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Inspiration for the book came from several directions. Hoover had recently gone to a concert of her favorite band, The Avett Brothers, and a line from one of their songs
-- "Decide what to be and go be it" -- kept replaying in her head. Then one of her sons got a part in a community theater production that left her tinkering on her laptop during rehearsals, which included looking up videos of people performing slam poetry. That in turn led to her trying to find a book with a main character who was a slam poet. When she couldn't find such a book, it occurred to her that she could write one herself. "When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph I was like 'Oh, I can go with this,'" Hoover said. "I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going." Even after being able to quit her job and signing with Atria, Hoover said it wasn't until a book signing she organized with other indie authors at a Chicago hotel in the fall that her popularity began to sink in. "I remember coming down the stairs and there was this huge line with hundreds of people and someone goes,
'There's Colleen Hoover,' and they all start freaking out," she said. "That was I think the first moment that it hit me that this was way bigger than I thought." Hoover grew up in rural East Texas, was married with a baby by the age of 20 and got a degree in social work from Texas A&M-Commerce. She worked as an investigator with Child Protective Services before returning to school to get her qualifications to teach special education, which she did for a year before returning to school again to get a minor in infant nutrition and going to work for the federal Women, Infants and Children program, known as WIC. Maryse Black, a book blogger who has mostly read and reviewed indie books in the last few years, was among Hoover's early fans. Black reviewed "Slammed" a couple months after Hoover uploaded it, asking readers if they were in the mood for "a book that will hook you from the first few lines, make you smile, make you laugh, make you ABSOLUTELY fall in love, and then sigh and sigh and sigh again." "She's 100 percent real in her writing," Black said in a recent phone interview. "I feel like I can relate to her characters. I can relate to their situations and I can relate to their reactions. I can see it actually happening as I'm reading the book it plays out in my head like a seamless movie." On a recent blog post Hoover shared with her readers what she called "a really depressing blast from the past"
-- a MySpace post from 2006 she recently came across in which she writes that although she's certain she "was born to write a book," she believes that she never will. She writes that she's researched whether it would be worth it to even try and decided that with the low odds of ever getting a publisher or being able to support herself writing, she shouldn't even try. She writes on her blog, "Good thing I didn't listen to myself. It also says a helluva a lot about how much the publishing industry has changed." ___ Online: Colleen Hoover's blog:
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