Reading Renee, Q & A with Leighton Summers: Stupid By Choice Book Blog Tour
Thank you so much for having me as a guest author. I truly appreciate it and want to thank all of you who read this post as well as my new novel, Stupid By Choice. I hope you enjoy it!
I know this is not really a spoiler but…Why did Melanie leave David? He was her (first) love—and when she was told that it was him or money, she took that bracelet. Why?
I know to some people that might have seemed harsh, but the character of Melanie was really making her first big decision of her life in that scene, and it was “one person vs. her whole future” I was looking at, for it wasn’t just the bracelet—it was her whole trust fund that it represented—and in this kind of wealthy, upscale world that’s an amount of money that can last you a lifetime. (And you never really know if someone else is ever going to stick around for a whole lifetime, no matter how “in love” you are at the moment.)
Also, Melanie was a teenager at this point in the story, and even at that young age she would still know you wouldn’t risk your whole future on only one person for such a large amount of money—or at least in my affluent social circles I’ve never seen that happen at any age—and though this is a novel, I was still trying to reflect the characters doing what most people from my world would do in a situation like that. *****I liked him and when she took the bracelet 
Was it hard to write Oldie? I mean, I know a writer is good when she writes a character like him and you hate the man.
Actually no, for I had never thought about Oldie as someone a reader wouldn’t like, but I do respect your opinion if you didn’t like Oldie. (I only hope it’s the kind of “love to hate” emotion like people thought of J.R. on the TV show Dallas.) (**OMG I though JR the whole time when it first started. You loved to hate him, like Oldie he was good, then bing something was wrong and he was hard as nails) I really loved Oldie and thought he was great fun to write. He was a strong character with strong opinions, and in Texas you see a lot of real men just like that, so it could also be that I’m just used to this type of male personality more than other people are.
Was it hard to write Melanie? (Being a glutton for punishment… bad men and poor choices?)
In a story you always want to see characters put in challenging situations to see how they grow or change, and I put the main character of Melanie St. John into as many interesting, challenging situations as I could to help show her overall growth as she (hopefully) learned from her past each time as the story evolved, and she then (eventually) made better decisions.
I felt Melanie was also the type of person who needed a challenge too, and she also really wanted to get out of her hometown. She could have stayed in her “safety zone” in Texas her whole life if she wanted to and settled down with a typical “trust fund brat” like the one she was with, but instead I wanted to show how she wanted to move to NYC to get away from that truly toxic relationship in Texas. I felt it was the best way to handle that situation in the story too, for it gave the character of Melanie a chance to really grow on her own for the first time in her young adult life when she was still in her twenties, which is important for all women to do I feel. (And even though this is fiction, I still hope that part inspires them to also do that if they ever want to leave a bad relationship and just start over somewhere else!)
How did you come up with the acronyms like BDL (Bad Date List), FF (Fearsome Foursome), T.O.P, (Texas Oil Princess)? I loved them!
Thank you! I just made them up—and I’m very happy you like them! 
(They were fun to think about and ponder over too.)
Did you like writing Whitney, “Miss Barbie Doll,” and Eva, “Miss Exotic”?
What great questions, for these two characters really were written to be the opposites of each other in many ways…
Eva was very hard to write and I often got very sad when I did, for she was my most tragic character. She was meant to show a person’s dark, painful choices and bring out their troubling emotions at times, especially if they felt they didn’t really “fit in” wherever they were in life like Eva always did… whereas Whitney was the fun, carefree “party girl” with nothing to worry about except her next glass of bubbly most of the time because everything was always handed to her easily, though I did try to show her growth too by the end.
In my upscale world there are all types of people, but I see this kind of “Whitney” character a lot, and I wanted to show that in the book. There are also a lot of “Eva’s” in regards to how they’ll do anything to be included in this high-society world, but they actually come from all walks of life and aren’t limited to just being “exotic types.” I mainly created Eva to be that to make her the opposite of Whitney in appearance.
Lastly, who inspired Barc? I MUST know!
No one in particular, for like Whitney and Eva’s character’s, there are a lot of “Barc’s” in this upscale, elite world. I actually created the character of Barc as an example of how you can be fooled by someone’s appearance, their “story,” pedigree, or even their charisma (and even for a long time), and you have to be careful to see what is really inside the initial package you are first presented with. For like a well-wrapped gift, it could look lovely and shinny on the outside, but sometimes opening it up is really like opening Pandora’s box—and the actual gift you’re left with isn’t what it “appeared” to be. I unfortunately run across this all the time in my social circles (with both men and women), so I had no trouble creating a fictional version for the book. He’s a character I hope women will learn from though!
This was my Barc
James Spader from Pretty in Pink, oldie (HA HA) but a goodie
Reading Renee 