Yesterday She Was Tiffany is the first Emily Perez’s novel, a teenager who took up the challenge of participating in the National Novel Writing Month.
Ophelia Ingals, the protagonist of the novel Yesterday She Was Tiffany, is a perfectionist girl and an excellent student, who dreams of getting a place at a prestigious university.
She has a lot in common with the novel authoress, the young Costa Rican girl Emily Perez, who is a passionate writer and gave life to this character: Ophelia.
The 16-year-old girl managed to carve out a niche for herself in the tough American literary market with her novel Yesterday She Was Tiffany, written for the National Novel Writing Month, a program that challenges writers from all over to write at least 50,000 words in 30 days (November).
Perez registered in the 2015 edition of this program, and when she had written 2,500 words, she realized that she could turn her text into a horror novel.
Yesterday She Was Tiffany narrates Ophelia’s story, a perfect girl, who faces all life issues like they were nothing. Yet her life changed radically when she started to have supernatural experiences. Ophelia gets confused with all these events and tries to find out what’s going on, since she even comes to believe she’s going crazy and that she’s the only one to notice those changes around.
“I need a story for the contest. I’m a perfectionist, thus I wanted to write the story of a character with such personality” – said Perez amidst a telephone interview for Viva. “Ophelia and I are alike” – she added.
The Costa Rican girl, whose family moved to the United States when she was only 9 years, is fond of horror stories. Even though she’s 16, she claimed to have already read 500 books.
Emily says that she picked up that avid passion for books from her mother, since her mom used to read books for her brother and her when they were kids.
Perez dreams of studying at Harvard, but she’s still indecisive about what to study.
Her first novel is not available in bookshops yet but it’s already on Amazon. The Kindle edition is $7.99 (but it’s free for users with Unlimited Kindle). The paperback version costs $10.99.
“I feel proud and I can hardly believe this is real. It’s like a dream. But I wouldn’t write another book now because it’s too much work. I’m currently trying to do my level best at school” – Emily concluded.
