Hannah McBride: Current Author, Former Irish Banana: Blog Tour: Tonight the Streets Are Ours by Leila Sales

Sep 6, 2015

Blog Tour: Tonight the Streets Are Ours by Leila Sales

I am so excited to have the beautiful and talented Leila Sales here today to talk about blogging, writing, and her new book, TONIGHT THE STREETS ARE OURS.

In TONIGHT THE STREETS ARE OURS, a girl is set on finding her favorite blogger. Have you every met any bloggers in person? Do you read blogs or follow any bloggers?

Definitely—that’s where the idea for this book came from! When I was in high school, my friends and I tracked down Christian Rudder, who at the time wrote the Spark.com, and now is the author of DATACLYSM. When I was in college, I found Tucker Max in person. When I moved to NYC, I made friends with this blogger Brendan Jay Sullivan, and he’s now a published author too (his book’s called RIVINGTON WAS OURS). When I think someone is funny online, I want to be friends with them.

My current blog reading involved lots of posts from the Toast. Mallory Ortberg is a genius humor writer.

What inspired you to write about a blogger?

I’m interested in the one-sided connection that can develop when we only know someone online. Like I follow Taylor Swift on instagram and twitter and that makes me feel like I know her, but really what I know is just what she’s presenting of herself.

Now, Taylor Swift is a celebrity, and that’s always been the situation with celebs: you feel like you know them from reading about them, but you don’t really, and certainly they don’t know you at all. Where it gets interesting, to me, is how regular everyday people now become similar to celebrities in this fashion. If someone reads your blog and your twitter, they can imagine this whole relationship between you and them. That’s fascinating.

Who was your favorite character to write in TONIGHT THE STREETS ARE OURS, and why?

Peter, the blogger. He’s dramatic and writerly and self-absorbed. He’s not very good at seeing the world from other people’s perspectives. I knew exactly who he was, so it was fun to write his blog posts. This surprised me a little, actually: I’d never written from a male perspective before, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be any good at it.

How much of your day is dedicated to writing in some form or another?

Well, I have a day job, too: I edit children’s books at a major publishing company. So when I’m at the office I’m usually writing editorial letters or rejection letters or memos. When I’m home I’m sometimes writing an actual manuscript, but often I’m writing answers to interview questions (like these!) or bonus content or responses to readers’ emails or whatever. So I guess the answer is that I spend way too much time in front of a computer, and only some of that time am I actually writing a book!

What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone thinking of starting their own novel?

Don’t view your first novel as the one and only story that you have to tell. Being a writer is something that you do every day; it’s a lifestyle and an identity. It's not an item on a to-do list that you check off and then are done with.

If you’re going to write your first novel, you should work as hard at it as you can, and revise the hell out of it, and strive to make it the best it can be. And then, once you’ve done all of that, you should move on to the next project. Every book that you write is a learning experience, and every one is getting you closer and closer to finally being able to say exactly what it is that you want to say. You may never get there. Most of us don’t. But the process is the point.

Giveaway:
1 Finished Copy of TONIGHT THE STREETS ARE OURS
US/Canada Only

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Full Blog Tour Schedule

September 1- Reader of Fictions

September 2- Forever Young Adult

September 3- Ticket to Anywhere

September 4- Alexa Loves Books

September 5- The Book Cellar

September 6- The Irish Banana

September 7- Adventures of a Book Junkie

September 8-Supernatural Snark

September 9- The Compulsive Reader

September 10- Miss Print