10 Things You Didn't Know About Sandi Kahn Shelton

I have a special guest today! Old bud Sandi Kahn Shelton, whose blog I have been reading faithfully for a couple of years now, has graced us with a guest post!

When Jaime over at Pump Up Your Book Promotion asked me what I would like Sandi to blog about, I thought wouldn't it be cool to find out ten things about her that we didn't know?

I thought so. But let me tell you why she's here first. She's on a virtual book tour with us with her new book, Kissing Games of the World. Isn't that the most fantastic title you've ever heard of? To find out more about her book and Sandi, do visit her website at www.sandishelton.com.

10 Things You Never Knew About Sandi Kahn Shelton

1. She may be the first iced tea addict on the planet. Unsweetened, lots of ice. Her children are concerned. You would think she’s drinking vodka the way they carry on. Which she is not.

2. It took her seventeen years to write her first novel, but since then she’s shortened her turnaround time considerably.

3. She is married to Jim Shelton, and the two of them comprise the entire feature-writing staff at the New Haven Register. She also teaches fiction workshops and keeps a blog at www.sandishelton.com/blog.

4. Besides her novels, she’s also the author of three humor books about parenting and for ten years wrote the humor column for Working Mother magazine.

5. Theoretically, she believes in backing up her work on her computer, but never quite remembers to do it, despite an alarming number of disastrous computer crashes that have caused her to start entire books over again.

6. She is now on a Seriously Heart-stopping Deadline with her fourth novel. A deadline she fully intends to make. To aid in that, she is going to back up all her work. RIGHT NOW.

7. She writes most of her novels in Starbucks, not only because of the comfy armchairs and the venti cups of iced tea (extra ice), but because there is no internet there. She is powerless against the call of the internet when she’s supposed to be writing.

8. With each book, she makes up a playlist of songs that resonate with the characters or the plot, and if she’s ever not in the mood to write the book or has lost her way, she listens to the playlist and can get right back in the mood. Right now she’s listening to “Desperado,” which was the theme song of the male protagonist in Kissing Games of the World.

9. She believes in magic—the magic of getting books done on time when there is simply no way, the magic of having an agent call up one day and say, “They’re buying the book!” and the magic of having a bunch of compelling characters show up and start telling a story that must be told. All these things have happened to her, and she believes they can happen for all writers.

10. When she’s not writing, she’s cooking or knitting or talking to friends and family---all of which she sees as ways of being open to the next story that wants to come in.

Sandi Kahn Shelton is the author of three novels, all contemporary novels about relationships and family, including What Comes After Crazy, A Piece of Normal, and the latest, Kissing Games of the World. She’s also the author of three nonfiction humor books about parenting, and is a feature reporter for the New Haven Register. For years she wrote the “Wit’s End” column for Working Mother magazine, and she has been a contributor to Redbook, Salon, Reader’s Digest, and Woman’s Day. She’s been a writer for longer than she can actually remember—but she does remember her first sale. When she was 6 years old, her mother wouldn’t give her money for the ice cream truck, so she ran home and wrote a story and sold it to the neighbors for 20 cents. It was called “The King Who Slept For Three Hours and Forty-five Seconds” and she saw this as the beginning of a promising career path that would keep her in frozen desserts for the rest of her life. You can visit her website at www.sandishelton.com,and her blog at www.sandishelton.com/blog.