Blog Tour-Dana Romanin

Please tell us about your most Recent Book

Abby’s Letters is about a seventeen-year-old girl who fakes her mom’s life in order to protect her little sister from foster care.

Here’s the back cover copy of my book, Abby’s Letters:

For years, Jane’s mom told her horror stories about her time spent in foster care. Now she’s determined to keep her little sister from suffering the same fate.

Seventeen-year-old Jane Sanders has had to take care of her alcoholic mother and little sister, Abby, since her dad died seven years ago. And now Mom had to go and die too. Authorities determine it was a homeless transient who died in the fire of the old manufacturing plant, but Jane knows the truth.

There is no way she’s going to let Abby go into foster care which leaves her with one option—fake her mom’s life. As far as Abby knows, their mom is in rehab. And Jane wants to keep it that way. She’d be eighteen in a few months then she could become legal guardian to her sister. With the help of her best friend, Clark, it should be easy, right?

Juggling nosy neighbors, a concerned school counselor, and an oblivious new boyfriend turns out to be harder than Jane thought. But the real problem begins when Abby starts writing letters to Mom. Through Abby’s letters, Jane sees a different side to their mom—a side she could have loved. And loving Mom is something she didn’t plan on. Because loving somebody makes it harder to ignore their death.

Why do you write what you do?

I write to shine a light into the muck of the world. I gear my books toward young and new adults because I’ve worked with teens for over fifteen years as a youth group leader and/ or Sunday school teacher. And I see a real need for books that uplift, encourage, and inspire. I also write to entertain—to elicit giggles and tears.

What are you currently working on?

I’m working on the sequel to Abby’s Letters. It follows the lives of different characters that you meet in Abby’s Letters and gives a little update on Jane and Abby’s life.

How does your work differ from other work in its genre?

I’m still a kid at heart. I love reading young adult books, but nowadays it’s hard to find one without explicit language or scenes. Seriously. It’s a gamble to just randomly check out a YA book in the library nowadays. Trust me. So I strive to write books that entertain without being well…demoralizing.

How does your writing process work?

I usually start out knowing only the beginning and end of a book. The middle is a little fuzzy. I focus my planning on character development. I take each character, big and small, and interview them. I ask them questions and drill deeper and deeper until something significant about their character is revealed. This process may look strange to an outsider. I sit down in a comfortable chair with a notebook and pen, then I ask a question, the character responds in my head (not audibly, I’m not that crazy), and I write down their responses. After I’m done, I read over my messy notes and highlight the significant responses. Not only do these interviews give my character’s depth, but I discover things about them that affect the plot of the book. Sometimes I even discover a character so demanding that she requires a book of her own. Hence the sequel to Abby’s Letters.

Dana Romanin has dreamed of being a writer since she was a little girl pretending to be Anne Shirley (from Anne of Green Gables). She used to write under a forsythia bush, but now she writes in a messy office that she shares with her sewing obsessed daughter.

Dana’s short story, The Silence of Sand, was chosen for adaptation into a short film performed by the Blue Man Group. Dana has also published short fiction for teens in Encounter—The Magazine and had a short story published in a Family Fiction anthology, The Story 2014. Her first novel, Abby’s Letters, releases in June 2017.

She lives in a small town near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia with her wonderful husband, three beautiful kids, and a lot of persnickety pets.

You can find her blog and awkward videos on her website www.DanaRomanin.com. She can also be found on Twitter (@DanaRomanin) and her Facebook fan page (DanaRomaninAuthor).