What inspired your idea for Full Flight?

Full Flight is inspired by my own time in high school, particularly marching band and my small hometown. It was such a joy to revisit band memories, to pull out my saxophone and play through some of the tunes we played during football games for old times’ sake, and of course to listen to my school’s fight song on repeat while writing.

Were you in a band? If so, do you have any fun or funny memories from that time?

Look, what happens on the band bus stays on the band bus, even a decade later. (Haha!) There are too many memories to pick from, honestly, but one of my favorites was that during football games, if our team was up by 50 points (which happened a few times in my high school career), our director had this great tradition of having us play the fight song at the touchdown, but ~adding a little spice to it~. We would play it much too fast, much too slow, or—my personal favorite—in a jazz/swing style.

Band moms also would make us sandwiches to eat on the bus after away games, and one band mom was assigned to throw them “to us” (see: at us) from the front of the bus. I still flinch a little when I see sandwiches in Ziploc baggies. I was beaned in the side of the head by one too many PB&J’s.

Is there anything about Full Flight that will surprise readers of Amelia Unabridged?

Amelia Unabridged was my love letter to books and bookish humans. Full Flight is my love letter to marching band and the power and joy of playing music communally. So they’re very different, but I hope readers from Amelia will love Anna and Weston as much as I do.

What comes first for you, the plot or the characters, and why?

I think a little of both. Often I’ll have what I call “flashbulbs”, brief glimpses of a character doing a particular action or experiencing a specific feeling, but the rest of the details are cloudy. That’s the great and terrible part of being a writer for me: Filling in the character, the scenery, the everything around that flashbulb.

What do you hope readers take away from Full Flight?

I love the quote from Jane Austen, ““My characters shall have, after a little trouble, all that they desire.” I think if I had to amend it for my own books, I’d say, “My characters shall have, after a great deal of grief and struggle and despair, all that they require and then some.”

I’m one of those people who obstinately believes in the pervasiveness of hope. So even if my books have sad parts or hard parts, I hope that readers walk away seeing hope at the end of it, both in the characters lives and in their own.