Last week, I had the pleasure of reviewing “Spare Change.” Today I am joined by the author of that delightful chick lit romance, Aubrey Mace.
Aubrey, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to chat with me. Is “Spare Change” your first book?
This is actually my second book, although it is the first to be published. The more I talk to other authors, I hear that’s pretty common. There was about a year between when I finished the first book and when I started working on this one, and there was a time that I thought I would never come up with another idea again. I wrote a lot of short stories, but after about 20-30 pages, they came to a place where they abruptly stopped. Looking back on it now, I was really trying too hard. Books on how to write written by other authors can be really helpful…or not. I read somewhere that you should sit down for an hour every day to get in the habit of making time to write. I did the sitting part remarkably well, but there wasn’t a whole lot of writing going on. It came to a point where I started to dread writing, and I remember my sister and mother telling me, this isn’t good for you. If you’re not having fun with this anymore, maybe it’s time to try something else. I thought a lot about that, and I decided to take a break. And once I stopped beating myself up over not having any ideas, they started creeping in again.
“Spare Change” is a fun story about a girl who decides to save up her pennies for a good cause. How did you get the idea for this story?
One day I was sitting at the kitchen table, and someone had emptied the pennies from their pocket and left them. I started stacking them, and my mind wandered into thinking about how just that handful of pennies wouldn’t get you very far, but if everyone pooled their spare change, we could probably do something amazing. And the book took off from there.
Your main character works in a cancer treatment center, as do you. What other elements of the story did you pull from your real life, and what parts did you invent for the book?
I work in an Infusion Center, so we do chemo but also lots of other things like hydration, IV antibiotics, blood transfusions, etc. It’s been fun for the nurses and aides in my office to read the book because they see things in the book that I didn’t even realize were there. And they all want to know which character they are. I told them that there are elements of personalities all mixed together, but no one character is any one person. So then, they pull me aside and say, ‘No, really. Which one am I?’ It’s hilarious. One girl I work with said, “I remember you used to leave at lunch a lot to go to the bank. Did you have a secret boyfriend that no one knew about?!” Unfortunately, it was nothing that exciting. I’m just the only person in the world who hasn’t started managing my account online yet.
My mother always encouraged us to make New Years Resolutions, but I can’t honestly say that I kept very many of them past February. The most fun resolution I ever remember making was deciding to do one new thing every month, and I think that lasted all the way through July. It got to the point where at the end of the month, I was either desperately trying to squeeze something in or trying to think of something I’d already done that would qualify. You can only use ‘try a new Chinese restaurant’ so many times before it gets silly. There was also another resolution that I really enjoyed- I was going to read one hundred books in a year. I tried to choose authors that I wouldn’t normally read, and even though I only made it to fifty, forcing myself to branch out like that, I found a lot of new favorites.
There is a lot of me in my main character, Riley. She is probably the most autobiographical character I’ve ever written. Her grandparents are my grandparents, and the unfortunate blind dates and fear of spiders are also something we share. We have the same tradition on Valentine’s Day. I guess I should say that most of the main story line is fictional, but a lot of the personality traits are mine.
We’ll continue our talk with author Aubrey Mace tomorrow. In the meantime, click here to learn a little more about her.
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