Today I am super chuffed to welcome Katey Lovell to the site! Katey writes the Meet Cute series, with two new novellas out this week that you absolutely must read! Here she is talking about birthdays!
Coincidentally, birthdays feature prominently in both the Meet Cute stories published this week. In The Boy at the BBQ, it’s Betsy’s mum’s fiftieth birthday celebration – a fun-filled gathering where Betsy finally gets to see her crush Seb again after a long summer without so much as a glimpse. For Helena in The Boy with the Board, the tragic events of her eighteenth birthday kick start a chain of events that lead her to California and hunky surf instructor Ashton.
This got me thinking about my own experience of birthdays.
I didn’t have a party every year as a child, but on my eighth birthday I had a traditional party at home with some of my school friends. We played all the old favourite party games like pass the parcel and musical bumps and my older sister made me a hedgehog cake with chocolate buttons for the prickles – yum!
Sixteen, eighteen and twenty one were fairly uneventful. I genuinely can’t remember anything special about sixteenth birthday, and although for my eighteenth I did have a cake especially made for the occasion and a bottle of Lambrini, it wasn’t a big event. My twenty-first was spent with my now-husband in the small attic flat we shared at the time eating take away pizza which was all I could manage to do as I wasn’t feeling very well on the day.
By the time I hit thirty I decided it was time to try something new and had my first (and only) experience of tequila on a night out with my workmates as the clock struck midnight and took me into a new decade.
All in all, my birthdays don’t tend to be that exciting, plus being in late September I was always been at school on my birthday unless it happened to fall on a weekend (as it did on my aforementioned eighth birthday which was a Saturday!).
In contrast, my son Zachary is now eight and his experiences of birthdays has been far more exciting! For his first birthday we had an open house where friends and family dropped in throughout the day for cakes and biscuits and his second birthday was celebrated in Rome with a day at the zoo. He’s had parties at play centres, church halls and at home, and his last birthday was spent on an aeroplane flying to America!
I love writing about milestones such as birthdays and anniversaries and I’ve just written a birthday scene for the novel I’m currently working on which is due out next summer – but I can’t tell you any more about that project just yet!
The Boy with the Board and The Boy at the BBQ are romantic short stories in The Meet Cute Series, published on May 19th 2016 by Harper Impulse, the digital-first romance imprint at Harper Collins.
This got me thinking about my own experience of birthdays.
I didn’t have a party every year as a child, but on my eighth birthday I had a traditional party at home with some of my school friends. We played all the old favourite party games like pass the parcel and musical bumps and my older sister made me a hedgehog cake with chocolate buttons for the prickles – yum!
Sixteen, eighteen and twenty one were fairly uneventful. I genuinely can’t remember anything special about sixteenth birthday, and although for my eighteenth I did have a cake especially made for the occasion and a bottle of Lambrini, it wasn’t a big event. My twenty-first was spent with my now-husband in the small attic flat we shared at the time eating take away pizza which was all I could manage to do as I wasn’t feeling very well on the day.
By the time I hit thirty I decided it was time to try something new and had my first (and only) experience of tequila on a night out with my workmates as the clock struck midnight and took me into a new decade.
All in all, my birthdays don’t tend to be that exciting, plus being in late September I was always been at school on my birthday unless it happened to fall on a weekend (as it did on my aforementioned eighth birthday which was a Saturday!).
In contrast, my son Zachary is now eight and his experiences of birthdays has been far more exciting! For his first birthday we had an open house where friends and family dropped in throughout the day for cakes and biscuits and his second birthday was celebrated in Rome with a day at the zoo. He’s had parties at play centres, church halls and at home, and his last birthday was spent on an aeroplane flying to America!
I love writing about milestones such as birthdays and anniversaries and I’ve just written a birthday scene for the novel I’m currently working on which is due out next summer – but I can’t tell you any more about that project just yet!
The Boy with the Board and The Boy at the BBQ are romantic short stories in The Meet Cute Series, published on May 19th 2016 by Harper Impulse, the digital-first romance imprint at Harper Collins.