Faking Faith was, I admit, born out of my own secret Internet obsession.  Like Dylan, a few years ago I became fascinated by the blogs of home-schooled fundamentalist Christian teenage girls. At first it was just a sort of voyeuristic interest in the lives of people whose convictions seemed out of another century (things like parent-guided courtship, the evils of public education and college, and frightening and antiquated beliefs about the appropriate place of women in the family and in society). I read the blogs in order to be flabbergasted. People believe this and write about it on the Internet?

Not only did I become fascinated with the bloggers themselves, but also the loosely affiliated fundamentalist movement that most of them live in. Many of the details about Abigail and her family’s beliefs were taken from literature and research surrounding this movement, particularly the Vision Forum and similar groups.

And, friends, if you’re the kind of person who believes a girl should be free to pursue any dream, be whomever and whatever she wants to be and grow up to become an autonomous adult in control of her own life? Then this stuff is terrifying. And it’s real. And it’s growing.

Bitch Magazine has an excellent article on the topic and the whole thing is so interesting:

The stay-at-home-daughters movement, which is promoted by Vision Forum, encourages young girls and single women to forgo college and outside employment in favor of training as “keepers at home” until they marry. Young women pursuing their own ambitions and goals are viewed as selfish and antifamily; marriage is not a choice or one piece of a larger life plan, but the ultimate goal. Stay-at-home daughters spend their days learning “advanced homemaking” skills, such as cooking and sewing, and other skills that at one time were a necessity—knitting, crocheting, soap- and candle-making. A father is considered his daughter’s authority until he transfers control to her husband.

Sounds great, right? Education and gainful employment are selfish! Cooking and babies, that’s all women are good for in 2011-almost-12!

Shudder.

There is also an amazing anonymous blog kept by a young woman who escaped the movement after she was betrothed to someone against her will. Start from the beginning – it’s a fascinating story and you can’t help but admire her courage and strength (and she’s had a tough time of it since she left…her family and the movement didn’t let her go easily).

I don’t feel comfortable linking to individual personal blogs of the girls that I initially found – and many of them have already married and moved on in any case (and Abigail certainly wasn’t based on anyone in particular). You can search out blogs like the ones I read without much difficulty, though. They aren’t hidden.

It’s good to be informed about what’s out there and the forces at work in this country…just don’t be like Dylan and fall down the rabbit hole.

Well, it’s been shipping from Amazon (and being downloaded onto Kindles and various other devices) for a week or more, but today is still exciting!  Even if there are no parades or fireworks, it’s still the culmination of years of work.  I’m grateful and happy.

The only proper way to celebrate is large amounts Mexican food with my stepsisters, who happen to be the dedicatees of Faking Faith.

Here is a picture of us from back in the day:

Emily, me, Alyssa…moments before one of us tried to push another of us into the water.

I was a reserved and lonely only child until they came into my life. I didn’t even know what I was missing until they were there, trying to push me in the water.  It wasn’t always the smoothest situation, which is often the case in blended families, but my teenager-hood would have been a whole lot more dull and solitary (albeit less damp) without them around.

This is part of the reason why I dedicated Faking Faith to my stepsisters.  In the story, Dylan Mahoney is a very lonely girl.  She’s messed up her friendships, she took a bad gamble on a jerk guy, and she feels completely alone and disconnected from the world.  Dylan desperately needs connection and support, and she finds it in the most unexpected place – the blog of Abigail, a girl whose life is completely unlike her own.

There are bad decisions and bumblings (and a scandalous incident with Abigail’s cute older brother) but in the end, what redeems Dylan  – and what can redeem all of us, I believe – is how she reaches to connect with other people again.  People who see her, just as she is, and love her anyway.  She heals and grows and thrives by learning to once more be open and vulnerable.

These days I count Alyssa and Emily among my closest friends.  We shared a three-person canoe through the wilderness last summer and danced until 4 a.m. at my last birthday.  Our sisterhood has made me a better person, and I’m proud to dedicate this story of friendship and victory over loneliness to them.

(You can buy Faking Faith here and read the first few chapters here.)

The review:

When 17-year-old Dylan Mahoney naively engages in “sexting,” she becomes an Internet phenomenon and a social pariah. Isolated from her friends and family, she retreats into the blogosphere, where she happens upon an online community of home-schooled teenage girls who write about their conservative Christian faith and document the blissful domesticity of their lives. Against her better judgment, she joins this community under false pretenses and develops a special friendship with a blogger named Abigail. The extraordinary set of events that ensue are at once outlandish and absolutely believable, thanks to Bloss’s compelling, down-to-earth prose. Conservative Christian characters who could easily be caricatured are multi-dimensional and complicated, and the lessons Dylan learns through her experiences with them are equally nuanced. Bloss somehow manages utter frankness and great generosity in her portrayal not only of Christian separatists, but also of typical modern families such as Dylan’s. Rather than promoting or demonizing any lifestyle, the novel illustrates how profoundly teenagers who seem to have nothing in common can connect and support each other, even as they choose very different paths.

Hooray!  I’m very pleased to be called both outlandish and believable.

(Okay, one thing missing that should be noted – the story also includes a CUTE BOY and maybe some semi-scandalous KISSING.  I couldn’t let that go unmentioned.  Because it’s IMPORTANT.)

I’m super psyched for the Faking Faith release, though, especially since getting the news that it’s an official Junior Library Guild pick for this winter.  I’ll be honest…I was entirely 100% certain that I wanted to write this book, and I’m entirely 100% certain that I’m proud of how it turned out.  But I was NOT entirely 100% certain that it would appeal to the rest of the world.

The anonymous and benevolent “They” instruct you to write what delights you, to write the book that you want to read, the book that makes your blood run fast and your brain gears spin, and to forget about the what the rest of the world might think.

And I find that separation is fairly easy to accomplish when you’re actually wrapped up in writing the book. You put down the words and create the story and live in a little universe under your control, just you and your characters hanging out together and making stuff up.

Eventually you finish the book and lovely people help you edit it.  Then the months creep by, the publication date gets closer, reviews start coming in, and you have to face the fact that after all that work and all that time spent living in that story, those words are not yours anymore.  Your part is finished and the book has to stand all on its own.

It’s a disassociation that can be pretty jarring, especially if the book is on a potentially controversial topic, such as Faking Faith.

It makes me think of the theme song I used for this book, which I still listen to almost daily (plus the cutest video in the world):

Beth Orton – Shopping Trolley

(For some reason, I can’t get it to embed, but watch it here! I swear it’s the best thing ever.)

I think I’m gonna cry

But I’m gonna laugh about it

All in time

I know I’m gonna cry

But I’m gonna laugh about it

All in time, all in time…

It started out a little fraught…YIKES.

But then it got pretty and sun-spackled! (And OMG so hot.  Hot.  During the summer.  Who would have known.)

I went to a Little League game and ate some candy of my childhood. (Not as good as I remembered.  And kind of stale.  This particular push pop might have actually have been made DURING my childhood)…

Then I spent some time hunting the wily and mythical wild lawn flamingo (unsuccessfully)…

But mostly it’s been as much of this as I can manage.  Ahhh.

Hope you’re having a lovely summer, too! (WATCH OUT FOR LAWN FLAMINGOS.)

A totally logical reaction to having the first ARC of Faking Faith in my hands.  Totally. Logical.

This seems to happen every time, so I’m just gonna go with it!

I’m throwing myself approximately four parties and demanding that friends and family come visit me, because if you can’t be a greedy birthday princess on a significant birthday, WHEN CAN YOU? (Answer: Every birthday.)

Anyway, I thought I’d share with you the excellent gift I got this week – the gorgeous cover to my next book, FAKING FAITH!  I love it so.

Out on November 8th!  Also, SO PRETTY!

(My cover girls always seem to have awesome lip makeup situations.)

Much more to come about this book, which I am so stoked about, but for now I have to go clean my entire apartment from top to bottom.  You see, almost all of my female relations will be descending tomorrow, which has incited some sort of massive cleaning panic in my lizard brain.  Even the baseboards and that spot under the chair that no one can see shall be scrubbed!  If there is dirt, they will know it’s there.  Now that I’m hurdy gurdy, I don’t have any more excuses.

Have a great weekend, friends! 

It’s currently called Faking Faith and will be out next Fall from Flux.  I AM SO EXCITED.

In celebration (and because Faking Faith involves farm animals), I present this, the best dairy-farm-related video that I’ve ever seen in my whole life (which is…saying something?).  Sometimes I am just so glad to be alive at this point in the internet, you know?

Yeah, you’re looking good in your cap and your shirt!

Now to figure out how to best bliss out and relax between now and when the revision letter comes in.  I’m thinking…Nanowrimo.  That makes sense, right?

To the shock of everyone, most of all myself, I survived the back-country canoe trip in Canada!  Here is photographic proof it actually happened:

Me in Quetico Provincial Park at the top of Louisa Falls, which I somehow managed not to fall down.  This was, like, day six without a shower.  Situation was dire.

It really was a great experience, though, and it was nice to know that I won’t fall to whiny pieces if I don’t have access to the internet or air conditioning.  And that I can carry a canoe all by myself and avoid being eaten by bears.  And that I can spend a week in the woods with my family and everyone will probably emerge ALIVE and speaking to each other (mostly).

After that, I took my yearly pilgrimage to the Keeweenaw Peninsula, where we found ourselves compelled to attempt the mentos/coke experiment:

Success!

As my friend Kelly says, there’s something about the wilderness that can bring out the juvenile delinquent in people.  AGREED.

It’s just unending amounts of lovely up there.

But then it was back to work and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since!  Working and writing and researching and thinking.  Pulling a book together is damn hard…even when you know you’re capable of it because you’ve pulled a book together before, it’s still so easy to be filled with doubt and angst and despair.  And honestly, I’ve found the only solution is to just plow right through the middle.

So…off I go, right through the middle!

Blog.  Blog blog blog.  Blaaaaaaaawg.

Anyway, I’ve been pretty busy this summer with important things like writing my next book.  Well, right now it’s more like working myself into a frothing panic over my next book, but that’s completely part of my process and is expected and on schedule.

I’ve been busy with other important things like putting on a dress and going to very lovely weddings – one of them involved sparklers and no one caught on fire!  Another one had teacups and cupcakes and croquet! – and playing lots of Rock Band (drums on hard level, guys.  Truth.)

I’ve also been reading some incredibly engrossing books which I can recommend:

Vampires. Apocalypse.  Apocalypse VIA VAMPIRES.

And then I’ve been doing slightly more terrifying things, like preparing myself for my impending demise in the wilderness of Canada.  For some reason, I’m going on a week-long canoe trip in a remote park where there are WOLVES and BLACK FLIES and NO INTERNET CONNECTIONS ANYWHERE.  I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to those three things (among many other things), so I’m expecting that I’ll probably just die.

I’ve asked my family to make up a story about how I died heroically, like as I was single-handedly defending the whole group from a rabid grizzly bear (is there such a thing?  Don’t answer that…

Oh, hey Bear!  What’s up?  Nope, I definitely wasn’t talking about you behind your back.  Heh heh.  Heh.  RUN!)

…instead of just expiring from being a wuss.  A wuss going through severe internet withdrawal. It’s a very serious condition, you know.

If I survive, I will make sure to report back!