A new book just came out by my amazing friend Tiffany Schmidt, Bright Before Sunrise. Just check out that glorious cover!
The tagline for Bright Before Sunrise is lovely:
"One night can change how you see the world. One night can change how you see yourself."
So to celebrate the book's release, I'm joining in with a group of writers and readers on the Bright Before Sunrise Tumblr to share our stories of one night when everything changed.
Here's mine. Maybe it will surprise you. It definitely surprised me:
The night I saw Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the first time.
Now, in retrospect, Sorcerer's Stone is not an especially great movie. It and Chamber of Secrets are clearly the weakest films in the franchise. The screenplay is juvenile, and not in a good way. The kids' acting is terrible across the board (the adults are another story, of course). There's not-at-all-clever gross-out humor, and the themes are spelled out in the most obvious ways possible. The movie wasn't aspiring to Pixar-level children's-movie quality. It clearly intended only as light entertainment for kids younger than 10.
But that night, 13 years ago, I did not care one whit about any of that. Because that movie sucked me in like few movies ever had. I saw it two more times that weekend. I can't count how many times I've watched it since.
I'd read the Harry Potter books prior to seeing the movie -- at that point, there were only 4 of them -- and I'd loved them. But I hadn't really understood the extent to which I loved Harry and his world until I saw that movie and experienced the story in a new, visceral way. Seeing the stuff I'd read on the page brought to life was magical in exactly the way it was supposed to be.
And it's what made me realize it was okay to really, genuinely love children's stories. Even as a (still-not-quite) adult.
The movie came out in November 2001. It was six months after I'd graduated from college, and two months after 9/11. It was a turning point in so many ways. That movie gave me the push I was looking for. It allowed me to embrace what I truly loved.
And, in a roundabout way, it was what led me to become an author myself. Because after that night, I became a full-fledged Harry Potter fan -- which, in 2001, meant writing fan fiction. My nervous attempts at writing Hermione/Ginny romance were the first creative writing I'd done since middle school -- when I'd decided my childhood dream of being an author was silly, and I didn't have time, and my stories weren't any good anyway so I should just stop trying.
Writing fan fiction was a safe way to try writing again. There was nothing to lose.
So I tried it. I wrote a story. Then I wrote another one. Then another. Slowly, writing stopped being this big, scary thing.
I decided to try writing a story that wasn't fan fiction. It was about characters I made up myself. It was crap, but I wrote another one. And then another one. I kept going until I'd written something that wasn't crap. And I kept going after that until I wrote one that someone decided might actually be worth publishing.
And it all goes back to Harry Potter, and sitting in that dark theater on Connecticut Avenue with a bunch of my college friends, eating popcorn and watching Harry fly on a broomstick for the first time.
So thanks for that, J.K. Rowling.
And thanks, Tiffany Schmidt, for making me remember. :)
About BRIGHT BEFORE SUNRISE:
Jonah and Brighton are about to have the most awkwardly awful night of their lives. For Jonah, every aspect of his new life reminds him of what he has had to give up. All he wants is to be left alone. Brighton is popular, pretty, and always there to help anyone . . . but has no idea of what she wants for herself. Her seemingly perfect life is marred only by Jonah, the one person who won't give her the time of day, but also makes her feel, well, something. So when they are repeatedly thrown together over the course of one night, anything can—and does—happen. Told in alternating chapters, this poignant, beautiful novel's energy and tension, amidst the humor and romance, builds to a new beginning of self-acceptance and hope.
TIFFANY SCHMIDT lives in Pennsylvania with her saintly husband, impish twin boys, and a pair of mischievous puggles. And while she thinks sunrises are quite beautiful, she'd rather sleep through them. Send Me a Sign was her debut novel. Find out more about Tiffany and her books by following her on Twitter @TiffanySchmidt or visiting www.TiffanySchmidt.com.
