YA Interviews and Short Stories - Long and Short Reviews

INTERVIEW: SUE PERKINS

2012-01-02T04:00:00.014-05:00

Long and Short Reviews is pleased to welcome Sue Perkins, author of Dragon Flame--which has just been released by Desert Breeze Publishing.

This is a story Sue originally wrote a while back, but put to one side.

"It has changed several times since the original and is now a Young Adult romance," she told me. "I had great fun creating the dragon society and how they interacted with the humans. In fact I enjoyed it so much I've written a sequel."

I asked her to tell us a little bit about the book.

Eighteen year old Talei is the eldest teenager left after dragons burn the settlement to the ground. She leads the younger children to the next settlement and arrives in time to see it attacked by the dragons. Eventually she meets Adri and they set out to the dragon continent to find the dragon home and save the human settlers.

She's in the editing and re-writing stage of the sequel, Dragon Clans, and hopes to have it finished in a few weeks. It's the story of a rogue clan of dragons who save Sie, a young girl, from the raging sea. Sie becomes one of the clan and helps them defend themselves against the other clans.

Sue originally began writing YA books because her son couldn't find anything to read in the library by the time he was eleven.

"He eventually read Lord of the Rings as nothing else took his fancy. I realized then there was a lack of books for his age group," she explained. "Of course that was many years ago, but I still think there's a need to write books for the tweens and teens that are fantasy or a story they can relate with."

Sue told me that her latest books are always her favorite, so currently Dragon Flame and Reva's Quest are her favorites. Reva's Quest is a Middle Grade book put out by Muse It Up Publishing.

Not only does Sue write fantasy, it's also her favorite genre to read. Her favorites as a teenager herself were David Eddings Belgariad and Mallorean series. Her favorite authors are still fantasy writers. Anne McCaffrey, Terry Pratchett and Naomi Novik.

"Terry Pratchett is so clever. He writes fantasy with such humor. I wish I could write so well. I have all his books," she told me. "Naomi Novik's Temeraire series is about dragons so that drew me from the first. She has a unique way of weaving dragons into British history. Anne McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern series is brilliant too. Unfortunately she died recently so we'll have to wait and see what her son Todd's books are like. He's taken over the series apparently."

"What are you reading now?" I asked.

"Ooh, what to answer? I tend to have books etc. scattered all over the house. At the moment my bedtime book is Awakening by William Horwood. I loved his Duncton Wood series and the Hyddenworld series has started very well. Apart from that I have several unread books on my Sony e-reader and my iPad."

She also prefers fantasy in her television viewing habits. She told me her favorite show is Dr. Who.

"I've watched them since the second series and love the way they keep up with modern technology," she said. "Another favorite is Who Wants to be a Millionaire. I try to see how many questions I can answer."

I asked her, "E-book or print, and why?"

"Until recently I would have said print, but I sat and had a good think about my writing recently. I believe print book publishers tend to be a bit stuck in a rut, but e-book publishers are willing to take a chance on new writers and new genres such as steampunk. I have made the decision to concentrate fully on e-books and build my name in association with that format."

Even though Sue no longer has teenagers in her home, she still manages to keep abreast of kids' likes and dislikes through the children and grandchildren of her friends. Her own grandchild just started school, so he can't help her much. She believes, though, the YA field will just continue to grow as more and more books are released electronically.

"The YAs seem to be glued to their phones and, with Smartphones and e-book readers, I believe they will take to reading more," she explained.

Things have changed a lot for teenagers since she was one, she told me. One thing in particular is she sees a lot more danger outside the home.

"As a teen I didn't think twice about being out on my own after dark," she said. "I would catch the bus home from my friend's house at about 10pm and walk a ten minute walk from the bus stop to my home. I certainly wouldn't do that today, or let a teenager in my care do this on their own."

On a more personal note, I asked her to share with us the scariest moment of her life.

"We had gone to live in Kuwait for two years (before the first Gulf War). My children were playing in one room while I was tidying up in another, bending down between two beds. There was an almighty crash and my immediate thought was - what have those kids done now? I straightened up and there was a dagger of glass sticking out of the wall at neck height. We found out later the Embassy across the road had been attacked by suicide bombers. Luckily all of my family was all right but it was very scary for all of us."

If she were to be stranded on a desert island and could only have five modern conveniences with her, they would be her laptop with solar charging; a coffee machine with plenty of coffee; a water distiller for fresh water; portable TV complete with satellite dish; and a global cell phone, which of course she wouldn't use until she got bored or had finished writing her best seller.

About the Author: Born and brought up in England, I visited to many exotic places with my husband, as his job required him to travel a lot. The Middle East, the Maldives, Gibraltar, Singapore, India, Japan, United States, Canada I’ve visited small parts of all of these countries. I’ve even been through the Suez Canal just after the Middle East war and found this a fascinating experience. Plus I lived in Kuwait for two years just as the troubles were starting.

My writing is enriched by these experiences. We eventually settled in New Zealand and have lived here for over twenty years and brought up our children in this country. Of course children are always contrary and now they are adults they have returned to England, but we still love it here. Two of my romance books are set in this wonderful country I call home, with another set in wartime England.

Three days a week I work as a graphic artist and the other four days I have to fit in writing, housework, shopping, laundry and anything else that needs doing. Who says an author lives a life of luxury? Obviously someone who's never written a book.

Keep up with Sue at www.SuePerkinsAuthor.com and http://sueperkinsauthor.blogspot.com.

INTERVIEW: SIMONE ELKELES

2010-10-11T04:00:00.011-04:00

Aurora is very excited to be able to welcome Simone Elkeles. I was privileged to meet her this past summer at the RWA conference in Orlando. Not only is she a NY Times best selling author, she's an awesome supporter of libraries and just a really neat person who loves writing for teens. Why?

"First of all, I have the BEST teen fans in the world," she said. "Second of all, I remember what it was like to be a teen. Everything is BIG and IMPORTANT. Some of the most important experiences of your life happen as a teen: first kiss, first love, first driving experience, first a lot of things."

Although she didn't read much when she was a teen, she remembers liking Judy Blume's Forever because it was edgy and sexy—a coming of age novel about a girl falling for a boy and losing her virginity.

"I remember being in 6th grade when all the girls at my school were obsessed with it," she told me. "Judy Blume was definitely a pioneer in writing the reality of teen life."

Simone told me that, growing up, she always wanted to be a veterinarian, but she's totally grossed out by blood and needles. "That sort of ruined that career," she quipped.

She used to try to work from home, which she loved since she spent a lot of time in her PJs. It was hard to concentrate, however, because the kids, the dogs, or the laundry always needed her attention. Now, she rents an office so she can cut herself off from the real world and really dive into her book.

"Do you prefer to write longhand, on a typewriter, or on a computer?" I asked.

"If I had to write longhand, I would still be working on my first book Perfect Chemistry! I have terrible handwriting and write really slow. I use my laptop for everything, even communicating with my husband!" She paused, then added, "I’m not proud of that fact."

If her book were turned into a movie, she admitted that in reality she probably would have little or no say as to her plays her characters.

"Alexander F. Rodriguez and Giancarlo Vidrio played Alex and Carlos Fuentes in the Rules of Attraction book trailer. They did an amazing job and my fans really like them!"

Simone told me she's sure outlining is a wonderful technique for many writers, but it doesn't work for her.

"If I plan out the story, then it’s hard for me to bring it to life. I prefer to be surprised by where my characters take me," she said.

"If you could be any character in any book, who would you be?" I wondered.

"That is one of the toughest questions. If it were one of my books, I guess Brittany Ellis from Perfect Chemistry/Rules of Attraction because Alex is the type of guy who would respect me and take care of me and let me be independent while being my forever partner in life. Plus I’d be blonde and have a kick-butt body, something I never really had before."

Simone loves interacting with her fans through email, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and her discussion group. She told me that her fans always surprise her in the best way.

"I have had more than one fan tell me that because of reading Perfect Chemistry, they have decided that they want to get out of their gang and they want more out of life. It is beyond surreal to think that my books have changed someone’s life."

At the beginning of September, Simone released Return to Paradise, which is now a New York Times Bestseller! It’s the sequel to Leaving Paradise. Maggie and Caleb are forced find themselves on the same summer trip. Together, they have to face the truth about the accident before they can look forward to a future, possibly a future together. She is also currently working on Chain Reaction, the third novel in the Perfect Chemistry series. It will be about Luis Fuentes, the youngest Fuentes brother. He’s such a good guy who doesn’t live with the angst that his big brothers have always lived with. Luis is smart, funny, and has big dreams.

"I’m currently rewriting it, so I can’t even give you a hint on what it’s about...sorry!" she said.

If you are interested in checking out the playlists for Rules of Attraction and Perfect Chemistry, check out www.PerfectChemistryTheBook.com.

Simone Elkeles is the NY Times & USA Today bestselling author of over seven teen romance novels. She has won various awards and recognition for her books, including the coveted RITA award from the Romance Writers of America for her book Perfect Chemistry and being named Author of the Year by the IL Assoc. of Teachers of English.

INTERVIEW: JO RAMSEY

2010-10-04T04:00:00.001-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome back Jo Ramsey, who is here to celebrate the release of the second book in the Reality Shifts series, Filtration System, on October 21 from Jupiter Gardens Press.

"Congratulations about the release of your second book in the Reality Shifts series. How has your life changed since the publication of Connection, the first book of the series?"

"Thank you! Since the publication of the first book, I’ve had some amazing experiences. The high school in my town required all students to read Connection this summer, and I’ve done some great school visits at the high school and middle school. Nearly every time I go for a walk around town, someone recognizes me and talks to me about my books, which is really cool."

Jo told me that a girl who attends the local high school messaged her on Facebook and told her that she hates reading. However, the girl couldn't put Connection down.

"I’d had a few days of feeling really discouraged about my writing, and her message really touched me," Jo said.

While Connection was narrated by Shanna Bailey, a 14-year-old girl, Filtration System is narrated by Shanna’s friend Jonah Leighton, a 16-year-old boy. Jonah is becoming concerned about the bruises he frequently sees on Shanna, but is distracted from his worries by the discovery that an entity from a reality completely disconnected from ours wants to enter our universe, and must use a person with a specific energetic vibration to do so. Unfortunately, if it succeeds, our entire universe will be vaporized. When an autistic girl at their high school starts acting strangely, Jonah learns that she is being plagued by demons and dead spirits, and that she’s the one the entity wants to use as a portal. He and Shanna have to help the girl before the entity makes its attempt.

Jo is working on several projects right now. She just finishing up rewriting a novel involving teen suicide that she received a revise/resubmit on from a publisher. She also anticipating publisher edits on the third book in the Reality Shift series, which is due out in March, and she's getting ready to do some revisions on another novel which has been contracted and will be out next May. It's the first book in a new urban fantasy series, The Dark Lines.

"I told a writing friend that the new series, The Dark Lines, makes Reality Shift look like 'fluffy bunny time.' The series is about a group of teenagers—and adults—with psychic abilities who become involved in the universal war between light and darkness. In the universe, the balance between the two must be maintained. Light wants to maintain it; darkness wants to tip the balance and destroy the universe. The characters in the series mostly fight against the darkness, though there is one who… well, I won’t give that away quite yet. The Dark Lines is actually broken into three sub-series, so some of the adults in the first ten books are seen as teenagers in the second ten. The characters aren’t necessarily what you’d expect as heroes: a boy who’s had to parent his mother most of his life; a boy taken into foster care at age five who has spent much of his life believing something is horribly wrong with him because of his psychic abilities; and, in the second segment of the series, a boy who has been subjected to some horrific abuse by his mother and her 'friends.'

"Readers will recognize some of the characters from Reality Shift; the final book of The Dark Lines takes place about five years before Connection, and despite my best attempts to the contrary, some of the characters from The Dark Lines show up as adults in Reality Shift."

"Your books focus on some dark topics: divorce, abuse, etc," I said. "What made you decide to go this route with your writing?"

"I didn’t really get a vote. These were the stories that came to me to be told. That may sound strange to non-writers, but for me the stories and characters just come to me, and I don’t really plan what happens to them. I just write and see where the story goes. That said, though, some aspects of Shanna’s life in Reality Shift are things I dealt with as a teen and as an adult, and I wanted to share those with readers in the hope that if they’re struggling with some of the things Shanna struggles with, they’ll seek help. I think most, if not all, teens can identify with the topics, because even if they live in an intact home and have never been abused, odds are high that they have friends who’ve dealt with those issues."

Not very much of the writing, though, is based on Jo's own life. She told me she didn't have many friends as a teenager, and spent most of her time in her room reading and writing.

"Writing longhand, in spiral notebooks, because back in them thar olden days we didn’t have these fancy computer-things," she explained. "Some of the things I write are based on stuff I imagined or wished would happen back then, though."

Jo told me that she thinks technology presents a lot of challenges that teens of her generation didn’t have to deal with.

"I’m not all THAT old; I graduated from high school in 1988," she said. "Computers were just really hitting their stride then, though, and we didn’t have the Internet, with all the social networking and so on. We didn’t have cell phones that you could text from. I think that unfortunately, technology has given a whole new way for kids to bully and harass each other, as well as endangering them more because of things like adults pretending to be teens to lure kids to them."

I asked Jo to tell us what her most memorable school presentation was about.

"I would have to say the anti-bullying presentation I did this fall at my town’s high school. The school divided students into two groups, one of freshmen and sophomores and the other of juniors and seniors, and a presenter from a bullying prevention program and I switched between the two. When I walked into the junior/senior group and said the word 'bullying', the auditorium erupted into a cacophony of fake coughing. I very sternly informed them that their behavior was harassment and was exactly the sort of thing I was there to talk about. They stopped.

"Don’t tell them, but I actually found it pretty amusing."

INTERVIEW: MARILEE BROTHERS

2010-09-27T04:00:00.086-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Marilee Brothers whose latest book Moon Spun, the third book in the Unbidden Magic series was released in August.

She told me that she's proud of all her books, but had a particularly good time in writing it. She had the opportunity to create a whole new world for the main character, Allie Emerson, who has been searching for her roots throughout the series. She discovers her maternal grandmother is a forest faery who desperately needs her help, so along with Ryker Matheson, a hot biker boy/red-tailed hawk, she enters the Land of Boundless.

"I had a great time creating all kinds of good and bad faeries," she said.

Marilee shared that when she was young, there were kids' books and adult books, but it was before the publishers started marketing books specifically for the teen audience.

"I soon tired of kids’ books and began digging into my parents’ stash," she said. "Consequently, at a very young age, I was reading mysteries by John D. MacDonald, romances by Katherine Woodiwiss and semi naughty epics by Frank Yerby. Didn’t hurt me a bit!"

Marilee has always been a voracious reader and dabbled in poetry and short stories.

"I was busy teaching, coaching and raising 3 sons," she said. "After the boys were grown and gone and I had more time, I began to take writing classes. My instructor said, 'You need to write a book!' My first reaction was, 'Who me?'"

Marilee is currently working on the next book in the Unbidden Magic series, which is tentatively titled Shadow Moon. Then, book 5 will complete the series and she will be writing one more standalone book for Bell Bridge Books, possibly a time travel or steampunk. She's also started writing a YA urban fantasy with a male protagonist, Gabe Delgado.

"What is your working environment like?" I wondered.

"We converted a bedroom into writing space for me. I love my writing room even though it’s always a mess. Three walls are painted sky blue, the fourth is pale burgundy. I have a corner desk (cluttered), two bookcases and multiple shelving all stuffed with book-related items. Opposite the desk, is a large, overstuffed chair and ottoman (also blue) that converts into a single bed. My desk chair has wheels, and since my dog is usually sleeping behind me, I have to be careful not to roll over her tail. I have a satellite radio and listen to music when I write. My two favorite stations are light classical and outlaw country. I know, pretty weird, huh?"

Marilee didn't start off writing YA fiction. She intended to become a romance writer, so joined RWA, Romance Writers of America. She was trying to sell her adult book, The Rock and Roll Queen of Bedla, and received tons of rejections. However, one of those rejections changed her life.

"An editor at Kensington included a personal note along with her rejection. She said, 'This book isn’t for us, but you have a natural voice for young adult. Get busy and write one.' I’d never, ever considered writing for the YA market but followed her advice. It turned out she was right. RWA has many wonderful, supportive programs to help new writers, including contests. When I started writing Moonstone, I decided to enter it in contests that had a YA category in order to get feedback. I had only about 60 pages done at the time. One of those contests, Dual in the Delta, was judged by Debra Dixon of Belle Books. Months later, she hunted me down, said she loved my voice and would I please send her the book because they were starting a new imprint called Bell Bridge. Book wasn’t finished. Oops! Long story short – I finished the book, they bought it and offered me a 5 book contract. Belle Books is a wonderful publishing company. I’m grateful every day for their support."

Marilee shared with me that she has to remind herself every day, when she sits down to write, that she is channeling the voice of Allie, her teenage protagonist.

"As you may have guessed, I’m far from fifteen, yet it’s the easiest thing in the world for me to go back in time and tap into the insecurities and angst of my life at that moment in time," she said. "Certainly, many things have changed, but many things have remained the same. This is just my theory, but I think it’s possible all women have a fifteen year old girl living inside them."

"What is the one book no writer should be without?" I asked.

"It depends on where you are in the process. Beginning writers who need inspiration should get Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. My favorite book is Write On by mystery writer Elizabeth George."

Finally, I asked, "If you could give any advice to your readers, what would it be?"

"Drop an email to your favorite authors and tell them you like their books. I love hearing from readers. It makes my day! I recently received an email from a reader who said, 'I’ve read all of your books at least ten times. It’s because of you I’m writing my own book.' Turns out she’s only fourteen!"

A former teacher and school counselor, Marilee lives in Washington state and writes full time. Her books include The Rock and Roll Queen of Bedlam, winner of the 2010 Booksellers Best award for romantic suspense and Moonstone, Moon Rise and Moon Spun, the first three books in the YA paranormal Unbidden Magic series. Castle Ladyslipper, a medieval romance with paranormal elements will soon be published by Awe-Struck Press. Marilee is a member of RWA, PNWA and the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Visit her website at http://www.marileebrothers.com/. and follow her on Twitter.

INTERVIEW: KRISTINA McBRIDE

2010-09-20T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Kristina McBride, whose debut YA novel, The Tension of Opposites, was released in May. Kristina wrote this story in response to the safe return of a child who was kidnapped while riding his bike to a friend's house. It has been nominated for the 2011 Best Fiction for Young Adults List from the YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association).

Kristina was a high school English teacher for eight years before quitting to stay at home once her first child was born. At that point she started writing seriously, with her first book being a suspense for adults. Although it didn't attract the attention of an agent and is still sitting on the computer, probably never to be published, it did teach her that she enjoyed teen characters more than adults.

"The two teen characters from that manuscript stood out more than the others, helping me open my eyes to my strongest point in writing," she said.

While she was growing up, she lived across the street from the library.

"I cannot remember a time that I did not want to create a fictional world, write a novel, get it published, and see my name on the cover," she told me.

She's currently working on the second book of a two-book deal with Egmont USA.

"That’s about all I can say for now," she told me. "Except that I’m getting pretty excited about this new book. I really like it!"

The first thing she bought after selling her book was a netbook—a small computer that fits inside her purse.

"It’s awesome," she said, "and I now use it for all my drafting. I still do like to use longhand for some scenes. It kind of just depends on how well everything is flowing."

She credits her agent, Alyssa Eisner Henkin, for being one of the biggest factors in Kristina's success.

"She worked with me on several drafts of The Tension of Opposites before it was ready to be pitched to editors," she explained. "Alyssa can ask one question and lead me in directions I had not yet considered. It’s wonderful, because when you’re so entrenched in a story, you often need a second eye to help ponder believability, etc. My family (husband, parents, kids, friends) has also been imperative to my success. Without their support, I would not be when I am today."

"What are some of your hobbies?" I asked.

"I love to be with family and friends. I also love to be in the woods – there’s something about hiking that makes me feel very at peace. I also love to read and write – obviously."

In fact, if she could be anywhere in the world right now, it would be a toss-up.

"Alone – a cabin in the woods so I could just write like a mad woman and finish this current novel," she said. "Or with family – the Caribbean . . . do I need to explain?"

I asked her about her favorite and least favorite words.

"When I really think about words – the power of words – I am overwhelmed," she told me."I mean, I wrote this book and it’s just a long string of words that I stuck together in a specific way. Someone could take all the words I used and mix them up to tell a completely different story. This fascinates me. Not enough to try it, but you get the point. Words are so very powerful, and such a part of me. I have no favorite. I love them all."

Kristina keeps note cards in her purse to jot down ideas for each chapter of her book so she can ideas whenever they strike. She gives herself the freedom , though, to not necessarily stick to the outline she's created. If ideas no longer fit, she changes or scraps them. When she starts her writing for the day, she grabs her netbook and reads the previous chapter to get steeped in the characters' world. Then she just goes. Sometimes she will turn on a fan to drown out any noise from the house. "The little ones can get a bit crazy at times," she confessed.

"Writers are known to set their own schedules and work at their own pace," I said. "Do you enjoy that kind of spontaneity in your life? How great is it to be able to take a vacation or just take a day off without calling in sick?"

"I feel like I’m cheating at life." She smirked. "I have this job that doesn’t feel like a job because it’s something I’d do regularly without payment. My hands just need to move to get the words out. That I can work from home based on each day’s specific schedule is awesome. The only problem is that there aren’t enough hours in a day to get all my thoughts down."

Finally, I asked Kristina, "Do you have any advice for young writers?"

"Write often. Read voraciously. And research the business – how to get an agent – how to write a query letter – etc. And develop a thick skin – there’s a lot of rejection in this business, and you can’t let it get you down. At least not for longer than one hot fudge sundae. Remember one thing, if you’re getting rejected, you’re in the game, and that’s a huge step in the right direction!"

Tagline: What happens when your best friend is kidnapped - and returns home two years later?

Short Summary: Two years ago Noelle disappeared. Two long years of no leads, no word, no body. Since the abduction, Tessa, her best friend, has lived in a state of suspended animation. She has some friends, but keeps them distant. Some interests, but she won’t allow herself to become passionate about them. And guys? She can’t get close—she knows what it is like to really lose someone she cared for.

And then, one day, the telephone rings. Noelle is alive. And maybe, just maybe, Tess can start to live again, too.

A haunting psychological thriller taken straight from the headlines, The Tension of Opposites is a striking debut that explores the emotional aftermath a kidnapping can have on the victim, and on the people she left behind.

INTERVIEW: HOLLY SCHINDLER

2010-09-13T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Holly Schindler, author of A Dark So Blue, which released in May, and the upcoming Playing Hurt, which will be released in March of 2011.

Holly told me she thinks the first book sold holds a special place in every writer's heart, since it the first labor of love that someone else loved enough to want to invest in. She admitted that her first sale didn't come easy.

"I had to give it full-time effort for seven and a half years before I finally inked my first deal! A BLUE SO DARK was the book that began to open doors, so I think I’ll always look on it fondly," she said.

While she was drafting her earliest manuscripts, Holly taught piano and guitar and her students really inspired her to try writing for the younger set.

"They were just so fantastic—so lively, so enthusiastic, so funny—that I knew I had to try my hand at writing YA," she explained. "I wanted to write for and about the same kinds of intelligent, thoughtful children and teens who filled my home with music."

Even before, though, Holly knew she wanted to be a writer.

"I started writing as a little girl, at my child-sized roll top desk. I was really painfully shy as a kid, and sometimes I think writing came about in some ways because it was an easier way for me to 'talk.' But I was also ALWAYS telling stories," she explained. "I remember making up stories when I played with my dollhouse…I wasn’t just posing my dolls, I was using them as actors in my own prime-time dramas!"

If she weren't a writer, Holly told me she would probably be a literature professor. Her initial plan was to obtain a PhD in lit, but by the time she got her master's degree she had to step away from school to pursue her writing. The desire and dream to write was everything for her. It's still on her bucket list, however, to go back to school to get her PhD.

"What is your working environment like?" I wondered.

"My environment reflects what stage my current WIP is in…I have a tendency to be a bit of a slob while drafting and a complete neat-freak while revising. Right now, I’m in the midst of outlining a few new projects—a stage during which I can let stacks of manuscripts start to mount. But I also just signed up for Skype, and I’m pretty sure this will force me to keep the old office in spick ‘n span shape from here on out."

At heart she says she is really being a low-tech girl.

"I prefer vinyl to digital music, have never texted ANYONE in my life," she admitted. "As I’ve sold more projects, and as I’ve begun to promote my work online, I really have grown more and more reliant on my new(er) computer…But I still do revise with a red pen and a notebook…A manuscript just reads differently in hard copy than it does on a computer screen."
Holly told me that she finds outlining essential, especially when an author has multiple works in development.

"You never know exactly when you’ll get the next email from your publisher, needing you to suddenly stop what you’re doing and revise or work on copy edits," she said. "If you’ve got an outline, you can feel safe stopping your current WIP and doing the work your publisher needs…When you complete your work for your publisher, you can return to your outline and jump right back into your WIP, never losing your momentum!"

I asked Holly to tell us a little bit about her debut novel, A Blue so Dark.

As A Blue So Dark opens, we find fifteen-year-old Aura Ambrose struggling to keep a secret. Her mother, a talented artist and art teacher, is slowly being consumed by schizophrenia, and Aura has been her sole caretaker ever since her dad left them. Convinced that “creative” equals crazy, Aura shuns her own artistic talent. But as her mother sinks deeper into the darkness of mental illness, the hunger for a creative outlet draws Aura toward the depths of her imagination. Just as desperation threatens to swallow her whole, Aura discovers that art, love, and family are profoundly linked—and together may offer an escape from her fears.

Holly told me that she didn't have personal experience with the illness so had to do research on it.

"I read all I could on the symptoms, treatments, etc. I also mined the YA nonfiction shelves in my local library…I wanted to find out how the disease had already been presented factually to teens," she said. "But once I sat down to start WRITING, I really had to put all my research away. I didn’t want my RESEARCH to drive the book—I wanted the plot and my characters to propel the story. I was writing fiction, after all, not nonfiction!"

She drafted A Blue So Dark late in 2006. The initial response to the book was positive—editors kept telling her the premise had potential. However, the manuscript itself needed work. After a cycle of revising and resubmitting, in 2008 she contacted Brian, the acquisitions editor at Flux. He asked to see the full manuscript and two weeks later, he and Holly were on the phone talking about the book.

"Right from the start, I clicked with Brian. I was ECSTATIC when the official offer came!"

Her next book is really quite different from her first.

Playing Hurt centers on two former athletes: Chelsea Keyes, a basketball star whose promising career has been catastrophically snipped short by a horrific accident on the court, and Clint Morgan, an ex-hockey player who gave up his much-loved sport following his own game-related tragedy.

Chelsea meets Clint (who’s working as a resort fishing guide) soon after arriving with her family for a summer vacation in Lake of the Woods, Minnesota. Sparks fly, igniting the pages, even though Chelsea has a boyfriend back home in Missouri…and even though Clint has sworn never to put himself in the position to be hurt emotionally again.

Their unlikely romance has the potential to heal their heartache and force Chelsea and Clint to realize just how timidly they’ve been living—but are they really ready to give themselves completely to one another? How will the weeks spent in another man’s arms play into Chelsea’s feelings for her boyfriend when she returns home? Will Clint allow himself to fall for a woman who’s bound to leave him at the end of her summer vacation? By playing hurt—entering into a romance with already-broken hearts—are they just setting themselves up for the kind of injury from which they could never recover? Will Chelsea and Clint pull away from each other before they have a chance to find out just how beautiful their story could be?

Finally, I asked Holly if she had any advice for young writers.

"Get used to criticism. It’s an inescapable part of the gig. You really have to learn to separate yourself from your project, so that you can look at it objectively, see where you can improve. That’s how you sell a book! You don’t sell the first draft of a novel, you sell the twelfth.

And these days, you don’t just get reviews from trade journals, you get reviews online from bloggers or Amazon shoppers or members of Goodreads…critique follows you as you try to sell a book and AFTER it’s published and hits shelves."

INTERVIEW: MICHAEL BRACKEN

2010-09-06T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Michael Bracken, author of more than eleven books, including the YA book Just in Time for Love, published by Hard Shell Factory. This is one of the books of which he is most proud, along with a completely different book: All White Girls.

Just in Time for Love is a young adult romance/coming of age story told from the boy’s point of view. It’s garnered strong positive reviews and was selected as a “Book To Live By” by the Dubai Scholars Private School, Dubai, U.A.E.

"I’m proud of Just in Time for Love because it tells the story of a young boy learning about different kinds of love—his first relationship with a girl, his father’s first relationship after the death of his mother, and his relationship with an elderly woman in the mobile home park his father manages—and how he deals with the conflicting emotions these relationships cause," he explained.

All White Girls, on the other hand, is a hardboiled crime story about a private eye searching for a missing girl. It’s sexual and violent, clearly intended for an adult audience, and has also garnered strong positive reviews.

"What the two novels have in common," he said, "is that, in both cases, they were the best writing I could do at the time I wrote them and they both achieved exactly what I set out to achieve."

Michael told me that he doesn't specifically write for young readers—his goal is just to tell a good story.

"Some of them just happen to feature young protagonists and are appropriate for young readers," he said

When Michael was a child, his favorite books were the Freddie the Pig books written by Walter R. Brooks. As he grew older, he read a lot of science fiction—Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. In his late teens and early 20s, Judy Blume was his author of choice. Now, he reads mostly mysteries and crime fiction. His favorite authors include Carl Hiaasen—both his adult and young adult novels—and James Lee Burke.

Michael told me that he knew in the 8th grade that he wanted to be a writer.

"I wrote a story titled 'The 1812 Battle at Two Rocks,' showed it to my mother, and told her I was going to be a writer. Of course, this followed proclamations about my desire to be a fireman, astronaut, and cowboy, so she had every reason to think it was a passing fancy. Instead, she gave me my first two typewriters and encouraged me," he remembered.

"But I suspect my mother was shaping my future as a writer long before the day I wrote 'The 1812 Battle at Two Rocks'. She was a single mother in the early 1960s when that wasn’t common and we moved quite often. The first thing we did after we settled into our new home was find the local library and get library cards. There wasn’t a television in our home until I was in the third grade and by then I had found all the adventure and entertainment I could ever want in the written word."

His first published piece appeared in his junior high school's literary magazine when he was in the 9th grade. While he was in high school, he wrote for the school newspaper, the school literary magazine, and an underground newspaper distributed to high school students. He and his best friend published an amateur science fiction magazine containing their own stories and stories written by their friends.

"I was collecting rejection slips from professional magazines while other guys my age were catching touchdown passes, and I made my first professional sale while I was still a teenager," he said.

"If you weren't a writer, what would you be?" I asked.

"I’ve worked in and around printing and publishing my entire life, so I don’t really know anything else. I’ve done almost every task involved in publishing, from writing copy to taking photos and drawing illustrations on through editing, typesetting, and page layout. I’ve operated high-end and low-end scanners, operated printing presses and worked in the bindery. I suspect if I wasn’t writing, I’d be editing or working for a printing company. Somehow, someway, I’d be involved with words and getting them to readers."

Michael is primarily a short story writer, having sold more than 800 of them over the years.

"I write and sell an average of one short story each week, and have had one or more stories published every month for the past 86 months with contracts for stories scheduled for publication on into next year. So I’m always working on something, and often I’m working on several things at the same time," he told me.

He admitted that his working environment is always messier than he wants it to be—he blames that on his cats.

"Every time I straighten my desktop, my cats come in and rearrange everything," he said.

He uses two bedrooms in his home for his writing.

"The larger room has several windows, two desks, bookcases with reference material, family photos, and trinkets that amuse me or hold some significance to me. I also have a CD player and a healthy collection of CDs because I often play music while I write.

"I have two computers. One is on my main desk where I do most of my writing and the other is a laptop that has a wireless connection to my main computer so that I can carry it around the house and write in other rooms if I tired of being in my office.

"The other room is primarily a filing room where I keep copies of all my published work and all my office supplies."

"How much of your writing is based on your own experience as a child or teenager?" I asked.

"I’m certain that every story I’ve ever written is based in some small way on my experiences, but some stories are more obvious that others. My first professionally published short story, “The Magic Stone” (Young World, November, 1978) was based on something from my childhood: For extra money my mother spent Saturdays cleaning the home of an elderly neighbor. I extrapolated from that to write a story about a young boy who has the opportunity to have one wish granted.

"Just in Time for Love is less obvious, perhaps, but the protagonist is the new kid at school—something I had experienced many times—and he lives in a mobile home park—which I did as a teenager and was doing as an adult when I first wrote the story."

Finally, I asked Michael for the best piece of advice he'd ever received about writing.

"Write. Submit," he said. "It’s pretty basic advice, but many beginning writers struggle to do these basic tasks. You have to write. You have to finish what you write. You have to submit your work to an editor. You have to keep submitting your work until somebody buys it."

His father writes confessions and jokes, and the biggest joke of all is his name—Justin Tyme. But Jay, as he prefers to be called, hasn’t had much to laugh about in the years since his mother died. His father retreats into an alcohol-hazed world of denial and self-pity, reversing their care-giver roles, and forcing Jay to grow up virtually on his own.

Then, the move to O’Shea, where his father manages a mobile home park, and Jay begins yet another year as the “new kid” in school. He has a lot to learn—about life, his father, and himself, but most of all, about love. And it all begins the day Jay meets Cindy Hamilton.

Spotlight On: Shannon Rouchelle

2010-08-30T04:00:00.000-04:00

Shannon Rouchelle was nominated in 2009 for the Dream Realm Awards for Alien's Revenge, best young adult.

Shannon lives on the Saskatchewan prairies with her husband Jerry and two sons, Matthew and Michael.

Her newest book, Quest for the Magic Stones, book one in her newest teen series, Leslie Burrows, was released last month by Devine Destinies.

Leslie Burrows, a young woman impoverished and living in a small cottage with her mother, is delighted when she attends her first royal ball and meets Prince Peter, the man of her dreams.

But the prince has a nasty secret and desperately needs her help. Leslie must complete a quest and defeat a wicked sorcerer to break the spell bestowed upon her beloved. She decides to risk her life and face the dangers that linger in the Spirited Forest.

Can love conquer all, or will evil prevail?

INTERVIEW: MARLENE PEREZ

2010-08-16T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Marlene Perez, author of the popular Dead Is… series, The Comeback, Love in the Corner Pocket, and Unexpected Development. The latest book in the Dead Is… series, Dead is Just a Rumor has just come out.

"It's the fourth book in the DEAD IS series and takes place in the fall of Daisy Giordano's senior year," Marlene said. "Here's a little blurb. As the creepy little town of Nightshade prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary—on Halloween, of course—many of its paranormal residents are receiving mysterious blackmail letters. Psychic teen Daisy Giordano and her sisters set out to find out who is behind the threats."

Marlene is proud of every single book she's written, she admitted.

"I think it takes a lot to finish writing a novel and anyone who has accomplished that much needs to give themselves a round of applause," she said. "And after a book is written, it takes guts and persistence to submit that manuscript. And then there's reviews! So far, I've had the most fun with the DEAD IS series."

She told me that she's always loved teen literature and some of her favorite books are novels for teens. These include Lois Duncan's Down a Dark Hall and Judy Blume's Forever. She also enjoys Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, and Anne Rice's Vampire Lestat.

"It's hard for me to pin down one favorite of anything," she said, "because it's always changing."

Marlene likes writing in longhand for first drafts and the computer for editing. She'll write by hand, then type it up, print out a copy of what she has, and continue this process until the book is completed.

Her first novel, Unexpected Development, was based on her experience working in a pancake house during high school, and she credits Norma Fox Mazer with influencing her writing.

"In the late 90s, I heard her speak about her writing process and stifling that nasty internal critic at an SCBWI conference. She used the 'fedora' method and put a hat over her head, sat in front of her computer, and just typed for an hour, no editing allowed. That was how I was finally able to shut up my own scared, self-critical internal editor enough to finish the first draft of my first young adult novel six months later. I will be forever grateful to her for such good advice. I will be forever grateful to her for such good advice. I sent her an e-mail to thank her, at the nudging of a writer friend, and she sent me the nicest reply back. She died not long afterward. I was glad that I was able to tell her how much that speech meant to me."

"What is your writing process like?" I asked.

"My writing process is different for every book, but it starts with a tiny glimmer of something. Sometimes it's a title or a character who just starts talking to me or maybe when I least expect it, I remember a place I was and it starts me thinking. My problem is I always have lots of ideas and am torn about what to work on next. Usually, one story or the other will eventually win out. I open up a file on the computer and write those little bits down and go from there. I will sometimes show a few chapters to my critique group or my agent, but I like to write a first draft quickly and then I revise it and line-edit and then print it out and do the same thing again."

She working on the first book in a romantic paranormal trilogy and a stand alone right now.

"I'm definitely going in a different direction with the stand alone, but I'm very excited about both projects," she said. "Neither book is under contract at this time."

I wondered what her husband felt about her writing.

"My husband is fabulous," Marlene assured me. "He shoulders more than his fair share of household chores so that I can have writing time. I once heard another writer say that she wrote under her maiden name because her father had been so supportive of her writing. My father was not involved in my life, so it seemed wrong to use his last name for my writing career, but it made sense to use my married name (Perez) because my husband is supportive and always has been. The other reason is my maiden name is an unusual one and a little hard to pronounce."

"If your book was turned into a movie, who would you like to play the main characters?" I asked.

"I don't know. It's fun to think about, though! The first three books in the DEAD IS series have been optioned by the Disney Channel for television. I think Danielle Campbell looks a lot like how I pictured Daisy. It was kind of spooky actually. A fan sent me a message on my space and her avatar was a picture of Danielle Campbell and I was like 'That's Daisy!'"

"Writers are known to set their own schedules and work at their own pace," I said. "Do you enjoy that kind of spontaneity in your life? How great is it to be able to take a vacation or just take a day off without calling in sick?"

She laughed. "I don't work at my own pace because I'm a huge procrastinator and I'd never get anything done. I set deadlines, either real or artificial ones and I stick to them as closely as I can. And if you're a professional writer, you can't be completely spontaneous and work at your own pace because you have an editor and marketing people and your agent and a lot of other people who are expecting you to turn in a book by a deadline. I worked at a university for several years, but now I write full-time and I approach it like any other career. Butt in chair works for me."

"Do you think the Internet will ultimately change the publishing industry?" I asked.

"I think it already has. The one thing that really bothers me is the amount of piracy that's out there. My goal is to continue to write and publish books and to be able to make a living doing so. I don't think readers who download an illegal copy of a favorite author's book realize that it's NOT a victimless crime. Ultimately, that author suffers because if the sales aren't there for a book, the publisher might not buy another book. It's different if the author and/or the publisher willingly offers excerpts or even entire novels to their readers. But for someone to just TAKE my work really irritates me, especially when those sites are profiting from something they are not entitled to and legally, do not have the right to distribute."

Finally, I asked Marlene, "If you could give any advice to your readers, what would it be?"

"High school doesn't last forever. And please please be kind to each other."

As the creepy little town of Nightshade prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary—on Halloween, of course—many of its paranormal residents are receiving mysterious blackmail letters. Psychic teen Daisy Giordano and her sisters set out to find out who is behind the threats. But launching an investigation isn’t easy for Daisy with her overprotective father watching her every move. Though she’s is happy to have him back after the years he spent being held captive by an anti-paranormal group called the Scourge, Dad is having difficult time adjusting to home life—and the fact that his little girl is now a senior in high school. He even disapproves of Daisy’s boyfriend, Ryan. Can their relationship take the strain?

And Daisy’s got even more on her plate: A talented amateur chef, she has won cooking lessons with celebrity chef Circe Silvertongue. After nosing around (with a little help from Circe’s pet pig), Daisy begins to suspect the temperamental chef’s secrets aren’t only in her ingredients. . . .

The fourth installment in this favorite series is full of surprises and scares!

INTERVIEW: Charity Tahmaseb and Darcy Vance

2010-08-09T04:00:00.002-04:00

Aurora is very pleased to welcome two old friends, Charity Tahmaseb and Darcy Vance, whose debut novel The Geek Girls Guide to Cheerleading was released last year. This interview originally appeared on The Long and the Short of It: LASR.

Charity and Darcy have both been lifelong readers—loving stories and books. Charity would rewrite movies and books in her head (generally, she told me, because there weren't enough girls or girl power in the books and movies she saw), but it didn't occur to her until after her son was born that she could actually write down all those stories she had in her head. "Why it never occurred to me to do this before, I have no idea," she said. Darcy, on the other hand, had her first (very short) story displayed on Back to School Night by her first grade teacher. "My parents read it and gushed with praise," she told me. "That was the first time I remember thinking, 'Hey! This writing thing might be kind of cool!'"

Charity and Darcy first met ten years ago as part of an online writing group. They became critique partners and friends, then started writing together about two years ago. However, they've only met in real life two times, and the second was just a few months ago for the launch party for The Geek Girls Guide to Cheerleading.

The Geek Girl’s Guide to Cheerleading is about a self-proclaimed geek girl who, partly as a joke, and partly to support her best friend, tries out for varsity cheerleading and makes the squad. It’s the story of her season on the squad. As Darcy likes to say, it’s also the story of falling in love for the first time and being a good friend even when the other person isn’t being such a good friend back.

I asked them, "What comes first: the plot or the characters?"

Charity said, "For me, it's a bit of both, usually a character in a 'what if' situation," while Darcy admitted she used to be strictly a character first writer.

"For a long time I believed that if a writer understood her characters well enough, the story would grow from within them. I'd still like to think that but, more and more, I find that if I don't have a clear notion of plot my stories wander too much. I'm trying to become a more efficient writer and I suspect that paying attention to plot first, and maybe even outlining, (omigosh, did I just say that?) might be the path I need to take."

I asked Charity and Darcy about what inspired each of them to write their first book.

"You mean my very first book," Charity asked, "the one that won't ever see light of day (unless Darcy comes up with a way to turn it into a young adult novel)? My biggest motivation was writing a book I desperately wanted to read."

The premise for The Geek's Girl Guide to Cheerleading is based on something that happened to Charity her senior year of high school.

Charity said, "When I emailed the idea to Darcy, she sent this back to me: 'I will either steal your idea or kick your scrawny cheerleader butt if you don't write this.' Now that's motivation."

Darcy laughed and countered, "I seriously considered stealing Geek Girls when Charity had seemed to give up on it! And, though her cheerleader butt may be scrawny, I doubt I could kick it. Charity's tougher than she looks. I was inspired to work on the book with her because (1) I loved it from teh very first mention of the idea; (2) I couldn't stand the idea of Chariy pushing it under the bed or in the back of a closet." She added with a wink, "And (3) she let me."

Charity and Darcy each described their writing space for us.

"I don’t have a 'room of my own” or even a closet," Charity said. "My house has an open floor plan and my writing desk is pretty much in the middle of that. We turned the formal dining alcove into a 'library,' and that’s to my right. The kitchen is to my left.

When I write, I also hang out with the pets and the kids and generally speaking, it all works out."

However, Darcy said, "Now that my kids have grown, I do have a room of my own – but I almost never use it to write. I like to have my husband handy to bounce questions off so mostly I write at a desk in the living room. It’s glass and dark metal and holds my laptop, a candle, a desk lamp, a jar full of pencils, a vase of bamboo and a really cool tile a friend of mine gave me when Geek Girls was launched. It says: She believed she could so she did."

Charity and Darcy both still work full time so they don't have a writing schedule the same way many fulltime fiction writers do. Charity said, "I do what I can, when I can. I'll write during lunch, while my daughter is at dance or gymnastics class, on the weekends." Darcy agreed. "I either write or do something writer related every morning before I go to work. I also carry a notepad with me at all times so I can jot down ideas in spare moments. I try to do book promotion work for at least an hour every evening – but after a long day, it’s hard to maintain my focus."

On a more personal note, I asked, "Do you really really want a dog?"

"Dude. I already have the incredible shedding dog," Charity replied. "And with the amount she sheds each day, I can make a dog for everyone."

"Double dude," Darcy echoed. "We already had an 85 pound lab mix (who totally has my heart) then my brother moved in with us last fall and brought along his 50 pound semi-mutt. I feel confident that I can make a dog for everyone, every day."

They also have similar feeling about photographs. I asked, "Do you hate how you look in pictures?"

"Duh," replied Darcy. "Like Mr. Rogers used to sing, 'Some are fancy on the outside. Some are fancy on the inside.' Let's just say I'd rather be x-rayed than have my picture taken."

Charity concurred. "My goal in life is to always be the one holding the camera. I had to get my author pictures taken a second time because I was way too tense in the first set (that, and my agent thought I should show more cleavage)."

I told them, "You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?"

Charity said, "None. Here’s the classic geek reasoning: In Star Trek, Next Generation, Picard does just this, a wish granted from Q (an episode called "Tapestry"--yes, I know, geek alert, geek alert).

"After the wish is granted, Picard finds himself not the commander of the Enterprise but as some mealy-mouth second science officer in charge of mealy-mouth kinds of things. There’s a funny scene where Riker blows him off when Picard asks about potential leadership opportunities. (I recall far, far too much of this episode.)

"I don’t think you can remove those threads from your life and still be you."

"I don’t have a funny Star Trek allegory but I agree with Charity," Darcy said. "Even the absolute worst things in life bring gifts with them that you might not receive otherwise."

"What's a saying you use a lot?" I wondered.

"Ooh, here’s the chance to toss in my own geeky Star Trek reference!" Darcy exclaimed. "When my daughter turned twelve she started inserting the word ‘like’ into almost every sentence she spoke. It drove her dad and me crazy. We even resorted to bribing her to try to curb the habit. We offered to pay her for if she could say ten sentences in a row without a single ‘like’ in any of them. It didn’t cost us much. But, as time wore on, she rubbed off on both of us. Now I find myself saying ‘like’ way too often. My daughter, she’s like the Borg. Resistance is, like, futile."

"I often use the phrase 'going to town' when my daughter is working on some sort of art project, as in, 'Wow, you’re really going to town on that!'" Charity shared. "I never knew just how much I used it until the day she glanced up at me and asked, 'Am I going to town on this, Mommy?'"

Finally, I wanted to know the strangest thing they had each ever eaten.

Charity told us, "Puppy Chow. No, not the human variety snack food, but actual Puppy Chow, the kind you feed real puppies. It was one of those damned if you do/damned if you don’t situations.

"When you’re the new lieutenant and the section master sergeant offers you some Puppy Chow, which, oh by the way, he’s been snacking on for about fifteen minutes now, do you:

"1) Refuse the Puppy Chow? (Result: the section’s enlisted soldiers end up thinking: “The new lieutenant is a priss. She’ll never be one of us.”)

"2) Eat the Puppy Chow? (Result: the section’s enlisted soldiers end up thinking: “Wow. The new lieutenant is *really* stupid. We probably don’t want her to be one of us.”)

"In the end, I ate the Puppy Chow. Because that’s hardcore."

Darcy laughed and went, "*URP*. My mountain oysters incident pales in comparison to Charity’s."

You can keep up with Charity and Darcy on their blog, http://thegeekgirlsguide.com

INTERVIEW: Eileen Cook

2010-08-02T04:00:00.004-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Eileen Cook, whose latest book, Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood, was released in January. She has another book scheduled for release next January--The Education of Hailey Kendrick-- which takes place in an elite boarding school where an innocent prank goes very, very wrong. She also has a series for middle graders (ages 8-12) about a girl who is a part of a family that have been fairy godmothers for generations. Instead of granting wishes- she has a few of her own. All three books in this series will be out starting in spring 2011.

Eileen has always loved books and reading. When she was around 10, she checked a Stephen King book out of the library, even though her mother had warned her it would be scary.

"I thought it couldn't be that scary, after all I knew it was all made up. It was just someone's imagination," she told me. "Then I didn't sleep for three weeks because I was terrified. I remember thinking that even though I knew it was 'fake' what I felt was real. I wanted to be able to do that- create worlds that made people feel real emotions."

Not only did Stephen King's ability to make the reader feel real emotions inspire her, his On Writing is one of her favorite writing books. The other is Save the Cat by Blake Snyder. She has found both of these books to be a huge help.
"What advice do you have for young writers?" I asked.

"Read. Read a lot! Books are the best writing teachers. Read books you love and books you hate. Figure out why you loved them, why you hated them. Look at how that author chose to tell that particular story. Why did she tell it from that point of view? When did she reveal information? What sucked you in and kept you reading until it was way, way, way too late?

"If someone tells me they want to be a writer, but they don't read I don't understand them at all."

Even though Eileen loves writing more than anything, she said, "There are days when you would think it was torture. On those days I would rather clean the bathroom than write. You have to write through those days so you can get to the days when it is great."

And, sometimes when she finds herself stuck ("and there is a point in every book where it doesn't seem to be working," she assured me), she likes to leave her laptop, sit with her notebook, and handwrite different options.

"Something about using a pen and paper makes me feel closer to the project," she told me.

Another thing she does at those times is take a break and bake cookies.

"It's a chance to create something with my hands instead of my brain and the best thing is there are warm cookies when you're done!" she said.

It doesn't hurt that warm cookies are her all time favorite food. Her least favorite? Brussels sprouts.

"Bleah. I think they taste like the decapitated thumbs of the Jolly Green giant."

Eileen shared with me that when she first started writing, she never outlined.

"I would have a vague idea of the story I wanted to tell and I would just jump in and see where the story led me. Now that I have an editor she likes to know where I'm going. (Publishing people can be sooo picky). Now I spend at least a couple weeks working on an outline before I start. I think either way can work as long as you leave yourself the freedom to change your mind. No matter how well you think you know the story- sometimes it can surprise you."

That surprise is one of the things that makes Eileen admit that the book she likes best is always the one she's currently working on.

"When I am working on a new book it is like dating someone new," she admitted. "Everything seems exciting and anything is possible. I haven't yet discovered the things I don't like."

"As an adult, how do you keep your finger on the pulse of today’s kids?" I wondered.

"I believe it's important to respect kids and teens. I try to never have that 'I know exactly how you feel' or 'don't make such a big deal out of this' type of attitude. I read a lot of YA fiction and I spend time with teens asking them about what's important to them and taking the time to listen."

She has recently finished Restoring Harmony by Joelle Anthony and is looking forward to reading the last book in the Hunger Games series, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins.

When Eileen isn't reading or writing, she enjoys knitting.

"I have a yarn compulsion," she admitted. "I have piles and piles of it in my closet all waiting to be turned into sweaters or scarves. I also live near the beach so I like to walk there with my dogs. I spend most of the time yelling at them to stop digging up and rolling in dead things."

Eileen loves hearing from readers (in fact, you can email her at eileen@eileencook.com). She told me she once received an email from a reader that made her day.

"She told me how much she liked my books and how I had written exactly what she was feeling. She ended her email with 'you are so good at getting inside a teen head. It's like you were one once.'"

And, entertaining the reader is what it's all about for Eileen. When she was growing up, books were a great escape for her.

"I love hearing that someone started my book and couldn't put it down. It means I did my job well," she said.

"What challenges do you think the youth of today face that you didn’t?" I asked.

"I think the biggest challenge is the change that comes with technology. If you write it down it can exist forever. When I was growing up there was no Facebook. If I did something stupid (and trust me I did plenty) it wasn't broadcast on the internet for the entire world to know. I've seen a lot of cases of cyber bullying. What used to be restricted to the hallway at school now follows people home. I've joined together with a group of YA writers and we're doing an anthology on the subject of bullying to try and draw attention to the topic."

If she could give just one piece of advice to her readers it would be, "There is life after high school. A life where you have control over where you live, what you do with your life and who you have in your life. Hang in there."

Popularity is the best revenge.

In the final weeks of eighth grade, Lauren Wood made a choice. She betrayed her best friend, Helen, in a manner so publicly humiliating that Helen had to move to a new town just to save face. Ditching Helen was worth it, though, because Lauren started high school as one of the It Girls--and now, at the start of her senior year, she's the cheerleading captain, the quarterback's girlfriend, and the undisputed queen bee. Lauren has everything she's ever wanted, and she has forgotten all about her ex-best friend.

But Helen could never forget Lauren. After three years of obsessing, she's moving back to her old town. She has a new name and a new look, but she hasn't dropped her old grudges. She has a detailed plan to bring down her former BFF by taking away everything that's ever been important to Lauren—starting with her boyfriend.

Watch out, Lauren Wood. Things are about to get bitchy.

INTERVIEW: Kirsten Miller

2010-07-05T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Kirsten Miller, author of the Kiki Strike book series, as well as her latest release The Eternal Ones.

Kirsten told me she's very proud of all her books and they're far too different to be compared. She admitted, however, "I consider my first novel to be my greatest achievement. Before I wrote Kiki Strike, I never imagined I could writing anything longer than a grocery list. It was like going out for a jog and finding yourself finishing a marathon."

All of her writing is based on her own life. The Kiki books borrow heavily from her childhood experiences, while The Eternal Ones was inspired by her high school years.

"As a teenager, I never really felt like I belonged in my hometown," she told me. "I always had this strange, sneaking suspicion that there was somewhere else I needed to be. I recall feeling extremely impatient. I had this crazy hunch that my destiny had an expiration date. If I didn’t get out quickly, I might never find what I was looking for.

"Unlike Haven Moore, the protagonist of The Eternal Ones, I didn’t experience visions of a handsome young man from another life. But Haven’s urge to leave home and seek her destiny is very similar to what I experienced at that age. I imagine quite a few people have felt the same way."

I asked her to tell us a little bit about this book.

The Eternal Ones is a twisted tale of past lives, sinister secret societies, and love at first sight.

Want more details?

For as long as she can remember, Haven Moore has had visions of a city she’s never visited and a handsome young man she’s never met. Haven’s visions, she learns unexpectedly, aren’t just fantasies—they’re memories. Memories of another life that ended in tragedy almost ninety years earlier.

At last Haven understands why she’s always felt like there was someone out there that she needed to find. And a chance glimpse of a young man on TV convinces her that she should look for him in New York. But Haven’s search for her one eternal love leads her into unimaginable jeopardy when she finds herself linked with a notorious playboy and a mysterious secret society. Before her quest is finally over, Haven discovers just how dangerous true love can be.

"What drives you to write books for kids and teens?" I asked.

"I write books for kids and teens? I write to entertain myself—that’s the only way I’m able to do it. I’m just fortunate to share many interests with young people."

Kirsten loves magical realism, particularly the works of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Angela Carter.

One book that she feels no author should be without is an unabridged thesaurus.

"A really great thesaurus is more than just a reference book, it’s a source of inspiration," she told me. "An online thesaurus will never be able to cut it."

Her favorite book, however, is a work of nonfiction--Outside Lies Magic by John Stilgoe.

"It’s the book that first opened my eyes to wonders of the ordinary world," she explained. "Life is so much richer when you know about the secret history of the interstate highway system or the unique ecosystems that develop near rest stops. After I read Outside Lies Magic, I felt like I was heading off on an adventure every time I left the house. My only hobby is exploring. I love traveling to new cities and exotic lands, but I’m just as happy to stay here in Brooklyn and search for sights I’ve yet to see."

"If you could give any advice to your readers," I wondered, "what would it be?"

"Practice a martial art. Always have an escape route planned. Keep your breath smelling minty fresh. Read more than you write. Collect nothing but good karma. Avoid people who are cruel to animals. Protect anything or anyone weaker than you are. Don a disguise at least once a month. Strive to be interesting. Exhibit good table manners. Research the secret, dark history of your own hometown. Open your eyes. Do something brave every single day.

"Is that the kind of advice you wanted? Ha."

If Kirsten weren't a writer, ideally she'd be an archaeologist or an auto mechanic. Realistically, though?

"I'd still be in advertising," she said.

"If your book was turned into a movie, who would you like to play the main characters?" I asked.

"Most of these actors are a bit older than the characters, but I do like their style.

Haven Moore: Abby Cornish (Though she looks nothing like Haven. Maybe with a good wig and a southern accent.)
Iain Morrow: This one is super hard.
Beau Decker: A young Heath Ledger (so sad he’s not around anymore)
Adam Rosier: DefinitelyJames Franco "

She has two favorite words—one spoken and one written. For the written word, she likes chthonic, and orally—caliginous. However, she does not like the word bleat which she said was used to great effect in the most shocking, horrifying novel she's ever read--Underneath the Skin.

"What's the most embarrassing thing your mother ever did to you?"

"I was horribly allergic to poison ivy when I was a kid, which is a real problem if you live in the mountains of North Carolina. Once, when I was thirteen, I had a poison ivy rash that stretched all the way up my thighs. My regular doctor was on vacation, so my mother dragged me kicking and screaming to a pediatrician (a man whose super-cute son was my secret crush) and made me show him the full extent of the rash. I can still remember what underwear I was wearing that day. A couple of years later I went out with his son (very briefly unfortunately). I wonder if I told him that his dad had seen me in my underwear. Probably. That’s just the sort of thing I’d do."

Finally, I asked, "What's the one question that no one ever asks you and you wish they would?"

"Will you please visit our bookstore in Tahiti if we promise to pay all of your expenses?"

INTERVIEW: Adam Selzer

2010-06-28T04:00:00.000-04:00

Adam (left) with Hulk Hogan. They were guests on the same radio show in October, 2009

Aurora is pleased to welcome Adam Selzer, whose latest work I Kissed a Zombie and Liked It has recently been optioned for a Disney Channel Original Movie. Adam explained that the option doesn't mean a movie will definitely be made, however Disney has bought the rights to make one if they want. Either way, it's an exciting bit of news.

I asked him to tell us a little bit about I Kissed a Zombie and Liked It.

"It was my attempt to satirize paranormal romance, a genre that was certainly ripe for it," he told me. "All of my books are really satire at heart. In the world of this book, vampires had to admit to the world that they existed when they found out that Megamart was raising the dead to work as zombie slave labor. That was about three years before the book, so by now the 'omigod vampires and zombies are real' scandal is over and life is back to normal, for the most part, except that douchebag vampires who mope around acting all emo are the most popular guys in high school and the goth look has taken over as the style of the day.

"All the girls love them, except for Alley, a snarky girl who thinks dead guys have no reason to live. But then she finds out the goth guy she's crushing on isn't just pale and sickly as part of his goth look, he's just been dead for three years. After that, she has a whole bunch of new issues to deal with, like how much of herself and her plans she should sacrifice for a first love. I think a lot of YA (well, really a lot of romance, going back hundreds of years) ignores those sort of issues.

"As a satirist, my job is to jump on the bandwagon and stick a Garfield doll in the window, but I still have to be able to drive the wagon. So it's a satire, but it's also my attempt to write the most realistic paranormal romance that I possibly could."

He has another book set in the same world as I Kissed a Zombie and Liked It that will be coming out next year. The tentative title is Fairy Godmother and the heroine of the book tells us a little bit about it:

You probably all know me from the book Emily's Fairy Godmother by Eileen Codlin. But Eileen Codlin can go sit n a closet and suck moldy toenails. She didn't get ONE THING right. I'm no ditz who was desperate to go to the prom with a vampire, and my fairy godmother wasn't the least bit beautiful, and I'm not a princess (and I can't make you one, so kindly get off my lawn). Then, I talked to Alley Rhodes, this girl from my school who had a book, I KISSED A ZOMBIE AND I LIKED IT, written about her. She said that when she told her story to Adam Selzer, he made the Smart Aleck Staff wait on her hand and foot for a whole week and didn't change a thing (except for leaving out some scene in Doug the Zombie's car). So, well, long story short, the Smart Aleck Staff ROCKS (even the interns!), and Adam's new book will be out next year! Take that, Codlin!

I asked him how much of his books is based on his own life and he told me, "As little as humanly possible."

He tries to write book that he would have liked as a teenager, and he usually has a few things in common with his characters. He thinks it's more fun to write characters who aren't much like him.

He also thinks it's fun to make playlists of songs he thinks the main character would like, songs that have the right vibe for the book and songs that he's just into. As a matter of fact, he literally wrote a bunch of songs to go along with it, got them recorded, and put an album up for download here.

"What challenges do you think the youth of today face that you didn’t?" I wondered.

"Honestly, nothing. The big issues facing teenagers are disillusion, alienation, loneliness, and all that stuff. That hasn't changed in decades. They can't game the system all the ways that I did ten years ago, but there are always new ways to do it. The internet changes way the social structures work, but it doesn't really change the basic rules of the game.

"Most of the differences are in economics, I guess. Teenagers today pay a lot more for gas than I did, but I don't think they're paying $18 for a CD very often, and I can't imagine they need to spend as much on blank tapes as I did.

"Anyway, bottom line is that being a teenager was a pain in the ass in the 90s, and it's a pain in the ass now."

Not only has the internet changed the way social structures work, Adam thinks it's also changed reading.

"There were tons of books that I wanted to read but couldn't find anywhere when I was a kid, and now I can find a place selling them used with no trouble at all," he explained. "And when I was getting started, I never once sent a paper query anywhere. I did it all online. One of these days something will come along that will do to ebooks what Pickwick Papers did to serials. You'll know it when you see it. I don't think ebooks will take over books the way digital downloads took over music, but the publishing industry is always changing, anyway."

Some of the best pieces of advice when it comes to writing are "All writing is mystery writing" and "It's easier to fix bad writing than a blank page." His favorite advice, though, is to ignore "how to write" books.

"You can learn everything you could possibly want to know about writing by reading Roger Ebert's movie reviews," he said. "Seriously. One book no writer should be without is I Hated, Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie by Roger Ebert."

Adam Selzer is the author of I KISSED A ZOMBIE AND I LIKED IT, THE SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY, and seven other books. He lives in Chicago, where he spent several years making a living in the ghost hunting industry. He enjoys eavesdropping on people on the train, picking arguments with libertarians, and cooking.

INTERVIEW: Helen Ellis

2010-06-21T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Helen Ellis, author of The Turning: What Curiosity Kills, her debut YA novel and the first of a series. Even though she lives in Manhattan, she clings to her Southern accent like mayonnaise to white bread. She is also the author of the acclaimed novel Eating the Cheshire Cat.

I asked her to share a little about What Curiosity Kills.

Plucked from foster care, Mary Richards hit the jackpot with a loving family, an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and a spot in the elite Purser-Lilley Academy. But she might lose it all if people find out about the turning.
Something not human is inside Mary. Her mind is reeling and her body is rebelling. She succumbs to urges and desires she never imagined. And then there’s the bizarre physical transformation.
Struggling with her metamorphosis, Mary is sought out by two boys who share her secret. Will she reject the destiny they swear is hers? Or will she find our what curiosity kills?
You only get one chance to decide if you’ll never turn again.

When Helen was a kid, her only escape was a book. She wasn't old enough to drive. She wasn't a kid who would cut school or run away from school. In fact, if you don't count being dragged by the ankle around the basketball court in a blue one-piece gym suit by Regina Hinton because she was such a skinny, quiet girl, Helen had a relatively happy adolescence. But, still, she wanted to leave Alabama, mean girls, and her shyness behind and losing herself in books helped her "get out of Dodge early."

She told me that she's still out of breath from writing What Curiosity Kills because she took Stephen King's advice in On Writing. He says to write as fast as you can to outrun the self-doubt. Helen wrote What Curiosity Kills in less than six months. She is now working on the second book in The Turning series: The Turning: Swing the Dead. Mary must decide which side she’ll be on in the New York City turf war. Domestic or Stray? Then she finds out that there are more than two sides.

In between Eating the Cheshire Cat and The Turning, however, Helen wrote three books that never saw print. She credits her husband, Lex, with being incredibly supportive.

"I was ready to give up on writing," she admitted, "but Lex said, 'Keep going.'" She did, and The Turning: What Curiosity Kills was the result.

When I asked her about her writing process, she told me it was simple: no outlining, no research.

"My entire writing process is me asking myself: 'And then what happened? And THEN what happened?!' And, for What Curiosity Kills, if I didn't know something, I made it up."

"If you weren't a writer, what would you be?" I asked.

"I would be a secretary. I was one for most of my day job life. I like filing, scheduling, opening mail, taking calls. Taking care of someone. Being a secretary enabled me to support myself while writing my first novel Eating the Cheshire Cat.

"If I were to choose another creative dream job, it would be designing the windows at Bergdorf Goodman. Every Christmas, I design a new tree. Themes have included Two in the Bush (all bird ornaments) and 'Fat Ho’s' (all Santas). I collect ornaments for years from estate sales and eBay. When their time is over, I give them away at our annual Christmas party."

Helen shared with me that she writes her computers on the computer, but for correspondence she prefers her 1969 Royal typewriter. You can learn how at Diary of a Luddite: How to use a typewriter. And, if you write Helen a real honest-to-goodness letter, she will write one back.

When Helen's not writing, she enjoys playing poker. In fact, she's a tournament poker player and just got back from Las Vegas where she took part in the World Series of Poker. She told me, "In Mississippi casinos, I am nicknamed The Velvet Terrorist."

She is a self-confessed Luddite and said her least favorite word is 'cellphone.' She does have an iPod but uses it solely for background music while she writes, so all of the tunes on it are jazz and big band: Glen Miller, Artie Shaw, Charles Mingus, and Count Basie to name a few. She does have one song with lyrics: "Yes" by Liza Minelli from Liza with a Z.

"What's the most embarrassing thing your mother ever did to you?" I wondered.

"My friend, Laurie Mundy, and I lied to a video arcade quarter jockey and said we’d lost a quarter in Ms. Pac Man. He keyed in a free game. I bragged to Mama about this the next day at the mall, and she made me walk back into The Barrel of Fun, walk up to a random worker, give him a quarter, and say, 'I owe you this.'"

Finally, I asked, "If you could give any advice to your readers, what would it be?"

"Be brave. That’s the message of The Turning. When you’re young, you haven’t failed as much as you eventually will. It’s easier to get your courage up – to talk to a kid you have a crush on, to apply to a college on the other side of the country, to backpack all by yourself across Europe, or to say what’s on your mind. My advice is: be brave now. The earlier you start, the easier it will be to brave the rest of your life.

INTERVIEW: WE HEAR THE DEAD

2010-06-14T04:00:00.002-04:00

This post is part of Sourcebooks' “Do You See Dead People, too?” paranormal mystery giveaway! To have a chance to win one of 25 copies of this book, all you have to do is answer one of the following questions:

1. Do you believe that communication with the dead is possible?
2. Have you ever felt the presence of someone who was not physically present?

You can also receive an extra entry by tweeting about the contest, linking to either your blog or Sourcebooks' contest page: http://teenfire.ning.com/forum/topics/do-you-see-dead-people-too. PLEASE NOTE: Answers to the above questions MUST be entered onto the contest page, NOT this blog. However, feel free to leave comments to the author on this blog. Thanks and good luck.

The Long and the Short of It: Aurora is pleased to welcome Dianne Salerni, author of We Hear the Dead which has been optioned for film.

We Hear the Dead is a historical fiction novel that retells the true story of Maggie Fox, a young girl who, in 1848, accidentally invented “the séance” and founded spiritualism with a high-spirited prank. Maggie and her younger sister Kate caused an uproar in their small, upstate New York town when they revealed that they could communicate with the ghost of a murdered man they claimed was buried in the cellar. In actuality, it was only a joke designed to scare an unwelcome guest, but once the prank had snowballed into something bigger, neither Maggie nor Kate knew how to get out of it. When their older, divorced sister, Leah Fox Fish, realized people would pay money to communicate with dead relatives, she took custody of the two girls and set them up as spirit mediums in Rochester. Maggie and Kate became America’s first teenage celebrities – but fame came with a price. The girls were living a lie; they faced accusations of witchcraft, and when Maggie met the love of her life – the heroic and dashing explorer Elisha Kane -- her unconventional occupation stood in the way of their future happiness.

Dianne told me that she has no doubt that We Hear the Dead would still be sitting in the closet with the rest of her old writing if it hadn't been for her husband pushing her to get it to publication.

"He is my most ardent fan and supporter," she told me. "He was my first reader – and he was tough! He put up with me when I spent more time in the evenings with my 'dead friends' – ie: the Fox sisters and Elisha Kane – than with him, and he listens when I talk through plot problems, brainstorm future writing projects, or just bemoan about my insecurities. He has come to almost every author event I’ve had, stood behind me, and pushed me forward when I was too shy to speak. I absolutely could not do this without him!"

The book was originally self-published in 2007 under the title High Spirits. Dianne worked really hard to sell the book and sent out a lot of copies for review at her own expense. The more great reviews she received, the more Amazon featured her book in recommendations for readers. Two of those readers who checked it out were Kelly Barrales-Saylor, an editor at Sourcebooks, and Amy Green, producer and owner of One Eye Open Films. They checked out the book and, nearly simultaneously, made offers for the publishing rights and a film option on the book.

Most interviewers ask Dianne about Maggie and Kate Fox since they are the main focus of the book. However, Maggie's love interest, Elisha Kane, is also a fascinating individual. In his day, he was one of the most famous men in America.
"It’s an interesting testimony to American fickleness that he is now almost completely forgotten," Dianne commented.

He was also the character who gave Dianne the most trouble. On the surface, the bare facts of his life make him out to be a man of great heroics – and arrogance. She struggled when she reached the part of the novel where Kane was supposed to make his appearance, because she wasn't sure how she could make him an appealing romantic figure to her protagonist and to her readers.

"Clearly, the real Maggie had loved him desperately, but I just wasn’t seeing it. Elisha Kane caused me to lay the manuscript aside for over 6 months, while I tried to figure him out. In the end, he won me over with his own words. I read his book, Arctic Explorations, and I read his love letters to Maggie Fox. I discovered that this young man, the first born son of an aristocratic Philadelphia family, was ambitious, heroic, and – yes -- more than a bit arrogant. But he was also intelligent, good-humored, self-deprecating, and deeply, deeply in love with Maggie Fox. He fought it … struggled to overcome it … because in every respect she was totally unsuitable for his station. But he was unable to leave her. And once I understood this – I picked up the manuscript and didn’t stop feverishly writing until I reached the end."

When Dianne was a teenager, she read a lot of fantasy and science fiction, with two of her favorite authors being Roger Zelazny, and C.J. Cherryh.

"However, I also enjoyed trolling for treasures in my mother’s collection of gothic mysteries," Dianne said. "She had quite a stash in the basement from her own teenage years, and I became addicted to Mary Stewart and Mary Roberts Rinehart. I think those are the authors who most influence my writing today. As for my current reading, I still read science fiction, although not a lot of fantasy, and I’m still a real sucker for a good, gothic mystery."

Dianne was making up stories before she could write and continued writing all the way through elementary school and middle school, although sadly she threw out all the old notebooks in a fit of insecurity at some point. She still has a lot of stuff from high school forward and she admitted she's glad she has them.
"Even if some of the writing is fairly immature," she told me. "It’s good to see how far I’ve come!"

She advises any young writers who are reading this to never throw your old writing away!

"Seriously," she said, "the best advice I can give is to keep writing. Like anything, you get better with practice. Read and learn from the books that you love. Write and don’t be afraid to revise and change your work. Good ideas sometimes spring from mediocre ones, and long shots sometimes pay off! I grew up reading and writing science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. I never imagined that my first published novel would end up being historical fiction!"

Currently, Dianne has recently completed the screenplay adaption of We Hear the Dead for Amy Green and is waiting to hear if she needs to make any further revisions on it. She's also working on a historical mystery with supernatural elements and a modern paranormal short story.

"When I have time left over – which isn’t as often as I’d like -- I’m doing preliminary research and brainstorming for another historical mystery involving a unique cemetery in Catawissa, Pennsylvania," she shared with me.

Dianne writes mostly historical or paranormal fiction, so very little is based on her actual experiences as a child—although she is greatly influenced by her mother's gothic mysteries. She did, however, admit to basing characters on people she knew growing up.

"People’s basic characters are the same, no matter when they lived," she explained. "In fact I like to draw connections between the lives of teenagers in the past and the present. For example, when teenage spirit mediums Maggie and Kate Fox were elevated to celebrity status in the 1850’s, they faced some of the same temptations and stresses of modern teenage stars – Maggie’s romance was threatened by her fame as a spirit medium, and Kate developed a taste for alcohol."

I asked Dianne what she's currently reading herself.

"I recently finished Jekel Loves Hyde, which I really enjoyed, and I’ll soon be starting Bleeding Violet. In between, I’m reading Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities. It was a birthday gift from my sister-in-law, who once saw me reading Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poisons and thought I might enjoy this one, too. I would really like to find a slow-acting, deadly poison in a common Pennsylvania weed. It’s for a story. I swear."

When Dianne is writing her historical mysteries, she first searches for some true historical elements to serve as the nuggets of truth within the story: the mysterious death of a 19th century psychic investigator, a girl apparently possessed by the spirit of young suicide victim, a haunted mansion, an Indian massacre, a grave enclosed in a cage. Then she weaves the "based on truth" elements into a fictional story.

"At this point, there will be some form of outlining," she explained, "including choosing names for the characters. Once I have a general sense of where I’m going, I’ll try to draft a first chapter, just to get a feel for it. I may end up changing it repeatedly, but I’ll keep coming at it from different angles until the story takes off on its own."

Dianne told me that she enjoys the research when she finds what she's looking for. She's a full-time elementary school teacher and mom, so she doesn't have the opportunity to do a lot of traveling. By necessity most of her research is done in books and the internet.

"Luckily you can find almost anything online," she said. "Recently, I needed to figure out how people would have treated arsenic poisoning around the turn of the century. After extensive digging around, I turned up a 1904 cookbook on Google Books which had a guide in the back titled: “What to Do Before the Doctor Arrives.” Apparently, arsenic was so commonly used in household products like rat poison and wallpaper glue that an emergency home remedy was included in cookbooks! In case you were wondering, the recommended treatment of the time was: 1) salt water purge 2) egg whites to coat the stomach and 3) rust to bind with the arsenic. Yes, rust."

Finally I asked, "If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be and why?"

"I’d be at the Sandals Resort in the Bahamas, lying out by the pool with a book. Of course, I’d have reservations with my husband for snorkeling later in the afternoon, but there’s no hurry in the Bahamas, and if we were late, they would wait for us. In the evening, we would have dinner at one of the restaurants, and then saunter over to the lounge for some snooker. Snooker is a complicated British version of billiards played on a giant table 5 feet by 10 feet. (I know this because, being 5 feet tall, I once lay down on the floor beside the table to prove it.) On the way back to our hotel in the evening, I’d probably stop some other couples to take romantic pictures of me and my husband, and my husband would take a few extraneous pictures of bizarre Bahamian electrical junction boxes because he’s an engineer and he can’t help himself."

INTERVIEW: PICTURE THE DEAD

2010-06-07T04:00:00.004-04:00

Lisa Brown is the bestselling illustrator and/or author of a growing number of books, including How to Be, The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming, and Baby Mix Me a Drink. Lisa lives in San Francisco with her son and her husband. Find her at www.americanchickens.com.

Adele Griffin is the critically acclaimed author of numerous young adult novels, including The Other Shepards, Where I Want to Be, and the Vampire Island series. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York. Find her at www.adelegriffin.net.
Find them together at www.picturethedead.com.

INTERVIEW: Sandra Cox

2010-05-24T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Sandra Cox, a multi-published author who, in addition to YA, also writes paranormal and historical romances and metaphysical nonfiction. Her latest YA book, Grounded, is now out with Class Act Books. I asked Sandra to tell us a little bit about her new release.

On the surface, Gillian Stone has it all: wealth, beauty, and the freedom to come and go as she pleases…at least from sunset to dawn. From dawn to dusk, she’s grounded in several hundred pounds of marble. And if that’s not bad enough, her life expectancy is preordained to be short…unless, she can find a certain genie and reverse the wish-spell.

I asked her a little about her other YA novel, Vampire Island.

Zoe Tempest lost both of her parents in a bizarre murder. She moves in with her Uncle Julian Kilmer who lives on a remote island in the Bahamas called Vampire Island. That is when her life changes in a manner more terrifying than anything she could have imagined."

If Vampire Island was made into a movie, she believes Dakota Fanning and Robert Pattinson would be excellent choices for the main characters.

Sandra didn't picture herself as a writer for several years, but the passion for writing was always lurking in her soul. She always had her nose in a book, living in a make believe world. Now, she writes paranormal and urban fantasy and creates her own worlds.

She has one piece of advice to readers: don't get locked into reading just one type of book.

"Try different genres and different authors," she said. "Hopefully, you'll discover new, exciting reads."

Sandra prefers to write on a computer, but when her brain stagnates, it helps to change her surroundings. She will get out the laptop and move to her screened-in porch to write during the summer, or she'll write in the car when she's on a road trip. She also always starts with an outline.

"My muse frequently takes a side road and I tag along," she said with a smile.
Many authors have inspired her in her own work, including Stephanie Meyer, Nora Roberts, Harlan Coben, and Elizabeth Peters. Growing up, though, her favorite author was Louisa May Alcott.

"What an amazing writer," she told me.

When Sandra's not writing, she likes to shop, read, garden, walk and hike.

Some of the challenges that youth face today that Sandra didn't include drugs, AIDS, and hepatitis.

"On the flip side they also have a lot of awesome tech items we didn't: laptops, ability to text, iPods, XBoxes, Playstations, e readers, all kinds of fun stuff," she said.

"Do you have any advice for young writers?" I asked.

"It's never too early to develop your craft. Join writing groups, enter contests, keep a daily journal, write every day. And, above all, don't quit. Don’t give up."

INTERVIEW: Heather Beck

2010-05-17T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Heather Beck, author of What Legends Are Made Of. She's been writing professionally since she was sixteen and had her first book published when she was nineteen. Since then, she's written seven well-reviewed book and she's still just twenty-four.

I asked Heather what she would be doing if she weren't a writer.

"Writing is a large part of my life but I’ve never depended on it as my career," she explained. "I recently graduated from the University of Toronto where I earned an Honours Bachelor of Arts, English specialist. I would love to do my Masters in English and, after that, a Ph.D."

She shared some exciting news with me.

"I’m proud to announce that I’ll be launching my publishing company, Treasure Cove Books, this summer of 2010. I have five middle reader books slated for publication with a tentative release schedule of one book per year. My company will also have a young adult and adult imprint."

In addition to writing books, she's also a screenwriter. Her short film, Young Eyes, had a theatrical premiere a few months ago. She also has three television shows in development and she's currently writing the pilot script and treatment for a fourth show. She has two feature films in development as well.

"One goal I’d really like to pursue is my own make-up and perfume line," she told me. "I’d also love to host my own fishing show where I travel to different lakes and oceans. I suppose these are more pipedreams than ambitions but one never knows."

I asked Heather to tell us what she's currently working on.

"I am nearing the completion of editing for my scary story series. They are the spin-offs of the bestselling Ten Journeys Through The Unknown and include: Haunted, The Sands Of Time, Shivers, Twisted Tales Of Terror, and When Darkness Falls. I really love these stories because they are fun, fast-paced and unpredictable. Currently, the TV adaptation of this series is in development."

As a screenwriter, Heather has been able to, in addition to writing original features and television shows, adapt her own books. One of the TV shows she has in development is based on her scary stories for kids. The other TV show she's working on is from her adult paranormal romances. One of her feature films, as well, is based on her young adult novel.

"I did the casting for the project that’s already reached that stage," she said. "When choosing the actors, I looked for similarities between my character and the actor. While experience is great, I also respect training. The deciding factor was the auditions and the callback performances. I definitely find it more exciting to discover new talent than to book a big name."

Heather shared with us a little about the stories included in Haunted, her latest anthology of scary stories for kids which will be released this summer. Below are the descriptions of the stories which are included in this unique collection.

Ghost Park
Chase discovers an old playground in the woods that’s home to a group of pale children who say very odd things and take an unnatural interest in her.

A Haunting Past
Truce’s class trip to an old native reserve turns deadly when Bear, an infamous chief who died two hundred years ago, blames him for the tribe’s extinction.

The Manor Upon The Rocks
Grey, damp, and surrounded by jagged rocks, Calla Lily’s new home isn’t only unpleasant, it’s also haunted by the world’s most evil boy.

A Medieval Nightmare
When Ellie and Brandon get trapped in a medieval museum that’s a bit too real, they fall under a spell and become pivotal players in a ghostly regime.

A Watery Grave
A camping trip becomes a heart-pounding race for survival when Justine meets a ghost who’s determined to change her fate by trading bodies with a living entity.

A new anthology of paranormal romances, Whispers in the Shadows, has been slated for publication. Heather will begin working with the editor on this shortly.

"These tales include: jilted ghosts who seek revenge, a sexy Egyptian tour guide with a deadly secret, cunning mermen who emerge from the ocean, a mystical forest where love truly can last for eternity, and a colony of perfect men who exceed reality."

Her works-in-progress include Last Werewolf Standing, which is a paranormal romance that includes three stories chronicling several generations of a werewolf clan, as well as Siren Island and Fairy Dust, both paranormal young adult novels.

"Which of your books are you most proud of and why?" I asked her.

"My goal as a writer is to always improve upon my craft. Thus, my answer to this question will frequently change. As of right now, I’m very proud of What Legends Are Made Of. I believe it is a high quality product and, quite honestly, I’ve been blown away by the rave reviews."

Most of Heather's YA writing is autobiography masquerading as fiction, she admitted.

"I’ve had many unique experiences in my life so far and always incorporate them into my work. Some of the situations I write about are obviously not based on my life. Rather, they are issues I deem important to address, analyze, and attempt to resolve."

INTERVIEW: Jacqueline Houtman

2010-05-10T04:00:00.002-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Jacqueline Houtman who spent much of her life learning to be a scientist (27, if you count kindergarten). The best part of all that school is that some people, especially her parents, call her Dr. Houtman. In the rare moments she did not spend in the lab, she did theater to feed the rest of her brain. Then she came to her senses and started over as a freelance science writer, writing for audiences from middle school to medical school. She most enjoys writing “sciency fiction” for kids, where real science is integral to the story.

"My science training has definitely had a positive effect on my writing," she told me.

Her debut novel, The Reinvention of Edison Thomas, was released recently by Front Street.

Science geek Eddy Thomas can invent useful devices to do anything, except solve his bully problem. Eddy Thomas can read a college physics book, but he can’t read the emotions on the faces of his classmates at Drayton Middle School. He can spend hours tinkering with an invention, but he can’t stand more than a few minutes in a noisy crowd, like the crowd at the science fair, which Eddy fails to win. When the local school crossing guard is laid off, Eddy is haunted by thoughts of the potentially disastrous consequences and invents a traffic-calming device, using parts he has scavenged from discarded machines. Eddy also discovers new friends, who appreciate his abilities and respect his unique view of the world. By trusting his real friends, Eddy uses his talents to help others and rethinks his purely mechanical definition of success.

Jacqueline told me if she hadn't started writing, she would probably still be working in science.

"You write grants, they get rejected, and then you write some more. A lot like writing books, actually, except with biohazards," she said.

She does most of her writing at a coffee shop around the corner from her home.
"I even got 'the call' there," she shared. "I spend so much time there that I’ve been known to get phone calls there. Not on my cell, on the coffee house landline."

Jacqueline confessed she does all her writing on computer, mainly because if she wrote it in longhand, she wouldn’t be able to read it. She does, however, prefer to do her editing on paper.

"Are you working on anything now?" I asked.

"Yes, I'm answering a lot of questions! I'm also working on another sciency middle grade novel. With rockets."

Her husband is a great help when it comes to checking Jacqueline's writing for scientific accuracy.

"He's been very supportive, in so many ways," she told me. "He serves as a technical advisor. I'm trained in biology, but my husband is very knowledgeable in chemistry and physics and electronics, subjects that my characters know more about than I do."

So far, Jacqueline said she doesn't have much in the way of fan stories, but she's had a few cases of people telling her that reading EDDY has increased their empathy or understanding for people on the autism spectrum or opened long-suppressed conversations on the subject.

One question she wishes an interviewer would ask her is "Why are the words autism and Asperger’s syndrome not used anywhere in your book?"

"I wrote EDDY from the point of view of a boy on the autism spectrum, and people who are familiar with the spectrum recognize Eddy’s autism, or more specifically, Asperger’s syndrome. I didn’t want readers to label Eddy before they got to know him as a character. Labels separate us. Autism is only one part of what makes Eddy who he is; it is not the only part."

"What challenges do you think the youth of today face that you didn’t?" I wondered.

"Kids today are so plugged in. They have instant access to every form of entertainment or information. In a way, that’s great, but I think it presents a lot of challenges, too. Lack of exposure to the nature. Short attention spans. More avenues for bullying and exploitation. Repetitive motion disorders."

When Jacqueline's not keeping her butt in her chair writing, she shakes it at a Zumba class.

"Active hobbies are a necessity in this profession," she explained. "That’s why I have a Wii. Crossword puzzles help keep my mind flexible, too."

Jacqueline and her husband don't have any pets, because she has allergies and her husband grew up on a farm where animals didn't belong in the house. If she could have an ideal pet, though, it would be one that didn't poop.

Finally, I asked, "As an adult, how do you keep your finger on the pulse of today's kids?"

"I sit on them and grab their wrists so I can feel the radial artery. Sometimes they complain about that technique. I also eavesdrop."

Jacqueline will be at the Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books June 18-19 and would love to have any of our readers who are in the area to stop by and say hello.

INTERVIEW: Chris Stevenson

2010-05-03T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Chris Stevenson, author of Gate Walker, a YA novel published by Lyrical Press.

Chris has been writing on and off for twenty-six years, solidly for about eight years.

"I never thought that I would be a writer," he confessed. "Even with my father’s success as a non-fiction author, it never occurred to me. I wanted to be an airline pilot, a paleontologist, and even a veterinarian at one point. I fell into writing—it was an accident, right around the age of 26."

As a matter of fact, if Chris hadn't become a writer, he probably would have become a paleontologist.

"I have a deep, fanatical interest in the primordial past, especially when it comes to dinosaurs and Ice Age mammals," he told me. "That fascination with the core sciences gripped me as a small child, and I hope one day to write a book about our distant past. Perhaps the Hobbits of Flores Island needs to be put into a narrative fiction format. I would love to explore this race of tiny hominids, much the same way that Jean. M. Auel tackled Clan of the Cave Bear."

His fascination with Ice Age mammals showed up in the favorite of his books, The Lupus Strain, which recently sold to LBF books.

"I wanted to do a different werewolf book that hadn’t seen it done before. The Lupus Strain (thriller) is my dedication to Michael Crichton, plain and simple. It’s about a DNA experiment that goes terribly wrong. A geneticist attempts to cross the genes of a man-eating ice age dire wolf with a contemporary. But the genome soup is contaminated. Poof! We end up with a very strange litter, one of which is a Paleolithic female who carries the genes of her ancestors, but also has a good amount of wolf in her. Another littermate is a ferocious monster bent on mating with her, and will kill anyone who gets in his way. A lonely forest ranger finds her, and spends the entire time in the story trying to keep her out of the hands of law enforcement, the crazed monster, a warped cryptozoologist, and every nut case vigilante in state of Wyoming. It’s a total twist on the werewolf tale—a gender reversal of Beauty and the Beast, mixed with shades of The Island of Doctor Moreau."

Gate Walker is the second favorite of the books he has written. "I didn't know I had it in me to write a YA novel, using a teenage protagonist," he told me. "It was a surprise to me."

Chris is currently working with a new agent who is interested in his entire inventory of books.

"I’m particularly proud of a book called Diane Nine and the Fusion Machine," he said. "I could think of nothing more appealing than creating a female Iron Man story, with no fantasy or anything derivative from the original graphic comic/movie idea. It landed me four agent offers, three referrals, 28 manuscript requests, and tons of compliments. I just finished a final version for my agent. My newest book is a SF thriller, about a rescue involving a Stone Age race that refuses to leave their organic sponge island because they think it is a God. Plus, they’ve never set their feet on soil before."

"What authors have influenced you the most?" I wondered.

"Crichton, of course, with the addition of Joseph Wambaugh, Alan Dean Foster, Poul Anderson, Clive Cussler, Heinlein, and many more who are known for large SF epics and off-planet tales. Joanne Rowling is my favorite YA writer because she is so adept at world-building skills. She makes her own environment with absolute clarity, unafraid of naming her props, devices, and elements that appear within her story. She has that whimsy factor that allows the reader to be transported to another world, and she does it so effortlessly."

Chris told me that he believes in outlining—up to a point. When he's stuck and doesn't know where the plot is going, he knows it's time for a serious bullet point outline.

"It’s only happened twice in my career, because I do prefer to write straight off the cuff and let the characters lead the story. Characters are unpredictable. They’ll often do things you never expected, so in a sense, the author is just along for the ride like a chaperone, discovering the adventure right along with the characters. They call it organic writing."

He doesn’t use his own experiences too much in his stories, because he's afraid of author intrusion. He does have an extended family with children and teenagers, though.

"All I have to do is watch them, monitor their activities, and seriously pay attention to what they have to say, to get a real feel for how the young, and young at heart reacts to this world. Children and young adults are gems. All you have to do is study them and you’ll find all of the story meat and conflict you’ll ever need in your plots and themes."

One of his favorite themes when it involves young adults is escaping from tyranny.

"My favorite movie of all time is Logan’s Run. A futuristic society that thinks you have to die and ride the carousel before you hit the age of 30, is a puzzlement to me on one hand, and a fascinating dilemma on the other. Escaping from tyranny is one of my favorite themes when it involves young adults, who have to find their way in life, sometimes clumsily, but ultimately break out of the mold to save themselves and their culture."

Chris' first big splash in the limelight came when his first non-fiction book, Garage Sale Mania, was published.

"I was the only one in the country who dared create a book about garage sales for both the seller and the consumer," he said. "It was a glossy trade paperback, and I received my first big advance for it. It took me to the BEA, wearing an author’s badge. I was hosted on several major TV network and news stations. I must have participated in 20 live radio reviews, and had over 30 interviews and articles written in the major magazines and newspapers. One 6 O’clock news interview was particularly memorable—that was a real paper bag moment for me. I knew then, that I had arrived. My next challenge was breaking into the fiction world. So far, it’s happening. But I wish it would happen faster!"

It's this "moving slowly" that's difficult for Chris' extended family to grasp when it comes to the writing life.

"They have no idea that conception to publication might take two years or more. My sister, niece, and nephew are my biggest fans and are very excited when one of my books come out. My brother-in-law has a dim view of the writing life in a financial sense—he doesn’t understand why an agent doesn’t shower the writer with bags of money, and why I’m not on TV anymore. I have to suffer through the negative outlooks, as well as take solace in the positive reinforcement. Strangers have no concept of how publishing works, so I don’t even bring up the subject with them. Explanations would take hours, maybe days to describe the process."

He also has a gaggle of fans in his writing group who can't wait to purchase his new book.

"They’re so easy and gracious with the comments, about what they like, or what drove them mad. I think every writer lives for this type of vindication and adoration—it’s why we do what we do. If I can change someone’s life through my themes that I occasionally sneak into the narrative, I’ve really done my job to better someone’s lifestyle and outlook. No amount of money and exposure in the world could replace that."

"What's the one question you wish an interviewer would ask you (and the answer)?" I asked.

"Boy, I wish an interviewer would ask me why I think it’s so important to write a 'breakout' novel today. I would say that it’s not enough to write a good book in this economy and climate, it has to be a great book that blows everything off the shelf. It’s much harder today to grasp the attention of the publishing elite—you have to have something that stands out, when millions of writers are competing for that same publishing slot. I do blame the internet because it makes it so much easier today to craft words and send off a huge file via electricity. That’s why I strive to explain that concept/premise is the most important factor in crafting a story today and it can be found in your most important piece of writing—the query. I believe voice/style follows a close second. I have to charm the reader from the first page on. There’s no other way to do that than to show how stylistically superior you are to the average writer. I go out of my way to show this side of my prose, and so far it’s worked. Particularly in Diane Nine."

Finally, I wondered if Chris had any advice for young writers.

"I think my best advice for young writers would be to hang in there in spite of all the rejections and disappointments. Writing is a craft that can be learned and polished. This business is not filled with instant gratification—it’s a long, difficult haul to publication and success. Determination and patience play an important part in keeping a sane and well-adjusted mind. Never give up, never get discouraged. Something I wrote to remind myself in times of woe and loneliness:

A Writer is…
A humble, receptive student and negotiator
But the heart that beats within his breast
Is a determined savage
Unfamiliar with surrender

Don’t drink and drive, especially when traveling the space-time continuum highway.

Avalon Labrador is convicted and sentenced to die for her husband's murder. In a twist of fate, before the sentence can be carried out, an odd priest informs her that she is being given a second chance to right the wrongs of the past. Avalon must die, but before she does, she must also give birth to a part of herself.

Avy Labrador doesn't know what to make of the odd twists life has thrown her way since she turned eighteen. All she knows is that something isn't right and it has to do with the death of her mother and her husband many years ago. As if an odd priest, powers she never knew she had, and a brand new magician boyfriend aren't enough to turn her life upside down, she finds her own life in danger as she tries to solve a crime that happened more than three decades ago and prevent a new one from occurring.

Will Avy accept her fate and learn to become a Gate-Walker in order to clear her mother's name and find the real killer?

INTERVIEW: Steven Philip Jones

2010-04-26T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Steven Philip Jones, author of Talisman: the Knightmare Knife, his new YA novel recently released from Mundania Press. Steve is also the author of another YA novel—Wizard Academies: The House with the Witch’s Hat—and over sixty comic books and graphic novels, including the original series Nightlinger, admittedly the work he’s most proud of to date.

“I created it in 1983 and it was published for only two issues by Caliber Comics in 1993, but I created Nightlinger to be a series where I could tell any sort of story: horror, adventure, fantasy, spy, human interest…you name it,” Steve told me. “I think it is the best thing I have created or will create, and I’m hoping I’ll eventually get the chance to write more Nightlinger stories in the future.”

“What drives you to write books for kids and teens?” I wondered.

“I’m not sure, outside of enjoyment. I have written books and comics for adults, but even then I usually aim for all ages. Who can say why anyone enjoys doing anything, but maybe it’s because I have such strong memories from when I was a kid and a teenager. I mean, I knew when I was nine years old that I wanted to be a writer, but even before that I was telling stories to other kids, or so my report cards from elementary school say. I had friends, but I have always enjoyed spending time alone--not a bad thing when you’re a writer--and my early stories were based on when I’d go off to the playground or the cemetery or the city dump by myself and concoct ideas for adventures while playing pretend. I just never lost the thrill of creating the same kind of stories now that I did then.”

His favorite book growing up still remains his favorite, and he lists its author as being one who has greatly influenced his own work: Arthur Conan Doyles' Sherlock Holmes. In fact, he could pick any character to be, it would be Sherlock Holmes himself, hands down. Other authors who have influenced him include Edgar Allan Poe, Dasheill Hammett, Clive Cussler, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Brian Daley, Stephen King, Chris Claremont and Mike Grell.

"My greatest influence, though, has to be the classic Universal horror films," he said.

He told me that the best piece of his advice he'd ever gotten on writing was to copy your favorite writer.

"Many writing teachers will tell you to be totally original and never copy another writer's style, but I disagree," he said. "You can learn so much and save so much time experimenting by reading and copying a successful writer's style and stories early in your career, just so long as you are careful to develop your unique voice over time. And I'm speaking from experience here. Dasheill Hammett is a big influence of mine, but I didn't read my first Hammett story until I was in my early 30s. My style was already pretty established, but Hammett’s style was so similar to mine that I learned a lot from him even at that point."

He pointed out that H.P. Lovecraft was like that.

"People like to point out that his style is similar to another writer named Lord Dunsany, who was a major inspiration of Lovecraft’s, but Lovecraft’s earliest stories were already pretty similar to Dunsany’s style for a good two years before Lovecraft ever read a Dunsany story. Dunsany was an older and more polished writer, though, so the younger Lovecraft learned a lot by reading Dunsany’s stories."

"If you weren't a writer, what would you be?" I wondered.

"Well, right now, apparently a call center representative because that’s my day job. If I had been thinking more clearly when I was younger, I would have done the necessary things to teach creative writing at a college level. I would love to do that. Maybe some day."

Steve usually writes his first drafts by hand, then he does the second draft while inputting what he wrote into the computer.

"I haven’t used a typewriter in I don’t know how long, but I have I’ve kept the typewriter I used to write on beginning when I was 12. It was a birthday present from my folks and I treasure that thing," he told me.

Right now, his writing environment is kind of unsettled, because he and his wife separated last year. "It's tough being married to a writer," he admitted.

He told me he needed to set up a new working office. "My old one was a basic library setting, nothing special except for knickknacks that only mean anything to me, like Iowa Hawkeyes and Universal Monsters and Denver Broncos stuff. Lots of books, too, of course."

"Before we leave, if you could give any advice to your readers, what would it be?" I asked him.

"Tell all your friends about my books and how much you enjoy them! I need all the word-of-mouth I can get! Oh, and never miss a dental appointment. Take it from someone who lost a bunch of teeth in less than two years."

Colin Sinclair, Reggie Sinclair, Ollie Steele, and Timmy Shannon have never had a dream in their lives, but on their twelfth birthday they share the same nightmare about a vicious dragon and a mysterious orange-haired girl.

The next day strange things begin happening to the boys. Monsters appear in school water fountains. A hellhound prowls city streets. And a green man dressed in gold stalks the boys. Danger is suddenly everywhere and it is closing in all around them. Fast.

Talismen: The Knightmare Knife is the first in a series of illustrated Young Adult fantasy adventures that follows Colin, Reggie, Ollie and Timmy -- four boys from Earth -- as they discover they are exiles from the Plain of Imaginings, the land where all dreams and nightmares come from. With the help of a dream warrior name Pratt and his young daughter Jennifer, the four exiles must find their talisman, magical objects that can protect the exiles from the green man, who has a dark and secret need for vengeance. Pratt and Jennifer also hope to guide the boys to a great destiny IF they can master their talismans. For instance, Colin must master a knife that assaults his mind with nightmarish images each time he draws it. Images that include the recent murder of Colin’s father by a mugger with a knife.

With beautiful illustrations by co-creator and co-plotter Barb Jacobs, Talismen: The Knightmare Knife is a fantasy for people of all ages who are young in heart and ready for action!

INTERVIEW: Linda Kage

2010-04-19T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Linda Kage, whose first book The Stillburrow Crush was released in February by The Wild Rose Press. I asked her to tell us a little bit about the book.

It’s about sixteen-year-old Carrie Paxton who grows a crush on—go figure—the football quarterback, Luke Carter. But she’s not too popular, and, well, he is. She doesn’t want to be so predictable as to fall for the best-looking, most popular super jock in the entire school, but when she interviews him for the school paper, she’s surprised to realize he’s just not a pretty face. What’s even more shocking is that he seems to like her in return. But coming from different social circles makes their hooking up feel like the impossible, and just when Carrie thinks she and Luke might actually make it, drama in her brother’s life interferes with everything.

She admitted it's not the first she ever wrote, but it's the first she was ever proud enough that she actually let family and friends read it. "I was just so amazed I was able to tie all the little subplots into the main story," she said.

"What drives you to write books for kids and teens?" I wondered

"You usually know if you’re going to be a reader when you’re in middle grade or high school; that’s when the obsession struck for me anyway. And a person always remembers their firsts. So, some of the first books you read are going to have the biggest impact on you and stay with you the longest. I think it would totally awesome if one of my stories was something that stuck with a young reader, something that will someday be one of their fond favorites because they’ll remember reading it 'back when’."

Linda started reading adult romance when she was a freshman in high school. She has three older sisters and they were always reading and discussing authors like Sandra Brown, Nora Roberts, Linda Howard, and Julie Garwood.

"I always wanted to be like my wonderful older sisters, so…I had to try one," she told me. "After just one book, I became addicted, and those first adult romance authors I started on remain among my favorites today."

She was bitten by the writing bug early. When Linda was in the first grade, she wrote a poem for a class assignment: "From up in the air, to down on the ground, a beautiful rainbow appears. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. A pretty, pretty rainbow."

"Sure, it was way lame," she said. "But it must’ve been good for a first grader. Either that or my teacher was a pro a boosting a child’s morale. She praised my pseudo masterpiece in front of the entire class, making me blushingly flattered. From that moment on, I wanted to a writer. It took me three or four years to actually get into reading. But once I became hooked on The Baby-Sitters Club, I wanted to be an author even more."

Recently she's been trying her hand at adult romance and, in fact, has two adult books scheduled for release later this year with The Wild Rose Press.
"My head is constantly buzzing with a handful of stories ideas," Linda told me. "It’s a total mess up there. If The Stillburrow Crush goes over well, I have a few more YA book ideas I could focus on…but beware: they’ll all have romance in them. I’m a romance junkie; I just gotta have that happy ending where the hero and heroine end up together forever. But for some very strange reason, two of my most favorite movies are The Fugitive and Shawshank Redemption, and in both, the hero’s wife is gruesomely murdered, while the hero is falsely accused of killing them. Huh, I wonder why I like those two movies?"

Finally, I asked Linda, "Do you have any advice for young writers?"

"Sure. Read lots, and don’t give up. I honestly believe you have to really love to write to keep with it too. That way, at least you’re happy telling stories to yourself in case it takes a while to sell anything. I finished my first full novel when I was sixteen but didn’t sell until I was 29. But since I love to write, I just kept at it, even though I figured I’d probably only be entertaining family and friends, instead of the entire world, with my stories."

Sixteen year old, Carrie Paxton, isn't the most popular girl in her small town. But that's never concerned her before. Her life revolves around her writing and she loves her job as the student editor of the school paper.

But when she gets assigned to interview the football team's beloved quarterback, she takes one look into Luke Carter's blue eyes and is a goner. Suddenly, she doesn't like her lowly rank so much.

Then her dreamy, popular crush surprises her when he starts to act as if he likes her in return. But there's no way Luke Carter could possibly ever like a nobody like Carrie Paxton.

Is there?

INTERVIEW: Rhonda Hayter

2010-04-12T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Rhonda Hayter, a member of the Class of 2K10 debut authors. The Witchy Worries of Abbie Adams stars Abbie Adams, who is a regular eleven-year-old girl with normal problems like a really strict fifth-grade teacher. (Meet Miss Linegar. Rhymes with vinegar.) She's chronically behind in homework, forced to keep a big secret from her very best friend and hoping like heck she can remember all her lines in the drama club play. But Abbie also happens to be a witch and in addition to everything else, she has to cope with stuff like her little brother morphing into a werewolf and trying to eat his first-grade teacher…not to mention figuring up exactly what is up with her very, very peculiar cat.

Rhonda is now working on the sequel to The Witchy Worries of Abbie Adams. She told me that she's discovered that, for her, second books are much harder to write than first books.

I asked her to tell us a little about this new book.

"Though it keeps changing with each new draft, Abbie 2 will definitely involve Abbie confiding the secret that she’s a witch to her best friend Callie...and Harriet Tubman figuring in...and Abbie’s little brother Munch causing some major difficulties."

Historical characters, like Harriet Tubman, will appear in each of the Abbie books, so as part of her research Rhonda likes to read biographies and, if possible, collections of letters so she can try to capture a particular voice and personal characteristics. She loves the research she does for her books and told me that the Internet makes it easy.

"I have a historical character in Abbie Adams, who comes into the present day and I wanted him to get excited about the fact that somebody invented rubber soles for shoes," she explained. "All of a sudden, I realized I had no idea when rubber soles were invented, so I just Googled, 'invention of rubber soles' and there the answer was."

Rhonda told me she didn't always want to be a writer.

"I always wanted to be an actress and I was too, for a long time but when I quit acting (actually, it quit me) I found that writing gave me exactly the same thrilling sensation of being completely in the moment in an imaginary world," she said. "All the ex-actors I know who write (and there are a lot of them) say the same thing."

Even when she wanted to be an actress, though, she always wrote. However, somehow she never managed to finish anything. Then, once she had kids (she has two boys—Duncan and Ethan) she couldn't seem to find any time to write at all.

"My life was fantastically full and happy and immediate and I was so caught up in their growing up that their behavior and experiences started bubbling up in my mind like a witch’s cauldron. Once they got to the ages of 10 and 7, I managed to steal some time to start filtering it all into a novel," she told me. "Kids are all I thought about for years and now kids are whom I write for."
"If you could give any advice to your readers, what would it be?" I wondered.

"Read in the bathtub, in bed, on the bus, in the car, with your cereal, with your after-school snack and every other minute you’re not doing important stuff like running around with your friends, relating to your family, doing homework, acting in plays, singing, playing sports."

The best advice she was ever given on writing, she gave to herself.

"Keep telling yourself it’s the most brilliant thing that’s ever been penned...until you get a first draft down. That fends off your inner critic until it’s an appropriate time for her or him to pay a visit."

Her husband, Stephen, is the only person who is allowed to read any of her works in progress, because she can rely on him to tell her that what she's writing is utter genius---and laughing at all the right spots.

"This inspires me to stifle my inner critic and keep writing, because I have a duty not to deprive the world of my brilliance."

Stephen is so proud of her that she told me she has to give him a little kick on the ankle now and then to stop him from telling people they've just met about her book.

"What's your favorite word?" I asked.

"Apparently, it’s the word, 'well'. I didn’t know it was my favorite word until I started revisions on The Witchy Worries and discovered that I had made Abbie start just about every second line with it, as in, 'Well, I guess I shouldn’t have cast that spell after all.' One whole round of revisions consisted of going through the manuscript deleting wells as if there was no tomorrow."

It may come as no surprise that her least favorite word is also 'well.'

I questioned Rhonda about her writing process.

"First I yell at myself to stop playing Internet Scrabble. Then I yell at myself for checking my e-mail yet again. Then, I try not to get my eye caught by the latest celebrity scandal...and fail. Can you believe that Tiger Woods? Then, I finally buckle down and enter my book’s world for two to three hours at a clip. Then, I reward myself with a little game of Scrabble."

Rhonda and her family also share their home with a poodle-terrier mix who, last June, wandered onto the campus of the school where Stephen teaches.

"I resisted it assiduously for years and at first I only agreed to foster...but you know how that goes. Now, after loftily rolling my eyes at 'dog-people' for years, I’m the most dyed in the wool dog person you ever saw. I can hardly restrain myself from hauling out photos and cooing over the adorableness. Today in fact she was especially cute because she was learning how to use her doggy door...and she kept... Shall I go on? No?"

Rhonda Hayter was born in St. Jean, Quebec. She was an actress for some time, appearing in plays on tour and in New York and Los Angeles. Now, she works as a story analyst for a famous movie producer. When she and her husband found themselves with two little boys, one of whom morphed into a werewolf one day, The Witchy Worries of Abbie Adams was born. Rhonda now lives in Los Angeles with her family. This is her first book.

INTERVIEW: Jo Ramsey

2010-04-05T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Jo Ramsey, whose debut YA novel, Connection, was released this year from Jupiter Gardens Press. Connection is the first book in her Reality Shifts series, a proposed ten-book series. The second book in the series will be published in October.

Shanna, the main character, is relatively autobiographical, and Jonah is based very closely on a close friend of Jo's. She told me a little about the book.

Shanna Bailey, who’s spent most of her life being verbally abused by her mother and picked on by schoolmates, meets Jonah Bailey on her first day of high school. Her entire life begins to change as she and Jonah become friends. Jonah’s considered weird at best by the other kids at school, in large part because he does things like meditating in the school lobby and talking to “invisible things” (his guides). When Kaylie Sturbridge, the “queen of eleventh grade,” starts seeing things, Jonah and Shanna discover that a demon is trying to possess her, and they’re the only ones who can help her.

As I mentioned, Shanna is very autobiographical, although my home life was nowhere near as bad as hers. Several years ago, I became friends with a man who practiced energy healing and channeling. He helped me cope with some things I’d gone through in my life, and did a lot to help me improve my self-image and my life. He also taught me the things he’d learned. He was the model for Jonah. I chose to make Shanna and Jonah teenagers rather than adults because I felt the story would work better as a young adult series.

Jo said normally an idea for a story will pop into her head as a "what if" or a brief scene. Once she has the idea, she might make a few notes about the characters and a few things I'd like to see happen in the course of the story. Then she starts the first draft and she usually aims for a certain word count a day until she's finished.

"Once I finish the first draft, I put it aside for a little while and work on something else," she told me. "When I come back to the story, I’ll use the 'find' tool to highlight a few words that I tend to overuse, like but and was. I go through and change sentence phrasing to get rid of most of those words, then go back to the beginning and go through to make sure the story is clear, that I’ve shown the characters’ emotions and reactions, and that I haven’t made any mistakes or contradictions. Once those are taken care of, I read through again to catch anything I might have missed."

"Do you believe in outlining?" I asked.

"Believe in it, yes. Use it in my own writing, no. I’m what they call a 'pantster,' meaning that while I might jot down a few quick notes about the characters and what I’d like to have happen in the story, for the most part once I sit down and actually start writing, I have no idea where the story will go until it gets there. However, I know that outlining works very well for some writers."

Jo told me she always wanted to be a writer.
"I can remember being two or three years old, making up stories with my imaginary friends and wanting to see them in books like the stories I read," she said. "Yes, I learned to read that early. My kindergarten teacher got me started by letting me write stories during reading time. She made it part of my reading program. My tenth-grade English teacher gave me a huge boost by encouraging me to write and allowing me to keep our required journal as a character I’d created for some short stories. In adulthood, my editor at Jupiter Gardens, Mary Wilson, and my writing friend Lex Valentine, along with other writers I’ve met, have taught me a great deal about writing and revising, and I feel that their guidance has helped me improve about a thousand percent just in the past several months."

Jo told me that she does all her writing on the computer now, but until she was about 27 she wrote everything in longhand.

"I have a filing cabinet drawer filled with old spiral notebooks containing stories that may never see the light of day because they’d take too long to type," she confessed.

"As an adult, how do you keep your finger on the pulse of today’s kids?" I wondered.

"Until about a year ago, I worked in public high schools. I’m now the mother of a high schooler, and she and her friends are pretty tolerant about letting me listen in on some of their conversations and about answering random questions from me."

Finally, I asked Jo if she thought the Internet would ultimately change the publishing industry.

"I think it already has. E-books are becoming more widespread; in fact, Connection was released as an e-book and print book simultaneously. Even some of the major print publishers now have e-book programs. Books are easier than ever to buy, because regardless of whether they’re print or digital, they can be purchased online. Unfortunately, that’s led to a lot of book piracy and other sorts of illegal activity (anything that violates copyright is illegal), so I think the publishing industry will take stronger measures to prevent that."

INTERVIEW: JUDITH GRAVES

2010-03-29T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Judith Graves who, in addition to writing YA fiction is a singer, songwriter, and makes daytime appearances as a library technician. Her fist book in the Skinned series, Under My Skin, was released this month by Leap Books She also collaborates with another Leap Book author, Kitty Keswick, on the Origins series.

Judith's favourite novel as a tween/teen was Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, and it’s still one she re-reads when the mood strikes. Her father was in the military and, when she was a little girl, they were stationed in Summerside, PEI, so the Anne books and Prince Edward Island hold a special place in her heart.

"How does Anne hold up today? She still kicks butt," Judith said. "She’s daring, smart, questioning, rebellious, but vulnerable. Anne is a character that will ring true indefinitely. And if someone were to re-tell Green Gables with a little zombie/vampire/man-eating potato action…I’d still love it."

She told me she always knew she wanted to be surrounded by words, music, and knowledge.

"As a singer/songwriter, fiction author, and library technician working in an elementary school – I kind of get to do it all," she admitted.

"If you could be anywhere in the world right now," I asked, "where would you be and why?"

"That’s easy. It’s -31 Celsius outside right now and snowing. I’d go to any hot spot where they’ve never heard long johns (and if you have no idea what long johns are, I so envy you right now). Also in this ideal hot location, I’m tanned, and thinner."

Judith is participating in several big events with the Class of 2k10, a group of the hottest debut authors of Middle Grade and Young Adult fiction. 2k10 is planning book signings and author panels in New York during Book Expo America (May 2010). Judith encourages everyone to check out the for updates and information about these awesome new young adult and middle grade titles out in 2010.

Some of Judith's hobbies, when she isn't writing, include playing guitar and bass, singing, songwriting, watching movies, and hanging out with her crazy Labrador retrievers.

"If you could give any advice to your readers, what would it be?" I wondered.

"My mother-in-law gave me this wonderful stone paperweight (I have many loose stacks of paper in my office that need taming), and it bears the inscription: 'If you can dream it, do it.' ’nuf said."
And for writers, she believes the two books no writer should be without are a dictionary and thesaurus –assuring me, "I'm not talking about the ones in Word." And, if young writers are reading this, her advice to you: "Go and write this very instant!"

All her parents wanted was for Eryn to live a normal life...

The town of Redgrave had had its share of monsters before Eryn moved to town. Mauled pets and missing children. The Delacroix family is taking the blame, but Eryn knows the truth. Something stalks the night. Wade, the police chief's son and Regrave High's resident hottie, warns her the Delacroix are dangerous. But then so is Eryn--in fact, she's lethal.

But Eryn can't help falling for one of the Delacroix boys, dark, brooding, human Alec. And then it all goes bad.

A normal life? That's the real fairytale.

INTERVIEW: MELISSA WYATT

2010-03-22T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to have Melissa Wyatt with us. Melissa's latest book, Funny How Things Change, has been named a 2010 YALSA Best Book for Young Adult and a Kirkus Best Young Adult book of 2009.
Melissa told me she credited Tom Petty in the acknowledgement of Funny How Things Change, because the tone and feel of his early music suited the feeling she wanted for the book and main character. You can see the soundtrack on Melissa's blog.

She loves doing research and shared with me some of the research she did for Funny How Things Change.

"I visited a so-called 'reclaimed' strip mining site that had been turned into a golf course. I also did a lot of reading about snakebites and the treatment of snakebites because originally the main character was going to be bitten by a snake (thank goodness that ended up on the cutting room floor!) But I’m very squeamish, so I’d read a little bit about snakebites and then have to put my head between my knees to keep from fainting and then read a little bit more, head back between knees."

I also asked Melissa to tell us a little about her latest book.

"Funny How Things Change is a classic coming-of-age story and at the same time, I think it’s something we don’t see much in YA lit, and that’s a frank look at socio-economic class and questions of worth. Remy Walker is a decidedly blue-collar guy in a small dying coal town in West Virginia, torn between wanting to follow his long time girlfriend when she leaves for college in Pennsylania and his deep attachment to his home and way of life."

"As an adult, how do you keep your finger on the pulse of today’s kids?"

"I reach to the left and touch my son’s wrist. Ha! But having kids around helps. Nieces, nephews, neighbors. And just keeping your eyes and ears open, keeping the sensible grown-up voice at bay long enough to understand what’s going on with them."

The books that moved Melissa the most were YA books. That age group is also the one that interests her the most, so it was a no-brainer for her to write YA.

"That time of life is all about change and choice," she explained. "and change and choice are conflict, and conflict is the basis of a great story."

Her favorite author as a teen was K.M. Peyton, a British author best known in the United States for her Flambards series.

"Her contemporary novels are necessarily dated in some ways but also still wonderfully immediate. They were the first books I read where I felt the shift from the storyteller voice of mid-grade fiction to that confidential voice of someone my own age, telling me about themselves," Melissa explained."Her historical fiction remains outstanding, with a vigor to it that is rare in historical novels for teens."

Melissa is currently working on The Novel That Will Not End.

"It’s totally different from my other two books, which were both contemporary realistic boy books. This is historical supernatural and very very girly," she told me. "I am not very good at branding myself as a writer!"

She shared with me that she always loved stories and telling stories.

"Okay, telling lies," she confessed. "I used to lie like crazy when I was a little girl, but what I was really doing was making up stories about myself so that I would seem more interesting to people. Turns out, it was very good practice for being a writer. But I didn’t start to think about writing until eighth grade, when Mr. Bailey made us read The Outsiders. From then on, I was hooked."

"If you weren't a writer, what would you be?" I wondered.

"Olympic figure skater? Yeah, I didn't think so either."

She didn't want to share a picture of her writing environment, telling me, "It's an awful mess."

And, she admitted that her writing process is just as messy.

"Seriously, I need to get a new process but I don’t know where you get them. I tend to write in spurts and need a lot of down time in between, which is not very efficient, but I find that when I try to push, I end up writing myself into snarls."
"Do you believe in outlining?" I asked.

"I believe it exists, just not in my world. I’m mostly a 'plunger,' starting with a character and a situation and some vague idea of where the whole thing will go."
One thing she doesn't do is base her writing on her own experiences.

"I'm a firm non-believer in 'write what you know.' I can't think of anything more boring than writing about my own experiences because really, I was and am a very boring person. I like it that way. It's a comfortable way to live. And I get all the excitement I want out of writing."

"What was your big break in writing," I wondered.

"Two things: One, I won a scholarship to a writers conference that gave a big boost to my confidence. You know, you get to that point where you wonder if you are wasting your time and don’t know if you should keep going or not. To me, that said 'Yes, keep going.'

"Two, I entered the Delacorte Press Prize contest for a first young adult novel. I didn’t win, but I got the attention of the editor who eventually bought my first book."

That editor gave her the best piece of writing advice she ever received. "She really taught me to revise. She said 'You write the first draft for yourself. Now you have to think 100% from the point-of-view of the reader.' That clarified the whole process for me."

On a personal note, here are some things you might not know about Melissa:

~~favorite movie: "I love old movies, and my favorites are The Heiress, All About Eve and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

~~favorite word: "Apple dumpling, pickle relish, elbow, and windowsill. (Fellow old movie lovers will know what I'm talking about!")

~~least favorite word: liver

~~She's an avid bird watcher and she keeps a life list of birds she's seen.

"If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be and why?" I asked.

"Somewhere warm! I’m freezing. But it would have to be somewhere warm where there are no earthquakes, hurricanes or very large bugs."

Finally, I asked, "What's the one question you wish an interviewer would ask you (and the answer)?"

"Q: 'More gooey chocolate cake?'
A: 'Why, yes, thank you. I think I will.'"

Bio: Melissa Wyatt is very boring. She still lives in the same town in which she was born and raised and has never lived anywhere else. She has never had any great adventures. She doesn’t climb mountains or wrestle alligators or anything cool like that. But if she was doing all that cool stuff, she wouldn’t have time to write, and that’s what she does when she isn’t raising her two sons or hanging out with her husband.

At seventeen, you're not supposed to already be where you want to be. You've got a whole world to make your way through, and you start by leaving the dead-end coal town where you grew up. That's what Remy Walker plans to do, to follow his girlfriend when she leaves for college. It would be the start of everything they ever wanted. Even a fascinating young artist from out-of-state who shows Remy his home through new eyes isn't going to get in the way of those dreams.

Over the course of a summer, Remy learns how much he has to give up for a girl, and how much he needs to give up for a mountain.

A 2010 YALSA Best Books for Young Adults

Kirkus Best Young Adults Books of 2009

Capitol Choices Noteworthy Books for Children and Teens 2010

INTERVIEW: MICHELLE LEVIGNE

2010-03-15T04:00:00.000-04:00

Aurora is pleased to have Michelle Levigne visiting with us this week. Michelle has been writing since junior high—first rewriting her favorite TV shows and books, then graduating to fan fiction.

She didn't consciously set out to be a writer, though, she told me.

"I've always loved to read, and then my daydreams kind of took over and got in the way of studying -- and that's a problem when you have semester exams! I had tried writing down stories before, and they always died. This one time, I started writing and kept writing -- and I haven't stopped since. My friend Barb, says we started out as word or reading addicts, and graduated to 'pushers'," she said with a grin.

She told me she was writing for publication for ten years before her writing was good enough to be published in fan magazines.

"I entered writing contests and listened to the feedback people gave me, and then I finally won a big contest -- and it was another ten years before I made my first professional book sale," she said.

During this time, when it might have been very easy to give up, she discovered "fandom"and found out people wanted to read stories about favorite TV show characters, she learned she could write stories people wanted to read.

"That encouragement kept me going through all the years -- and years -- when paying markets were giving me form rejection letters," she shared.

"Writers are known to set their own schedules and work at their own pace," I said. "Do you enjoy that kind of spontaneity in your life? How great is it to be able to take a vacation or just take a day off without calling in sick?"

"HUH? Who told you that?" she replied. "Well, maybe the big-time authors who get 5-figure contracts and advances and don't have to worry about paying the bills. As for the rest of us, we have day jobs and families and chores. We have to steal time for writing. A lot of people get up really early every day to crank out a page or two -- or stay up late after everyone else is in bed, to create a couple pages. I have to create every day. There's always pressure to produce something. Yes, writing and playing in my own private universe is fun, but it's work, too.

"I was laid off last summer, a year ago. Fortunately, I was already earning money doing freelance editing, so I was able to transition to doing that full-time. Honestly, staying in my pajamas all day got really old, really fast! Yes, it's tempting to take the day off, to go to the movies and sit around reading instead of working, but I'm the boss now, as well as the only employee, and I sure would fire someone who did that to me too often, wouldn't you?" she asked with a grin.

Michelle has over forty novels and short stories published, but admitted to me she's most proud of The Dreamer's Loom, which was originally published as "The Dark One" by LTD Books and is now released through Amber Quill Press.

"It's the proverbial book of the heart that every writer has, the dream (or daydream) that won't go away," she explained. "I loved Greek/Roman mythology in elementary school and junior high, and I was fascinated with the old Kirk Douglas movie, Ulysses and Penelope. I had just learned that movies are often based on books, so I found The Odyssey and read it straight through -- in junior high! -- and eventually created my own version of Penelope's side of the story. Some good friends 'dared' me to write it, and the book took me 2 years to write, and then another 10 before I sold it."

She writes both romance and Young Adult fiction, and I asked her what drove her to write books for kids and teens.

"It's not so much that I chose the audience, but the 'feel' and subject matter of the story are more suited for that age level. Shatter Scatter is a fantasy set in my part of Ohio, in areas I've known all my life. It just made more sense to have the main characters be younger and have areas of concern more 'suitable' and 'powerful' for younger readers -- as opposed to my romances," she added, grinning. "Questions of what we are in the world, where we really belong, who we really belong to -- and how very different people can make a place for themselves. For instance, how does a girl with very vague memories of living in another world, where magic is real, deal with living in a suburb of Cleveland -- and knowing she can turn into a wolf whenever she feels like it?"

"How much of your writing is based on your own experience as a child or teenager?" I wondered.

"I want to say none at all -- I was a pretty boring kid, picked on, harassed by the bullies in school and my brother, awkward and fat -- and always in a dreamland." She grinned again. "Honestly, probably a lot of stuff is in my subconscious and slips out into various villains and adventures, all the daydreams I had wanting to escape or get revenge on the jerks who picked on me and told me I'd never amount to anything. All my heroines are the way I wanted to be -- able to say the right thing, fight back, know what to do, and winning out over the bully/villain in the end."

"What is the one book no author should be without?"

"Umm, this isn't a smart-alec answer .... but I'd say a blank notebook, because you never know when you're going to get a cool idea, maybe the answer to a big problem with a character or plot or something else."

"Do you think the Internet will ultimately change the publishing industry?" I wondered.

"It already has," Michelle asserted. "Look at the price wars between Amazon and Wal-Mart. Look at the struggle over electronic rights, and the constant childish bad-mouthing of e-publishers and e-pubbed authors by so-called 'real' writers and writing groups. Look at the morons who pirate books and music, because they claim anything available on the Internet is public property. Look at review sites like yours, which make it so much easier for authors to communicate with our readers -- and where a bad review or a social gaff or a stupid remark on a blog can trash someone's career in a day, where battles over plagiarism and 'art' go on and on in public view, and anyone can claim to be an author or a publisher, without any investment other than time and software and web access. Publishers are no longer little kings of their own kingdoms."

Finally, I asked Michelle what advice she would give to young writers.

"Read. Lots of genres. Fill up your head with stories and ideas and images. Explore multiple universes in your imagination. Don't be afraid of failure and making a big mess with your first dozen -- or your first hundred -- attempts. We learn by doing and by failing and figuring out what we did wrong and trying again. And again. And again. It takes time -- don't get discouraged if you don't sell right away. Just keep working and trying and improving."

Aggie, Lara, Brody and their friends triggered more magic than they intended and fell through into another world, filled with shadows of home. Was it their original home? And if so, were the people who tried to kill them 10 years ago waiting to finish the job?

INTERVIEW: JACLYN DOLAMORE

2010-03-08T04:00:00.001-05:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Jaclyn Dolamore, whose debut novel Magic Under Glass was released by Bloomsbury this past December. She's just finished the synopsis and is polishing the partial pages of the proposed sequel, Magic Under Stone.

Jaclyn enjoys writing books for teenagers because she feels that they tend to be a generally maligned group.

"I think it's too bad," she said. "It can be a hard age, but also a wonderful one full of creativity, discovery, and growing self-awareness. Kids and teenagers make the most enthusiastic fans."

She always wanted to write, with occasional diversions into wanting to be a comic book artist or an actress. In all of those desires, however, the goal was to be able to tell stories.

She's working on one story that she keeps trying to get right.

"It contains a magical Mafia and doll people and telepathy and a lot of cook stuff that is really hard to explain in a blurb," she said, "which is one reason I worry about that story…"

If she wasn't a writer, though, she said she would probably be a librarian, admitting "I'm so predictable."

What's not so predictable is where her writing comes from. Not much of it is based on personal experience, but a lot of it is based on stories she loved as a child or teenager.

"There are things I can trace back to Final Fantasy games or Xanth books or Elfquest comics," she told me.

Dade, her partner, is a creative guy himself.

"He does my website; he did my trailer; and he designs all the bookmarks, posters, and things like that I need," she said. "He's is awesomely supportive. One of his passions is building scale models, so I read him everything I write while he builds models."

Along with Dade, Jaclyn said her parents, her sister Kate, her agent, and her editor have all helped her with her career.

In addition she said, "I have to mention Sarah Cross, the author of Dull Boy. I've been friends with her since I was 14, and for most of that time we haven't even talked that much. Like, I hardly heard from her in my late teens and early 20s. But she was always really determined to be published, and she always encouraged me and told me my stuff was really good. I never really pursued publication because I had trouble finishing books and I was really intimidated by querying agents. But, about four years ago, I started writing more seriously, and I started to think I could really finish novels. But agents and editors still intimidated me. She reentered my life at that point, gave me a well researched list of agents, answered all my questions, and then she got an agent offer herself, which made me think it was really possible. It took several more years, and we mostly faded back out of each other's lives, but she came in and was exactly what I needed at that moment in my life. I really owe her one."

She learned many years ago that she has to outline her books, or she will never finish them.

"With that said, I never follow the outline," she confessed. "I think of it like a destination. I need a map that shows the path, and I need to know where I'm trying to get to. But along the way, I might try a back road, or a shortcut, or I might stop to see if that diner has good pancakes. Sometimes the ultimate destination might even change. But there has to be one to start, or I won't get very far to begin with."

Jaclyn loves to do research for her books—usually, she said.

"There are some things I hate to research, and I try my best to avoid putting those things in a book to begin with! One of my favorite things to do is prowl used bookstores looking for books I've never heard of on different times and places. I try to have a book already in my collection for every place or time or situation I would need. For instance, the last time I was in New York, I spent hours in the Strand and I bought a book about the history of the English country house, and one about shops in 19th century America, a history of posters and a book about Berlin in the 1920s. I mostly write fantasy set in another world, but I like to ground it in something real, and I never know when I might need these things."

Along with prowling bookstores, she enjoys cooking, collecting vintage clothing, as well as home furnishings when she can find them, drawing the characters in her novels, and history. She also goes through sporadic waves of studying Japanese.

One of her favorite meals is good German sausage with mashed potatoes, red cabbage with apples, and linzer torte for dessert.

"I would not want to eat that every often," she confessed, "but when I do…oh heaven!"

On the other end of the spectrum is mayonnaise. Jaclyn told me, "It borders on a phobia."

Finally, I asked, "What do you envision happening within the YA field in the next five to ten years?"

" Right now young adult is really exploding in popularity and creativity. So, like all good things, at some point it's going to get oversaturated... well, that point might already be here. And the genres might become a little more set, like the adult market. I really hope it doesn't lose the magic. I do think, though, that we have some really wonderful talent that's going to be around for a long time, and the tight writing will continue to attract readers in this busy world. I also think there will be a slow trend for young adult to encompass more college and early twentysomething stories."

Jaclyn Dolamore spent her childhood reading as many books as she could lug from the library and playing elaborate pretend games with her sister. She has a passion for history, thrift stores, vintage dresses, David Bowie, drawing, and organic food. She lives in Orlando, Florida, with her partner and two black tabbies who have ruined her carpeting (the cats, not the boyfriend, that is). This is her first novel.

INTERVIEW: Nancy Coffelt

2010-03-01T04:00:00.000-05:00

Aurora is pleased to have Nancy Coffelt visiting with us this week. Nancy's debut novel, Listen, was released by WestSide Books this past fall. Listen is not, however, Nancy's first book. She's also written several picture books for younger readers, winning the Horn Book Honor Award for Fred Stays With Me. She's currently revising a YA novel and is in the middle of a first draft of a new one. She's also working on a couple of picture book projects.

Nancy had a list of things she wanted to be when she grew up: teacher, veterinarian, concert clarinetist, and artist. Writing and reading were activities she just did.

"It wasn’t until I had my own studio gallery and found that my artwork’s titles were getting longer and longer, did I explore really working on that craft," she told me.
"I don’t play music so much anymore and I found out that I can’t stand the sight of blood so veterinarian was out. But I do teach as writer and artist in residence, and still illustrate and show my fine art in galleries."

She can't imagine not writing or drawing. "That’s about the same as imagining I had gills instead of lungs," she said. "But if I had another separate lifetime I would have wanted to be a physicist and a professional tennis player."

Nancy has an office/studio where she draws and writes. A large drafting table is covered in mountains of oil pastel stubs, a computer, TV, and a stereo. It's also filled with books, her teaching files, empty tea cups and diet Dr Pepper bottles.

"Twig, the min-pin puppy’s toys cover the floor as well as the paper scraps she loves to shred," Nancy said. "I don’t let anyone see my messy room!"

She sometimes writes down ideas for picture books in longhand, but she confessed that she writes so fast that her handwriting is almost illegible, even to herself.

"I’m a two finger typer but do okay," she said. "I got a netbook to write my latest novel. I wanted to be able to write outside of my studio if I wanted. "

Nancy told me she needs an extra day in the week.

"Because I don’t have a 'regular' job, I need to have lots of jobs to make up for that fact. So I’m usually scheduled within an inch of my life. I get up super early to get my own writing in before running off to a school or teaching an online class."

"How do you keep your finger on the pulse of today’s kids?" I asked.

"I read a fair amount of YA and I also am in the schools a lot. Right now I’m teaching 2nd through 5th grade in one class and also a couple of other classes with middle schoolers and high schoolers. Plus, I am highly immature."

When Nancy's not writing, she enjoys cooking and admits to being a tennis freak. "I play on a team and try to get out there on the courts a few times a week," she explained.

Her favorite word? Lackadaisical. Least favorite? Moist.

"What's the one question that no one asks you that you wish they would?" I wondered.

"Would you like me to give you a million dollars?"

The lives of three people intersect unexpectedly in this unique, compelling story. There’s Will, an eighteen-year-old living alone since his mother died and his drug- and alcohol-addled brother was put in jail. Then there’s Kurt, a troubled, fourteen-year-old loner still reeling in the aftermath of his mother’s abusive boyfriend’s death, and his part in it. And there’s Carrie, a middle-aged schizophrenic who “hears” the thoughts of the abused and neglected neighborhood animals she rescues and brings home. When Carrie and Kurt connect, she agrees to pay him for each “stray” cat or dog he delivers. But when her “rescuing” goes one step too far, events spiral dangerously out of control. Told from alternating viewpoints, Listen is the haunting story of three people dramatically thrown together by fate, each struggling to come to terms with their harrowing past.

How Jennifer Got Her Talisman by Steven Philip Jones

2010-02-27T04:00:00.000-05:00

There was a girl

who did not like her name.

“It is too long,” she pleaded to her father.

“And it is dull.”

She wanted a new name,

something short and beautiful.

Her father told her,

“Your name is just right for you.”

He thought her name was just fine.

Perfectly fine.

This girl and her father

lived in a cottage.

Hills and plains surrounded the cottage.

It was a lonely place,

But the girl and her father liked it.

It made them happy.

One day a tall man rode over the east hills.

“I am trying to find a house,”

he told the father.

“Requin’s house.”

The father said,

“No one lives in Requin’s house.”

But the tall man pleaded,

“Somebody is waiting for me there.

A fine lady

with the name White.”

The father nodded.

“My daughter can show you the way.”

So the girl led the tall man

over the west hills.

The two traveled together

for a long time.

They waded across an angry river.

They crept through scowling woods.

They climbed a stern mountain.

At the top the girl said, “There is Requin’s house.”

The old house was big.

It had many rooms and looked empty.

Only the wind seemed to live there.

But, suddenly, a lady stepped out!

The lady was all white

except her eyes, both grass green.

The lady asked for the tall man’s name.

He said, “I am only a guide.”

The lady asked for the girl’s name.

She said, “It is just Jennifer.”

The lady smiled. “It is beautiful.”

The girl said, “It is long and dull.”

The lady shook her head. She asked,

“Do you know your name means `White’?”

The lady started to shine.

First like a ghost,

then like a star.

Jennifer was amazed and afraid.

Then the glow faded. She was alone.

But Jennifer turned and saw a staff

stuck in the ground.

She grabbed it and smiled.

The tall man’s face was carved on its grip.

Jennifer brought the staff home.

Her father asked, “Where did you find that?”

Jennifer told him.

She told him everything.

Then, “Did you know my name means `White’?”

Her father nodded.

“Just like I know a name does not matter,

only the person.”

Jennifer nodded. And smiled.

Bio: Steven Philip Jones has been writing professionally since 1987. His novel credits include Talismen: The Knightmare Knife, King of Harlem, Bushwhackers and Wizard Academies: The House With the Witch’s Hat. Steven also has over 60 comic book and graphic novel credits including adaptations of Dracula, several H.P. Lovecraft stories and the 1953 film Invaders From Mars, as well as the original series Nightlinger, Tatters and Wolverstone and Davis (formerly Street Heroes 2005). Steven was also the editor for Malibu Graphic's anthology of H.P. Lovecraft's Herbert West—Reanimator serial. He is also the author of several nonfiction articles and an original Sherlock Holmes radio drama, “The Case of the Petty Curses,” which was syndicated nationally by Imagination Theater. Steven’s Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Religion from the University of Iowa prompts many people to ask him why he majored in two such dissimilar subjects. (He won't say). Steven was also accepted into Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop M.F.A. program in 1990. He makes his home in eastern Iowa with his daughter.

Visit his website at http://fuziondigital.com/SPJhome.htm

INTERVIEW: CHRISTY TRUJILLO

2010-02-22T04:00:00.002-05:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Christy Trujillo, whose second book in her Maldito series, Emmy's Heart, has recently been released by Devine Destinies. Her first published novel, Emmy's Song is the one she is most proud of, because not many people believed she could actually write something that was good enough to be published. Even though she always wanted to write, she had trouble believing, herself, that she was a good enough writer to become published.

I asked her to tell us about Emmy's Song and Emmy's Heart.

"Emmy’s Song is a YA Paranormal Romance about a girl named Emmy who really has it together; she knows just what she wants and where she’s going. And then Cale Cruz comes to town. He really throws her whole life out of whack and she wouldn’t have it any other way. Did I mention he’s Maldito (half-human, half-vampire)? Oh yeah, good times. Emmy’s Song is the first of three books in the Maldito series. Emmy’s Heart has just been released on 2/15/2010 and Sarah’s Fate will be scheduled for a fall 2010 release."

Christy had befriended an author with Devine Destinies who had suggested that Christy query them with Emmy's Song.

"The rest," she said, "as they say, is history."

She loves writing books for kids and teens, especially, because she wants to be able to reach out and have people read her words and think, "Wow, how did she know that? How did she know that's how that felt."

Her response to that would be, "Because I’ve been there, baby girl. That’s how I know."

"I tried to commit suicide my senior year of high school. My true love broke my heart and I was a mess," she shared with me. "No one understood; not my friends, family or favorite teachers. I felt utterly alone. I often feel if I would’ve had someone to talk to, someone who had been there or at least gave me credit that I was actually in love, then it would have been easier to cope with the feelings. My books are always centered on young love and while, yes it is young, it is still love."

She wants her readers to know that no matter what they are going through, no matter how dark the times seem—the sun will rise again.

Along with working as a sales coordinator for a staffing firm, Christy is also working on the final book in the Maldito series, Sarah's Fate, as well as a shape-sifter novel called True North and a ghost story called Fireflies.

Her husband is supportive of her writing. He set up a corner of their den for her writing area and bought her a pink Dell laptop. They've been married for eight years and she said, "He is happy when I’m happy. He doesn’t really consider my writing a career, though."

The laptop was a great present, though, since Christy does all her writing on the computer—mostly because it has spell check and she's a horrible speller.

She has always loved books about the paranormal. The first paranormal she read was Wait till Helen Comes.

"It scared me to death," she admitted. "I loved it!"

As a young adult, her favorite series was The Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith. The Twilight series have now taken over the top spot, but The Vampire Diaries are still a very close second. She credits both L.J. Smith and Stephanie Meyer as influencing her own writing.

The Maldito series is highly autobiographical and based, in part, on her own high school experiences. She even named the chorus teacher in the book the same as her own teacher.

"Emmy’s Song is unique as it takes the reader on an emotional journey, not only through the written word but also through the music that is constantly playing in Emmy’s head," Christy said. "These songs make up the soundtrack. The list can be found on my website."

This soundtrack is the first playlist on Christy's iPod.

Christy also told me that she's addicted to Twitter/Facebook/MySpace/Blogger. "I love to be online and meet new people," she said. "I get something different at each site and therefore could never give any of them up."

Finally, I asked Christy what advice she had for young writers.

"Don't stop!" she said. "Just write. Worry about what comes out later, but for now, just write. Then, put your manuscript away for at least a week before your proof it. Your eyes see what they want to see when you remember exactly what it's supposed to say."

Christy Trujillo was born and raised in a small town in Northeast Florida near Jacksonville and the Florida-Georgia line. As a child she loved books on vampires and the paranormal and has been heavily influenced by the writings of L.J. Smith. Christy currently works for a major staffing company, and dreams of becoming a full-time author. She resides in Jacksonville, FL with her husband, son, and two black cats that turned out to be anything but unlucky.

www.christytrujillo.com

INTERVIEW: Susan Beth Pfeffer

2010-02-15T04:00:00.001-05:00

I can hardly remember a time when I didn't want to be a writer. I knew by first grade I was determined to be one. I always loved making up characters and stories, and I loved knowing people enjoyed my storytelling abilities. In sixth grade, I wrote most of a mystery (I lost interest as soon as I solved it, and stopped writing), and I discovered even kids who didn't like me were waiting to read each chapter as I finished it.

I also read enormous amounts as a kid, far more than I read nowadays. I had very little respect for most of what I read, and by seventh grade I felt I could do better. There were only a few writers I really respected. One was Mary Stolz, whose books were far superior to the drek I devoured. Many years later, she permitted me to dedicate a book to her, and I'm delighted that I was able to tell someone I looked up to so much how influential she had been to me.

When I was a junior in high school, I wrote a humorous autobiographical essay for the school paper, and it met with great success. Fool that I was, I asked my 11th grade English teacher (who didn't like me) what she thought.

She said, "It's like everything else you do- it's I,I,I."

While that was kind of nasty of her, it was also excellent advice (even if she didn't intend it to be). She taught me to make sure I don't start every paragraph with the word "I." When you write in first person (and I frequently do), that's a good thing to watch out for.

And while I'm on the subject of advice, the other best piece I was ever given, was from one of the many excellent editors I've had the good fortune to work with. I'm a sucker for backstories, which can really clutter the start of a book. My editor spotted this weakness (well, it was hard not to notice), and said, "A book should start as close to the center of the story as possible."

Oh, there's one other piece of advice that has been enormously helpful to me. It's professional, rather than writing advice, but it's essential for anyone who's self-employed. It came from an agent who was telling me about a possible big deal. She said, "Don't buy the mink coat until after you've cashed the check." So many possible big deals fall through, it's good to remember that.

My mother was a secretary and she taught my brother and me to type when we were in high school. As a result, I've always written by keyboard, first with a typewriter, and then on a computer. I write very fast, and I can't imagine how I would have managed if I'd written by hand (then again, I can't imagine writing poems any way other than longhand, but I can't write poems, so I'm just guessing on that).

Now that I think about it, there's another piece of advice that's had a huge positive effect on my career. Another agent said it to me, and it took a while before I understood what she meant. She said, "Think before you write."

Before then, I would just start to write without having given much thought at all to how the story was going to turn out. That's a good system for some people, but not for me. So now I'll come up with a question (what would it be like to be a teenager living through a worldwide catastrophe), and then I'll spend as much time as needed coming up with the questions and answers. Who is the teenager? What is the catastrophe?

Writers have themes they turn to again and again. My theme is families living through unusual circumstances. To me, the best way of exploring families is through children and teenagers .I love writing problem novels, and I saw Life As We Knew It as a problem novel about a very very big problem.

I loved writing Life As We Knew It and wanted to write a sequel, but my publisher was uncertain that was the way to go. So I convinced them to let me write a second book about the same world wide catastrophe, but with a completely different set of characters. I called that book the dead & the gone. Then my publisher decided a sequel was a good idea after all, so my newest book, This World We Live In (scheduled for March 2010), is about the characters in both books, as their lives intertwine. Writing a book that's a sequel to two different books is a lot trickier than you might think, and I take a lot of pride in how I figured out what details of the first two books to include in the third and what details to leave out.

Most of the outlining I do is in my mind, and I do it pretty much non-stop if I'm working through a story. It's that continuing process of asking and answering questions. When I'm confident of the beginning, have a strong sense of where I want the book to end, and know enough of the middle to be sure there is one (that reminds me of another great trick I was taught, by another excellent editor- If you're writing a book with chapters, write down each chapter number and a one sentence description of what happens in that chapter. If you see numbers without action, you know where you need to strengthen your story), I start the actual writing.

With all the pre-writing, the writing itself doesn't take that long, which is a good thing for me because I'm an impatient person and I can lose interest pretty easily. But it's a good system for me, and it prevents lots of headaches like writer's block. Other writers prefer to solve the problems as they go along. There's no one right or wrong method.

I have two goals with my writing and when things work out best, they go together quite nicely. One goal is to earn money. Writing books has been my fulltime job since college. I'm incredibly fortunate to have lived my dream. Some years I've earned lots of money and some years not nearly enough, but they've averaged out fairly well.

The second goal is to entertain myself. I am my own best audience. That's a good thing since I'm the one doing the writing and the rewriting. It's a not such a good thing when it comes to being objective. I have to write something pretty awful for me to acknowledge it's less than fabulous. Which is why I'm very dependent on my editors, and why I've been so fortunate to have worked with so many excellent ones.

I lead a quiet comfortable life (considerably more comfortable in the years when I earn enough money). I love movies and watching figure skating (I go to the occasional competition). This past spring, I adopted a kitten, who I named Scooter. As you can tell from the photograph, he's a very intelligent cat!

Susan Beth Pfeffer wrote her first book, Just Morgan, when she was a senior at NYU.

Since then, she has written 76 books for children and young adults. Her award winning titles include Kid Power, About David, and The Year Without Michael.

In 2006, her New York Times best selling novel Life As We Knew It was published. The winner of several statewide young reader awards, it was followed by the dead & the gone. In April 2010, the third volume in the trilogy, This World We Live In, will be published. The books follow the story of Miranda, a teen girl in small town Pennsylvania and Alex, a teen boy in New York City, after a worldwide devastation.

Ms. Pfeffer lives in the Town of Wallkill, New York, with her kitten Scooter.

http://susanbethpfeffer.blogspot.com/

INTERVIEW: JANET LANE WALTERS

2010-02-08T04:00:00.000-05:00

Aurora is pleased to have Janet Lane Walters visiting with us this week. Janet is an eclectic writer whose focus lately has been in fantasy. She has been an EPPIE finalist twice and the winner of one for non-fiction in 2003. Her YA fantasies are published by Mundania and Diskus. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband. Her four children have given her five grandchildren and they are the focus of The Henge Betrayed – Flight, published by Mundania.

She told me that her grandchildren, in different personas, are the main characters in the book.

"The thing that makes me proud," she said, "is that the older four (ages ten to twenty) have read and enjoyed the book. They're awaiting the sequel. One of my grandsons is so into the book that he's trying to develop a video game based on the chapters."

Janet is a planner, but she doesn't always stick to the original plan, because she found that once her characters take life, sometimes that plan changes.

"When writing The Henge Betrayed --Flight, I remember writing 'In order to escape you have to die.' The threat of death of one of the characters wasn't in my plans," she told me. "In the second book this is explained."

She's recently finished the third book of The Henge Betrayed Series -- Quests and will soon be working on the fourth and final book of the quartet Confrontations.

I asked her to tell us about her latest books.

"My latest YA book is The Secret of the Jewels published by DiskUs and is the third of a fantasy trilogy. In the book the eight Jewel Holders and their companions finish the battle against the mages and learn the origin and the danger in the Jewels. Up to this point the Jewels have helped them develop their powers. When they learn what the Jewels really mean they must find a way to destroy their influence without destroying themselves.

"Soon to be released is the second of the Henge books Refuge. Once again the four are on the run seeking a refuge from the evil Dom Senet. They also fear for their friends they have left behind. Two with talents have remained in the garden in Cedris. The son of the ruler of Wesren has remained in the palace and has learned he must die in order to escape. Trouble escalates and though the four are safe, their friends aren't and they must find ways to rescue them. Others with affinities for the four elements-- Earth, Fire, Water and Air-- join them and aid in the escapes."

One of the reasons she enjoys writing books for young adults is it keeps her young. It also gives her a way to use heavy subjects in a different way than she would deal with them in her writing from adults.

When she was growing up, she read everything.

"I do mean everything," she stressed. "I gave a book report on Anna Karenina in third grade though I wrote a different ending. I know I didn't understand everything happening in the book until I became an adult."

She enjoyed mysteries, fantasy, and as she became a teen, some light romance. She had access to the classics at her home and read most of them, even though she had to labor through the writing since it was much more ponderous than writing today.

Janet didn't always want to be a writer, even though she's always written. "Until I married and had my first child anything I wrote was kept in notebooks and not shared," she told me.

She still writes in long hand and then transfers her work to a computer. She might rewrite a chapter, scene, or even a paragraph by hand and then type that in as well. "I think better with pen in hand than a computer, but that is how I learned to write many years ago," she explained.

I asked her to share with us what her writing space was like.

"I have a study off the living room that was once a sun porch to the house. There are two windows but they're too high for me to see outside so I'm not distracted. On the shelf above the computer is my collection of dragons, twenty or so as well as a few other oddities. The walls have bookshelves and sometimes there are stacks of books on the floor when I'm heavy into research. No pictures since this writer is often disorganized except I know where everything is hiding."

She finds researching fun—using books she's collected over the years, the library, and the internet.

"You can find out just about anything if you look hard enough. One of the problems is to stop researching. In The Henge Betrayed – Quests, I needed to do a thatching a roof scene. I read everything I could find on the subject, printed out a lot of pages from my internet searches and then put the information in my own words. I probably used ten facts out of the thousand or so that I found."

"Do you think the Internet will ultimately change the publishing industry?" I wondered.

"I definitely believe this will happen and has already happened. When one of my granddaughters was eight, she called me and asked me to buy her a real book. This child loves to read. I send her books every few months and reminded her of this. She said she meant a real book. At school they read books on the computer. According to her paper books aren't real since you could tear them up and throw them away."

Finally, I asked Janet if she had any advice for young writers.

"Read everything you can. Remember when you're writing you need to know your characters, what they want, what effect does where they live and the time period have on the characters. Give your characters a goal, reasons why what they want can and cannot be had and this will become your plan."

Taken by Bev Irwin

2010-02-06T07:11:00.002-05:00

The picture didn’t really look like him. But then that was a good thing. The computer-generated photo had some of his features, but not enough to cause somebody to take a closer look.

Luckily he looked more like his grandfather than either one of his parents. Maybe if his hair wasn’t dyed so dark… He tipped his head and examined the picture. Yeah, maybe if his hair was still blonde. Jeremy shrugged and walked away.

He could have ripped the poster off the wall but that would draw attention. Somebody might wonder why he’d want to take down a profile of missing children. They might take a closer look. They might see something familiar in the blonde boy in the right hand corner of the poster.

Jeremy forced himself to keep to an even pace despite the overwhelming urge to tear out of the school and never come back. But he had to. He’d promised his grandmother that he would finish the school year.

Will they never stop looking for us? It’s been ten years now. I’m not going to tell Mom. That’s the last thing she needs right now. As it is, she’s hanging on by a thread.

Jeremy looked at his watch.. He had to hurry. He had to get back to the apartment before Doc MacKay showed up. How long would it take him to clean up? He should have stayed home today but he couldn’t miss any more time. He couldn’t take a chance on the school sending anybody to check on him, or teachers calling his home.

That was if they could. Nobody had bothered yet. Otherwise they’d know the number he’d put on the forms wasn’t right. It had happened before. He’d gotten used to that. He’d just shrug and give them another number. By the time anybody got around to calling they’d usually moved. How many times had they moved? Too many to count.

Sliding the key into the lock, he prayed the damage was minimal. He didn’t have much time. The door whined open. Raised talk show voices blared from the television set. The heavy cotton curtains were drawn allowing minimal light into the room. The combination living room/kitchen smelled as dank and old as it looked.

Jeremy saw the prone form laid out on the worn plaid sofa. A multi-colored crocheted afghan partially covered his mother’s swollen form. Her long brown hair was tangled and in need of a wash. Tied in a loose, ineffective ponytail, thin oily strands spread across her forehead. He wanted to brush them off her face but he didn’t want to wake her yet.

If she woke in one of her melancholy moods he’d be too busy consoling her to clean. It wasn’t bad today. Almost the same as when he’d left for school this morning. An over flowing ashtray and a half-empty glass of coke sat on the scarred coffee table. A few magazines had slipped onto the floor. He glanced at the Arborite table, then the kitchen sink. Both were devoid of dishes. Either she hadn’t eaten or she’d cleaned up after herself. Shaking his head, Jeremy picked up the ashtray. He sighed so deeply gray flecks of ash floated in the air. He couldn’t worry now about the last time she’d eaten. He’d make them something filling after Doc left.

The ashtray emptied, Jeremy bent to pick up the magazines off the stained carpet. As he layered them in neat piles on the coffee table hiding the recent cigarette burns, he couldn’t help glancing at his mother. Her face was sallow and plump. Wrinkle free, it made her look younger, not reflecting the years of abuse she had suffered. Her mouth was open; drops of saliva lay in the v of her lips. Unconsciously, his shoulders sagged. At least she’d made it out of bed today. That was the first time this week.

He thought of the Polaroid picture he kept hidden in a box under his bed. The one he took out every night when he said his prayers. He didn’t know why he bothered. Nobody seemed to be answering them. Yet he couldn’t let go of the habit, couldn’t let go of hope. He thought of the picture. Somebody on the street had snapped the photo and handed it to him. Was it only two years ago? Only two years, but it seemed like another lifetime.

He knew it was her illness. And the treatment for it. Side effects of the drugs that kept her barely this side of sane, barely functional – and that was on a good day– and there weren’t many of them. Less and less all the time.

His eyes closed and he saw the photo of a petite, laughing woman, her gleaming brown hair styled like the pixie she resembled. No one would recognize her now. He shrugged again. Maybe that was a good thing.

“Mom,” he shook her shoulder. “You have to get up now. Doc will be here soon.”

Her eyes drifted open. “Hi, Jeremy. School over?”

“Yeah, Mom. It’s after four. You have to get up. Brush your hair, your teeth. Remember, Doc Mackay is coming to see you.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Her eyes were glazed over, the lids thick and too heavy to remain open. Her words slurred together. “Just let me sleep for a few more minutes.”

“No, Mom. You have to get up.”

Jeremy slid his arm under her shoulders, gently lifting her. Supporting her unsteady steps, he guided her to the bathroom. He leaned on the closed door until the toilet flushed. She had washed some of the sleep out of her eyes and the drool from her lips. Her hair was still unkempt and she had a water stain on the front of her sweat top. He led her back to the sofa hoping the stain would dry soon. He didn’t know if she had anything else clean to wear.

“Can I brush your hair, Mom?”

Her fingertips caressed his cheek. “That would be nice, dear.”

Jeremy drew a wide toothed brush through her brown stands. Not great, but it was an improvement. There was a knock at the door and he shoved the brush into his backpack. Crossing to the door, Jeremy let Doctor MacKay into the apartment.

“Hello, son. How is she today?”

“Much better.”

He lied.

About the Author: Bev writes in the romance and mystery genres, at times combining them into romantic suspense. With many years of being a registered nurse, she likes to add a medical edge to her writing. This year has been a good year for contests. Her mystery, MISSING CLAYTON, came second in the TARA, and third in Gateway to the Best contest. DANGEROUS WATERS, a historical romance, received Honorable Mention in the Fab Five contest . Bev has been published for her poetry and has done well in a cross-Canada contest for one of her children's stories. TAKEN is the first chapter of a YA novel. She lives in London, Ontario with two dogs, and two cats. The three children having flown the coop.

INTERVIEW: Cynthia Leitich Smith

2010-02-01T04:00:00.001-05:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Cynthia Leitich Smith, acclaimed author of Tantalize, Eternal, and the upcoming Blessed. Tantalize was honored at the 2007 National Book Festival as well as being a Borders Original Voices Selection. Eternal was a YALSA Teens Top Ten nominee.

Eternal, a YA Gothic fantasy love story as well as a political thriller, is the story of Miranda, a shy wannabe teen actress, who is "adopted" by the king of vampires, and Zachary, the guardian angel who initially fails to save her from him. It's set in a multi-creature-verse and is told in alternating points of view. It's also part of a larger series and building storyline.

"The cast of Eternal will crossover with the cast of my previous novel, Tantalize, in Blessed which I’m revising right now," Cynthia told me. "The books are a conversation of sorts with Bram Stoker and other classic authors, though you don’t need to have read those books to follow my series. Readers will find strong elements of romance, mystery, suspense, and some humor, but big picture, these are contemporary horror novels per se. They’re also influenced by Joss Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer, especially with regard to its girl-empowerment subtext."

Cynthia is intrigued by young heroes, because everything they are going through is newer. And, because their experiences are fresher, the intensity involved is also much higher. "Consider a kiss," she said. "Then consider a first kiss. Then consider your first kiss ever."

When she's researching, she doesn't rely only on print and video media; she's very hands-on.

"Hands on and feet walking out the door," she explained. "If at all possible, I’m out in the middle of the setting and shootings photos of the landscape and interviewing folks with any sort of pertinent expertise. For Tantalize, I interviewed a chef and talked to living vampires. For Eternal, I walked Chicago’s Chinatown in -20 weather. Where my characters go, so do I."

"Did you always want to be a writer?" I asked.

"Yes. I started as a young poet and then quickly became a journalist. I was the editor of my junior high and high school newspapers, and I earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from The University of Kansas before continuing on to The University of Michigan Law School. It wasn’t until I was a twenty-something professional in Chicago, though, that it occurred to me that I could write fiction for a living. But it came at me with blinding clarity, and I immediately quit my day job and plunged in. (Don’t try the quitting your day job thing. It worked out for me, but there were a fair number of sleepless nights in the meantime)."

I wondered what Cynthia's husband thought about her writing.

" I’m married to Greg Leitich Smith, author of Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galileo. We have a new short story out together in Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd. So, let’s just say, he identifies."

Cynthia prefers to do her writing on her laptop. "I spent much of my teens and early twenties in newsrooms," she explained, "so I’m used to composing on a keyboard, both daily and on deadline."

She writes her entire first draft, two pages a day. Then when she's finished, she prints it, reads it, tosses it, and deletes the file. Then she starts over.

"That first draft is just an exercise," she said, "a way of getting to know the world, protagonist, and his or her story."

Cynthia shared with us a soundtrack she developed while she was writing Eternal. It includes a wide variety of songs: “Bad Moon Rising” by Clearance Clearwater Revival; “New Dark Ages” by Bad Religion; “Dead Man’s Party” by Oingo Boingo; “My Kind of Town” by Frank Sinatra; “I Want to Be Evil” by Eartha Kitt; “Princess of the Night” by At Vance; “Fate or Faith” by Julie Cruise; “In the Arms of the Angels” by Kristin Richardson; “Forever Love” by Anna Nalick. You can listen to it on Cynthia's MySpace page.

Finally, I asked Cynthia what advice she had for her readers.

" You are the hero of your own story. Honor that about yourself, respect it. Think about how you can use your power over your life to build the best possible future. And watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. Repeatedly. Until you can quote it."

INTERVIEW: BOBBIE PYRON

2010-01-25T04:00:00.005-05:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Bobbie Pyron, whose debut teen novel, The Ring, was launched in September. Bobbie's very proud of The Ring because it's her "first born" and so will always have a special place in her heart. However, she has a new book which is coming out early next year that is also very special to her--A Dog's Way Home-- about a Shetland Sheepdog (Sheltie).

"I was told by numerous critiquers (including editors and agents) it didn't 'work' because it's told in alternating points of view," Bobbie told me. "I'm happy to say my wonderful agent sold it at auction this past summer!"

I asked her to tell us about this new work.

It’s the interwoven stories of ten-year-old Abby and her beloved Shetland Sheepdog, Tam. When Abby and her mother are in a terrible car accident on the northern end of the Blue Ridge Parkway, Abby is badly injured and Tam is lost in the mountains. Told in alternating chapters in alternating points of view, the reader follows Abby and Tam’s journeys as they try to find their way back to each other. It’s my personal love letter to all those great dog classics like Lassie Come Home and The Incredible Journey that I loved so very much as a child.

I wondered how much of herself Bobbie puts into her characters.

"I think quite a lot. I was very much an outsider as a kid and as a teen. As a kid, I preferred animals to people, like Abby does in A Dog's Way Home. And as a teen, I was pretty rebellious, like Mardie in The Ring," she told me. "I also find that, at some level, all my books (published and unpublished) deal with loss. I had a great deal of loss in my childhood. I'm sure I'm still trying to work through all that in my writing."

Bobbie enjoys writing for the YA and MG crowd because she loves the honesty and passion in books for that age group, not to mention the honesty in the readers themselves.

"If a ten-year-old or fourteen-year-old reads your book and loves it, they really love it!" she said. "And if they don't, they'll let you know. I also think, for the most part, the subject matter of books for these age groups are much more interesting to me. Themes of loss, one's place in the world, what makes life worth living, friendship, family, questioning the status quo, questioning who you are apart from your family, your peer group, your culture—all these are reasons I love to read and write teen and middle-grade fiction."

"How do you think YA fiction has changed since you were a kid…and who was your favorite author?" I asked.

Bobbie told me she doesn't think she had a favorite author as a teen. She was reading many different things—nonfiction as well as fiction.

"And I was a teen back in the Dark Ages-- the early 1970s. Young adult fiction wasn't even really a genre then. But I do remember loving The Chronicles of Narnia, Lisa Bright and Dark, To Kill a Mockingbird, Black Boy. I think teens today are so lucky to have such a great variety of books to read written by gifted writers who really care about their audience."

"Did you always want to be a writer?" I wondered.

"Well first, I wanted very much to be a mermaid when I grew up. After that, at about age nine, I wanted to be a writer. I had a lot of detours along the way doing other things like being a professional singer, gladiola harvester, bookstore manager, dog trainer, wilderness instructor, and librarian. But I finally got back to my original dream, and it was worth the wait!"

When Bobbie first has an idea for a story, she mulls it over for a long time—until she decides whether or not it's worth pursuing. If, after a couple of weeks, she's still excited about the idea, she writes as much as she knows about the story in a notebook--the plot, the characters, the setting, etc.

"I can’t actually start writing it until the voice of the narrator comes," she continued. "It doesn’t matter if it’s in first person or third, the voice has to start 'talking' to me before I can do a darned thing."

Once she starts writing, however, it's all done on the computer. She tries not to edit as she goes along, although she admits that's very hard for her. When she gets the first draft completed, she lets it sit awhile before she rereads it…trying to do that in one sitting.

She shared with me that she didn't used to believe in outlining—thinking it would cramp her creativity.

"But now, thanks to my agent, I'm a great believer in outlining after I'm done with the first draft," she said. "I go back and list for each chapter the main things that happen. It helps me see how the chapters move the story forward (or don't) and the arc of the story. I like to think there are no 'dead zones' in my stories, but I always find that there are when I outline in this way."

Bobbie has an office in her house—a room she took over after the last of the kids moved out.

"My desk faces a window that looks out on to our back yard," she said. "There's an apple tree just outside the window my step kids gave me for my birthday a couple of years ago. It's a wonderful reminder of how my relationship with them has grown over the last ten years."

"What's the most embarrassing thing your mother ever did to you?" I asked.

"OMG!" Bobbie exclaimed. "When I was in, like, first grade, I forgot to put on underwear. I didn’t realize this until I went up a slide at recess and the little boy behind me said—well, you can guess. The teacher called my mother. As it happened, I’d also forgotten my lunch box. So my mother brought my lunch box to the school, gave it to the principal, who gave it to my teacher, who gave it to me just before we went to the cafeteria. Just imagine my 'surprise' when I opened the lid to my lunch box (of course, with a bunch of other kids around) and there, right on top, lay my lacy underwear. That put me in therapy for years!"

Finally, I asked Bobbie what advice she would give to a young writer.

"Keep your eyes open and your ears alert. Every experience, every person you meet is a story," she said. "And don't just dream of writing, do it! Don't be afraid of not being 'good enough' or 'as good as'. Don't wait for permission to pursue your passion. Sit down and write."

Leave a comment on this interview for a chance to win an autographed copy of The Ring.

Blurb for "The Ring": Plagued by slipping grades and a budding criminal record, Mardie’s heading down a path of self-destruction she can’t seem to avoid. Unlike her perfect older brother Michael, who does everything right according to their father, Mardie can’t meet those high expectations.

But when she discovers a girls’ boxing club at the gym, Mardie’s drawn in by the fighters’ fearlessness and strength. Having already lost her parents’ trust and shunned by her boyfriend and even her best friend, the ring is the only place left where no one judges her. Angry and hurt by the state of her life, Mardie can’t wait to start throwing punches. But her wise and patient trainer, Kitty, a former boxer who’s coached her share of troubled teen girls in the ring, shows Mardie that boxing isn’t just about fighting—it’s also about strategy and mental discipline—the things that make a fighter into a winner.

Mardie begins to apply the lessons she’s learned in the ring to her battles at school and especially at home, where she finds she’s not the only one struggling for acceptance. And, as she trains for her upcoming championship bouts, Mardie hopes to find a way to make her parents proud. Filled with exciting sports action, The Ring is an inspiring story of a girl learning to believe in herself.

INTERVIEW: Dana Davis

2010-01-18T04:00:00.000-05:00

Aurora is pleased to welcome Dana Davis, a four time award-winning author of fantasy and science fiction. Dana recently signed multiple book contracts with SynergEbooks Publishing. Her latest YA fantasy, Breach of Worlds is now available.

Dana has always been a sci-fi/fantasy fan, but when she was a kid, there weren't a lot of sci-fi/fantasy books with girls as the main characters.

"I felt cheated that boys got to do all the fun stuff in novels. My young adult books are written from girls’ perspectives. There are, of course, boys and men as strong characters in the books, but I tend to have a girl as the main character," she said.

"If you weren't a writer, what would you be?" I asked.

"Hmm, that's a hard question because I really love my work. But if I had to choose a different career, I would probably be an archaeologist, an astronomer, or perhaps a paranormal researcher. I love the unknown and the quest of finding answers. I think I'm a researcher at heart."

She uses books and the internet quite a bit, but she also travels and takes part in local activities that are relevant to her books.

"My ancestors were Celts from Ireland, Scotland and England, so I sometimes use my own genealogy and family stories in my work. Fictionalized, of course," she said. "And there's nothing like traipsing through a real castle in England or Scotland to get the feel for a fantasy story. Currently, I’m scheduled for a local ghost hunt with a paranormal investigation team and plan to use my experiences in my paranormal books."

She always has a number of projects going. Currently, she's writing an adult paranormal fantasy series for her publisher and will soon be doing a final edit on her young adult sci-fi novel Quest for Freedom for an upcoming deadline.

"The audio book and eBook are scheduled for release this year," she told me. "I'm also planning a series expansion from a previous novel for young adults that I hope to get going on in another year or two. Busy is my middle name these days."

"How much of your writing is based on your own experience?" I asked.

"Actually, more than I like to admit sometimes. I don’t do it on purpose, but I have written entire scenes then realized when I went back over them that some of the stuff I put my characters through actually happened to me as a kid. In Breach of Worlds, for example, my main character, Nara, escapes from an orphanage. In the beginning of the book, she’s scared and trying to keep strangers from noticing her.

"As a young kid, I was walking home from school in the rain when a car pulled up and offered me a ride. My mom was big on teaching about stranger danger and I thought I was going to get nabbed right then and there, so I ran all the way home. Now the woman in the car was probably just concerned that a little kid was out in the rain by herself, but I used those strong feelings when I created that scene and didn’t even realize it until after I had written it."

Dana told me she would drive herself nuts if she didn't have a computer—mostly because she has really bad handwriting.

"Half the time, I can’t even read it," she admitted. "I used to get called down for it in school. And I tried working on an old typewriter once, just to be chic, but gave that up as soon as I had a typo to correct, which was pretty much the first paragraph. I love technology so computers are perfect for me. Otherwise, I might never get any books finished."

Dana and her husband love to travel and, every year, try to take a trip to someplace they've never visited. They plan to go to Egypt for their next big trip. Other hobbies include reading, of course; downtime with a good movie or TV show; or playing computer and video games.

"For physical hobbies, I hike, bike, dance, and swim," she said. "Hubby talks me into tennis now and again but I'm not very good at it."

In Dana's latest YA fantasy, Breach of Worlds, the character of Nara is eleven in the beginning of the novel and fourteen by the fourth chapter. Dana said she can see somebody like Alyssa Shafer or Chloe Moretz playing the younger Nara in a movie with an actress like Dakota Fanning playing her as a teen. She would choose Marcia Cross to play Mirin and a George Cloony or Harrison Ford type playing one of the male leads—Tanith.

She's not sure she would want to be a character in her own books, because "they have to go through some nasty stuff before the end of my books. So, honestly, I don’t think I would want to be any of them for very long. One rule of writing is to create conflict for characters, otherwise no one would want to read about them, so that's what I do. Though if I did become a character, I’d certainly want one with lots of power, like Mirin in Breach of Worlds, so I could defend myself. And it might be fun to be a bad guy for a day."

"What challenges do you think the youth of today face that you didn’t?" I wondered.

"We have a load of technology that tends to create instant gratification, while keeping people physically isolated, and I think the challenge for young people today is to find a balance between the exciting world of technology and the unpredictable world of people. In fact, being a Star Trek and Star Wars fan as a kid, I’m a bit envious of all the technology today’s kids have at their fingertips. When I was young, we had computers, but they were clunky and as slow as mud, and we certainly had no internet. Cell phones were the size of bricks and cost as much as a house. Okay, maybe not that much, but I certainly couldn’t afford one. And I imagine the coverage was pretty bad. Texting was unheard of, cameras used film, and cable had 20 channels on a good day. As a self-proclaimed hermit, if I had access to the technology back then that we have today, I probably wouldn’t have left the house, except at my mother’s insistence."

Finally, I asked her what advice she would give to her readers.

"Whatever you decide to do in your life, be patient and persistent and educate yourself. Even if that means discovering a second career. I started out in the entertainment industry and Hollywood, so writing books is a second career for me. I was always writing something on the side during that time but never thought of doing it full-time. In the mid-90s I decided to leave the entertainment industry and go back to school for a writing degree. I had to do a lot of work and it took me years to get where I am today, but I absolutely love being a writer."

Author Bio: Dana Davis is a four time award-winning author of fantasy and science fiction. She studied with Nebula Award-winner Sheila Finch and received her creative writing degree from California State University, Long Beach. She recently signed multiple book contracts SynergEbooks Publishing and her latest young adult fantasy Breach of Worlds is now available.

When she's not writing, she loves to read and travel. Just try to keep her away from ruins and old cemeteries. Dana lives in the Arizona desert with her husband and two insane birds, where she is currently writing another book. Her website is http://www.danadaviswriting.com

INTERVIEW: Kitty Keswick

2010-01-12T04:00:00.003-05:00

Aurora is pleased to have Kitty Keswick, the co-president of the Class of 2k10, a group of debut MG and YA authors. Kitty's debut novel, Freaksville, will launch January 17 from Leap Books. The second book in the series, Furry and Freaked, is scheduled to be released later this year.

Freaksville is told through sixteen-year-old Kasey Maxwell's blog. Here's a little about the book and series (and if you're interested, our review of it is here):

High school is hard enough when you’re normal: peer pressure, book reports, yearning to be in the in-crowd, and the enormous zit that has a life of its own. Having a family whose skeletons in the closet lean toward the paranormal is not a topper on anyone’s list. Sophomore Kasey Maxwell is busy juggling typical teen angst. Add visions, ghosts, and hairy four-legged monsters into the mix and you get FREAKSVILLE. It’s a wonder Kasey has survived.

Every woman in the Maxwell family has the gift of sight. A talent sixteen-year-old Kasey would gladly give up. All she wants is a normal life. Shopping and talking about boys with her best friend and long-time sidekick Gillie Godshall consume her days. Until Kasey has a vision about Josh Johnstone, the foreign exchange student from England. The vision leads her into new waters, a lead in a play, a haunted theater…and into the arms of the Josh. Yet both Kasey and Josh have secrets lurking in dark corners. Can Kasey’s new romance survive FREAKSVILLE?

It's not surprising Kitty has a character from England in her debut novel. She's a self-confessed Anglophile (lover of all things British) and has been since she fell head over heels in love with Robin Hood at the age of four.

"Problem was," she said, "he was a cartoon fox. Minor detail, right?"

Kitty has written since she was a kid, but she's had a few detours along the road to publishing. "Rent will do that," she explained. But, she choose to write for kids and teens for one very simple reason.

"I never grew up," she told me. "Peter Pan doesn't have anything on me." She then added, "My voice fits the YA genre, and I find the characters have more energy and are fun to write."

"If you weren't a writer, what would you be?" I wondered.

"Queen?" she said. "Errr, okay, maybe not royalty, but it would be kinda cool. I think I’d want to be a set designer. If we are talking dream job, I’d like to work on location for fantasy movies. Like the LOTR or something along those lines. One of the things I like best about writing is creating the worlds (I love settings almost as much as conflict), so to be able to that with a visual canvas would be pretty darn cool."

Kitty is a fan of series, not only in her own writing, but also is what she reads. She's currently reading Tempted, the sixth book in the House of Night series by PC and Kristen Cast as well as Fade Out from the Morganville Vampire series by Rachel Caine. "Great series," she said.

Kitty feels one of the most important things a writer can do is "read, write, read. Then read." The second most important is be prepared for rejections.

"Everyone gets them and you will too," she declared. "Thicken your skin and keep at it. The publishing game is all about persistence."

She also shared that her high school journalism teacher, Ms. Kingston, told her something that has stuck with her.

"She wrote in my yearbook: 'Welcome to the world of publishing. If you do anything that stands out, people will either love it or hate it."

Normally, Kitty uses a computer for her writing, but does confess to jotting ideas down on… well, anything.

"I jot things down on napkins, scrap paper, notebooks, gum wrappers, magazines, sticky notes, whatever I have that will hold ink. If an idea strikes, I’ve been known to scribble on just about anything. I once wrote dialogue on the tub surround so I wouldn’t forget it. I had conditioner in my hair and—well, ideas come at the most inopportune time sometimes. TMI? Yeah, TMI."

On a more personal note, I asked Kitty if she had any pets.

"Does the spider in the corner of my room count?" she asked in return. "Darn thing’s spun its own condo, and I’m too chicken to swat at it with the broom. I also have two cats. One likes to keep my lap warm while I type."

Along with having her cat in her lap while she types, she also snacks on Peanut M&M's. "They are easy to eat and don't require any thought," she explained.

She realized that, in her writing, she uses the word gingerly a lot and has to watch herself. And, talking about words, I asked her what her least favorite word was.

"No," she said promptly. "Oh, you mean in writing??? One that’s long or hard to spell."

Finally, I asked, "Do you have any book tours or 'Meet the Author' events coming up soon that your readers can meet you at?"

"Check me out on various blogs during Traveling to Teens this January, and the Class of 2K10 has various events throughout the year. One of our big events will be attending BEA in May. You can look for me there along with co-president Judith Graves and also Bonnie Doerr, both fellow Leap authors."

Warning: Dating a werewolf can be dangerous to your...heart.

Every woman in the Maxwell family has the gift of sight. A talent sixteen-year-old Kasey would gladly give up. Until Kasey has a vision about Josh Johnstone, the foreign exchange student from England. The vision leads her into deep waters...a lead in a play and into the arms of Josh. But Josh, too, has a secret. Something that could put them all in danger. To solve a mystery of a supernatural haunting, they must uncover the secrets of the haunted theater when they are trapped on the night of the full moon.

INTERVIEW: Bonnie J. Doerr

2010-01-05T04:00:00.000-05:00

Aurora is pleased to have Bonnie J. Doerr with us. Bonnie is an author with the brand new Young Adult publisher Leap Books, and her book Island Sting will be released on January 6, 2010.

Bonnie has always played with words, ideas, and nature. She's taught students from kindergarten to college. Degrees in reading education, combined with a stint as a science teacher, led her to write ecological mysteries starring caring, involved, "green" teens who take action with attitude, along with a touch of romance. Her work has been recommended by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) for use in environmental education and is also included in Milkweed Editions literary field guides.

She loves creating characters that jump wholeheartedly into a struggle to right a wrong and sees teens as being, as she told me, "uniquely passionate and fearless, often sensing injustice in clear, immediate ways that adults miss."
Growing up, Bonnie was always too active and "out-doorsy" to spend much time thinking about writing.

"In junior high," she said, "about the time I became aware that legs covered with bug bites held no appeal, I became a stay-at-home voracious reader. I was always insatiably curious about places and people. Still am. I love being transported to different towns, states, countries, and crawling around inside other people’s heads. It fascinates me to learn how different people are one from the other and to follow their train of thought. I can safely experience dangerous adventures and hang out with wickedly nasty characters when in real life I wouldn’t dare. As a teen, I’d sit on our front porch devouring books while hoping that the boy of my momentary interest would ride by on his bicycle, and in later years, in his car. I didn’t write much until high school when I learned how much fun it was to create characters I could only dream about—especially guys!"

When Bonnie's working she sits where she can see the woods and gardens from two directions. She admits this is not without its downside, however.
"This position can be inspiring or distracting, depending on what the wild critters are up to outside," she told me. "Sometimes I have reference books and papers scattered all around, but I’ve learned that clutter distracts me. I begin a project, see something that reminds me of another task, attack it instead, then notice something undone on a forgotten list only to take care of that to-do item, all the while feeling guilty because I’m not making progress on the main assignment. Not productive behavior. So I try to keep my desk cleared except for my ceramic turtle hatchling, inspiration for work on Stakeout, my next release, and a fresh flower from my garden. The camellia on my desk now is likely the last bloom for a while."

She loved being outdoors as a kid, as she's said, but most of her childhood "wilderness romping" took place in mountains, streams, and fresh water lakes, while she writes about semi-tropical island environments.

Island Sting is set in a Florida wildlife refuge in the Florida Keys—where Bonnie spends a great deal of her time. She also does research for her books, which she loves since it involves travel, exploring an island environment, and spending time with officials and other professionals who protect and care for animals, like Florida wildlife officers and sea turtle hospital personnel.

"Is my research vacation or work?" she asked me. "You decide."

When she's home, she feels guilty if she's not working on her latest manuscript, but while she's working on the manuscript, she feels guilty that she's not working in her house or in the gardens.

"Those home responsibilities are always staring and waving in my face," she said. "Plus, my husband is retired and hangs around doing as he pleases which is usually READING ! Awesome, right? But reading is what I most wish I had more time to do. Reading books is so-ooo much easier than writing them."

"Do you prefer to write longhand, on a typewriter, or on a computer?" I wondered.
"Please don’t make me think about writing on a typewriter," she begged. "Oh, the nightmare memories of such slow, laborious editing--one draft after another. Do my readers even know what a typewriter is?

"I make notes in longhand, but I compose on my laptop. The irony is the computer makes it so easy to edit these days I don’t know when to stop making changes."

I wondered which authors have influenced Bonnie the most.

"For subject matter, I’d have to say Carl Hiassen and Jean Craighead George, authors whose styles have nothing in common, but who share environmental topics," she told me. "I loved Carl’s adult novels and wanted to write similar stories for kids, but darn if he didn’t beat me to it. If only I could create such quirky, funny characters. My brain isn’t large enough to contain half of Ms. George’s knowledge. But don’t I wish? To the gods of writing I issue this plea: give me Carl’s wit and Ms. George’s wisdom!"

She's currently reading Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George, as well as Operation Redwood by S. Terrell French.

As far as a book no writer should be without, for Bonnie it depends.

"Every author should have a book of charms and a book of lottery tickets!" she asserted, to begin with, and then continued, "In all honesty, each author must learn what book the writer within needs at any given time. If I need inspiration, I will refer to one book. If I’m struggling with voice, I may pick up another. I’m concentrating on mysteries these days, so I keep Chris Roerden’s Don’t Murder Your Mystery nearby. One book won’t do it. I need an entire library. What does it say about me that a single book is not help enough? You know that was a rhetorical question, right?"

Island Sting is set in the Florida Keys, so Bonnie is launching it at the Southern Most City. The first and second week of February, she will be at several venues in Key West.

On the first Friday, she will share Island Sting at the Walk on Winn Dixie. Sunday afternoon, February 7, she will be at The Key West Wildlife Center hoping to help raise awareness and funds. February 9, at 5:30 pm, she will be talking with students and the community at Florida Keys Community College. She will meet with patrons of the Key West Public Library on the morning of February 11.

"Don't you want to join me February in Key West?" she asked. "Sun, sand, snorkeling, fishing, blue sky, turquoise water… OK, I’ll shut up now."

Wanted: YA / Middle Grade Authors and Reviewers

2009-10-10T16:19:00.000-04:00

*******PERMISSION TO FORWARD GRANTED*******

BIG NEWS!

The Long and the Short of It (www.longandshortreviews.com) is pleased to announce the upcoming launch of a new member in our family:

Aurora Reviews for Young Adult* and Middle Grade stories!!!

MORE BIG NEWS!
Do you write Young Adult or Middle Grade stories or know someone who does? We launch "Aurora" on January 1, 2010 and will need authors to feature in interviews (this is a free promotional spot).

We'll also need free short stories to share on our “Thrifty Thursday” page. As a special introductory offer we are asking YA/Middle Grade authors to submit to us a 1000 word short story for inclusion on the site free short story page. Upon acceptance for publication we're offering the following compensation:

One free author spotlight on Aurora (a $20 value)

One six-month banner/book cover ad on Aurora (a $45 value)

50% off of your choice of any one Goddess Fish Promotions service

Note: All offers must be used or scheduled by January 31, 2010

Email us at lasreviews@gmail.com with "Aurora submissions" in the subject with your story in the body of the email. If you have any questions, would like to schedule an interview or have your book reviewed by Aurora, email us at the same email address with your question or request (but please make certain you indicate that it is for Aurora).

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!!
On the heels of our announcement that we'll be opening a YA/Middle Grade reviews site, we also need to put out the call: WE NEED REVIEWERS!!

I'm already getting review requests in the door, and only have a few reviewers lined up. So, if you're interested in reviewing for the soon-to-be opened Aurora Reviews, please see the reviewer guidelines for LASR/WC (which will be the same for Aurora ... except the erotic romance part *G*) and apply as soon as you can.

The guidelines are here:

http://www.longandshortreviews.com/reviewerapp.htm

We have a great incentive program and we're tons of fun -- so for all the books you can read, and the chance to earn Amazon or BN gift certificates, Aurora Gear (tote bags, mugs, T-shirts, etc) and more, become a reviewer!

We hope to hear from you soon.

Marianne and Judy

* Our definition of Young Adult Fiction: YA is fiction written especially for adolescents and/or teenagers and involve characters of the same age (i.e. eighteen y.o. or younger). If your story involves main characters over the age of 18 y.o., we don’t consider it “Young Adult”.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

2009-10-05T20:50:00.000-04:00

The Aurora Reviews Website will launch on January 1, 2010.

Please check back then!