The Butter Moment

This is a blog I’ve started—and then chickened out on—probably a dozen times in the past few months. On one hand, it feels like something I need to write. On the other hand, it’s something I’m almost afraid to have anybody read.

But it’s universal—this butter moment thing. And it’s important, I think, for people to know about. To remember.

My butter moment started off easily enough—with an idea. A simple idea, really. One about a girl who goes to spy school and then falls for a normal boy.

It was a cute idea, I thought. It might sell. It would be fun to write about this girl and her fascinating world and maybe I’ll make a little spending money.

So that was how it started—this long trek that led me to the butter isle of my grocery store.

The idea was soon followed by a publishing contract and then a movie option and then the news that the publisher loved the idea so much that they wanted the book on shelves ASAP.

All of these are wonderful things—the best of things—but the book still had to be written.

Not only that, it now had to be perfect--worthy of my editor’s respect and my publisher’s money and my agent’s time.

It had to make people laugh and make people cry.

It had to make people think about destiny and callings and what a person must give up in order to have an exceptional life.

It had to entertain and thrill and make people’s hearts skip a beat at all the right times.

It had to walk the line between fun and fluffy, between fanciful and fantastic.

It had to make people want to be a Gallagher Girl—or maybe even believe you already are.

It had to do all these things.

And it had to do them soon.

So that’s what I was thinking one Friday afternoon last fall when I finally reached the point where I had to take the time to go to the grocery store. I pushed my cart up and down aisles, submersed in the choices—the hundreds of them—that writers have to make. Every day.

So when I reached the dairy section that fateful Friday afternoon and found that the butter I always buy wasn’t on sale—but the butter right beside it was—I knew I had a decision to make.

A butter decision.

And it was too much.

Yep. It broke me. I couldn’t help myself. I cried in the butter aisle because I really, really like my regular butter, but that stuff that was on sale might be just as good and it was a lot cheaper. But my regular butter is “better for baking.” What if the new butter isn’t better for baking? What if I try to bake with it and it ruins and entire batch of something and I have to bake it again. Do I look like someone who has time to re-bake just because of inferior butter?!?

So that’s my butter moment.

Don’t be fooled—most don’t have anything to do with butter. But now, as I labor toward the sequel’s ultimate end, I find myself thinking about the butter moment over and over again, especially because, this time, in so many ways the stakes are higher.

But I haven’t cried over any dairy products.

Yet.

--Ally

PS…I don’t know if the book did any of those things that I thought it needed to do. But I hope it at least did some of them.