherine Center’s second novel, Everyone Is Beautiful, is featured in the March issue of Redbook. Kirkus Reviews likens it to the 1950s motherhood classic Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and says, "Center’s breezy style invites the reader to commiserate, laughing all the way." Booklist calls it "a superbly written novel filled with unique and resonant characters." Katherine’s first novel, The Bright Side of Disaster, was featured in People Magazine, USA Today, Vanity Fair, the Houston Chronicle, and the Dallas Morning News, among others. BookPage named Katherine one of seven new writers to watch, and the paperback of Bright Side was a Breakout Title at Target. Katherine recently published an essay in Real Simple Family and has another forthcoming in Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers on the Mother-Daughter Bond this April. She has just turned in her third novel, Get Lucky, and is starting on a fourth. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and two young children.

You can visit her website at http://www.katherinecenter.com/