By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Chelsea Bobulski’s second novel “Remember Me” is about ready for delivery — as is her second child.
The young adult novel on the Feiwel and Friends imprint will drop on Aug. 6. Bobulski’s due date is Aug. 10. On Aug. 5 from 6 to 8 p.m., Bobulski will celebrate the publication of “Remember Me” with a book signing at Gathering Volumes, 196 E. South Boundary in Perrysburg.
The Perrysburg resident will have books to sell, and cookies to eat, and she hopes she’ll be on hand to autograph those books — she’ll let people know if she’s in the hospital.
“Remember Me,” a romantic thriller with a dark side, comes on the heels of her first published novel, “The Wood,” released in 2017.
Often writers confront a sophomore jinx when it comes to getting a second book in print. “For me it wasn’t quite as much of a struggle because ‘The Wood,’ even though it was my first book published, was actually my fifth book that I wrote in pursuit of publication.”
Bobulski, 29, has dreamed of being a writer since third grade. “In my teens I started putting authors on a pedestal thinking no way anybody can do that. They must be born authors,” she said.
While a history major at Ohio State, she took a writing class at the Thurber House with writer Lisa Klein. “For the first time I heard somebody say: ‘I started the same way, with a blank page.’”
Bobulski set out to be an author, inspired by the books she loved as a child, including the Harry Potter series.
While her books make have elements of fantasy, her life is no fairy tale.
About five years ago, she said: “I was in this horrible place. Maybe my dreams of being an author and a mother would not come true.”
Bobulski had gone through years of rejection of the manuscript for “The Wood” and other projects. “And my husband, Nathan, and I have been trying to get pregnant for almost two years.”
They turned to prayer, she said. She found reassurance to go on.
Now she is on the verge of the release of her second novel and delivery of her second baby. “So it’s all come together in that time. It was very special.”
“Remember Me” was inspired by a trip Bobulski and her mother took to San Diego around that time. They visited the Hotel del Coronado, a grand beachfront hotel built in 1880.
“That hotel had the feel of the past weaving into the present,” the novelist said. “You felt that the only thing standing between you and all the other people who had visited was time.”
The story took shape from those ghostly intimations. She wrote it while pregnant for her daughter, now 3.
While “The Wood,” which is set in a place very much like the rural outskirts of Columbus where she grew up, had its dark elements, “Remember Me” goes deeper.
The first sentence reads: “He’d known somehow, as he pulled the trigger, that death would not be the worst of what he would face.”
That launches the tale of ghosts and love.
The plot set in a haunted old hotel located to South Carolina, cuts between 1907 where we meet Lea and the summer of 2019 where we meet Nell.
Lea is about to enter into a marriage arranged by her bankrupted father to an arrogant tycoon with money and a mean streak. Her family’s well-being, she’s told, depends on this match. Nell has moved to the hotel with her father, who has taken a job as head of guest relations. Her mother has died a couple years before.
Lea sees this summer before her forced marriage as the last time she will be in any way free, and a romance ensues.
Nell is having a hard time getting her grounding in this new place where she has gruesome nightmares and hears threatening voices. She finds romance as well — and that’s not all that connects her to Lea.
When Bobulski’s agent was peddling the book, the pitch was the horror of “The Shining” meets the romance of “Titanic.”
“There’s that horror thriller aspect, but also a deep star-crossed lovers aspect. I like to play with the dark side of characters,” she said. “Sometimes you can look at a person and think how can you be so awful, and it’s because we don’t see the tiny little choices they’ve made through their lives.”
Maybe something happened that they took personally that they shouldn’t have. Maybe their attitudes have been warped by experience.
“I like to investigate that,” she said.
While the book is listed as being for readers 13 through 18, Bobulski said she considers it for readers in the upper end of that range. Still, she’s aware, many of her readers are in middle school. “So many kids read up.”
Bobulski said: “It’s not something I consciously think about when I’m writing because I just want to serve the story. … My number one priority is to serve the story first.”
When a younger reader buys the book “I do let parents know parents know what’s in it.”
They may, she said, want to read it first just to make sure they’re OK with it.
That’s a good thing, she said, because it can encourage conversations about how attitudes have changed, and maybe not changed.
She has several projects in the works, and one seems to be calling to her more than the others. But she knows in the coming months she’ll be occupied with taking care of her new baby.
Over the years she’s learned how best to structure her time. Writers are bombarded with advice on how to market their books by being active on social media and writing a newsletters.
“You can’t do it all and keep on writing,” she said. She does post on Instagram and Twitter.
“Your best marketing is to keep writing.”
While both “Remember Me “ and “The Wood” were thrillers with elements of horror. She said she also likes romantic comedy and would like to try that at some point.
She’d definitely would love to create a series. “Publishers aren’t looking at series as much,” Bobulski said. “They want to see how your first book sells. So you have to write it as a standalone with series potential.”
That’s not the case with “Remember Me,” but she has thought about a sequel to “The Wood.”
Writers never feel they’ve “arrived,” Bobulski said. There’s always another book to write.
“I don’t feel the same pressure that I have to keep striving to get to this dream. I can sit back a little bit and appreciate my family and the writing will come. I know that whether my next book comes out next year or three years from now, I feel secure that it will happen.”
