Spotlight & Giveaway: EVERY VERSION OF YOU by Natalie Messier

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Natalie Messier to HJ!

Hi Natalie and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, EVERY VERSION OF YOU!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Every Version of You follows Josephina “Joey” Vasquez, a 32-year-old Los Angeles lawyer whose life looks great on paper but is sparse in reality. She’s grown distant from her closest friends, she mostly spends her free time with her grumpy geriatric cat, and her career isn’t as emotionally rewarding as she once hoped.

When Joey attends a dinner party hosted by Elijah, the best friend she’s been in love with for a decade and a half, she runs into the one person she’d hoped to never see again: Alex Aquino, a rich asshole who always seems to witness Joey at her worst. After getting into a fight with Alex, she leaves the dinner party…and dies.

After death, Joey finds herself in a waiting room where she’s told that due to her multitude of regrets in her first life, she qualifies for a second chance. She can return to an earlier point in her life and attempt to “get it right.” She returns to her freshman year of college, determined to make Elijah fall in love with her, only to find herself strangely drawn to Alex. What follows is a story of love, self-discovery, and second chances.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

I’ll include two of my favorites. The first is related to the theme of regret and an unfulfilling life, and the second is connected to the romance.

I think the difference between the happiest way our lives could go and the saddest is a much finer line than we like to think. A couple decisions. A matter of seconds. Tiny moments that add up to a completely different life.

“I know from experience, with zero doubt, that I will always be in love with you. Until the day I die, and even after that, I would change the fabric of time and space for even the chance that you could love me back.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• One fun fact is that this story started as a pilot script that I wrote about a year before I drafted the novel. The pilot was originally called “Take Two.” And then I wrote the novel and even queried and sold it as “The Second Life of Joey Vasquez” before retitling it with my publisher. The line that my final title is taken from in the book actually got added in revisions after landing on my new title.
• Also, there’s a cat subplot in the book that didn’t exist in my original pilot, and it mostly got added due to me crying while watching Silence of the Lambs because there’s a scene where (sorry, spoilers for a 30+-year-old movie) a woman gets abducted in front of her home, and then the camera pans up to her cat in the window. I got so emotional at the thought of this cat waiting for its owner who might not come back. It made me think of my cats waiting for me if I were to die, which stuck in my mind until I wrote the first draft of my book and added Ruthie the cat. Also, I feel the need to defend myself because I can usually handle my horror, and it’s almost definitely the only time a horror movie has ever made me cry. But cats always get me!

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Joey is first attracted to Alex very reluctantly because she knows a previous version of him who she wasn’t a fan of. She’s drawn to his charm and charisma and shameless appreciation of her.

Alex is initially attracted to Joey’s intelligence and the way she takes no shit and isn’t scared to tell him what she really thinks of him. He isn’t used to that kind of refreshing honesty and really wants to impress her and win her over.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

Despite the fact that I read a lot of romance at all spice levels and nothing fazes me in other people’s writing, I always feel like a blushing bride when I write sex scenes. I usually avoid writing them for as long as possible, to the point where when I applied to Reese’s Book Club LitUp Program I didn’t realize I had “insert sex scene” still in my manuscript. I had gone back and written the scene, I had just forgotten to take out the note to myself for future drafts. With that said, here’s the tiniest of snippets:

“Tell me you feel this too,” he murmurs. “Tell me it’s not just me.”
“I feel it too,” I say, ending on a gasp as he pushes into me.

Readers should read this book….

My goal with Joey in Every Version of You was to tell a very human story. Humanity is inherently flawed and messy, but it’s also hopeful and resilient. This book is about trying, and failing, and trying again. Readers should pick it up if they’ve ever felt like they needed a second chance, if they’ve ever felt lost or listless, and if they need hope that things can, and will, get better.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m not sure I can say much beyond the fact that I am working on my second novel, which is unconnected from Every Version of You. What I will say is that it will be romantic, and it will be speculative, and there will be yearning.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: Happy to provide two finished copies of EVERY VERSION OF YOU by Natalie Messier for a giveaway. U.S. based entries only

To enter Giveaway, please share this post on your Socials and Leave a comment below to this Q: If you could relive a formative time in your life, would you take the opportunity? When would you go back to, and what would you do differently?

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✨ Giveaway closes 3 days from the date this post is published.
  

Book Info:

For fans of The Love of My Afterlife and The Seven Year Slip, Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow Natalie Messier’s heartfelt contemporary romance debut follows a woman who gets a second chance at a formative time in her adult life—this time to win the “one that got away.”

Joey Vasquez’s life is the definition of good on paper. At thirty-two, she’s a lawyer on the cusp of making partner, she owns her house in Los Angeles, and she almost keeps pace with her doctor sister in her parents’ eyes.

When she reluctantly arrives at the very couple-y dinner party hosted by Elijah Aarons, the best friend she’s secretly pined after for fourteen years, she’s dismayed to find that the last person on earth she’d ever want to see again is also there: Alex Aquino. Your basic rich Silicon Beach bro asshole. The night couldn’t possibly get worse—and then she dies.

When Joey is given a second chance at life, she finds herself eighteen again, the year she first met both Elijah and Alex. Armed with memories from her first life, Joey is certain she’s come back to finally convince the one man she ever loved to love her back—so why does she find herself strangely drawn to the man she thought she hated?
Book Links:  Amazon | B&N |

Meet the Author:

Natalie Messier is a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow and Los Angeles-based screenwriter. She has worked as a writers’ assistant for the series Severance and Chicago Fire, and her scripts have received recognition from NBC, Disney, Paramount, Final Draft, The Blacklist, NHMC, and the Austin Film Festival. Originally from south Texas, she is a proud Mexican-American. When she’s not writing, she can be found searching for LA’s best matcha lattes, reading romance novels, and cuddling with her two cats.
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