Chelsea Bobulski made her name with her fantasy novels, The Wood and Remember Me. Now, she’s branching out of fantasy and adding young-adult contemporary romance to her collection. Described as It’s a Wonderful Life meets Wish Upon A Star – All I Want For Christmas is the first book in a four-book deal set for publication in the fall of 2021.
Wise Wolf Books: You’ve previously published two young-adult fantasy novels, but this is your first young-adult contemporary romance to be published. How do you feel about that and what has been the most exciting thing so far?
Chelsea Bobulski: The whole thing has been extremely exciting! I’ve always had very eclectic tastes, and I grew up devouring almost every genre in sight, and I tend to get just as many contemporary ideas as I do fantasy, so I’m very excited to finally get to explore those types of stories now. I’m also so thankful to Wise Wolf Books for giving me the opportunity to explore four books set at Christmastime, and to be able to publish them all so close together as well, so that readers won’t have to wait longer than a few weeks for the next book in the series, allowing them to binge each book and see what happens next with their favorite couples.
WWB: What was your first experience with writing that you can remember?
CB: My first experience must have been the first time we had an author come speak to our third-grade class—it was the first time that it really dawned on me that writing could be a profession, and for a girl who was constantly forcing her friends to act out the stories in her head during recess instead of playing normal games, like tag or hide-and-seek, that sounded like the best job in the world. Not long after that, I remember watching a video interview with J.K. Rowling in our school library, which only further cemented the fact that I wanted to spend my life exploring castles and writing stories in coffee shops (which, from what I could tell, was what J.K. Rowling did all day). I have yet to explore castles, but I do love getting story ideas from interesting places (my second YA novel, Remember Me, was inspired by a trip to the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, a Victorian castle in its own right).
WWB: Do your books spring to life from a character first or an idea?
CB: This is such a hard question to answer because, for me, it’s kind of a chicken-or-the-egg type of question. I’m a very visual person, and usually the first scenes of an idea play out in my head like the preview to a movie—I don’t get the whole story, but I get enough to know what the story is going to be about, and who the characters are, so both plot and character tend to be so intertwined for me from the beginning, it can be hard to remember which came first. I will say that, just like with the my first YA novel, The Wood, Graham, the main character of All I Want for Christmas, did seem to just plop into my head one day and start telling me his story, so while I don’t typically remember which came first, all of my stories do tend to be very character-driven.
WWB: We know you like to write, but what do you like to read in your free time, and why?
CB: I’m typically reading at least 4-5 books at a time. Currently I’m reading three theology books (The Way Up is Down by Marlena Graves; Emboldened by Tara Beth Leach; and Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading by Eugene Peterson), one YA (Sources Say by Lori Goldstein, which is a brilliant take on fake news and the political landscape of our country today), one narrative nonfiction (D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazi’s, and Helped Win WWII by Sarah Rose), and one biography, (Alexander Hamilton) by Ron Chernow, along with the occasional dip into The British are Coming by Rick Atkinson (research for a story idea that’s been brewing in the back of my mind). I guess this goes back to having eclectic tastes, or maybe it’s that I love to be juggling a lot of different thoughts at any given time, or maybe it’s that I have two small children and so I keep stacks of books throughout my house for the rare moments when they’re both independently playing and I can read a few sentences. Whatever it is, I love being able to pick up a book in any room of the house and already be in the thick of it when I dive back in.
WWB: YA is known to be a difficult genre to break in to. What drew you to YA in particular?
CB: So, this answer always gets mixed reactions, but I have to be honest—I got most of my books at my local K-Mart growing up and, as such, I almost completely skipped the YA genre completely because, other than Harry Potter, K-Mart didn’t really stock YA when I was a teen—it wasn’t the “it” genre it is today. I read a couple Sweet Valley High books when I was ten or so, but other than that, I pretty much skipped straight to Stephen King, Nora Roberts, adult urban fantasy, and women’s fiction. It wasn’t until I was in college and a friend of mine let me borrow Twilight (the fourth book had just come out at that point and I hadn’t heard of the series at all) that I discovered YA as a genre, and it felt like coming home. I’d always loved stories and always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t find the right fit for my voice until I discovered YA, and then it was like this whole world opened up to me, both in reading and in writing. I think it’s because so much of my life was formed in those high school years. I love writing about falling in love in high school because I married my high school sweetheart (we just celebrated 16 years together this October, and we’ll be celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary this December!). I love writing about how uncertain everything is in high school, because it really is like this waiting room of life where you’re preparing for a future that everyone’s saying you need to figure out, but how do you figure out what you want to do with your life when you’re still not sure who you are as a person yet, independent from outside influences? It’s just such a special and formational time in a person’s life, and I think that’s what draws me to it the most.
Let’s talk a little about the book now – All I Want For Christmas:
WWB: The book has been described as It’s a Wonderful Life meets Wish Upon A Star. Were those the inspiration behind your novel, or is that a coincidence?
CB: Total coincidence—in fact, I hadn’t even seen It’s a Wonderful Life until last Christmas, when the book had already been written, but the second I saw it, I recognized how similar the themes were to All I Want for Christmas and realized it was the perfect comparison. This tends to be the case with all of my stories—I have yet to go into a story with a specific inspiration, but once the book is written, I can always see those kernels of stories I loved growing up, and I can definitely see a hint of Wish Upon A Star (a favorite movie from my preteen days that used to play on the Disney channel all the time) in my main character, Graham, who also makes a wish on a shooting star that he doesn’t expect to come true, but that ends up changing everything.
WWB: You’ve been quoted as saying, “All I Want for Christmas centers around the idea that we, as human beings, often don’t know what we want. We think we know what’s best for us, and we get these images in our heads of how great something might be, and, in so doing, we miss the blessings that are actually right in front of us.” Can you tell us about a time that you missed a blessing that was right in front of you?
CB: I think motherhood really brought this to the forefront for me. As women, we’re told we can have it all—the dream career and the perfect, pristine home and the adoring children who feel completely loved and cared for, with all of their needs met, and still have enough time to exercise every day, eat healthy, get eight hours of sleep at night, and be Instagram-ready at any moment—and it’s just not true, especially in the early years. Looking back, my first year of motherhood was more difficult than it had to be because I bought into the lie. I believed that I could do all of the things and still be my usual bright, cheery, creative self, and when it didn’t work, when I burnt out, when I hit rock bottom, that was when I realized I couldn’t do it all—nor was I meant to. Focusing on how dirty my house was, or on how I didn’t get to write, or “do anything for me” in the way that other women seemed to be able to do (because we live in a time when, thanks to social media, appearances are more deceiving than ever), meant that I missed the blessing of the baby giggles that proved to be fleeting, as that baby is now a four-year old kid, and I don’t know how she got so big. I also found myself wondering what the road not taken might have looked like, the career in law I could have pursued instead of writing and staying home with my children, or any other countless choices I made that could have made my life turn out so differently, but the second my thoughts started to go in that direction, God convicted me of how useless that pursuit is, because I am living the life I prayed for, and the only time I forget that fact is when someone else puts pressure on me to “do it all,” or when someone else puts up a veneer making it seem like they have more time in the day than the rest of us. When I let go of the pressure to be perfect, when I let go of the endless to-do lists and the feeling that the day is won or lost based on how much I accomplish, I can be fully present and appreciate every snuggle, every sparrow flying overhead on our morning walk, every cup of tea and magical sentence of a good book, and yes, even every dish that must be washed, for even that dirty dish is a blessing, especially when you think of how many people in this world go hungry and would give anything to have the blessing of many dishes to wash, for it would mean their stomachs are always full. That is what it means to me to be aware of the blessings that are right in front of us: to not take the sacrament of the present moment for granted, for it is all we have, all we are guaranteed, and I for one don’t want to waste it trying to live up to someone else’s standard of productivity and perfection. Our lives are what we make them to be, and that battle begins and ends in the mind, in the lies we buy into or reject, in the truths we hold or discard.
WWB: Your main character, Graham is very much in touch with his feelings and willing to own up to his mistakes. How important is it that both young boys and girls see these kinds of characters in the books they read?
CB: My husband and I talk about this a lot, about the culture of toxic masculinity and how subtle it can be in the messaging it gives our boys from a very young age, messages like “boys don’t cry”—that there’s something wrong with a boy if he is in touch with his feelings—and so while I think it’s really important for both boys and girls to learn how to navigate their emotions in a healthy way and to also learn that mistakes are a necessary part of growth, I think it’s even more important for our boys to get this messaging, because there’s nothing healthy about being told to bottle up your emotions, just as there’s nothing healthy in expecting girls to conduct themselves with empathy and politeness and care, but dismissing the crucial education of our boys in these same necessary traits by blanketing every potential learning opportunity with that damning sentence, “Boys will be boys.” The best men are empathetic. The best men are caring. The best men learn from their mistakes. But it’s really silly that I even have to characterize it by gender, that there’s even a different measurement given to boys than girls in our society, for in reality, the best human beings are empathetic; the best human beings are caring; the best human beings learn from their mistakes, and the only way our boys are going to learn this is by seeing it in the role models they look up to, be they real or fictional, for often fiction is truer than anything they may encounter in their present reality.
WWB: We hear you’re a big Harry Potter fan, which book was your favorite?
CB: I’m that strange person who loves the fifth Harry Potter book, Order of the Phoenix! It might just be because it’s the longest, or maybe it’s the emotional roller coaster of seeing all of these beloved characters go through ALL THE FEELS, but whatever it is, it stands out as the best of the best to me (with Goblet of Fire at a VERY close second). And yes, this is the Harry Potter hill I will die on.