Interview with Middle Grade and YA Author Margaret Peterson Haddix

Today I have the privilege of interviewing author Margaret Peterson Haddix. She is the author of many critically and popularly acclaimed YA and middle grade novels, including the Children of Exile series, The Missing series, the Under Their Skin series, and the Shadow Children series. A graduate of Miami University (of Ohio), she worked for several years as a reporter for The Indianapolis News. She also taught at the Danville (Illinois) Area Community College. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio.

When did you decide to become an author?

I started thinking about it as far back as third grade. I remember making up and writing down my own stories way back then. But I wasn't planning out my whole career as an eight-year-old--it was just something I did for fun. And sometimes after I finished reading a book I loved, I would make up new adventures for the characters, because I missed them like I would miss a friend. Years and years later I realized what I was doing was actually fanfiction, but nobody had invented that term yet when I was a kid. For me, being a writer just seemed to evolve from being a reader.

Tell us about your journey. How did you get your first book published?

I wrote a novel in college, and my creative writing professors encouraged me to try to get that published. And I did try a little, but quickly realized that I'd outgrown the book, and would have been embarrassed if it ever did appear in print. Then for my first few years out of college, I worked in newspaper journalism and wrote fiction on the side. The journalism jobs were actually great practice for both writing and writing discipline, and some of the newspaper stories I wrote gave me ideas for fiction I wanted to write, too.  By the time I wrote RUNNING OUT OF TIME, I felt a lot more hopeful about its chances. But I still collected a lot of rejection letters and had to do a lot of revision along the way. When I was ready to seek publication, I mostly used the "try everything" approach, submitting to agents and publishers both. (This was in the early 1990s, when that approach made more sense.) Ultimately, it helped me to go to a writers conference, where I met both agents and editors; a contact I made there led to me getting my first agent, and she was the one who sent my book to David Gale at Simon & Schuster. He and I ended up working together on more than forty books.

You have written a number of series, as well as a bunch of standalone novels. Do you find the development process different? Do you know you are writing a series when you start book one or does that happen later?

Two of my series began with books that I thought were only stand-alones. With the first one, AMONG THE HIDDEN, it took a lot of other people (including my editor and agent) to convince me that a series was possible; I truly had to shift gears as a writer to see interlocking stories there. With the second, JUST ELLA, I always felt there were possibilities for continuing the story somehow, but about a decade passed before I saw how I wanted to do that. All my other series were planned as series from the beginning. Writing a series vs. a stand-alone is a different process. With a standalone, I try to avoid tangents and detours that would be a distraction from telling that book's main story. With a series, I'm constantly looking around at possible detours and thinking, "Is this going to be important in a future book in the series?"

Is there anything about being a published author that has surprised you?

Oh, yes. Pre-publication, this is how I pictured life as an author: I'd spend my time alone at my computer, grappling with ideas and always searching for the right word. It's true that I do plenty of that, and I love it. But I never expected to also spend a lot of time traveling and meeting/talking with kids, educators, librarians, booksellers, parents, etc. I've now been to all 50 states, and some of my trips to about 35 of them were for book travel. I've also spoken about my books in China, Honduras, Germany, Spain, and Canada. If you count Skype visits as well, I've gotten to interact with kids in countries as far away and remote as Tajikistan. And all of this has been an unexpected delight. I love to travel and love to meet new people. It's allowed me to keep some of my favorite parts of being a newspaper reporter (getting to talk to different people, whose lives are very different from mine in some cases) without having the stress and challenges that I didn't like in that job.

The other unexpected joy has been getting to meet and befriend other authors. We are a strange tribe, and it's nice to feel that solidarity with people who also think deeply and care passionately about both the fate of humanity and grammatical minutia such as the Oxford comma.

Any advice you would give to a writer just starting out?

Savor the journey. Starting out (and who am I kidding? Lots of times even now) I would stress myself out trying to plan or predict the direction of my career; I wanted to be able to plot my life the same way I plotted my characters' lives. But that's not possible. And many of the really wonderful things that have happened have been more serendipitous. When I look back, it's a lot of little moments that have truly mattered: the burst of intense joy that comes with suddenly understanding what should happen next in a story, the glow of hearing a reader quietly tell me what one of my books meant to her or him. This profession comes with a heaping portion of self-doubt--most writers have to pass through a lot of rejection on the way to their first acceptance, and even success is no guarantee of future success. So celebrate every victory along the way, constantly look for ways to grow as a writer, and surround yourself with people who will help build you up, not tear you down. And make sure you are that encouraging person for others in your life--whether they are fellow writers or not.

Thank you so much for joining me today! For more information about Margaret Peterson Haddix and her books, visit her at HaddixBooks.com. You can check out my review of Children of Refuge, the second book in the Children of Exile trilogy. Comment for a chance to win a copy of the book.

Interview with #MG and Picture Book Writer Holly M. McGhee

It’s Thursday so it’s time to interview another author. Today I talk to Holly M. McGhee. Holly is both a literary agent and a writer. At her agency, Pippin Properties, Inc., Holly's clients include Kate DiCamillo, Jandy Nelson, Doreen Cronin, Sean Qualls, and Peter H. Reynolds. In 2009, her first book was published under the pen name Hallie Durand, and this year, with her debut novel Matylda, Bright and Tender, which has a plum line straight to her heart, she decided to integrate both parts of her creative life, and is now writing under her given name. Her picture book collaboration with Pascal Lemaitre, Come with Me, will be published by Putnam on September 5.

Holly, you are a published author and a literary agent. Did one thing lead to the other? 

Not so much in a straight-line kind of way—but for sure, my work as a literary agent and as a writer are connected. I started as an editor, and I brought along that interest to my career as a literary agent, helping my clients in the early creative stages of their projects in addition to negotiating the publishing deal. I generally get right in there and roll up my sleeves on the manuscript or storyboard, long before the project is submitted—it's just part of who I am. And I think it's true that my own stories come from that same creative reservoir inside of me.

How do you balance working with your client’s books and working on your own? 

That's the hardest part. I'm kind of obsessed with my job as a literary agent and it's hard for me to step aside and be still and ponder my own stories. It was easier before my kids became teenagers because they would go to bed at 9 and I would write. They stay up late now and the house is seldom quiet; trumpet practice begins at 9:30 p.m. every night! If I'm deep into something I go away, but the breathing space it takes to get going on something new is the hardest to find. I've recently decided to honor my writing career by setting aside every Friday for my own work. It starts this week, so my fingers are crossed that this new balance will be good.

Tell us about your journey. How did you get your first book published? 

My first book is titled Dessert First, and the character came bursting into my life while I was pleasantly reading a manuscript on NJ Transit one morning. Her name was Dessert Schneider and she would not be quiet till I wrote down her story, in her words. I did it all in a spiral bound notebook, longhand, in 2007. But I was concerned that when it was submitted, an editor might be influenced one way or the other because of who I was as a literary agent. That's why we used a pen name—Hallie Durand—nobody knew who I was until the deal was done; that way I could always be sure that the book was acquired because of the writing itself. The knowledge that my story was acquired solely because of the words has helped me along my path, especially during the too frequent times when I doubt myself as a writer. Under my pen name, I wrote two more books in that series and then three picture books (Mitchell's License, Mitchell Goes Bowling, and Catch That Cookie!). 

With Matylda, Bright and Tender, my debut middle-grade novel, I decided to integrate my writing and agenting career under Holly M. McGhee, partly because Matylda is based on the emotions from my own childhood and partly as an acknowledgement that my writing and agenting comes from the same place inside of me. (Also the original idea of having a pen name was long past the point of serving its purpose.)

Was there ever a point when you felt like giving up? 

With Matylda, I don't know if I consciously felt like giving up, but I did put the story down for a year. The book had started out as a sweet story of two best friends which I wrote over the summer of 2012, up to page 25. At that point I realized one of the friends would have to go on without the other, and I couldn't bear it. I set the pages aside for an entire year. In a way, I felt tricked by my own psyche, because it lured me into unraveling something I'd buried in my own life for decades, a fatal car accident I was in as a teenager. But as I began to give myself permission to go to the darkest places inside of me, the book ended up being such a gift—it helped me work through my own grief, and I'm so grateful for that. 

Tell us a little bit about your novel, Matylda, Bright & Tender.

Matylda, Bright and Tender is the story of best friends Sussy Reed and Guy Hose, neither of whom has siblings. They very much want something to love, all their own, and together they adopt a leopard gecko and they name her Matylda, with a "y" so it's all her own. When the unimaginable happens, on a simple bike ride to get some vitamins for Matylda, Sussy is left to go on without Guy, and she works through her grief by loving Matylda fiercely—and in so doing she is trying to keep her attachment to her friend . . . until it becomes impossible to go on . . . that's when she comes to understand that when we love someone, we can love them in death the same way we did in life / that we don't have to fight those feelings / that they become part of who we are, and that we can go on from there at a deeper level, as people who have the capacity to hold the tension of all the feelings at once, both the dark and the light. And that we can survive. That the act of going on itself is a way to honor the person who died. 

Your latest book, Come with Me, opened a lot of conversations in my classroom. How did you come up with the concept for Come With Me? 

My long-time friend Pascal Lemaitre and I had been playing around with the idea of the Native American fable of the humming bird and the forest fire, in which the humming bird, the tiniest of all birds, doesn't think the amount of water she can carry will make a difference in extinguishing the fire. But then there is the epiphany that if all the hummingbirds each carried a drop of water, together they could put out the fire. Watching the news of terrorism over and over in the Spring of 2016 with my three children, and feeling so helpless, not knowing how to go forward, I realized that we are like the hummingbirds, and that a simple act of connecting in the face of tragedy and fear, if multiplied by thousands, can make a difference. 

And Pascal had actually connected with me, sixteen years prior, after 9/11. I lived in Manhattan. My husband and our baby, 18 months old. I remember that day so clearly; my husband worked on Wall Street—and our lives, everybody's lives, New York itself and the world as we knew it, changed forever that day. We were scared; immobilized with fear. Then a package arrived in the mail, from my friend in Belgium to me, with a painting of a frightened grieving man planting a flag at the World Trade Center sight, the flag bearing a big red heart blowing in the wind. This act of love, and caring, and connection, in such a time of fear, touched my heart and gave me strength. And the idea that if we all each reached out to one another in our own way, how different the world might be, is at the core of Come with Me

My students are always surprised to hear that authors don’t always get to approve their illustrator and some don't even see the pictures until the book releases. What was that process like for you? Did anything surprise you when you saw the illustrations? 

Well in this case since Pascal and I are friends and since I work in the business, we all collaborated, and so I was involved along the way. Pascal is married to a French Cambodian woman, and so he used his daughter as a model for the little girl. I'm not sure whose dog it is though, but it's very cute! I was surprised that Pascal found a way to work his ladybugs in :-) The jacket was a challenge; do we curve the type or leave it as a straight line? Big discussions! We ended up going straight across and I think that made a big difference. There was a lot of talk about the color of the paper too and I'm really happy with what was chosen. Just like the history behind the book, we worked as a team; I know that's unusual but it was amazing!

Is there anything about being a published author that has surprised you? 

One of the most surprising things about being a published author is the direct connections that are possible between writers and teachers and librarians. As a literary agent, which is what I do as my full-time job, I don't often have direct relationships with educators. It has been incredible to be able communicate with teachers and librarians through twitter. It has been so exciting to see how many people there are out there who are dedicated to creating lifelong passionate readers. I have loved connecting to teachers of every subject who are eager to read books and share them with students. Seeing how seriously these teachers take their reading material has made me think even more carefully about the books I want to bring in to the world, the ones I want to invest my time in, both as a writer and a literary agent.

Any advice you would give to a writer just starting out? 

Yes.
Write every day. That's an easy one to nod yes to, but it takes commitment and passion to show up every day and actually write something. Even if you only have ten minutes, show up & honor your dream.

Is there anything else about you or your books you would like to tell us? 

I'd love to share a few events I'm doing with Pascal Lemaitre for Come with Me, which pubs on September 5. (Lucky for us he is here from Belgium until 9/15)

New York Times Facebook Live Illustration with Maria Russo, August 9 at 3 p.m. (join in on New York Times facebook page)

Rizzoli Bookstore, NYC, our launch: September 7 at 6 p.m.

Albertine Bookstore, NYC: September 9 at 11 a.m.

Maplewood Memorial Library Community gathering for Come with Me, with sidewalk chalk: September 9 at 3:30 p.m.

And I'll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Saturday, September 16.

Good luck with all of your events, Holly. Thank you so much for stopping by.

Thank you for inviting me to your blog, Stacy!

For more information about Holly and her books, visit her online and on twitter. Don't forget to leave a comment and check back next week for a new author interview. Here's a video to enjoy before you go:

Interview with #MG and #YA Author Shari Green

It’s Thursday so it is time for another author interview! Today I talk with Shari Green. Shari writes middle grade and young adult fiction. She's in love with stories and the sea, and can often be found curled up with a good book and a cup of tea, or wandering the beaches near her home on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada. In her non-writing life, Shari works as a Licensed Practical Nurse. She's married to her high school sweetheart and has four children. 

When did you decide to become an author?

I first wrote novel-length fiction during NaMoWriMo 2005. I'd dabbled in writing non-fiction for many years, but once I finished a first draft of my first novel during that crazy November challenge, I was hooked. 

Tell us about your journey. How did you get your first book published?

My first book was a YA novel called Following Chelsea. It was my third completed manuscript. After revising based on feedback from critique partners, I researched agents and started querying. I signed with an agent and worked with her on more (and more!) revisions. However, we parted ways before going on submission, so I ended up subbing the manuscript myself to Evernight Teen. I was thrilled when they offered! Following Chelsea was published as an e-book in 2014.

Was there ever a point when you felt like giving up?

There were times when I was seriously discouraged and when I wondered if all the work and trying and rejection was worth it. I still get discouraged some days. It can be a difficult journey, for sure! But I've never wanted to give up.

Is there anything about being a published author that has surprised you?

I think I had fairly realistic expectations -- perhaps a perk of taking a long while to break in to publishing, and of having many writer-friends! But maybe I was struck a bit with the truth of "it doesn't get easier" -- there are still days when everything I write is garbage, when my work is rejected, when I wrestle with doubts or imposter syndrome. And yet, I appreciate the journey I'm on. I know I'm lucky to have my books out in the world, and I'm so grateful to have the support of friends, family, fellow writers, and especially readers. 

Any advice you would give to a writer just starting out?

Read widely. Find your tribe (other writers who "get it", who can offer honest but kind feedback on your work, and who can be part of a mutual support and encouragement team). And don't lose sight of the joy -- remember what you love about writing, so when the publishing journey is hard, it won't overwhelm you. 

Is there anything else about you or your books you would like to tell us?

My most recent books are both middle grade novels in verse -- ROOT BEER CANDY AND OTHER MIRACLES came out in 2016, and MACY McMILLAN AND THE RAINBOW GODDESS in 2017. I hadn't planned to write in verse when I began working on RBCAOM, nor had I planned on the story being middle grade, but that's how it came out, and it felt like the most true-to-me writing I'd ever done. I learned from that experience the importance of both trusting my gut and following my heart (which is advice I probably should've included above!). 

Thank you so much, Stacy! 

Thank you, Shari!

For more about Shari Green and her books visit her online at her website and on twitter. Don't forget to leave a comment below and check back next week for a new author interview.

Interview with #YA author Carrie Ann DiRisio

Today I talk with Carrie Ann DiRisio. Carrie Ann is a YA writer and creator of @BroodingYAHero. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA with one large fluffy cat, and is currently pursuing her masters in Digital Marketing, although her true dream is to become a Disney Villainess, complete with a really snazzy gown. In addition to writing and plans for world domination, she also enjoys running, coffee, Krav Maga, and knitting. I met Carrie Ann at the New England SCBWI conference last April. 

Your book, Brooding YA Hero, started as a twitter account. What motivated you to start @broodingyahero?

I mainly started it to make my friends laugh. I had no idea it would be so popular!

Before you started @broodingyahero, did you know that you wanted to become an author?

Absolutely! I've been writing since I was in first grade. My first story focused on me and Han Solo celebrating Christmas together. As he's pretty much the broodiest smuggler in the galaxy, I'm proud to say I've always been on brand.

How did a twitter account become a book?

Through magic and luck and lots of hard work. ;)  In more boring terms, I wrote the book, sent it to my awesome agent, and we shopped it to publishers. Then I ate a lot of Nutella as I waited to hear back. I was really lucky to have an amazing editor, Alison Weiss, who helped me shape the Broody character into the protagonist of his own novel.

Tell us about the book. 

in it, you'll get to know Broody, the archetype character behind all those tweets.  as he attempts to pen Brooding YA Hero: Becoming a Main Character (Almost) as Awesome as Me, a "self-help" guide (with activities like mazes and word searches) that lovingly pokes fun at the YA tropes that we roll our eyes at, but secretly love. His book is going pretty well, until his evil ex, Blondie DeMeani shows up!

You were introduced to me as a social media expert. What is one piece of advice about social media that you would give a writer who is just starting out? 

To not get overwhelmed by social media! Twitter is fun, but it's no replacement for working hard on your writing craft. Consider it a water cooler where you can take a break, not a place to live. Also, follow @broodingYAhero ;) I kid!

Is there anything else about you or your books you would like to tell us?

It's illustrated by the amazing Linnea Gear (linneart.tumblr.com)

Thanks so much for the interview. To learn more about Carrie Ann and her books, visit her online:

Goodreads

Her blog

Twitter: @broodingyahero and @Writer_Carrie

I hope you enjoyed this interview. My hope is to have an interview with a different author or illustrator every Thursday from now until the end of the summer. If you are an author or illustrator who would like to be interviewed, please contact me using my contact page. Please leave a comment below to let us know that you visited and read Carrie Ann's interview today.