Alicia Renee Kline – Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Intoxicated

Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Intoxicated

by Alicia Renee Kline

I appreciate the opportunity to guest blog here today, and wanted to do something a little bit fun.  If you’ve visited my personal blog, you know I’m fairly transparent on where I find inspiration.  I’ve also discussed how this has been a project in the works for about the last fifteen years.  I’ve shared some of the struggles and the joys of self-publishing.  But I haven’t filled my readers in on everything.  So, even if you’re familiar with the story, here’s some bonus content that will be new to you…

1. The original genre for the book was decidedly Young Adult.  As I matured, so did the characters.  The first draft of the story featured Blake and Lauren meeting as college roommates their freshman year.  Matthew was always roughly three years older, so he would have been a college junior.
2. Blake and Matthew originally had a younger sister, Sasha.  Sasha still lived at their parents’ house, and would have added some conflict there as the older siblings tried to keep her in their lives.  Ultimately I found she just didn’t contribute that much to the story, and she was dropped.
3. In the first draft, Lauren didn’t learn the Snyder family secret from either Blake or Matthew.  The night of the incident, Matthew had a big fight with his then flavor of the month.  She stormed out of the party, inadvertently causing the fallout that spiraled out of control.  Even though it was curtains for their relationship, this unnamed ex of his either held a serious grudge or some unrequited love.  Somehow she caught wind of his growing interest in Lauren and tried her best to end that with some conveniently placed newspaper articles detailing the event.
4. Gracie wasn’t in any of the previous drafts of the book.  When I sat down and seriously began writing this version in the summer of 2012, I felt like Lauren needed someone else to confide in.  It would just be too weird for Lauren to talk with Blake about her burgeoning feelings towards Matthew.  Consequently, Gracie got the first line in Chapter One, and arguably some of the best lines in the entire novel.
5. The floor plan of Blake’s house was modeled after a real life house that my husband and I considered buying when we were looking for our current home.  This house was number three on our short list (we ended up making offers on house one and two).  When I wrote about Blake’s house, I envisioned the addition the real house is located in, though the actual home isn’t on a cul-de-sac lot like Blake’s.  It also didn’t have a hot tub.  It might now – that was ten years ago, after all.
6. In earlier versions of the story, Eric was more of a bit player than a main character.  To increase the love triangle aspect of the book, I specifically wrote scenes in which Eric displays that he can be good boyfriend material.  I still think that the rooting factor in the published version of the novel leans heavily in Matthew’s direction.  However, I feel that Lauren and Eric’s relationship has been developed to the point where you can at least understand why it would give her pause to be attracted to someone else.
7. For whatever reason, Chapter Twenty was incredibly hard to write.  I started it several times, deleting everything out before finally coming up with the final version.
8. Intoxicated was originally a stand alone book.  As I kept writing and reached about 50,000 words, I realized that these characters had lots of story left in them.  To do them justice, I couldn’t condense everything into a single book.  That and once I came up with the cliffhanger ending, I knew I had to do it even though it would make people mad.
9. Once I had decided that these characters would continue on for at least one more book, I seriously considered not introducing Chris (as an actual person and not just a mention) until the next novel.  Ultimately, I felt it would be amusing to write the scene where he comes to Lauren’s aid.  Plus, it would make the bombshell that Matthew inadvertently drops about him and Blake in the epilogue a little more interesting since the reader had actually met him.  Yes, that was in there on purpose; stay tuned!
10. I wrote the poem at the beginning of the book long after Intoxicated was finished.  My beta readers never saw it.  The reason for it being there is due to me starting the second book, Shattered, with a poem that I had written about twenty years ago and never forgotten about.  I had always been immensely proud of this poem, and due to the place all of the characters are in at the beginning of the second book it fits perfectly.  For continuity’s sake, I decided that if I included a poem in Book Two, Book One needed one as well.

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Genre – Romance / Chick Lit

Rating – PG13

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Website http://aliciareneekline.com/