Guest post written by Make Me A Liar author Melissa Landers
Melissa Landers is a former teacher who left the classroom to pursue other worlds. A proud sci-fi geek, she isn’t afraid to wear her Princess Leia costume in public–just ask her embarrassed kids. She lives outside Cincinnati in the small town of Milford Ohio, where she writes romantic space adventures for teens and the young at heart.
Make Me A Liar sees Veronica Mars gets a fantastical twist in this novel about a girl with a transferrable consciousness, who uses her power for good, only to have it turned on her when someone uses her body to commit murder. Now she must solve the crime before the killer comes after her.
I’ve written a lot of novels over the years—(fourteen and counting!)—but my newest release, Make Me a Liar, was inspired by a toxic mindset that took me a while to recognize.
Make Me a Liar features a high school senior named Tia Dante, who uses her power of transferable consciousness as a side hustle, temporarily taking over her clients’ bodies to do the tasks that scare them, like confronting a bully, breaking up with a manipulator, or coming out to their parents. But while Tia is occupied in the body of a client, someone uses her body to commit murder.
Now let’s talk about where that story idea came from.
Several years ago, I was watching a “Real Housewives” episode. I don’t remember the names or details, but a man and woman were engaged to be married, and they traveled together to Las Vegas for their joint bachelor/bachelorette parties. While in Vegas, the bride-to-be caught her groom violating some major boundaries. (Like seriously major. He would be dead to me.) I wanted SO BADLY for the bride to break up with him, but I knew she wouldn’t do it. Suddenly, a delicious thought occurred to me: “What if I could get inside her head and impersonate her for a day or two—just long enough to dump her fiancé, cancel the wedding, and force her to raise her standards?” Then I thought deeper. The act of head-hopping could be a valuable service, something people would pay for. And just like that, Tia Dante was born.
While plotting Make Me a Liar, I ensured that Tia only used her powers with consent. But if I’m being honest, I fantasized a lot about how cool it would be to hop into other people’s heads and fix their problems for them, with or without their permission. I had always been a fixer, a solver, an expert at dispensing logical advice that people rarely took. So it was cathartic for me to live vicariously through Tia, to do for her supporting characters what I couldn’t do for my own loved ones. But after a while, I began to wonder if my urge to solve other people’s problems was healthy. (Spoiler alert: it was not.) I eventually learned that my compulsion for fixing was a codependent tendency, and if I hadn’t created Tia Dante as an outlet, I might not have recognized it.
Luckily, this story has a happy ending. After a great deal of therapy and self reflection, I can honestly say that I no longer covet Tia’s superpower. The only person I’m interested in “fixing” is me, not that I’m broken, because I’m not. And even though Make Me a Liar was inspired by dysfunction, it’s still a really cool story, if I do say so myself. I hope you’ll pick up a copy today, and that you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I loved writing it!
