MUSE MONDAY
If we have one really good friend in life, someone who we can always rely on, and we would walk to the ends of earth for, we can count ourselves really lucky. CJ has a great post today on friendship and real life experience adding to our fiction. Enjoy!
Good friends are blessings. Most women have at least
one person they can truly rely on. I call
I am blessed with a supportive circle of friends who
have helped me walk every step of the way through life. Being married and
raising a family while working full-time was stressful. Having friends who were
simply a phone call away, helped me get through some of life’s toughest days.
Hence, I wanted to write a story about friendship.
Friends Who Move Couches was inspired by true-life
events in both my life and in my friend’s lives. Yet many aspects are
different. First and utmost, because this is fiction, I spiced my life up and
married myself off to a man who cheated on me. It is true that I do come from a
small family and am frivolously addicted to friendship, but thankfully, I
married Jeff Zahner, not Mark Grey (the husband in my book). Throughout my
thirty-eight-year marriage to Jeff, I often wondered how many men would so
easily smirk and shake their heads at my escapades. But Jeff and I have been
faithful to each other since the day we met. (He assures me I can state this.
He does not want to end up a character in one of my thrillers.)
All of my novels are somewhat inspired by my life but Friends
Who Move Couches is the closest I can come to a memoir. It reflects my
experiences with raising three children, dealing with Alzheimer’s, suffering
health issues, and the main topic, surviving the loss of friendship. I believe,
because so many chapters were based on real-life trials and tribulations of
friendship and motherhood, readers resonated with and related to Nikki.
Most of the characters are real. In fact, one of my
best friends who is mentioned in the book, Carol Crandall, is the model in my
ad Friends Who Move Couches, do we really need them?
Blurb:
Nikki Grey's idea of living dangerously is not
wearing a seatbelt, yet calamity always seems to find her.
Friends Who Move Couches is a laugh-out-loud
yet insightful story about life, friendship, quieting your inner critic, and
surviving rejection.
Married to a workaholic, mothering three
rebellious kids, and feuding with neighborhood friends, Nikki Grey forgets her
problems one afternoon by smoking marijuana. That blunder ignites a lifelong
yet dormant medical condition, and she loses her driver’s license. Suddenly
stranded in her home, she’s forced to stare out the window at women who have
ostracized her.
Her true friends encourage her to concentrate
on her health, but Nikki is her own nemesis. She embarks on a scheme to win
back neighborhood friends and plunges into efforts that only end in muddying
her reputation. She becomes the butt of neighborhood jokes.
Foolishly, her ache to mend her broken
relationships escalates.
Not until her two-timing husband asks her a
question that catapults her frivolous suburban life into a tailspin, is she
forced to stop reaching for others, stand on her own, and decide: Who should
she keep in her life and who should she kick to the curb?
Excerpt:
Evy
opens a folder he’s brought along. “I’ll draw the list of good friends. Those
who move bodies.”
He
hands me the paper. “You write down friends who stab you in the back, like
Ellie, on your list.”
“Why
am I a bad friend?” Ellie squeals.
“Because
your mouth runneth amok.”
“Nikki,
am I a good friend?”
“A
very good friend,” I say. I write Friends Who Move Couches on the top of my
list and enter Natasha’s name beside the number one.
Evy
drops his pen and stares at me.
“What?”
I react. “I’m not putting Ellie on the bad list.”
He
stands up, points a finger, and taps the top of my paper. “What does this mean?
Friends who move couches?”
“That’s
the saying. Which kind of friend are you? A friend who moves a couch or a
friend who moves a body?”
“My
God, save them from themselves. The saying is ‘A good friend will help you
move, but a true friend will help you move a body.’ No mention of couches. Has
that seizure crashed your memory?”
“What?
It’s not friends who move couches?”
“No!
No couches.”
Contact Links:
Website: www.cjzahner.com
BookBub: http://bit.ly/BBProjectDream
Links for Purchase
Thanks Brenda! This was a fun blog. Friendship means the world to me!
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