Relationships aren’t easy in debut YA novel

For many authors, it usually takes a healthy dose of courage to write their first novel, but for Jeff Bishop, it took a nasty vehicle accident that laid him up for weeks to start the process.

Bishop’s debut novel, “A Healthy Dose of Allison Tandy,” is hitting bookstore shelves all across the country, but locals can meet the author in person as he pays the Shawano Public Library a visit July 20. The book is described on Amazon as “You’ve Reached Sam” meets John Hughes as Cam spends the summer after his senior year pursuing the ex-girlfriend who viciously dumped him the year before.

The book geared for young adults is art imitating life, as Bishop said he’d had a relationship with a girl that ended once high school did.

“Like a lot of people, I was dating someone in high school and you get to the point where everyone asks the same question that I think is impossible to answer — what do we do next year?” Bishop said. “The inevitable answer is, you break up, because you’re both going off to college.”

The Illinois native, who now lives on the west coast of the United States, noted that even if high school sweethearts decide to keep the relationship going once they’ve received their diplomas and start planning their futures, there are plenty of challenges that test whether they’re really meant to spend their lives together.

“I have a couple of friends who recently got married but first met in high school,” Bishop said. “They initially broke up but then got back together and then moved across the country together. It worked out for them, but that’s obviously not the case with the vast majority of high school couples.”

In the book, Allison is left in a coma following a car crash, while Cam has his own tragedy on the basketball court by tearing his ACL. In real life, Bishop was the one in bad shape when he had a nasty encounter with a semi truck.

“I was driving back to school (at the University of Illinois) in the fall of 2014 and got run over by a semi truck on Labor Day,” he said. “It was really bad. We’re talking the Jaws of Life. I was lucky to be alive.”

Bishop had to leave college for a while due to a traumatic brain injury that resulted from the accident as he underwent multiple surgeries for his head and his hands.

“There is still pieces of windshield that are stuck in my scalp that they couldn’t get to,” he said.

Bishop also had to learn memory recall and how to speak again. He lamented how all of his friends had gone off to college, but he was stuck at home having to recover “in a dark room.” While recovering, the man who started college to be an economy major decided to turn his attention to writing.

“Besides going to all these doctor and rehab appointments, I figured I might as well put some of this time to good use,” Bishop said. “It started out as half-journaling, half-writing but from there, a narrative came to form.”

He started the first draft for “Allison Tandy” in 2016, and then in late 2017, he got involved with a program called Pitch Wars, where published authors and editors pick a writer, read their manuscript and come up with ways to make the book better.

“I sold it in late 2018, with the understanding that it was going to require some rewrites because while I’m good at writing jokes and dialogue and things like that, plot was a little difficult,” Bishop said.

“Allison Tandy” was about 150,000 words when Bishop finished the first draft, but now the book is down to a more manageable size with about half the word count. He noted that his writing, in the beginning was self-taught, with no creative writing classes to his credit when the journey to the published novel began.

“The first draft took me about a year, but it was this monstrosity,” Bishop said. “It will be interesting to read what made the final, final cut.”

Even though the final book is over 360 pages and geared toward a high school-aged audience, a critic from Kirkus Reviews claimed it was “fun” and “fast paced.” Bishop noted that it’s possible to engage young adult readers without making the story seem too childish.

“My frustration with books was that they read like they were younger than I was at that age,” he said. “That’s why I turned a lot to movies.”

Bishop added that it helped that he grew up in Evanston, Illinois, living two houses down from where John Hughes filmed “Sixteen Candles.” He noted movies like “Mean Girls” and “Superbad” really resonated with him.

“That was what I loved, and I wasn’t really seeing that on the page,” Bishop said, adding, “It’s been about 10 years since I graduated high school, and books have come a long way in more accurately representing high school, which is great. I think my initial instinct was to recreate what I’d seen on the screen on a page.”

lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com