Split Your Heart, Not Your Tongue

"Just remember that secrets are the foundation of a long relationship."- Alex Kinsley ( RED ) Possibly the last theme I want to talk about from RED is the factor of cheating. Now, this theme doesn't tie into the others, it's more of a standalone but it's a MAJOR theme in the novel. There's cheating in every possible form all over the place from beginning to end (basically). Everyone has secrets and unacknowledged feelings that they have to deal with; just like real life it begins to affect their relationships with the people around them. In some cases, cheating may seem like a good idea or the only option in order to be happy with someone ( A Tragic Heart has a perfect example of this) but in reality it should never be an option. We think we find the one for us and then suddenly things take an ugly turn and we find ourselves in the arms of another. The worst part is that we tend to try and justify it. To tell you the truth, our justifications make s...

"I guess in the end if you have to try that hard, it's no longer natural."- Mason Taylor ( RED ) For the last lesson/theme from RED , I'll talk about loving who you are. After traveling along the hard and frustrating journey to get to this point, the only option you really have is to love who you are. Once you made your mistakes and learned from them, dropped your ego, learned to forgive, started over, found yourself, been judged and learned to stop judging, now it's time to love the person you worked so hard to become.  After a while being who you once were no longer feels like a natural thing. You'll find yourself trying to fit in with others but something will always feel a little off about it. That's because you are someone new and it's time for you to embrace that someone. In RED , it takes a while for my characters to learn this but this is also a factor that doesn't happen overnight in reality. We're all a work in progress. Whe...

"We can't be judged. We can't be told we're not good enough because of our past. After all, we're all red on the inside..."-Peyton Hayley Giordano ( RED ) The theme I chose from last week was finding yourself and this week I'll take off from there. While finding yourself you're going to come across a lot of people who will have their own opinions about you and most of the time these opinions will come off as judgmental. For some reason, when we're in the process of changing people like to point out your past and the things/mistakes you used to do. It's like a constant reminder of who you used to be but the thing to remember is that, that's not important anymore. What's important is that you're moving on and trying to become the person you deserve to be. In RED , Peyton does a lot of things that every one of you will judge her for. You will yell at her in your heads and call her various names throughout the book...and I c...

"I somehow managed to play the protagonist and the antagonist in this story"-Peyton Hayley Giordano ( RED ) Last week I wrote about starting over after you already made those messy mistakes, dropped your ego and learned to forgive yourself and others. This week I want to talk about another major theme from RED : finding yourself.  When you focus on starting over you have to also focus on finding yourself. After being dragged through the mud and experiencing disappointment after disappointment, you have to hit the restart button. Restarting also means that things are going to have to change. In the process of us being dragged by our hair while our face scraps against the cement we become someone different. We just have to find out who this person is.  Finding yourself is critical in the process of starting over. If we don't gain a clear vision of who we are we'll just falter into another mess (and who wants that?). Not knowing who you are usually results i...

"That's your only way out... wrecking who you once were and rebuilding yourself from scratch."-Mason Taylor ( RED ) Starting over is hard but sometimes it's the only option we have. The only thing harder than starting over is staying where we are because it eventually will tear us to shreds. Last week I spoke about forgiveness and how important it is to forgive others and yourself. Well, after you forgive you need to learn to move on because that doesn't happen on its own. Starting over is another major theme from my upcoming novel, RED and it's a topic that needs to be discussed almost everyday. Each moment that goes by consists of someone trying to hit the reset button.  The characters in RED are both beautiful and flawed. This is what makes them so realistic. The main character, Peyton is on a journey to find herself and make a better life. She hits tons of bumps in the road (some she caused, others not so much) and there comes a time in the bo...

"I closed the bedroom door behind me. I could feel her crying herself to sleep but I had no time for feeling sorry. She betrayed me and that wasn’t something I could easily forgive her for. I needed time to myself."-Mason ( RED ) Forgiveness is a touchy subject but it's the topic I said I would talk about this week. Last week I talked about dropping your ego to become someone new and make a better life for yourself, and the week before that I talked about making mistakes and learning from them. These are all major themes in RED but forgiveness is probably one of the biggest. As I mentioned before, my characters are far from perfect and they make tons of mistakes (maybe even more than the average person) which causes for a lot of forgiveness to take place. From the moment the novel starts, Peyton struggles with forgiving her mother for leaving her the way she did (readers of A Tragic Heart knows exactly what I mean). Mason and Adalyn has some obstacl...

"I kissed him intensely and at the moment I didn’t care if I was making a mistake."-Peyton Hayley Giordano ( RED ) Starting today, I'm going to write blog posts based on the many themes of my upcoming novel, RED . I think sometimes people get so caught up in a story that they forget to take lessons out of them. I'm going to make it easier for you all to pick out the lessons and themes from the book. You'll understand more once you read it.    As most of you all know (hopefully all of you), no one is perfect...not one of us. Therefore, it only makes sense for characters in books to not be perfect. They need flaws like everyone else. RED is full of characters with flaws (some major, some minor). The topic of today's post is mistakes. We all make them and we're all guilty of them.    The problem with mistakes is that we usually know beforehand when we're making one. In fact, a lot of mistakes are premeditated but something inside of us p...