From the desk of Cassie M. Thompson
Finding love, losing yourself: writing Laura Lynn Landry
I did not sit down to write a book about wanting more. I sat down because I could not stop thinking about a girl I used to be.
Laura Lynn Landry started as a question I could not shake. What does it mean to want more? More appreciation. Someone excessively in love with you, all of you. It is a lot to ask of people who only give a small percentage to look into your wild mind. And at seventeen you cannot answer it, because what do any of us know at seventeen? Nothing. But seventeen is the perfect age to start finding out.
So I gave her a hometown, and I gave her a mystery man, and I let her go.
I wrote her for the lost girls. The ones who enjoy affection and crave admiration and do not realize how beautiful they are. The ones who seem fine, but whose minds fumble with their own reality and ask, quietly, whether they want more than this.
In the second book I took her somewhere that would test all of it. New Orleans has magic in it, the kind that makes dreams come true and the kind that drags the dark history back up out of the ground. I moved her there heartbroken and made her rebuild. Death keeps following her. Predators keep finding her at night. She has to decide whether to move on from what happened to her, or make worse memories on purpose. Curiosity killed the cat, after all. All nine lives.
People ask if Laura is me. She is not. But she came out of the parts of my life I do not talk about at parties.
I am a wife, a mom, a Gemini, and an unapologetic eighties fan from a coastal town in South Mississippi with a little Cajun in her. I like good music, southern food, and a cigarette. I wanted to write a book, so here we are.
If you pick up Ho(l)me, you should know what you are getting. It is a thriller and a romance and it does not look away from the ugly parts. There is smut. There are plot twists you will not see coming. And there is a girl trying to work out who she is while everyone around her tells her.
We only get one shot at this. Do not regret a thing.
XOXO