Flying Starts
Profiles of six authors making their children's book debuts this spring.
By Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 6/29/2006
Frank Portman
 photo credit Paige O'Donahue |
"In a way I skipped a step or two in the usual publishing process," says Portman (aka Dr. Frank, front man of popular Bay Area band The Mr. T Experience). "My literary agent, Steven Malk, had been a fan of my band as a kid, and he proposed the idea. He figured, 'This guy writes songs about bitter and confused adolescence, maybe there's a book in that.' "
Back in 2004, MTX was playing in New York City. Malk saw an opportunity and invited several local YA editors to come to the show. "One editor showed up," Portman recalls. "She said, off-the-cuff, 'You write a lot of songs, why don't you use that as a starting point for a novel?' That was Krista Marino, who became my editor."
Portman notes that once he got his mind around the concept during some down time from the band (a tour fell through), King Dork flowed rather easily. "I chose the coolest song title I had," he says. "All of my songs have these characters, and this particular guy was in a lot of my songs. I free-associated after that and didn't really know where it was going. I wrote 30 pages as a sort of demo and when that sold, I was a little worried," he says with a laugh. "But it was all so spontaneous and random—maybe that's part of its charm."
As for the actual process of getting the book made, Portman says, "I've been pleasantly surprised at everyone's enthusiasm for each other. YA publishing is such a vibrant, alive section of the industry compared to adult publishing, which seems pretty conservative. It would have been a tough sell to get something as quirky as King Dork through that system."
Quirky or no, Portman believes (and many critics have agreed) that his book strikes universal emotional chords with readers. "Stories of high school really resonate to everyone forever," he says. "Rock and roll is a teenage art form, really. A rock and roll song or album is a stepping-off point for more general resonance." King Dork never strays from its musical roots, and for the curious, five of Portman's original tunes appear on the Listening Library audiobook edition of King Dork.
Portman has already begun work on a second novel (not yet under contract), but, as many fellow authors had warned him, "It's a little bit tougher the second time around. I'm more wary of making mistakes." The new book takes place about 10 years later than King Dork and is set in the same town, with different characters, mostly girls. Its title, Andromeda Klein, comes from another Portman song. Fans will also be glad to know that he's planning a third go-round, which will be a sequel to King Dork. "I wanted to wait and see if anyone liked it first. Because of course, a sequel to a flop would be a bad idea," he says.
Happily, King Dork has been far from a flop. It's been warmly praised in review journals and all over the blogosphere, and received a lead review in Entertainment Weekly. This newly minted author can hardly believe his lucky circumstances. "I'm one of those adults who was a fan of YA books before I ever dreamed of writing one," he says. "Now my book has made this crazy splash. It's kind of weird. When I think about it, it freaks me out." Sounds like another song, er, maybe book, waiting to happen.—Shannon Maughan
Frances Hardinge's Fly by Night (HarperCollins, May) is a fantasy/comedy, centering on plucky heroine Mosca Mye and her passionate love of words. That passion is no coincidence, as Hardinge herself is a firm believer in the very real magic of the printed page.
"There is a great deal of me in Mosca," Hardinge says. "I have certainly given her my fanatical love of words and books. She also owes a little to a fierce, black-haired, black-eyed little girl I once encountered in a museum. She was telling her young friend with great detail and gusto about the way in which the ancient Egyptians used to pull mummies' brains out through their noses."
Fly by Night took a little more than a year to write—a particularly difficult year, as Hardinge was also working a fulltime job as a technical author and graphic designer, with a healthy commute to boot. In March 2005 she was downsized, and the very next day she received a call with feedback on her first draft—enabling her to devote her newly opened schedule to the necessary revisions.
"I had a hard deadline for the revisions, since I was due to set off on year-long trip around the world on October 1, 2005," she recalls. "As this deadline approached, my rewrites became increasingly frenzied. A couple of days before my flight, one last marked-up manuscript was brought to my door by motorcycle courier. I spent the penultimate day before my trip writing solidly from 7 a.m. to 4 a.m., and when I staggered blearily onto my flight I had no idea what changes I'd actually made."
One of the highlights of the book is Mosca's palpable love for words—she savors them like sweet treats, carving them on bits of bark so she won't forget them. (It is precisely this fascination with words that gets her into trouble when she decides to free a literate man from the town stocks, kicking the book's plot into gear.) Here again, the creator shows herself in the creation. "I've always been fascinated by fictional and historical figures who were word-wizards, people who could win a battle by making a speech, or change the shape of a country by writing a book," Hardinge says.
All that is not to say that humor is absent—quite the contrary, actually, as Hardinge uses her substantial literary gifts to reflect one of her other great loves: British humor. "I'm certainly a big fan of Monty Python and the Goon Show," she says. "I'm strongly attracted to the absurd, surreal and grotesque, particularly where the ludicrous has elements of seriousness or emotional resonance."
While the milieu of Fly by Night is certainly expansive enough for multiple sequels, that doesn't seem to be on tap—at least, not just yet. "I am certainly hoping to write further books in the same world, quite possibly involving Mosca Mye, but this probably won't happen for a year or two," Hardinge says. "I have just handed in a final version of a stand-alone novel in a contemporary setting, and I have started writing a third book set in a different fantasy world."—James Bickers
 photo credit Chelsea Hadley |
The details of the book, including the protagonist Simone's budding relationship with a Jewish boy, and her relationships with other friends and family members "filled themselves in" as Reinhardt wrote at remarkable speed, completing her manuscript in only two and a half months.
Reinhardt had never really planned to be a writer. She graduated from Vassar with a degree in American Culture, "a major that exists for people who don't know what to major in," she jokes. Before becoming an author, she tried her hand at several jobs in such varied fields as social work, publishing and broadcasting. At one point she even went back to school (NYU) to pursue a law degree, although she never became a practicing attorney. According to Reinhardt, "Everyone thought that my father, a judge, was the one pushing me into law, but the opposite was true. My father didn't want me to go to law school. He said I should write, and I thought, 'If I did that, how would I pay the rent?' "
It wasn't until she was married and had a child of her own that Reinhardt heeded her father's advice. During the same year she quit work at PBS to be with her daughter, she also began writing A Brief Chapter. After completing the first few chapters of the book, in which a liberal teen learns to embrace traditional Jewish traditions, she sought the opinion of longtime friend Douglas Stewart, a literary agent with Sterling Lord Literistic, to see if it would be worth her while to continue. Stewart's enthusiastic "Keep writing!" was all the encouragement she needed to finish the manuscript by late summer of 2004.
"I sent him the [completed] manuscript on a Friday afternoon, expecting him to spend some time with it and make suggestions," Reinhardt remarks. "But I heard from him the following Monday, and he said he loved it!" Stewart, who became Reinhardt's official agent, sent the manuscript to five publishing houses, four of which responded favorably.
Once her book found a home at Random House, Reinhardt says she enjoys a "fantastic" working relationship with editor Wendy Lamb. "She has a perfect ear," states Reinhardt. "Every comment she makes is right." While waiting for the book's release, Reinhardt kept busy, working on her second YA book, Harmless, which is due to be released next February. That book, told from the point of view of three girlfriends, traces the "fall-out" that occurs when a lie gets out of control.
Reinhardt, currently working on her third book, has practical tips for beginning writers that reflect her own work ethic and optimism. "Write all the time, rather than thinking about it or reading about it. It's the only way to get better," she advises. "At first, writing a book may seem like an insurmountable task, but if you write two or three pages a day, you'll eventually have a book. Maybe it'll turn out to be no good, but if that's the case, you're sure to do better the next time around."—Lynda Brill Comerford
Sara Varon never really aspired to having a children's book published. So she's doubly surprised these days that her picture book, Chicken and Cat (Scholastic Press, Mar.) has attracted a number of admirers in the children's book world.
The nearly wordless Chicken and Cat started out as a thesis project, when Varon was attending the School of Visual Arts. And since the finished project resulted in a bound, 32-page children's book, she decided to shop the dummy around to some publishers. It finally landed on the desk of Scholastic editor Jen Rees, who says, "I knew right away that it was something for me."
Although Rees saw something in Chicken and Cat that she liked, the road to being a published book was a long one. The dummy of the book came in with text and Varon and Rees struggled for some time with the story. Rees says it wasn't until they took the text out of the book completely that "it was like magic. It worked!" Varon says the process took so long that Rees even went away on maternity leave, came back, and they were still working on the book.
All of that time and effort seems to have paid off: the book has been very well received, and another picture book starring the fowl and the feline is planned for 2008. Varon says that she has been getting letters from fans through her Web site, www.chickenopolis.com, and she especially loves to hear the different interpretations people give for the book and what questions they have. "One person wrote in and just wanted to know how Chicken and Cat knew each other," says Varon. "I thought, 'I don't know. They're just friends from Chicago.' "
When asked why she chose a chicken and a cat as the main characters, Varon admits that she has a thing for chickens. "When I moved to my neighborhood in Brooklyn from Chicago, there was a drawing of a chicken on a nearby building. I thought that was a good omen." As for the cat, "They're just easy to draw," she says. "I'm really a dog person though."
Varon is currently working on a wordless graphic novel for Roaring Brook's First Second imprint, called Robot Dreams, due in stores next spring. "It's about a dog and a robot and it's 200 pages," the artist says. "It's also wordless and I wonder if readers will find it tough-going to get through 200 pages without text. It will be interesting to see if they do."
And as for her sequel, Varon says, working on a second picture book after the long graphic novel, she says, "I think the second Chicken and Cat book will be a snap. I hope I'm right about that." —Joy Bean
 photo credit Greg Martin |
Her first thoughts were cinematic, since she had been writing screenplays—which hadn't sold—for years. "But I realized, what's going to happen is, I'm going to write a screenplay, and it's going to wind up in a box, so let me just try a novel. I wrote it as an exercise for myself, and lo and behold."
Dairy Queen (Houghton Mifflin, May) follows the exploits of D.J. Schwenk, the lovable, put-upon daughter of a dairy farmer, who is forced to spend her summer mucking out the barn and teaching Brian Nelson, the rival high school's quarterback, the meaning of hard work.
The path to publication started with Murdock's sister, novelist Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love), who read a draft and said, "We need to find you an agent." Jill Grinberg of Anderson Grinberg Literary took the manuscript but had Murdock revise twice, suggesting that D.J. be 15, rather than 17, and asking for more about D.J.'s long-suffering mother.
"She really felt we had only one chance to send it out," says Murdock, who put her final draft in the mail and went on vacation, since Grinberg had said finding out if there was a buyer would take "about a month."
"A week later, I got a call. It was like a caricature—me on my cell phone on the bunny slope, holding my daughter between my knees, and Jill saying she had sent the manuscript to 11 houses and nine of them were bidding."
The winner was Margaret Raymo at Houghton Mifflin, who pointed out things Murdock knew but hadn't addressed, like the fact that D.J.'s best friend, Amber, disappeared midway through the book. "She made me add a scene with Amber at the end, and now I just love that scene," Murdock says.
The two clicked and Raymo is now editing a sequel—A Whole Herd of Trouble—which begins an hour after Dairy Queen ends. It is scheduled for spring 2007 release.
Despite growing up in Connecticut, Murdock insists she drew on her own experience in creating the Schwenks' Wisconsin farmstead. She based it on a dairy near the Gilbert sisters' childhood home in Litchfield.
"We spent hours there, looking for kittens in the hayloft, playing with the cows, climbing the trees," Murdock said. "So I had a very clear mental picture of dairy farming. My dad has a Christmas tree farm, and you can walk away from that for a few months, but dairy farming is work every day, so I decided that would be a good way to force D.J. and Brian to work together."
Murdock also knew sports—she is a former triathlete sidelined by a knee injury—but she just didn't know football, so she turned herself into an Eagles fan, and set her story in a region that wasn't football-crazy, to make a storyline about a girl playing for the high school team more believable.
"It turned out I had the end first, and I had to figure out everything that led into that moment when their eyes meet, which now actually doesn't happen until Chapter 27," she says.
Ironically, of course, now that Murdock's published her novel she's heard "murmurs" about film interest. But she's not getting her hopes up. "A girl trying out for the football team is an after-school special, but a girl saving her family after having an existential crisis about being a cow, that could be a film," she says. "But it would be a challenging script to write because so much of the story is D.J.'s internal monologue, and that would be tough to show without it being contrived. I'd settle for seeing the trailer. I'd love more than anything to see the trailer."—Sue Corbett
"Mental illness and addiction and writing—don't they go together? Seems like a perfect fit to me," says Charlie Price when asked how the idea for Dead Connection (Roaring Brook/Brodie, May) came about. His debut novel, which revolves around the disappearance of a high school cheerleader, is peopled with characters from society's fringes: a borderline psychotic 22-year-old, who may have seen the cheerleader leaving school the day of her disappearance; an alcoholic cop; a loner teen who spends his days in the local cemetery communicating with dead children.
In his years of working with kids in at-risk schools, mental institutions and psychiatric hospitals, Price has developed a great deal of compassion for such people—which comes through in the full-blooded portraits of his wildly diverse characters. Price's interest in such characters began when, shortly after his graduation from Stanford, he went to work in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1968 with at-risk kids, in a program financed by Union Carbide. "At that time, everyone was smothering from heroin," he recalls. Price says that he "met so many amazing kids and families with powerful stories, powerful issues."
Price had dabbled in writing for years, including a story set during the Dust Bowl. But three events converged for Price in the creation of the plot for Dead Connection. Price and his wife, Joanie Pechanec, have a house on a river in Dunsmuir, Calif., where he fly fishes. "One afternoon I was walking through the [nearby] cemetery, and I noticed how many children were in there. I found myself looking at the inscriptions and feeling some kind of connection to these long-dead children."
After a teenage girl the same age as his daughter, Jessica (who is now 23), was kidnapped in Price's community, the author started thinking about what it would be like to be her parent. A few years later he drafted a manuscript about an alienated boy who couldn't function socially and who took refuge in the cemetery. "The idea of the boy and the graveyard and the missing girl came together for me," he explains.
Author and friend Chris Crutcher helped to make the connection between Price and Roaring Brook editor Deborah Brodie. The two men met in the mid-1970s in Oakland, Calif., at a school for at-risk kids. According to Price, Crutcher told him, "If you'll make the effort to [write], I'll give you some names." Price, now 60, mailed out the manuscript to Brodie and, after a month had gone by, he sat at his desk thinking, "You foolish old man, how could you think you'd be a writer? Why didn't you just buy a red convertible?"
A couple of weeks later, however, he received a message from Brodie saying she'd like to publish the book. "Working with Deborah is like going to graduate school in literature," says Price. "She sees what I'd like to do even when I don't see it."
The author and editor are at work on a second novel, tentatively called The Lizard People, about a boy whose psychotic mother shows up at his school, and who meets an unusual peer at his mother's psychiatric hospital who seems to know too much about his life. "I wanted to talk about mental illness, future possibilities, and the world you enter when you're connected in any way with the psychotic process," Price says.
The author makes his living as a consultant, often teaming up with his wife, a psychotherapist. Recent assignments range from a week's reflection with an S&P 500 company, to a talk covering ways to ameliorate pain along with medication for addicts. With his sporadic schedule, he finds a daily writing routine difficult. Instead, he blocks out two or three days at a time. He describes his process as akin to a dog circling before it can lie down. "I may circle until 4:00 in the afternoon, then write for the next six hours." His "office" sounds idyllic: he took the walls off the garage, and writes from there. "I can look at the river and watch the insects hatch and the fish jump, and I can write on and off all day long with the river music in the background."
Price genuinely seems to enjoy the creative process as much as completing the book. Perhaps that's no surprise, coming from a fly fisherman. "Most of the pleasure is about wading in the water, the smell of the stream, the pressure of the water. The brook more than the fish."—Jennifer M. Brown
