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She's quite the character

This young novelist knows her subject well.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published March 6, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Scott Keeler] Kristen Harmel, at her alma mater, Northeast High School in St. Petersburg, is working on her fifth novel.

Kristin Harmel learned a few things when she published her first novel last year.

One was that she should have thought through its title: How to Sleep With a Movie Star.

Catchy, yes. But, she says, "People always ask, 'So, which movie stars have you slept with?' I haven't slept with any!"

She has interviewed a passel of them, though. Lunching on shrimp mojo de ajo at Red Mesa in St. Petersburg, a few blocks from her alma mater, Northeast High School, Harmel says, "If I had thought about it, I might have made the character in my first book a little less like me. I mean, she's a 5-foot-tall blond who writes for a magazine."

The confusion is understandable. Harmel, 27, is a 5-foot-tall blond in skinny jeans and a trim "Boys like blondes" T-shirt. When she's not writing novels, she's a contract writer for People magazine, for which she has interviewed Matthew McConaughey, Sarah Jessica Parker, Justin Timberlake and a host of other celebs. She has also covered more serious stories, like the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education.

The Orlando resident has just published her second novel, The Blonde Theory, and finished the draft of her third, The Art of French Kissing, for 5Spot, an imprint of Warner Books. She has a contract to write two teen novels for Random House.

All of them, she says proudly, are chick lit. The genre's staples - the foibles and joys of single young women and their struggles to find love and the perfect pair of shoes - are material she knows well.

"This is the stage I'm at in my life, the kind of experiences I'm dealing with," Harmel says. "And when I have a bad date, at least it's material for my books."

Chick lit's readers and writers are a supportive bunch, she says. "One of the best things about writing chick lit is that I've made so many great friends" with other writers.

She also thrives on the response of readers, like the woman who wrote recently to say her own romantic problems were a lot like those of Harper, the main character in The Blonde Theory, and the novel made her feel as if she weren't alone. "When I hear from someone who says she identifies with what I wrote, it's like the best thing."

Harmel moved with her family to St. Petersburg when she was 10. She graduated from Northeast in 1997 and is an enthusiastic fan: "I had some great teachers at Northeast. The school has some problems, and it gets criticized a lot, so it's nice for people to know about the positive side."

She began working as a journalist in high school. One of her first stories to see print was an opinion piece about racism at her school, printed in the St. Petersburg Times in 1995.

She covered sports for the Times and also sent a query letter to a local sports magazine. The editor gave her several assignments before meeting her face to face. "Here I was interviewing all these big sports people. When the editor met me, I looked about 13. He said, 'How old are you?' I said, 'Sixteen. Is that a problem?' And he said, 'No, I guess not. You can write.' "

Harmel earned a journalism degree at the University of Florida. An internship at Woman's Day garnered her a few clips, and she parlayed that into an internship with People between her junior and senior years.

"I worked like 12, 13 hours a day. I figured that's what an internship is. When it was over, the editor I worked for said they wanted to keep me on."

She also writes for Glamour and several other magazines and reviews books on the syndicated television show The Daily Buzz.

But she always wanted to write fiction; her first attempt, at age 6, was a Bobbsey Twins novel.

The plot of How to Sleep With a Movie Star draws on her magazine experience, its main character a journalist who faces a media storm when it is mistakenly reported that she's having an affair with an actor.

The Blonde Theory moves a step away from her own life, Harmel says. Its protagonist, Harper, is a successful patent attorney in Manhattan whose six-figure income means she doesn't need to find a man to cover her shopping sprees, like some other chick lit characters.

But Harper runs into a common dilemma for smart, successful women: She's so self-sufficient, it scares men off. The theory of the title, espoused by her crew of girlfriends, a la Sex and the City "I'm obsessed with that show," Harmel says is that acting ditzy can get her a man.

Writing for magazines helps Harmel with her fiction, especially in creating believable characters. "As a journalist, you can ask questions you don't normally ask people. When I first meet someone, like at a party, I can't say, 'So, how did you feel when your mother died?' But in an interview you can ask things like that.

"What I really like is to sit down with someone and really talk, spend some time. It's interesting to peel back the layers."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

The Blonde Theory

By Kristin Harmel

5Spot, 290 pages, $13.99

www.kristin harmel.com

[Last modified March 5, 2007, 18:50:32]