Love Means Zero by Daisy Jordan
About Love Means Zero
A chance encounter in a Rome hotel, two tremendously damaging photographs, and Hilton Joliet’s life is instantly altered. Previously working a dead-end job as an assistant in a portrait studio, she is now a freelance photographer for Game Set Match magazine, “the Us Weekly of tennis,” as she calls it.
Thrown rapidly into a jet-setting life of world-class tennis, the best seats at the best matches, and trailing the hottest young tennis stars and their model and actress girlfriends, Hilton, a former tennis player herself, can’t imagine a more fun job or a better way to jump-start her career while her boyfriend Luke finishes law school.
As Hilton spends more and more time away from home, grows closer and closer to Tanner Bruin—the world-ranked No. 3 player on whom she’s always had a huge crush—and becomes more and more hated by Aubrey Gage—the actress girlfriend of world-ranked No. 6 player Haidin Bayliss—Luke keeps a secret from her that could drastically change their six-year relationship.
It is through Hilton’s discovery of that secret, her love for the tennis tour, and her front-row glimpse into its most high-profile relationships that she starts to see how love doesn’t always mean near as much as she thought it did.
Author Daisy Jordan
About the Author
Daisy Jordan is an obsessive tennis fan and wrote Love Means Zero, in which Hilton Joliet gets a job as a photographer for a tennis magazine, so she could live out her dream-job fantasy through Hilton. But don’t worry if you’re not a tennis fan; Love Means Zero still has all the drama and suspense of Daisy’s previous books! Those books include Everything Happens for a Reason…, the Spin the Bottle series, and All That Sparkles Isn’t Real Sapphire. Before she published her first book, Daisy grew up in Indiana watching tennis all summer every summer on TV and having her own fair share of high school and college boy drama, much like her characters. She now lives in Denver and religiously fills out brackets for every Grand Slam with her brother Josh, while still managing to find time for boy drama. Daisy can be found online at:
www.daisyjordan.com
http://www.facebook.com/AuthorDaisyJordan
http://twitter.com/DaisyJordan06
http://myspace.com/daisy_jordan
Interview
Q: Do you write on a computer or with pen/pencil and paper?
A: I write on a computer most of the time, but there are times when I take a break to work with a pen and pencil. This happens if I’m writing a poem or song for the book and want to try it out on paper first, or if I’m working on a mystery and need to devise a code or some aspect of the story that may take more than one try to create.
Q: Worst rejection you’ve ever received?
A: This one stands out very clearly to me! It was from an agency in Denver that states on their website, “Consideration, respect, and good customer service regarding communication,” are things writers should expect from a good agent. They also say good agents should, “treat clients as the reason why they exist in the first place.” After submitting a query letter to them, I received the following rejection email: “Dear A: Author, Thank you so much for sending [this] Literary Agency your query. We’d like to apologize for the impersonal nature of this standard rejection letter. Rest assured that we do read every query letter carefully and, unfortunately, this project is not right for us. Because this business is so subjective and opinions vary widely, we recommend that you pursue other agents. After all, it just takes one ‘yes’ to find the right match.”
I was so completely turned off by this condescending letter that I was glad I would not be working with this agent. All over their website are other quotes about how a good agency treats all writers as individuals and is personal, warm, and caring. I later read on the owner’s blog that the agents themselves do not even actually read the query letters; they are read by an administrative assistant who has no background in writing or publishing. Awesome. :p
Definitely not the right agency for me! I have received other, and much less offensive, rejection letters from actual agents who could at least manage to type my name into the beginning of the email. 🙂
Q: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
A: Currently I have another job besides writing, but in ten years I hope to call writing my only career! I see myself with a family, which will take up a lot of my time, and I want to be able to devote my “work time” solely to writing! 🙂 As for where I’ll be living…who knows?! I’m in Denver right now, and I love it, but ten years is a long time from now, and I’m not saying I won’t move!
Q: What’s next for you?
A: Lots of things! I am currently working on the follow-up to Love Means Zero, but I will be publishing two more books before that one comes out. So I will be spending a lot of time working on all three of those books, and I’ve also been submitting my work to agents. I hope to continue doing a lot of online promotion. I also have ideas for my next couple of books after the one I’m writing now. And, I have lots of travel plans! Next up are some weekend trips, a beach trip this spring, and Paris this summer!
Q: Time Frame: From start to finish.
A: I usually spend anywhere from four months to a year writing the first draft of a book. There will be phases where I write a hundred pages in a couple weeks, and then there will be phases where I don’t write anything for a couple months, because I’m busy updating my website for my next new release, doing final proofreads on that new release, or promoting it.
After all the chaos that comes with a new release is over, I get back to writing! This is always a really exciting time for me. After I finish the first draft, I proofread it one time all the way through (I do smaller proofreads while writing), then email it to my mom to read. After she and a couple of my good friends have read it, I read a printed version and start to make changes.
Then, I usually put that book on hold for a while, because it’s time to start doing final proofreads on the next book I will publish, the first draft of which was probably finished about a year ago. I reread it, make changes, and get it into submission format. Then, while the publishing process is going on, I will probably start the first draft of another book. Then it’s time for updating the website, and the cycle begins again.
I am usually working on four books at once – one that’s being published or was just published, one that will be published next, one on which the first draft is completed and it is sitting in waiting, and one that’s in the first-draft stage.
Q: Have you ever abandoned any books/novels in progress?
A: I used to do this all the time when I was younger! In fact, I can’t remember one book I finished. Then I didn’t write fiction at all for about ten years. I was too busy writing papers for high school and college. But in college, I had an idea for a book, and I wrote it down in case I ever decided to try writing fiction again. Later that year, I had some time and I decided to start. That became Everything Happens for a Reason…, the first book I published and the first one I ever finished! Now I feel that from here on out, I will follow all my books through to the end. By the time I actually start writing a book, I’ve had it planned for a long time (while I’ve been writing other books), and I’m already way too involved and invested in the characters’ lives and the plot to not write it or to start and not finish. My characters are like real people to me, and to not finish a book would be to leave some part of their lives unfinished. Plus, it would make it hard to go on to the next book, which probably involves at least some of the same characters.
You can find Daisy Jordan at her tour page at Pump Up Your Book
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