FRIEND FRIDAY LEIGH TALBERT MOORE!!

I'm gonna give you a moment to drool over her gorgeous new cover.
I may have had something to do with this one, so I might be a bit biased...

It's an incredibly intense story that takes place in a theater house in New Orleans in the 1800s. GORGEOUS.

SO -

I don't know Leigh all that well, but I wanted to tell you some random things I DO know about Leigh...
But first - let me tell you this story of how this post came to be.
I thought it would be funny if I wrote what I knew about her, and then she wrote some random things she knew about herself, but that just ended up tricky, so I sent her an email saying - "Trusssst me......."
And now the post is ALL MINE!

First off - she is adorable in her LSU cheerleading outfit as evidenced by her Facebook avatar.
EVIDENCE:

But I think most days she looks like this:

(because curly hair always turns out this perfect ;-)

Second - she is a sucker for GORGEOUS writing.
Third - Leigh writes in loads of genres, becuase I think like me - she's a character writer. She has a YA Contemp out now - The Truth About Faking (if you haven't read it, you need to - SO good) and today she's officially revealing the cover of Rouge, which is a YA Historical (SO. FREAKING. GOOD) and I also know that she has a SCI-FI YA sitting on her computer.

WOWZA.

Another thing I know about Leigh is that she's hysterical on the phone. HYSTERICAL.

She's been on the periphery of bloggy people I know for a while. Every time either of us would comment on the other's blog, we'd end up in this 20 messages long email chain because we always had a lot to talk about.

And then she wanted to ask me about self-publishing and told me about "Faking" and mentioned she was probably going to wait until February, and I was like, "Why are you waiting?" And so she didn't ;-O

(This is a warning - don't ask to talk to Jolene on the phone unless you want to be talked into doing something. She's an expert at this and it's sort of a compulsion)

I know that Leigh has a lawyer husband, only he does "boring law" according to Leigh (now I hope Richard doesn't read this post).

And that her girls are ADORABLE.

And that she's displaced from her home of LA (the state, not the city), and is going to get a "real" winter this year. I put "real" in quotations, since her winter won't come close to mine ;-)

And she used to be a freelance editor, but I'm not sure that she's still doing that with her writing gig taking up so much time and all ;-)

And you can find her on goodreads HERE, and on her blog HERE, and on facebook HERE.

SO - that's Leigh!

Read anything by a new author lately that's knocked your socks off??

~ Jolene

P.S. I'm not officially waiting for an email from Leigh saying - I definitely should NOT have trusted you ;-)