Laura Resau: Short Bio
"With a background in cultural anthropology and ESL-teaching, award-winning author Laura Resau has lived and traveled extensively in Latin America. Her experiences inspired her young adult novels What the Moon Saw, Red Glass, and most recently, The Indigo Notebook. She now lives with her husband, toddler, and dog in Colorado."
Laura Resau's journey as a writer on The Indigo Notebook
Thanks for inviting me here, Minnie! I love your blog-- it's an honor to be here!
After my first book, What the Moon Saw, came out, I started getting lots of reader mail asking me for a sequel. I felt that I was ready to leave those characters and move on to new ones, but I realized how attached readers get to characters they love. I had already written my second novel, Red Glass, by that time (which I also see as a self-standing novel), but I started thinking that my next book could be the first in a series. That way, when readers connected strongly with the characters, they could look forward to more adventures with them.
In the meantime, I was working on a collaborative memoir called The Queen of Water (to be released in spring 2011) with my Ecuadorian friend, Maria Virginia Farinango. As research for this book, I went to the Otavalo region to spend time in places of significance in her life. While I was there, I fell in love with the landscape and culture, and heard some stories that sparked my imagination. I began jotting down notes on possible storylines, and imagined that this could be the setting of the first book in the series I wanted to write.
Over a year later, on my second research trip to Ecuador, I began to get a clearer idea of the storylines of The Indigo Notebook. I knew that the protagonist was a teenage girl whose flighty ESL-teaching mom dragged her around the world. I loved this premise, because it would give me the chance to have adventures with these characters for a few years— and to imagine how my life might have been if I'd chosen a wandering life for myself. I wove the storyline of Zeeta's love interest, Wendell's, search for his birth parents, after hearing an interesting true story from an Otavaleno friend of mine. This storyline took on a great deal of significance for me when I decided to adopt a baby from Guatemala that year (a decision I actually made during a healing ritual in Ecuador!)
There will be two more books in the series—one set in southern France (where I lived for a year in college), and the third set in a coastal town in Oaxaca, Mexico (where I used to vacation when I lived in Oaxaca). I'm so excited that my readers won't have to say good-bye to these characters forever… they'll have two more books to look forward to (well, if I can get them written! I've been revising the manuscript of the second installment—it's been hard to focus on it with all my excitement about The Indigo Notebook release…)
Thanks so much for having me here, Minnie! I hope you all enjoy my book! You can find out more about it at http://lauraresau.com/the-indigo-notebook.html .
Happy reading,
Laura
"With a background in cultural anthropology and ESL-teaching, award-winning author Laura Resau has lived and traveled extensively in Latin America. Her experiences inspired her young adult novels What the Moon Saw, Red Glass, and most recently, The Indigo Notebook. She now lives with her husband, toddler, and dog in Colorado."
Laura Resau's journey as a writer on The Indigo Notebook
Thanks for inviting me here, Minnie! I love your blog-- it's an honor to be here!
After my first book, What the Moon Saw, came out, I started getting lots of reader mail asking me for a sequel. I felt that I was ready to leave those characters and move on to new ones, but I realized how attached readers get to characters they love. I had already written my second novel, Red Glass, by that time (which I also see as a self-standing novel), but I started thinking that my next book could be the first in a series. That way, when readers connected strongly with the characters, they could look forward to more adventures with them.
In the meantime, I was working on a collaborative memoir called The Queen of Water (to be released in spring 2011) with my Ecuadorian friend, Maria Virginia Farinango. As research for this book, I went to the Otavalo region to spend time in places of significance in her life. While I was there, I fell in love with the landscape and culture, and heard some stories that sparked my imagination. I began jotting down notes on possible storylines, and imagined that this could be the setting of the first book in the series I wanted to write.
Over a year later, on my second research trip to Ecuador, I began to get a clearer idea of the storylines of The Indigo Notebook. I knew that the protagonist was a teenage girl whose flighty ESL-teaching mom dragged her around the world. I loved this premise, because it would give me the chance to have adventures with these characters for a few years— and to imagine how my life might have been if I'd chosen a wandering life for myself. I wove the storyline of Zeeta's love interest, Wendell's, search for his birth parents, after hearing an interesting true story from an Otavaleno friend of mine. This storyline took on a great deal of significance for me when I decided to adopt a baby from Guatemala that year (a decision I actually made during a healing ritual in Ecuador!)
There will be two more books in the series—one set in southern France (where I lived for a year in college), and the third set in a coastal town in Oaxaca, Mexico (where I used to vacation when I lived in Oaxaca). I'm so excited that my readers won't have to say good-bye to these characters forever… they'll have two more books to look forward to (well, if I can get them written! I've been revising the manuscript of the second installment—it's been hard to focus on it with all my excitement about The Indigo Notebook release…)
Thanks so much for having me here, Minnie! I hope you all enjoy my book! You can find out more about it at http://lauraresau.com/the-indigo-notebook.html .
Happy reading,
Laura
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