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Excerpt from The Sweet Life of Stella Madison by Lara M. Zeises

My boyfriend, Max, and I are lying on his twin bed, limbs tangled, foreheads pressed together, trying to catch our collective breath after a dizzying _forty-five-_minute make-out session, when he says the three most terrifying words in the English language:

"I love you."

Instinctively I recoil, my spine stiffening.

"Stella?" Max says, running his hand along the curve of my hip, pulling me back toward him. "Did you hear me?"

I mumble something along the lines of "mm-hmm" and try to paste on one of those mysterious Mona Lisa smiles.

Max scoots even closer and rolls slightly so that his mouth tickles the outside of my ear. "I said, 'I love you,' " he whispers throatily.

I respond the only way I know how: by pulling his face against mine and kissing him deeply.

Max isn't the first boy to tell me he loves me, but he is the first who seems to notice that I don't say it back. My best friend Kat would point out that this is because when most guys say "I love you," what they're really saying is "Let's get naked." She warned me about Max from the start. I thought he only asked me out because he was looking for a date to the junior prom, but Kat said I should be careful, because Max had never dated a girl for fewer than six months, not even freshman year.

That was almost nine weeks ago, and except for bringing me a single long-stemmed red rose on our "one-_monthiversary," Max has kept the sentimental stuff to a minimum. This, frankly, is fine by me. I don't "do" mushy very well.

So before Max can make any more uncomfortable declarations, I tell him we need to get going.

"Mom needs me at the Kitchen," I remind him. "You can probably stay for dinner, if you want."

"Pass," he says. "I've got basketball with the guys tonight. But thanks for asking." After planting one final kiss on the tip of my nose, Max scoots off the foot of the bed. He fishes his rumpled "Practice Safe Lunch--Use a Condiment" T-shirt off the floor, and I admire his tanned, toned chest as he pulls it over his head.

"You checkin' me out?" he asks.

I grin. "You know it."

"It doesn't seem fair," Max says. "You always take shirts while I play skins."

I do up the last three buttons on my top. "Good thing you're shooting hoops. You'll have plenty of time to work out some of that pent-up aggression."

Max groans, but in a playful way. It's one of the things I like best about him. We're in our third month of dating, but so far he's let me set the pace in terms of fooling around. He doesn't give me crap about it, either. He drops hints here and there, and I usually have to redirect his hands once or twice, but there's no real pressure to do anything I don't want to do. Which is almost the exact opposite of my last boyfriend, Brice, who was never truly satisfied unless I let him knead one of my boobs or fondle the elastic of my underwear.

There are a lot of things I like about Max, though, that have nothing to do with Brice or any other guy I've ever dated. Like how he always opens the car door for me and waits until I'm tucked into my seat before closing it. Or how he lets me listen to WXPN when we're driving around, despite the fact that he can't stand most indie music. I like, too, that he calls me to touch base once a day--no more, no less--and doesn't mind when I make plans with my girlfriends for a Saturday night, even though I never bother to check with him first.

We don't talk much on the drive from Max's house to the Kitchen, which is another thing I like about him. He doesn't feel the need to fill the silence with a lot of meaningless chatter. I reach over and squeeze his knee in appreciation. He turns toward me and smiles, and it feels nice to know I've made him happy in some small way, even if I couldn't return the "I love you."

Max eases his VW Jetta into the parking lot of the shopping mall where the Open Kitchen is located. Before I get out I say, "So I'll see you tomorrow?"

"What's tomorrow?"

"Tuesday. Omar's party?" School has been out a little more than a week, but the never-ending string of summer parties is only just beginning.

Max shakes his head. "I totally forgot--I told Cory I'd take him to the Phillies game. But I can reschedule, if you want me to."

"No, no," I say. "Go with Cory."

"You won't be mad?"

"How can I be mad at a guy who's blowing me off to take his little brother to a ball game? Could you be more adorable?"

Max leans in for another kiss, and I relax into the warm saltiness of his mouth. When we break apart, I let my head lean against his shoulder for a second, and that's when he says it again:

"I really do love you, Stella."

On autopilot, I launch into Diversionary Tactic #2: rubbing my nose gently against the back of his ear and dropping a light kiss on the side of his neck. "And I," I say in my best sexy-girl voice, "really do love the way you smell."

Then I grab my bag and make a quick exit before he can say anything else.

Excerpt © 2009 Lara M. Zeises. All rights reserved.

The Inspiration Behind The Sweet Life of Stella Madison

Like most of the novels I've dreamed up, the idea for Stella materialized after several seemingly unrelated incidents:

Although I was beginning to appreciate fine dining, I wouldn't exactly call myself a foodie during this time. It wasn't until after I began writing Stella, and left my TV on the Food Network by default, that I became fascinated with food and foodie culture. I learned about the science of cooking from Alton Brown, the importance of mastering simple recipes from Ina Garten, and the ways to develop distinct flavor profiles from Bobby Flay. Rachael Ray had me churning out her 30-minute meals - though to be perfectly honest, I've never made one in less than an hour (I think the show should be called 30 Minutes Worth of Dishes) - and Giada De Laurentis introduced me to a little miracle ingredient called pancetta (if everything really is better with bacon, it's twice as good with Italian bacon). Then Bravo's attempt at translating Project Runway into a culinary reality show yielded the phenomenon of Top Chef and it was all over for me.

I spent a summer chopping anything I could get my hands on so that I could improve my "knife skills," and for Christmas, the only things I asked for were tools of the foodie trade. I explored every grocery store, gourmet shop, and ethnic outlet I could find for new ingredients to play with. I'd always loved to cook, but it wasn't until then that I fell in love with what Stella's dad calls "the art and craft" of cooking. It's not about throwing ingredients into a pan and slamming dinner on the table (though of course, meals like that have their place as well). It's about tasting, and experiment, and communicating. It's about love, too, and that's one of the main themes of Stella - learning to love and appreciate food, as well as feeding and appreciating the people you love.

How Stella Gave Me My Groove Back

The Sweet Life of Stella Madison marks the first book I've published under my own name in almost four years. In between the time that I first told my then-editor Jodi Keller "I want to write a book about a girl named Stella. I think her dad might be a chef," and when this novel came out in July 2009, I

Yes, you heard me correctly. I was thisclose to giving up my writing career, despite all of the cool stuff that was happening to me. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of which would bore the average reader. But for the writers (both aspiring and published), teachers, and librarians who happen to come across this page, and may be interested in such things, I'll give you the short version:

The young adult genre has changed drastically since I published my first novel, Bringing Up the Bones, in the fall of 2002. Teen authors have always been expected to play a role in publicizing their books, but once the market exploded, a writer's publicity efforts became crucial to a novel's success. (This is assuming you're not already a superstar, like Laurie Halse Anderson or John Green, who are so talented and beloved that pretty much anything they write is guaranteed to get terrific reviews and sell a zillion copies and make YA enthusiasts swoon over their genius.)

Something else happened, and I call it the Gossip Girl Syndrome. Now, don't get me wrong - I own and have read every volume in the original Gossip Girl series, and I'm a big fan of the television adaptation. The books/TV show unquestionably made a huge mark on pop culture, but they also had an enormous affect on publishers' expectations. Suddenly, it wasn't enough to write a quality piece of fiction. That piece of fiction had to have a sexy hook and high commercial appeal. Smaller, more introspective stories fell out of vogue (again, this is assuming you're not a Laurie Halse Anderson or John Green, either of whom could probably turn a grocery list into something that would sell like gangbusters - they're just that talented and beloved).

For someone like me, who prefers to write books that I like to call "brainy chick lit with heart and soul" - stories about strong girls who may not even know their own strength (metaphorically speaking - not like weight lifting or whatever) that focus on themes that matter most to me: love, friendship, personal identity - this new emphasis on salability was daunting. And even though I heard an editor at a local SCBWI conference say that obviously, a literary novel with high commercial appeal is every publisher's dream (Jay Asher's 13 Reasons Why is a good example of this), the truth is, it's definitely more important to generate major sales dollars than it is to garner starred reviews. (Not that I've done either, though True Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet has sold twice what all of the other books published under my own name have combined.)

True Confessions was released not only the same year, season, and month as Anyone But You, it was released the same week - which also happened to be the week I became a first-time homeowner and moved for the seventh time in as many years. Between settling into my new abode, housebreaking a seriously high-strung puppy, marketing my two new books, and teaching part-time at the University of Delaware, I completely burned myself out. Did I mention I was deep into the revision of More Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet, too? It was like my personal perfect storm.

Just as More Confessions was coming out in the spring of 2006, I realized two things:

1. The marketing end of the YA book business kind of overwhelms me. If I could just sit at my computer and type my stories, making occasional appearances at conferences and schools (both of which I actually enjoy very much), then I would be content. But that's not enough in this day and age, when you must blog, you must Facebook, you must Twitter. You must participate on relevant message boards and listservs, make endless connections, and schmooze your butt off. You must create contests with cool giveaways, trick out your web site, and you must do all of this while producing new books at least once a year. Which leads me to...

2. It's not enough to simply write a good book once a year. It also has to be that high-concept novel that oozes with commercial appeal. And if the things you want to write about aren't high concept enough, or have enough commercial appeal, there are some publishers who will pitch you their own high-concept, commercial ideas that they hope you'll deliver to them in as little as six months. For me, this meant having to become a plotter, and turn in massive, thirty-page synopses with chapter-by-chapter breakdowns which then had to be edited even before I could write a single word. And I learned quickly that this is not how I operate. I ended up feeling more like a dancing monkey than an author, and that is never a good thing.

So, yeah. I wanted to quit. I tried to tell my agent this twice, but made the mistake of doing it in an e-mail he found so amusing that his response was, "See? You couldn't stop being a writer even if you tried. You just are one." I told the women in the WIPs, my critique group, who wouldn't accept my resignation either. I told librarian friends, fellow authors, my undergraduate mentor (the man to whom Stella is dedicated), and even my mother - but no one ever believed me. And it turns out, they all knew me better than I knew myself.

After taking a long hiatus to pull my head together, I dove into a massive revision of Stella. Much to my surprise, I found myself having fun with the writing. A lot of it. For the first time in a long, long time. I remembered how much I love putting words together. How much I enjoy channeling characters, letting their voices speak through my finger tips. Yes, it sounds corny, but it's all true. My agent was right; I can't stop being a writer, because writing isn't merely what I do, it's a huge part of who I am.

Okay, so maybe that wasn't exactly the short version, but it's what happened. The upside to all of this is that I figured out what I will and won't do to help my book get into the hands of readers. Speaking to educators, librarians, and booksellers at conferences both big and small - check. Visiting schools and libraries - check. Teaching writing workshops for teens and adults - check. Blogging, Facebook, and Twittering - check, check, and check. Writing anything dictated to me by someone else - nope. Sorry. That's just not how I roll.

I get a lot of e-mail from readers who desperately want a third installment in the Starlet series, something I'd love to write but not something that publisher is interested in putting out. To be honest, I've gotten requests for sequels to all my books, though the only other one I'd even think of revisiting is Contents Under Pressure. So I can't promise that there will be any sequels or companion novels in my future.

But.

I am working on something, the seed for which was planted several years ago. It's not a super-sexy, super-high concept, super commercial idea, but it's the book I know I have to write. The kind of book that exemplifies why I wanted to be a YA novelist in the first place. Which I guess means that I'm not tendering my resignation. It might be a while before this particular book is available at a store near you, but it will happen. That I can promise you.

© 2003-2010 Lara M. Zeises. All rights reserved.
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