Today, you can find me over at The Book Bratz blog as part of their 2021 Debut Author Interview series. They asked me some great questions about YOUR LIFE HAS BEEN DELAYED, including a few I hadn’t been asked yet. You can check out the interview at:

https://thebookbratz.blogspot.com/2021/07/2021-debut-author-interview-michelle-i.html

Just as an extra tidbit, one of the questions asked me if any books/authors had inspired YOUR LIFE HAS BEEN DELAYED. I listed a number of young adult authors that inspire me–click through for those!–but there were also several time travel romances that stuck in my mind. One in particular, BREATH OF MAGIC by Teresa Medeiros, was about a witch who traveled forward from the 1600s to the present and learned all about customs, technology and fashion in a new century. I remembered thinking the book was so fun when I first read it.

Well, last weekend when my husband took the kids on a float trip, I had the house to myself and decided to re-read this book. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it came out in 1996–the year after Jenny took off! If I’d realized, I totally would have read this book as research when I was writing, because it was like a time capsule of the times. The main guy was running a company at the forefront of technology and there is absolutely no mention of the internet at all in the whole book. (There is a mention of hacking, though. I take this to be the sort of hacking done within an internal network at a company rather than the worldwide web.) Other highlights:

• Fax machines!
• Brief mention of “cellular” phones
• Flyers in the streets to spread the word
• Indoor plumbing! (hey, the character was from the 1600s 🤣)

Anyway, I loved stepping back into this old favorite. I’ve pretty much exclusively been reading books released this year–and I love them!–but sometimes you just need to read for no purpose at all.

But back to The Book Bratz… they’ve been super supportive of debut authors and also of me! They’ve also featured my book in their Waiting on Wednesday feature and in lists of debut books they look forward to reading this year. So please do go check out the interview and their blog!