Guest Post by Daisy Jordan!! Author of Love Means Zero.
In my first novel, Everything Happens for a Reason…, the main character, Jill, has a baby at age 21. The book tells the turbulent story of her pregnancy and her heart-wrenching relationship with the father. After that, because of feedback I got from readers who loved the characters, I went back and wrote about Jill and her friends in high school, in a 4-book series called Spin the Bottle that tells how Jill got to be where she is in Everything Happens for a Reason…. These books are full of excitement, drama, and the typical romantic suspense of high school. One of my biggest fears when I started writing Love Means Zero, which takes place 2 years after Everything Happens for a Reason…, was that readers would no longer find Jill’s life so fascinating.
While Love Means Zero is mostly about Hilton, Jill still plays a large role as Hilton’s roommate and best friend, and I wanted to give her a significant side plot of her own for my readers who are true Jill fans. I knew they would want to know what’s going on with her, but I was afraid when they were reintroduced to her as a 24-year-old with a 2½-year-old child, living a happy and stable domestic life, they would lose interest in her.
This, of course, comes from the perspective of someone who is 27 and has no children, but many of my friends and young teen or twenty-something readers have no children either. Writing about Jill as a mom was one of my biggest challenges as an author so far. But I’m really happy with how it turned out. I realized as I wrote more and more of the book that Jill’s life wasn’t going to be boring, because Jill’s an adventurous, fun-loving person. She would never settle for her life being boring. For one thing, while she does live with her boyfriend and daughter, she also still lives with Hilton and Hilton’s boyfriend Luke. The 5 of them are best friends and form their own little family, in a way, and I think readers who have followed Jill and Hilton over the years will agree it’s a perfect living situation for them.
Jill also has a couple surprises coming her way in Love Means Zero, both of which will change her life in pretty thrilling ways. But the biggest thing I realized that made writing about Jill as a mom so much easier is that just because she’s a mom doesn’t mean she’s stopped being Jill. She’s still a fiercely loyal friend, she still spends sunny summer days laying out at the pool, and she’s still just as in love with her boyfriend and as excited about their relationship as she’s ever been. So while Love Means Zero is a completely new chapter in her life, it’s a great one. I hope all my readers out there, whether you already know Jill or not, will love reading about her life as a young mom! J
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