While her novel includes a love story, LaBarbera also explores other relationships within the book, including the sibling relationship between Kai and her twin brother, Kade. “I was very close with my brother and sister, and I really wanted to delve into… different types of relationships, but the sibling relationship was really important to me… and I think twins have this kind of thing of even more so, this more of a connection and yet you are these two different people, and Kai and Kade have different struggles… and they have different relationships with their parents that make things very complicated, particularly for Kade… He’s depressed, and so I wanted to also show how that impacts him and also how it impacts Kai and the rest of the family… I work with a lot of depressed teens, but I also work with a lot of kids and adults that have family members going through struggles like that, and so I wanted to represent their perspectives, both of those perspectives.”
For LaBarbera, writing the first draft of All I Want only took 6 months to complete, but editing and revising the entire story took about 2-3 years. With the demands of her day job, she found it difficult to carve out small amounts of time each day to work on her writing. Instead, she chose to work on it in large portions at a time. She remarked, “I want to spend a whole weekend just writing nonstop or revising or editing… I need big chunks of time and so I’ve done that. I’ll block out a weekend and then I’m working on it all that weekend. Doing the whole half-hour a day or an hour a day thing doesn’t really work. It’s hard for me to transition from my clients, and my private practice, and my teaching, and that kind of thing, and my family, and then transition to the book and then transition out of it, so it works better for me to set aside a clump of time and do it then, and so that’s kind of how I work with it.”
I have playlists for all my books. I’ll often listen to those songs when I’m driving to work or when I’m taking a walk just to kind of keep me in the zone when I can’t actually be writing. That’s the time when I’m writing in my head.”
It’s really hard coming of age in today’s society, where society wants you to make the decision of what you want to do with your life by the time you’re 16 years old. Most kids don’t know what they want to do. How could they? They haven’t lived in the real world yet.”
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