Good morning guys! Today is a new day and with it, we bring you a great guest post by lovely author Calista Lynne. We are honored to have her here in the blog and can't wait for you guys to know more about her.


Authors wouldn’t be able to write if they didn’t get inspiration from somewhere. People ask me where mine comes from and I’m honestly not overly sure. A good chunk of it probably comes from the fact that I’m an expat who just can’t get a hang of British culture. Allow me to explain how I came to be where I am.

The week I turned eighteen, I moved to England to pursue a Drama and Theatre degree. With only television and films as a jumping point, I entered a land where people looked scandalized by someone asking “What’s up?” and assumed I was an expert on Donald Trump. Although certain Britishisms threw me off, such as figuring out the correct answer to “You alright?” and understanding why exactly everyone was so angry about Maggie Thatcher, my main issue was being legal drinking age.

Everything went from beers hidden in brown paper bags to schools touting how they do their best to make alcohol cheap for students. The change probably would have been more difficult if I had ever been someone to sneak out beer in brown paper bags, but my first experience drinking came overseas. While everyone at home was dreaming of turning 21, I was being handed a violently blue drink called WKD at my first party. It tasted more like it should have been sold in juice boxes than glass bottles; apparently the English middle schoolers chug it like water. If my inexperience in this sort of thing wasn’t evident enough, though, I also thought a group of students rolling cigarettes were preparing to smoke marijuana which earned me more than a few strange looks and sealed my fate as the Token American.

That night I didn’t get drunk. I was informed that in order to be properly British- something I was aspiring to in order to impress my high school friends- it was my duty to order a full english breakfast with a hangover. In order to meet this goal, the next time I saw the opportunity to get cheaply inebriated I took it. Vodka lemonades! Whiskey and coke! Wine!

I learned I am a depressed drunk. Insanely so.

The strongest memory of that night was crying on a French girl about how I want to keep bees one day. I must have looked rather tragic as well considering a double decker bus driver leaned out his window to give me a high five. And I didn’t even have a hangover the next morning so I never crossed the threshold into being a Proper Brit. Tell the queen I’m sorry.

Being the dictionary definition of lightweight isn’t exactly an asset in a country where pubs never card and Guinness is cheaper than gentrified coffee. Drinks as simple as cider have led me to perform in an open mic tipsy and unintentionally insult a film director at a screening in the Google headquarters. So now I stick to Ribena and tea like the grandmother I am and pray that one day I’ll develop some sort of alcohol tolerance. Honestly, figuring out the difference between aubergine and courgette is a bigger issue for me at the moment. Not to mention actually getting to Ikea by London Underground instead of accidentally ending up in Essex.

If this alcohol intolerance isn’t bad enough, I’m also extremely secretive about the fact that I’m a published author. Those two facts don’t mix well. Perhaps I use a mountain of pseudonyms because I feel like I’m showing off if I tell anyone, or it might be because writing is a very intimate thing and I’m not sure if I want friends to see that far into my mind. Hiding what I’m doing all the time when writing or working on promotions has been difficult and on more than one occasion the beans have spilled. So right now I’m an American Hannah Montana living in London who is a student/steward during the day and writer at night, with the occasional tryst in a publishing house. It gets complicated. Not as complicated as things are for my characters, though, who are two female, asexuals in a relationship.