Traveling To Teens Tour: Guest Post with Kitty Keswick

Today, Kitty Keswick is here with a guest post about high school! Kitty Keswick is the author of Freaksville, which comes out tomorrow!

Here's a bit about Freaskville:
High school is hard enough when you’re normal. There’s peer pressure, book reports, the in crowd and the enormous zit that has a life of its own. Having a family whose skeletons in the closet lean toward the paranormal is not a topper on anyone’s list. Sophomore Kasey Maxwell is busy juggling the typical teen angst. Add visions, ghosts and hairy four-legged monsters into the mix and you get FREAKSVILLE. It’s a wonder Kasey has survived.

Every woman in the Maxwell family has the gift of sight. A talent sixteen-year-old Kasey would gladly give up. All she wants is a normal life. Shopping and talking about boys with her best friend and long-time sidekick Gillie Godshall consume her days. Until Kasey has a vision about Josh Johnstone, the foreign exchange student from England. The vision leads her into new waters, a lead in a play, a haunted theater…and into the arms of the Josh. Yet, both Kasey and Josh have secrets lurking in dark corners. Can Kasey’s new romance survive FREAKSVILLE?


High School equals Freaksville

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times… Hmm, I wonder if Charles Dickens was describing high school?

My teen years weren’t exactly a horror story…

I grew up in a small town in central California, where cows and fog were in the majority. The town has changed a lot. Now the cow-patty fields hold a Target, Kohl’s, and Borders books.

I was average, I think. I enjoyed some aspects of high school: yearbook and speech and debate. The cool thing about speech was the tournaments. We spent the weekend away from home in hotels and had a lot of fun. I plead the fifth on how a fake pink flamingo ended up in my possession.

I hated math class and counted the hours until it was over. Cried my eyes out over crushes gone bad. Thank God for Corey Hart on the boom box… Nope, we didn’t have iPods back in the dark ages.

I had a wonderful group of friends; some I’m still friends with. I think that’s what made high school bearable. Without them, well, I’d be in Freaksville.

Kasey Maxwell, my heroine in the novel Freaksville, has a great support system in her BFF Gillie Godshall. The two are cut from the same cloth in many ways—sparkly and fuchsia, maybe even trimmed with faux fur—even though Gillie towers over Kasey!

Friends make our lives richer. Without them our worlds would be a darker place. Kasey wouldn’t have as much inner strength without Gillie. Gillie is the researcher of the group, the one who provides Kasey with the info she needs to tackle the ghosts and the furry beasts…and even the British hottie who catches Kasey’s eye. When I wrote Freaksville, one of the first scenes that came to me was one where Gillie and Kasey were hanging out discussing how hot the guys from the TV show Supernatural are. It originally started out as a discussion of Spike vs. Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but to make it more up to date, I changed it to Supernatural.

The way the girls laughed and munched on Oreo cookies and a plethora of other junk food was so real, the scene solidified their friendship in my mind. I ended up trimming a lot of that scene down to the essence, but still it served as the backbone of Kasey and Gillie’s friendship.

I didn’t base Freaksville on real people or events, but I did draw from my life experiences, as all authors do. Ironically, I use to tell werewolf tales in high school. Some things never change.


Thank you so much for stopping by Kitty! You can visit her on the web at: http://www.kittykeswick.com/. Also, you can check out her blog Wolfy Chicks - which is a blog shared by her and Judith Graves (whose novel, Under My Skin, comes out in March).