Buccaneer Blogfest - DAY ONE - About Me

AHOY! AHOY! 
Batten down the hatches! 


Today is the first day of the BUCCANEER BLOGFEST! 

For DAY ONE, an introduction is in order. 

My name is Jessa Russo, and I write young adult fiction. My debut novel, EVER - a YA paranormal romance - will be released later this year from Curiosity Quills Press.


If you'd like to, you may follow me on Twitter
Or add my author profile on Facebook
Or if you'd prefer, you can just "like" my author page on Facebook

I'm pretty much obsessed with all things paranormal, and I LOVE visiting old cemeteries. The first one I ever went to was an old cemetery in San Juan Capistrano. I was sixteen years old, it was Halloween night, and IT WAS AWESOME. Thus began my love affair with cemeteries, which eventually fueled my love for another obsession of mine: New Orleans. I'd live there if my husband would agree to it. Or well, even just right outside New Orleans would be okay with me, or heck, anywhere in the south. But he's convinced he wants to move up north to Oregon or somewhere cold like that and I say absolutely never going to happen. I need my heat and sunshine, and I mean I need A LOT of it.
So here we remain, in sunny southern California, my home sweet home.

I was raised in Mission Viejo, California, where I lived until I was 16. Then we moved to San Clemente, where my mom still resides. I have lived in quite a few different places around southern California, like Tustin, Huntington Beach and Corona. The furthest away I've ever lived was Lake Havasu, AZ (stayed 8 months), Las Vegas, NV (stayed about two months before running back home to my mom with my tail between my legs), and Phoenix, AZ (moved there when our daughter was about a year old, and it was the worst three years of my life. No offense to the Phoenicians, but it just wasn't for me.)

Now we are in Wildomar (a city you've NEVER heard of), which is near Temecula (a larger city you've probably also never heard of).

We have a nine year old daughter who I have tried two different times to homeschool because I'm kind of a spaz and I'm terrified she's going to get lost in the crowd, fall through the cracks, and end up hating school like her dad and I did. Unfortunately, homeschooling isn't the answer either because she and I are both VERY stubborn, and it really wasn't working. Now that I've signed a publishing contract and I can actually say I have a deadline, homeschooling would work even less, so back to school she heads in the Fall. I have to trust that she'll be okay, and that she won't fall through the cracks.

My husband and I have been married less than a year - October 2011 - but we've been together much longer than that. He loves me for all my quirks, and believe me, there are MANY. We're complete opposites in a lot of ways - one of the biggest ways would probably be how uber emotional I am, and how stoic he is. I'm hoping our daughter will be perfectly in the middle of the two and not wear her heart on her sleeve like her mama. We'll see. I'm pretty sure she's already much tougher than I am. 

If you don't count the pages and pages of angst-filled poetry from my youth, I began writing seriously in 2009. My first attempt was an adult suspense, taking place in New Orleans. I set the story there because I'm absolutely obsessed with that city, as I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately though, I'm not convinced I am an adult fiction writer, and I found that I was having trouble forming the story, so I stopped, and tried another one of my many ideas. i believe that it will eventually become New Adult, and look forward to picking up that WIP and diving in again soon. Only after I've made all my YA WIPs happy though. And like my many quirks, my YA WIPs are also MANY (as you can see on the right side of this blog).  

So, there's a brief introduction, that really wasn't brief at all. Welcome to my world. I hope you'll follow along, and I especially hope you'll join the BUCCANEER BLOGFEST crew!

If you'd like more info on the BUCCANEER BLOGFEST, please check out Courtney's post. If you'd like to sign up, do it! (Linky below)