Posts for category ‘author interviews’

In Febrary, 2010, I offered up a manuscript critique as an auction item for a local fundraiser. I specified “contemporary realism”, citing not bias but a greater confidence level when it came to giving feedback. Soon I received an email from a guy named Mike Martin wondering if he could bid on the auction even though his book wasn’t exactly contemporary realism. I knew this Mike person a little bit from Facebook, back then, and from messages we’d exchanged about Story of a Girl. So, though I was skeptical of my ability to critique something more like “genre” fiction, I asked him about his book. He answered. It sounded great. I said, go ahead and bid, and he won the auction.

It’s tempting now to relive the 22 months of friendship-building since then for you all, but I will restrain myself. I think this sums it up: Mike’s wife, Sarah, made Mike and me matching friendship bracelets. Yeah, it’s like that. And if there’s anything better than having a BFF who really gets the “knowing and being known” thing that makes life so rich, it’s seeing that friend’s dream come true. Which is what happened recently for Mike, announced thusly in PW:

Donna Bray of HarperCollins’s Balzer + Bray imprint bought two novels by screenwriter T. Michael Martin, including his debut The End Games, about two brothers braving the apocalypse in the wilderness of West Virginia, pitched as The Stand meets John Green. Martin’s screenplays have been developed at Kopelson Entertainment, Phoenix Pictures, and Valhalla Motion Pictures. The first of the two is due out in 2013. Joanna Volpe of Nancy Coffey Literary was the agent.

Was that the book that Mike first emailed me about two Februarys ago? Indeed it was. And I have sense memory of reading the first chapter. Emotional sizzle. Heart-in-my-throat action. The experience of reading the final, revised draft was similar. The End Games thrilled me and moved me, stirred up my admiration and envy, captured my imagination wholly. And I’m so happy and proud now to be the one who gets to introduce to you all a great new writer, an awesome person, one of the hardest working writers I know, and my dear friend: T. Michael “Mike” Martin.

SZ: You started out your creative life as a screenwriter. What was the path that led you to writing a YA novel?

TMM: R.L. Stine.  That’s the easy way to answer, and probably the most honest.  I’ve always had an equal love of films and books; I’ve always wanted to create both.  Film taught me the importance of wonder and structure; books honed my appreciation of poetry and resonant theme.  It’s just different tools for doing the thing I love the most, which is:  telling huge, scary, thrilling, hilarious, ultimately human stories (with monsters). So!  It wasn’t really a matter of diverging from a path to write YA; it was just another aspect of the same thing.  Even though I wrote my first feature-length screenplay in eighth grade, I’ve actually been writing prose stories since the first Goosebumps came out.  (That first screenplay, by the way, was titled Wrong Answer: Night of the Calls.  Read it?  No?  Good for you.)

SZ: Considering how often we talk and how much we’ve talked about The End Games, specifically, I don’t know if I’ve ever asked what initially sparked that idea. Tell us a bit about that.

TMM: Okay, so not to risk my ultra-manly persona, Sara — not sound too gooey about this — but:  I wrote the book for my little brother.  Back in 2008, my little bro, Patrick, and I got into zombies sorta.  But in that sentence, “sorta” means “just ridiculously obsessively.”  Patrick and I watched zombie movies; read zombie and survival books; even traveled to the mall where they filmed the original Dawn of the Dead.  But the activity that most directly led to The End Games was the discussions (lengthy and detailed) that Patrick and I had about what we would do to survive an undead apocalypse.

Patrick called these discussions, by the way, “The Z Games.”

I’ve always felt protective of Patrick, who is ten years younger than I am.  So I didn’t think just about how I would keep myself alive in the apocalypse; I also thought — mostly thought — about how I’d protect, in body and spirit, this little kid I loved so much.  (In fairness, I also wondered a lot about how I could use live electrical lines and nailguns to destroy human brains.)

So all that was simmering in the background when I was laying in bed in September 2008 and the first line of a YA thriller boomed into my head: a thriller about two brothers who aren’t fighting zombies. . . but something far worse.

SZ: Not to drag a sob story out of you, but a lot of readers of this blog are aspiring writers themselves. I remember in my pre-published days, it could feel, whenever a new book deal was announced, that everyone but me was getting overnight success. But virtually all the stories behind those deals involve hard work and struggle, and it’s good for all of us to hear those stories, I think. Can you share a little bit about some of the trials and tribulations, as well as the good moments you’ve been through to get here?

TMM:  Oh, how I can relate to that feeling….  You’ve been around for some of the lows and highs, Sara.  The highlights are pretty obvious, and pretty wonderful.  I had a screenplay optioned when I was twenty-two; I became best friends with one of my favorite-ever writers; said writer read and loved my book; I got an offer from an incredible literary agent two days after querying with The End Games.  And maybe the highest high of came a month ago, when I sat on the couch next to my wife and received a phone call telling me that I had just won the cosmic lottery, because Balzer + Bray wanted to buy my book.

I have to say, though, that that the main reason those highs are meaningful is because of the sadness — the outright misery — of the lowlights.  Of which there were, let’s say, legion.

Losing a film manager; receiving over a hundred rejections from film and literary agents; watching my high school friends go on to great success while I worked a series of frustrating minimum-wage jobs; being rejected from Creative Writing MFA programs. (Twice!  Once with a recommendation letter from Sara Zarr!) All of these things, more than once, drop-kicked me down the flights of despair. It was depressing.  Sometimes desperately so.  But that pain drove the character of my writing and of my self deeper than I’d thought possible.

I’ve recently thought a lot about how depression is really the opposite of creativity.  If it is anything, creativity is the continual process of choice-making.  Depression, meanwhile, is perhaps most defined by a terrible sense of a diminishing ability to have choice. So although writing isn’t life, for me writing can often be a metaphor for life.  And here’s the lesson the metaphor has taught me, over and over and over:  You must please keep going.  If Choice A doesn’t work, try Choice B.  Or C, or H, or Z.  You will fail, more than you’d dream; but over time, you will fail better.  And eventually, you will fail well enough to break into new worlds. And while you’re at it:  Lighten up a little.

“…although writing isn’t life, for me writing can often be a metaphor for life.”

SZ: How about a peek into a Day In the Life of Mike–what does an ideal working day look like for you?

TMM: The ideal happens about 60% of the time.  But since you asked…. Up at 4:30 AM.  Go to gym for 40 minutes to run or lift weights.  Get back at 6 and do meditation exercises for 30 minutes.  Read a bit.  Wake up wife at 7:00 and eat breakfast with her.  Read and write from 8 ’til 1, then eat lunch and go for a walk.  In the afternoon, catch up on email/business-y stuff.  (Also, play Smash Bros.)  Have dinner with wife and watch a movie in the evening.  In bed by 8:30.

SZ: That anyone’s ideal day involves getting up at 4:30 a.m. fills me with sadness. Going to bed before 9, that I can endorse. Okay, also, because I’m a big process nerd, and also a fan of old-school writing supplies, I’d love to hear about the various roles that pen, paper, typewriter, and computer have in your process.

TMM: Most of The End Games was written either by hand (on graph-paper legal pads), or on an electric typewriter (the Brother SX-4000).  There’s something about seeing actual words accumulating on actual paper that makes me feel particularly Like A Writer.  And the rush of hearing words being snapped out often makes me feel like a guy on a runner’s high. Then I usually transcribe my typewritten pages into the MacBook, realize what a mess I’ve wrought, and revise almost-every sentence 10-20 (or more) times.

SZ: Writing is revising! It is, people. It is.

(Confession to the world about my suggestibility. When I learned of Mike’s Brother SX-4000, I had to get one, too, to add to my already prodigious typewriter collection.)

Well, dear reader, boy am I excited for The End Games to be out in the world. It’s a special book, like nothing you’ve read before. I’ll have Mike back around release time, if not before, to talk more specifically about it. Meanwhile, go read The Stand and Looking for Alaska in alternating chapters to prepare yourself.

Comments are on, and Mike will be around to answer any questions you might have about his journey and process.

Mike on Twitter :: Mike on Facebook :: Mike’s website in progress

A Zarr-Martin Production

I’ve been a fan of Adele Griffin’s for a long, long time. And I don’t mean to make her feel old by saying “long, long” instead of merely “long.” We’re the same age, after all. What I’m saying is: Adele began publishing back in the day when YA occupied one slim shelf in the back of the store, and I was only submitting, getting rejected, and dreaming. Adele was one of a small handful of YA authors breaking ground in the 90s and giving me something to dream about. She has one of those careers I’d love to emulate: sustained, prolific, diverse, and riddled with award recognition. I finally got to meet Adele earlier this year and, well, it’s too personal and meaningful to go into, but it was not a letdown after the years of anticipation, let me tell you.

Some of my favorites of Adele’s: Sons of Liberty, Amandine, Picture the Dead (illustrated by Lisa Brown), and Where I Want to Be. Her newest book, Tighter, re-imagines Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. In it, a 16-year-old au pair heads off to an island for the summer to take care of a girl who is a leeeeetle bit more troubled than your average tween. Maybe. Or maybe not.

The first book of yours I read, years ago, was The Other Shepards. Which is at least partly about ghosts. Last year you had a wonderful book out with illustrator Lisa Brown, called Picture the Dead. Ghosts? Check. Tighter is…sort of…about ghosts, maybe. And I know those aren’t the only examples from your body of work that include ghosts, ghost-like apparitions, or the sense of being haunted (though I do not think of your books as “paranormal” in the way we now use that word to describe s a sub-genre of YA). Okay, Adele. What is the deal with you and ghosts?

Ah, your question “gave me pause!” as my grandmother used to say. You know that Elizabeth Bishop poem “The Art of Losing”? Here’s the first stanza: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master;/so many things seem filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” I love this poem. It speaks so well to process. Perhaps writing about ghosts is how I use art to handle loss. In each of these books, I can sense a core, personal loss that I was dealing with at the time. So while the plotted storylines are fiction, I do think my ghosts are conjured out of an intense longing to make sense of that hollow space. To lay it bare and let it go—that’s my process.

Getting specifically to Tighter, when did you first encounter Henry James’ novella, and why do you think it stuck with you so, to the point that you wanted to do your own version?

Turn of the Screw is fascinating! It’s the Rosetta Stone of ghost stories. It was first published as a serial for Collier’s in 1898, and magazine readers were scandalized by it. Crazed for the next installment, and the weird, sexy game of it. James knew he was stirring the pot, and I loved the novella’s devilishness and its delirium. Plus I was enthralled by its point of view—being trapped in the maze of this young woman’s mind. She’s such a girl on the edge. It felt perfect for YA.

What were the challenges of retelling the story for a modern audience, specifically for a YA audience?

James’ deliberate ambiguity is dearly-held by fans of Turn of the Screw, but I didn’t feel I could pay an homage in that way and make a modern YA reader not feel short-changed. And I think in any homage, you must take what you yourself love most and not get paralyzed or obsessed with what others hold precious. James wrote a masterpiece, and I wasn’t looking to reinvent it—I couldn’t possibly. But I had fun making my own decisions and “answering” on some of his more cryptic points.

Without giving anything away, in Tighter, your narrator, Jamie, well…let’s just say she is a little free and easy with prescription drugs that were not prescribed to her. I really like how this gives the reader (and Jamie) the sense of not being able to trust what we’re seeing.

When I was Jamie’s age, raiding the medicine cabinet was a common practice. We went after the NyQuil and the Benadryl and sleep aids. Most kids will walk away from that stuff while some will find it very seductive. I did, and I got pretty dependent on artificially regulating my wake and sleep. I didn’t see ghosts, but it certainly altered my chemical makeup, and not in happy ways. I sought help for this problem years later, in college. And while I didn’t write Tighter as a “message” book, I do hope, considering what happens to Jamie, that I’ve underlined the issue as serious, with repercussion.

You’re a two-time National Book Award finalist. Would you ever want to be there again, or does the idea of going a third time and possibly not winning feel too harrowing? (I know how it feels to sit there and not hear your name – as wonderful and miraculous as it is to be there at all, it’s a challenging moment.) What is your take on awards in general?

Well, there are worse things than being the Susan Lucci of the National Book Awards (and I must credit that comment to my friend Lisa Brown’s husband, Daniel). When I was a kid, my dad used to make my brothers and me complete a punishing round of pushups every night before bed, and one of the first prizes I ever won was “Iron Woman.” I was eleven years old and maybe the skinniest kid in my class but I was super strong. When my win was announced in assembly, I jumped up to get my plaque, and everyone in the audience nearly died laughing. They thought it was a joke. Mortifying! So heaven help me if I win an award, I’ll likely leap onto the stage and do pushups to prove my worth.

Please, please do that. I beg you. What are you working on next?

A book called Wolf, out in Fall 2012. It’s about a pair of sisters whose lives have been sabotaged by their mother’s re-marriage to an extraordinarily wealthy man. I will now guess the CIP data: “sisters; mental illness; emotional problems; Greenwich, Connecticut.” Alas, no ghosts.

That sounds great, seriously. I will be first in line.

Order Tighter

Adele’s web site

Adele on twitter

Tara Altebrando and I were born within 24 hours of each other, on opposite sides of the country. We made contact in 2006 and have been friends–and fans of each other’s work–ever since. She’s the author of three novels for young adults, and two for not-so-young adults (under the name Tara McCarthy). Some things I know about this lady: she is hardworking, generous, smart, and has some great title mojo–she basically titled Once Was Lost for me when I was getting desperate and ready to call it Story of Another Girl.

Tara’s newest book, Dreamland Social Club, set on Coney Island, officially came out just last week from Dutton. One of my favorite book blogs, Forever Young Adult, says it best:

Oh, man, I love Altebrando’s style with this book.  It has the perfect mix of beach read and tender portrayal of life.  She grounds the fantastic elements – carnies and mermaids – in reality and elevates the all-to-real elements – gentrification and cultural wars – into the fantastic. This book is a bit like a sea shanty – a little salty, a littly crusty and overall magical. [quoth Erin]

DSC also got a starred review from Kirkus, and a thoughtful rave from Chasing Ray.

What I admire about Tara’s writing is its elegance–I never feel like it’s trying too hard, hammering the reader, or drawing unnecessary attention to itself. She’s in control of it and it’s at her service, and the service of the story–and with Tara, you always know the story is going to be one you’ve never read before.

I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

SZ: As a reader familiar with your body of work, I know this isn’t the first time that you’ve explored the idea of (for lack of a better phrase) “circus freaks.” One of your adult novels, Love Will Tear Us Apart, features conjoined twin pop stars who are in conflict about their careers. In your second YA, What Happens Here, the sister of one of the characters walks around on her hands all the time and wants to run off with a Cirque de Soleil kind of group. And Vegas, where it’s set, is a kind of circus in itself. What do you think your interest in this topic is?

Tara: I think this interest in “freaks” or “other” dates way back to my youth, and I think is not entirely original. I feel like maybe we talked about this once? About how when I was young I used to fake limps and do other weird things to make myself look different, as a way to attract attention, and how you had done stuff like that, too? [SZ: I'm not sure, but I do know I was "dramatic" and craved attention.]

At any rate, in the case of Dreamland Social Club, the use of freaks as characters grew out of the history of Coney Island, so it certainly wasn’t a conscious decision to revisit the theme. I just felt that setting a book on Coney Island, which has a legacy of exploiting those who are “different” and also of celebrating them, was a young adult writer’s dream, since most people feel like freaks or outcasts during adolescence. We’re all so desperate to be normal. So I wanted to set a  “normal” character down among a cast of “freaks” and see what happened.

SZ: On a related note, you always do something so interesting with setting in your books. You’ve got Coney Island in DSC, Vegas in What Happens Here, and in The Pursuit of Happiness, your first YA, the main character works in a Colonial re-enactment village. The themes that keep coming up in your work, as I see it, are real vs. manufactured environments, what is “normal”, and life as some kind of performance. Again, can you sort of trace where this first captured you in your creative DNA?

Tara: The settings that I’m drawn to are sometimes an extension of this fascination with “other.” I’ve lived the bulk of my life in pretty ordinary (to me) places, mostly in the New York area, so I’m drawn to places that capture my imagination (Vegas, as you mentioned; and L.A.,the setting of Love Will Tear Us Apart) just by being so different from what I know best. In a way, it’s all born from a very immature thought; I go places and I think, “People LIVE here? What’s THAT like?” And then I write a book about it.

And I do believe that life is a performance, though to varying degrees for different people and at different stages of life. We all know people  who are always “on” and who leave us wondering what they’re really like at home, alone, when there’s no one  watching. And I think we’re all looking to reach a place in our lives where the part that we’re playing lines up with who we really are, so that we are never “on” or “off” but just “me.” Again, when writing about adolescence, this stuff is just so interesting to explore because it’s that time in life when we really start to struggle with identity.

SZ: Yes! That’s so true, and really well put. I remember when was 12 or 13 I became transfixed by the idea of having some kind of hidden camera that could record me all day, then I could watch it and see who I was, because I just was not sure. Mind you, this was 1982, way ahead of reality TV and pocket-size video cameras! Anyway. Talk about what Coney Island means to you.

Tara: I think my fascination with Coney Island has its root in this question: How can something that was once so spectacular have fallen so very far? (A question I’ve also asked myself, by the way, about Paul McCartney  but I promise not to write a book about that.) There’s a sort of devastation I feel when I’m out there on Coney Island, telling my daughter not to play with the glass she found in the sand on the beach and imagining old amusement parks like Dreamland and Luna Park and Steeplechase and knowing I’ll never be able to experience them in all their weird glory.

And there’s an edge to that kind of nostalgia (longing for things you never knew) that I find really interesting, especially when you consider that the history of Coney, with its  exploitation of freaks and “savages” from other parts of the world, is a completely cautionary tale and such a disturbing glimpse into our evolution as a people when it comes to basic human rights. In Dreamland Social Club, with Jane longing for the mother she barely knew, it made sense to me that she would latch onto the wondrous aspects of old Coney Island, and only begin to come to terms the more unsavory aspects as part of her coming of age.

SZ: That’s such a bafflement of being human – the way every era but ours, any place but here, can seem better, more meaningful. It’s one of the ways our difficulty living in the present manifests itself, and in DSC you can see so clearly the battles among the different factions trying to make Coney into something else, but it’s all based on this idea that the past or the future are always better than now.

To wit: One thing your main character, Jane, is trying to figure out is what pieces of the past are important, what she needs to carry forward, what she can let go. It’s the bigger theme of what’s happening to Coney itself, too. There’s a moment Jane asks herself, “Do you save an old journal if it’s boring? Do you save an old bar if it’s got rats?” Can you talk a little bit about the sorting/letting go stuff that is going on in the book?

Tara: The current situation on Coney Island is very much about what and who should stay and what and who should go and what, if anything, should replace it. And it’s a story that has captured the attention of millions of  New Yorkers and many others beyond because by defining Coney Island, we’re defining who we are, what we value. So in the book, Jane has to contend on the one hand with this boy, Leo, who is campaigning to save his dad’s total dive bar and, on the other, her dad, who has designed a snazzy state-of-the-art rollercoaster for one of the corporations that wants to “clean up” Coney.

Her struggle to come to her own position on this issue runs parallel to her struggle to clear out her grandfather’s house, which is full of old Coney and family memorabilia. And that process is my way of writing about adolescence as a time during which you’re coming into your own and deciding what aspects of your upbringing and of your family, you want to carry with you into adulthood.

It’s no accident that my husband and I often clash about the amount of memorabilia from my life before him that is stored in our garage. Letting go is something that I struggle with even as an adult. But I love that my daughters can play with my dollhouse, which was my mother’s before mine, and that the toy piano I banged on as a kid is here in our house, too. It’s also true that I’ve kept a lot of stuff that I don’t need and that doesn’t add value to my life now so there has been a good amount of sorting and purging over the years, as pieces of the past either shrink or expand in my mind as my life changes.

SZ: I so understand this, yes. Trade secret: I read an early draft of this book a couple of years ago, and it’s  changed so much from then to now. Many readers of this blog are aspiring authors, and writers who have been on the publication journey for awhile. When you sold DSC, you felt you were kind of in a mid-career slump, and I know how hard you worked to get this book into the right hands and into the right shape. Can you talk some about the process of bringing this book from that very first early vision, to publication day?

Tara: The first version/vision of this book was a complete misfire. It was meant to be a sort of dazzling first  book in a trilogy about a high school for sideshow freaks. Which sounds like a book that maybe someone could write and make a lot of money on—I confess this was part of its appeal—but it turns out that I am not that writer. In the final version of that book—and yes, I wrote the whole thing—it was clear (to many people but me) that the concept was getting in the way of all the themes we’ve been talking about here, the themes that drew me to the idea of setting a story on Coney Island in the first place.

I had the good fortune of being told by Julie Strauss-Gabel, who saw that book on submission, that I should basically rewrite the whole damn thing. Of course it didn’t feel like good fortune at the time, but wow am I grateful for that conversation now. It was a long slog for sure—almost nothing of that original, massive manuscript remains—but it was the right call creatively and one I would not have made without help. This is why writers have editors, people! (This is also why we have to write the books we write and not try to write the sort of books that other people write.)

SZ: (Emphasis added! Because, yes.) And p.s. how do you do all this with two small children?

Tara: Well, I’ve always been pretty disciplined, but I’ve definitely gotten better by necessity since becoming a mother. I haven’t seen an episode of Dr. Phil or Oprah or a daytime re-run of Law & Order in years, and things have definitely gotten easier with my older daughter in preschool. I just know that I can’t afford to be precious about my process, or nothing will ever get written. Besides, if you’re paying someone to mind your children while you can write, you had best write. Because if you don’t, sooner or later someone, likely your spouse, will catch on.

SZ: Yeah, when you can quote Lennie Briscoe but not your own work, it’s a red flag. So, what’s next up for you in your writing life?

Tara: Another book for Dutton! Coming out next summer. It’s set during a senior week scavenger hunt—one sort of epic day/night in a group of teens’ lives. Writing it  has been really fun for me because it taps into different parts of my brain than Dreamland Social Club did. DSC is this sort of languid and dreamy book full of melancholy and nostalgia and this is a more breakneck and lively read.

SZ: Not that there’s anything wrong with melancholy and nostalgia! Thank you, Tara, and I’m excited for your next book, and your next and next and next.

Some Tara links!:

Her web site, including a great author video with more about her personal connection to Coney Island

On Twitter (@TaraAltebrando)

Tara’s Largehearted Boy Book Notes on What Happens Here

I’ve been looking forward to this blog post for well over a year now, if you can believe that. Around that time I was reading Rival, by Sara Bennett Wealer, to potentially blurb. Well, “potentially” isn’t exactly right because I’d read the book in draft form and knew I’d be honored to give it support. Because: I love this book. Not to overdo the mashup thing, but it’s like…Pretty In Pink, Heathers, Glee, and even a little Hilary and Jackie, plus of course a lot that is uniquely its own all rolled into one great story that feels to me like an instant YA classic.

As Lauren “this generation’s Judy Blume” Myracle wrote: “Awesome, awesome, and more awesome. Not one wrong note.” And I said, “This book gets it all exactly right–friendships, envy, and the fact that you can never truly know another person.”

Here’s the tagline, which I love and is a great summary of the book: What if your worst enemy turned out to the best friend you ever had? (For more about the plot, see here. Or just let yourself be surprised.)

Leave a comment if you’d like a chance to be picked to win a copy of this terrific novel. Meanwhile, here’s what Sara had to say about it (and sorry for any formatting weirdnesses…thwarted by technology…)

Congratulations on the publication of RIVAL! I know it’s been a long journey for you to pub day, with a lot of ups and downs along the way. Could you share maybe a couple of memorable highs and a particularly low low, and how you celebrate the highs and get through the lows?

Sure! For other authors and aspiring authors I know my story won’t sound unique; I experienced all of the drama and drudgery that most of us endure on the road to publication–querying agents, revising, revising, revising, and then going out on submission with all of the heartburn that can entail. My biggest highs are actually pretty recent–the reviews for RIVAL have been wonderful, which just validates all of the hard work and love I put into that book. Knowing people are connecting with it makes the hard times worthwhile.

My lowest low actually came about a week before i got “The Call” telling me we had an offer. I’d been working my rear end off–doing lots of revisions for Harper with no guarantee they’d result in a sale, and with several disappointments under my belt, including a deal for another book that fell through at the last minute. I went to the bookstore to get away from my noisy house and mooch off their wifi. Of course I went to the YA section, and looking at all those books on the shelves, by people who’d accomplished their goals–some of whom I knew well–it just got to me. All of the exhaustion and uncertainty boiled over and I started bawling, right there in the store. I was such a mess that I had to leave.

What got me through the lows, I guess, was either my Scots-Irish “quit whining and get the job done” DNA or a compulsion to see things through, even if it drove me to distraction. I don’t really pamper myself that much. My response when things are tough is to power through, and I find that doing so–keeping active, moving forward–is good therapy, as counterproductive as that sounds. When I have a high to celebrate I try to treat myself to something–dinner out with my husband is a favorite.

As for Brooke and Kathryn, I really have to thank my critique partners and editor for helping me see that I hadn’t fully developed their characters. In earlier drafts, Brooke came across as a heartless crumudgeon and Kathryn seemed like a whiny victim. I had to work in moments where Brooke demonstrates that she has a fun side and a capacity for kindness. And then I had to create moments where Kathryn could show a bit of backbone. As for her ugly side, I think one of the ugliest things she does in the book is misuse her best guy friend’s credit card, and that was in there from the first draft. It was one of those scenes that you just start writing and you can’t believe what the character is doing, but you can’t stop and when it’s over you’re like, “Oh no you didn’t!”

Ah, Twitter after completing a goal. Makes sense. Thank you, Sara, and congrats again on a debut of which you should be very, very proud.

Sara and I got to meet in person in Cincinnati while I was on tour for Once Was Lost. We found our friend LK Madigan's book, Flash Burnout, on the shelves and got happy!

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Matt de la Peña is the author of three acclaimed novels for young adults, and has also had short fiction published in various literary journals. I’ve known Matt awhile—our friendship began when we were forced to ride around in a stretch limo together at the Rochester Teen Book Festival. Yes, sometimes this job is hell.

While on tour for Once Was Lost, I picked up a signed copy of Matt’s latest book, We Were Here, at BookPeople in Austin and read it on the way home. This story, about three boys who break out of a group home and embark on a journey down the California coast, moved me from page 1, when the narrator, Miguel, muses about the book he’ll someday write:

“About what it’s like growing up on the levee in Stockton, where every other person you meet has missing teeth or is leaning against a liquor store wall begging for change to buy beer. Or maybe it’d be about my dad dying in the stupid war and how at the funeral they gave my mom some cheap medal and a folded up flag and shot a bunch of rifles at the clouds.”

Later, Miguel joins up with Mong and Rondell, and together they’re three characters I’ll never forget. While traveling for OWL and doing school visits and trying to connect with bored-looking teenage boys, I kept thinking, “I wish they could be listening to Matt de la Peña instead of me.” Not that I don’t have anything to say to bored teenage boys, because I think I do and usually once I get my talk rolling they are bored no more, but We Were Here truly speaks their language. It speaks your language, too, if you’re a writer, with prose that is both immediate and poetic, clear and complex, and has real drama and humor without straining for either. Matt and I have been having an email conversation about WWH for a few weeks—edited below for your reading pleasure.

My first and most important question before we even start: how do you get the little accent mark/tilde thing over the n in Peña?

So, the tilde over the “n” is tricky on the web. It’s easy on word — you just go to special characters. But I really don’t know what to do on the web. They make it hard to be Mexican online. And when I see my name without the tilde I feel naked. And I feel like I’m disrespecting my grandma.

(Fortunately, I figured out how to do this, because of course there is an entire wikipedia entry about it. On a Mac, you do option+n then the letter you want under the tilde. /PSA) Okay, at the risk of sounding like I’m asking where you get your ideas, what was the genesis of We Were Here?

When I was writing short stories I developed a weird strategy. I’d always take two partially finished stories and throw them together, no matter how odd the fit (sort of like Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked). It usually took me in totally new directions. One time I paired a landscaping story with a story about a relationship that was messed up by a cheating dude (not based on my own experience) (well, maybe a little). It seemed to work. For We Were Here I did something similar. Main character Miguel’s crime is something I took from a college basketball teammate of mine. He came to the first open gym of the year with one of those house arrest anklets. It wasn’t until six months later that he told me what happened. It broke my heart. And I always secretly watched him when everybody was goofing off or messing with each other. He’d be laughing like everybody else, but there was always something sad in his eyes. Such a complex crime (I guess I shouldn’t give it away). So, I took his crime and made it Miguel’s backstory. I also worked in a group home for a couple years after college. Tough job, but I remember looking through all the kids’ files after they went to sleep. Heartbreaking stuff. At least in some cases. So I threw Miguel into a group home setting. And last came the trip down the California coast. Seven years ago I started a failed novel about a musician living in LA. He’s originally from Stockton in Northern California. After his old man dies he drives the coast to LA and stops at random places to hang out solo. The book died because it didn’t have enough plot. But I stole the section where he travels the coast and gave it to Miguel, Mong and Rondell. And the last thing I had to do was find the right voice. Remember that story collection we were both in, Does This Book Make Me Look Fat? That was the first time I’d ever done 1st person in YA. And I was sort of practicing the voice I eventually gave to Miguel.

Anyway, that’s a very long-winded answer to your question, I know. The point is, We Were Here is a bit of a mashup. It came from all over. But the genesis, the core story I wanted to explore, was what happens to a kid who commits the kind of crime Miguel commits. What does that do to his psyche moving forward.

Ever since you mentioned Half Baked, I am jonesing.

Sara, I want you to seriously trust me on something, okay? Häagan Dazs’ Caramel Cone. Please try a pint. This son of a bitch ice cream is so good I can’t believe it.

(Insert several-day interval during which I ignore Matt’s advice, yet do consume a pint of Everything But The, against doctor’s orders.) The case files. The scene in which Miguel reads his friends’ case files had this powerfully physical effect on me I don’t often get when reading. I had to keep putting the book down, and was talking aloud to myself: “Oh God. Oh no.” Did you know when you started the story what would be in each of the three main characters’ files? On a related note: how much do you know when you start a book? Do you have it pretty well mapped out or do you allow yourself to be surprised, and allow the story to change because of those surprises?

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