Severed Heads, Broken Hearts Blog Tour: Robyn Schneider on being published in the UK.

Severed Heads, Broken Hearts by Robyn Schneider || Release date: August 15th 2013.

After witnessing his girlfriend in a “very friendly” position with a guy who is definitely not him, closely followed by a catastrophic car accident that shatters his leg along with his pro Tennis hopes, Ezra Faulkner returns to school for senior year, cast into social oblivion, a shadow of his former self. Ezra believes that everyone suffers a defining tragedy: it appears that his has just occurred.

But this new tragic self might have its own appeal, especially after he meets the clever, oddly sexy Cassidy Thorpe, a girl who launches him into a series of transformative adventures that help Ezra learn the truth about tragedy: unlike lightning, it can and will strike the same place twice.

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Guest Post: Robyn Schneider on being published in the UK 

When I was twenty-two, I lived in London, in a house in Primrose Hill with five other girls. We went down to the pub for pad thai, and walked along the canal to buy groceries, and swapped clothes, and had jobs that sounded more aspirational than true. 

I moved there from New York City, intending to live abroad for a year and write novels, but what I was really doing was running away. I’d deferred graduate school, where I planned to study medicine and I suppose grow up.

I had a secret identity that year. I wrote books, but no one knew about it, because they were children’s books, and I wrote them under a pen name. There is something peculiarly disorienting about being a novelist in one country and then moving to another. I was not published in the UK. The bookstores and libraries there had never heard of me and would not carry me. The book I was writing was not for them. It was something I would take back home to my American publisher, like a souvenir of my time abroad. 

It’s very strange now, four years later, that I survived graduate school and somehow managed to write a novel while I was there. But it is even stranger and more lovely still that this book is making its way back across the pond, to the bookstores and libraries I visited years ago and sadly knew were not mine. It's fitting then that the UK, a place which has become a story I tell, is getting a story I told. A care package from a broad, of a piece of me that will never have to grow up and go back home. 

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Follow Robyn on Twitter: @robynschneider

Check back on Wednesday to read Arianne's Five-Star review of Severed Heads, Broken Hearts.