M. L. Edmunds

I get excited to come to work just so that I can make you smile. 

Do you find me coming to your desk to make you laugh cute? 

Or am I a nuisance you would rather not have? 

Have you told her about me? That girl you go home to every night. 

Because I think about her a lot. Even though you never mention her to me. 

Everyone else asks how she is, but I am too scared to. 

Because I still find your theatrics funny, 

And I am pretty sure you are doing them for me. 

And I am pretty sure you didn’t laugh this much before I got here. 

I ask like it even matters anyway. 

You are going to leave soon. Who is going to play with me then? 

The office won’t have as much laughter, and I might not enjoy coming anymore. 

I want you to be one of those guys, the ones who let me eat their fries. 

I have a ton of friends like that, and I would settle for you just being one of them. 

But I don’t dare ask if you want that too.

Do you think you will come back? I am pretty sure we would still have a place for you. 

By then I should be better than I am now. I could have accomplished something. 

Grown into someone that you could love. 

 Or you could move on and become someone amazing.

And the memory of you will forever sit in the back of my mind

Appearing as a faint smile on my face 

Whenever I open that tricky drawer like how you taught me to. 

So for now I will just go to the back room

To call out your name, maybe tell you a joke

And laugh when you complain about how the world hates you.

Because you don't have to put in as much effort in making me smile as you do, 

Siena Gobel has the perfect life and nothing can possibly mess that up except for the annoying boy next door, Alec. When Alec starts dating Siena’s best friend and his home life takes a turn for the worse, Siena is forced to confront the reason she stopped talking to Alec all those years ago. Will Siena be brave enough to let Alec back into her life or will her fear cause her to possibly lose everything?

In this town, 

where we grew up

I can feel her in the air.

Walking down the street,

I think I see her. 

But in the end,

it was just 

“I thought they were icky and gross, like the vegetable version of a corpse. Don’t believe me? It’s wrinkly and embalmed. Need I say more? 

I am thinking about how much I hate pickles because my least favorite person on the planet, Alec Harrison, is currently munching on the world's fattest pickle across from me at the lunch table and is making no effort to contain the splatter.” 

--It Comes With a Pickle, my debut novel. 

Everything that I am, 

that I do, 

you start. 

You are the thing that motivates me. 

You are the reason I do anything.” 

I am so excited to finally announce the title of my book!! 

I started writing this book with a prompt that was about pickles. And over time I don’t know, the importance of pickles in the story kinda grew bigger and bigger until it became an overarching motif in the story. 

I chose the title because it kinda feels like a warning that someone should give you when you order food, because the pickle juice gets all over everywhere and ruins the other things, especially if it’s right next to bread. And like half of the people I know don’t eat them anyway, so if there was a warnig then you could ask for the m taken off...

Honestly, this book was so fun to write because it gave me a chance to look back at my childhood in Chicago and how that city served as a landscape for growing up. I enjoyed picking up moments from my past and revisioning them through my protagonist's experience.

Featured in this drawing are the Sears Tower*, the John Handcock, and the Crain Communications Building. For me, these three are the most defining of the city and I am trying to figure out a way to incorporate them into the cover somehow. Any ideas?

It’s done and I am not letting myself make any more major changes!! (Because you know that I could do that forever...) 

I can’t believe that I started this project 14 months ago as something to entertain myself while I had no job.  It sure has come a long way since then. 

Now we move onto the pain that is copy editing. Ah!! 

“Our childhood was made up of junk food and American highways.” 

I am an artist who paints only the details. 

My brush strokes are so small and tiny 

I only see the mess the paint leaves.

while the grander picture remains a mystery. 

Each stroke adds to the chaos of jumbled colors, 

some seem to resemble a picture, an idea. 

Others only add to the madness. 

How am I to tell which is which? 

I want to see the picture I will eventually paint, 

but a blank canvas stares back at me. 

Each stroke is a guess of color, of direction. 

...how do you deal with writer’s block? And as much as I wish I could say that I never have to worry about it, I totally have days where just nothing flows. On those days I do one of two things: vomit or leave. 

Yes, I get that sounds a little gross but hear me out. 

Most people have it so easy writing the start of a story, but for me I find that the hardest part. Like how am I supposed to know what a character is going to say if I don’t know their personality yet? Are they sassy enough for that? Or how stoic is stoic? Would they find a joke funny? Will the reader find this joke funny? Am I being realistic and believable?

These questions permeate my mind as I sit down to write a new story. But every once in a while a scene appears in my head. The emotions pour out of invisible characters that slowly fade into existence. The background comes into view like the landing strip of an airport. Then the questions come.  How did they get in this situation? Who else knows about it? Better yet, how will they react to it? 

These questions slowly fill with answers. Then another scene appears, answering some of the questions, and springing more of its own. 

Soon enough I want to know how the scenes connect, how do they affect each other?

Oh boy, now those two characters have to interact. What do they say to each other? Do they get along? Is it realistic? Oh no, let’s have them fight, But why? Is that a good enough reason?