My Favorite Mistake
Chelsea M Cameron
Taylor Caldwell can't decide if she wants to kiss her new college roommate or punch him.On the one hand, Hunter Zaccadelli is a handsome, blue-eyed bundle of charm. On the other, he's a tattooed, guitar-playing bundle of bad boy. Maybe that's why Taylor's afraid of falling in love with him, or anyone else. She doesn't want to get burned, and even though her other roommates adore him, she wants him gone before it's too late.Hunter himself has been been burned before, but the fact that Taylor calls him out on his crap and has the sexiest laugh ever make him decide maybe love isn't a lost cause. They make a bet: if she can convince him she truly loves or hates him, he'll leave the apartment--and leave her alone. The problem is, the more time they spend together, the less she hates him, and the more she moves toward love.But when the man who holds the key to Taylor's fear of giving up her heart resurfaces and threatens to wreck everything, she has to decide: trust Hunter with her greatest secret, or do everything in her power to win that bet and drive him away forever.
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GUEST POST
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When I first had the idea for My Favorite Mistake, I knew that somehow, some way, that the two characters were going to have to live together. I could have had them in an off-campus apartment, but it would have been too easy for Taylor to get rid of Hunter. I wanted them to be completely and totally stuck with one another. Then I had an idea.
My Favorite Mistake is set at The University of Maine, which also happens to be my alma mater, so I know quite a bit about the campus. My freshman dorm was across the street from the upper-class apartments, known as the Doris Twitchell Allen Village, or D-TAV. Not only are they EXTREMELY small and cramped, they are co-ed. Bingo.
I never lived in D-TAV, but I did have friends who did, so that gave me a reference point. When you first walk into the rooms, you fall right into the living room, which is attached to a small kitchen. The bedrooms can either be single or double. I took some liberties and made my rooms both doubles so that Hunter would be forced to stay with Taylor. In reality, the co-ed rooms have at least one single room so that no one has to share with the opposite gender. Of course, if you decided to switch rooms, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be able to stop you.
The living room is just big enough to hold a couch, and I added a recliner. Across from the bedrooms is a tiny as all get out bathroom. There is no way I could share one of those things with three other people, let me tell you. The bedrooms themselves are so cramped that the beds have to be lofted so you can cram the desks underneath. There is barely any closet space, and you pretty much have to cram your dresser in there as well. The beds are perpendicular to one another, so you could actually sleep with your head almost touching your roommate's if you wanted to.
The key to setting the book mostly in those apartments is the intimacy. You're practically on top of one another ALL THE TIME. You get to know people real fast when you live with them. Here's a little bit of how it ramps up the intensity with Hunter and Taylor's relationship:
I saw Hunter when I woke up. I saw Hunter as I ate a bowl of cereal. I saw him in human sexuality, where he seemed to be trying to break a record for most innuendos in one hour. I saw him at work where he assaulted my email. I saw him every night at dinner. I saw him go to and from the bathroom. I saw him at our stupid mediations, which were as pointless as socks with sandals.
I. Saw. Him. EVERYWHERE.
I’d never spent so much time with someone I wasn’t related to, ever.
Author Info:
Chelsea M. Cameron is a YA/NA writer from Maine. Lover of things random and ridiculous, Jane Austen/Charlotte and Emily Bronte Fangirl, red velvet cake enthusiast, obsessive tea drinker, vegetarian, former cheerleader and world's worst video gamer. When not writing, she enjoys watching infomercials, singing in the car and tweeting. She has a degree in journalism from the University of Maine, Orono that she promptly abandoned to write about the people in her own head. More often than not, these people turn out to be just as weird as she is.
She has two books out now, Nocturnal and Nightmare, the first and second books in the Noctalis Chronicles about a girl with a dying mother who meets an immortal boy. The third book, Numb will be out this August, and the fourth in the winter. Her other book, Whisper, about a girl who is alive, a boy who isn't and the complications that go along with their relationship, released June 16 and is the first in a trilogy.
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