Chicklish: GUEST POST: Stacy Kramer and Valerie Thomas, authors of From What I Remember

From What I Remember is a fun-packed road-trip novel by Stacy Kramer and Valerie Thomas, and here's more about it...

"Life is nothing like you planned. Even when you've planned absolutely everything. Kylie Flores - class brain and movie addict - has been planning her big graduation day speech for three months. A scholarship student, she would never dream of mixing with the likes of Max Langston - rich, undeniably handsome and athletic, but totally dead from the neck up. So it's a total mystery when Kylie wakes up in Mexico, with the hangover from hell, in a bed she doesn't recognise, next to Max - and they are both wearing wedding bands...Rewind 48 hours to find out just how and why they got there!"

I read and really enjoyed From What I Remember this summer, and my short review is here.

As part of the From What I Remember blog tour, we're pleased to introduce an exclusive deleted scene from the novel, with huge thanks to Stacy Kramer, Valerie Thomas and Electric Monkey at Egmont UK.

From What I Remember by Stacy Kramer and Valerie Thomas - DELETED SCENE

When we decided to use a deleted scene as a blog post, we went into our files and searched for all those scenes that ultimately failed to make it into FROM WHAT I REMEMBER. What we found, however, is that we didn’t have very many deleted scenes at all, which surprised us. We’d like to think it’s because everything we write is perfect, instantly, but of course that’s not the case. Instead, what we realized is that while we don’t throw many scenes out wholecloth, we do rewrite scenes so many times that they often transform into entirely new scenes by the time they are finished.

Below is a deleted scene we wrote quite early in the process of writing the book. It was written before we knew that we were going to use several different voices. At that point we thought the book was going to be from Kylie’s and Max’s point of view, and only later did we decide to include Will’s, Jake’s and Lily’s. This deleted scene is from Kylie’s point of view, about her brother Jake, but what’s kind of interesting about it is that had this survived the cutting process, at least part of it would likely have been written from Jake’s point of view, as it centers around a subject that is near and dear to Jake’s heart – the rain forest. Here, Kylie talks about Jake’s interest in the forest while also comparing the forest canopy’s separate ecosystem to Jake’s condition. At the end of the scene Kylie refers to Jake as being autistic; only later did we decide to refine his condition to Asperger’s Syndrome. It is not entirely clear to us why we deleted this scene, or decided against transforming it into something that Jake said. We found it in the files, dusted it off, and decided to share it with you.

Yesterday I read about a tribe in Brazil that only has five members left. One died last week, the article said, and that death left them with five. How is that possible? Can you have a tribe with only five members? What will happen when they all die? That tribe will no longer exist, all the things they did will die with them. How they hunted for monkeys, or termites, or whatever they ate, and how they created a pipe out of a tiny reed they found in the river, or wove a certain palm together to use as a sleeping mat, and the songs they sang to their babies to lull them to sleep – it will all die.

It’s things like this that make it hard to live life as if nothing like this is going on all around us. But what can we do? I can’t save the tribe. I can’t even make myself happy. But it makes it all that much worse to know that the world is falling to pieces bit by bit, every second of every day, and I’m just standing by, dawdling on my way to school, pushing cereal around my bowl in the morning, doing nothing at all of any worth.

My brother Jake became consumed when he was 2 and a half years old with rain forests. First he wanted to know about the canapy of leaves at the top. He could read by then, and he read a book about the virgin trees that grow so tall above the forest floor that they are separate ecosystems from the rest of the forest. We didn’t know it then, but Jake is sort of a separate ecosystem from the world, even from his family. We all breath the same air, but Jake has different weather than us.

At four Jake could tell you the difference between a coral ant’s mating practices and a fire ant’s. He knew that leaf cutter ants could virtually tear down an acre of forest in little less than a week, and he made sure we knew it too. He talked about it all day long, and I really mean that. He would wake up talking, and it would become so unbearably tedious that you wouldn’t even listen at all, ever, not the whole day long, it was the only way to survive. Which of course made you feel horrible, shot through with guilt and shame, but we all have our defense mechanisms and those of us who live with an autistic brother most likely have more to defend against than others.

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Thank you very much, Stacy Kramer and Valerie Thomas!

From What I Remember is published by Electric Monkey at Egmont UK and is available in all good bookshops now.