I had a fantastic visit at Penn Wynne Library August 19, 6:30 p.m. I love speaking with young readers, especially in the area which inspired Deadwood. I especially enjoyed previewing a new story I’ve written — and of course, the Corner Bakery cookies. Thanks to all the readers, Corner Bakery, and children’s librarian Alison King.
Author Archives: Kell
Return to the scene of inspiration
I took my new copy of Deadwood out to the tree that first sparked the idea. It’s a gorgeous old American beech (Fagus grandifolia) in Wynnewood Valley Park, a small wooded park near my home in Lower Merion, PA, that I spotted when I was brainstorming for a new novel idea four years ago. The arborglyphs in the bark were both interesting and disturbing, and I started to wonder what kind of magic they could introduce. That seed of an idea grew into Deadwood.
Now Deadwood is out as an ebook and paperback from Spencer Hill Press, and the book and the tree have finally met, leaf to leaf.
Read the whole story behind the story >>
Deadwood Release! My Debut Redux
Deadwood, my middle-grade mystery fantasy debut, is out from Spencer Hill Press today! What a great feeling — exhilaration, anxiety, the realization of a long-held dream.
But wait… this feeling is so familiar. Is it deja vu?
Not quite. It’s Debut Redux.
My kids’ contemporary fantasy was released by a small press which went out of business, and now it’s being re-released by the innovative, risk-taking folks at Spencer Hill Middle Grade, including my wonderful editor Jennifer Carson. I hold deep gratitude for the writers, family, and friends who supported me throughout the process.The story of how I got here is a long and twisty one, but I like the ending.
Or is this beginning?
Either way, some things are better the second time around.
Deadwood by Kell Andrews
Order on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Powell’s, or from your favorite independent bookstore, including Children’s Book World and Paperback Exchange.
Sometimes a lucky ritual becomes a curse.
Seventh-grader Martin Cruz hates his rotten new town, Lower Brynwood, but with his mom fighting a war in Afghanistan, he has no other choice but to live with his crazy aunt. Then he gets a message from a tree telling him it’s cursed—and so is he.
It’s not just any tree either, it’s the Spirit Tree, an ancient beech the football team carves for good luck before the season opener. But every year they lose.
Now the Spirit Tree is dying, and the other trees in the park are toppling around it like dominoes. The town is plagued with unexplainable accidents and people begin to fade, drained of life.
Martin must team up with a know-it-all soccer star, Hannah Vaughan, if he has any chance of breaking the curse. If they fail to save the Spirit Tree, it could mean the destruction of Lower Brynwood and a permanent case of bad luck.
Deadwood Blog Tour!
I have a whirlwind blog tour this week with giveaways to celebrate the launch of Deadwood June 24! Here’s the schedule:
June 23rd
June 24th
Literary Winner | Review
Brooke Blogs | Review
Because Reading is Better Than Real Life | Top Five Things You Didn’t Know About the World in Deadwood
Who Tells the Story?: Everyone is the hero of their own story
On Wednesday, I took my daughters to see Maleficent. We’re going to see Wicked on Broadway today with Girl Scouts, which makes this Misunderstood Women Week.
Yesterday my older daughter mentioned Morgan La Fey, who she knows mostly from the Magic Tree House and Sisters Grimm series. I said the character she was really from King Arthur and that in that story, she wasn’t a good guy. Her eyes widened and she said, “Morgan La Fey is a bad guy?”
And of course my answer was, “It depends who is telling the story.”
Sympathy for the Devil
Jane Eyre was one of my favorite books as teen, and then in a college course on postcolonial novels came another favorite, Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys’s retelling of Jane Eyre from the point of view of Antoinette Cosway — Rochester’s wife — showed me that the mad woman in the attic may not be at all, but simply not able to tell her own story.
Retellings of classic tales from other points of view is a favorite form of YA and MG, and the viewpoint of the villain makes a story immediately fresh. There’s a reason little girls (and big ones) related better to conflicted Elsa in Frozen than open-hearted Anna. We all feel misunderstood at times, told to hide what makes us special, cast as the villain in narratives told about us.
Its frequently said that everyone is the hero of their own story. Every villain has motivations that could make them just as interesting as a main character — or more interesting.
Room for Both Sides of the Story
When I read Wide Sargasso Sea, it was both a revelation and an immediate, but it didn’t replace Jane Eyre for me. I could love them both — both novels, both Jane and Antoinette.
Similarly, there’s room for both sides of the story, even in a novel with a single point of view.
- Before you write, ask yourself, whose story is this?
- How would it change from another point of view?
- How would your antagonist tell it?
What’s your favorite retelling from an antagonist point of view? Do you consider and write your own stories with the antagonist viewpoint in mind?
That Middle Grade Voice
The long and the short:
Character sketch for a chapter-book-
turned-picture-book-turned-
middle-grade story
By the time I was middle-grade age, I wanted to be a writer, but for grownups. It was only as a grownup that I found my voice writing for middle grade. It’s not a coincidence I moved from writing for adults straight past YA to middle grade. Those were the books that made me love reading, and it turned out that I have a middle-grade voice.
Not-blurry middle-grade voice
So what’s middle-grade voice? It’s elusive — one of those “you know it when you see it” things. You know it whether it’s Lemony Snicket’s wry, formal omniscient or Rachel Renee Russell’s effusive, run-on first person. And while the lines might be blurry, middle-grade voice itself never is. It’s clear and succinct — no words wasted, whether lyrical or comedic, prose or verse.
Once you have that voice, it’s a bit persistent.
The long story of a short story
Once I decided to write middle-grade, I wrote two novels. (The second written turned out to be Deadwood, which releases June 24 from Spencer Hill, and the first of which has not yet decided what it will turn out to be). Then I had a great idea for younger story — a chapter book featuring second-graders. The draft was 6,000 words, and I loved it. But I was between agents, and my querying efforts yielded exactly zero agent requests — chapter books are not great agent bait. My single request, actually, was from an editor in an early reader/chapter book imprint who found the voice (third person, whimsical) to be charming but the story too thin for 6,000 words.
I realized that my chapter book wasn’t really a chapter book — it was a picture book. I started with a blank page, chose first person, present tense, changed the age of the characters to first grade, and wrote the story in 850 words. Still loved it — my favorite story that I’d written.
This time when I queried the story as a picture book, I got an agent offer of representation. On the phone, I told her about my middle grade novels too. She said, “I can tell. Your picture book kind of sounds middle grade.”
I chose a different agent and we subbed a different book. But I didn’t forget my favorite story. Eventually I rewrote it featuring third-graders and finally sold it as an early middle-grade short story. Which is what it was meant to be all along.
Middle-grade voice is varied. It isn’t a length or a genre — it managed to assert itself as strongly in my 1,000-word contemporary story as in my 60,000 word fantasy/mystery. And if I ever write for grown-ups again, I’m going to have to hope they’re looking for a little bit of (not-blurry) middle-grade whimsy.
On Childish Things
This week there was another controversy where a columnist criticized adult readers of YA, believing that they should feel ashamed for reading books marketed to teens.
So what would she think of me? I write and read middle-grade novels and picture books.
The answer is that I don’t care. Someone more brilliant has said what I think:
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis
This isn’t exactly true of me. When I was ten, I read fairy tales and I wasn’t ashamed. But when I was thirty, I saw adults reading Harry Potter, and I thought they should be.
Then I read it too.
BEA, by the pictures
On Saturday, May 31, I went to Book Expo America 2014 for the first time. The Javits Center is a huge place, and the experience is a bit overwhelming. Thus the only picture on my phone is this one:
Spencer Hill founder Kate Kaynak took this of me with Laura Diamond, author of The Zodiac Collector, before our joint signing.
But through the magic of social media, it is not the only photo of me. I show up, Where’s Waldo-like, in the background of quite a few other photos. For example, Laura was more diligent about recording the event for a post on YAtopia, and she took this:
You can see how much fun it was to sign books — a huge honor to meet so many blogger and readers who attended the BookCon, and wonderful to connect in person with my editor Jennifer Carson and publicist Damaris Cardinali.
And here’s one of my favorites, taken by Karen Chaplin @CapChapReads:
That’s me in the middle of the huge crowd at the #WeNeedDiverseBooks panel — such excitement in the room. I finally met some of the originators of the campaign. The event has been covered widely and well, and I managed to live tweet some of the event, covered in a separate post.
Thanks for the great experience to all I met.
Live tweeting the BookCon #WeNeedDiverseBooks Panel
One of the privileges of attending Book Expo America on May 31 was attending the #WeNeedDiverseBooks panel. The event was covered widely by the media, but at the time, I wa able to peck out some live tweets for those who didn’t attend the panel. Here’s a selection.
#weneeddiversebooks Lamar Giles: "in order for dialogue to be effective both sides need to be willing to change"
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
#WeNeedDiverseBooks Jacqueline Woodson:"I didn't realize what I missed until I saw it on the page. I've been hungry for it since."
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
#WeNeedDiverseBooks M Jung: I could have created a world that wasn't ethnically diverse but I would have needed a reason. There wasn't one.
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
#WeNeedDiverseBooks Matt de la Pena: Educators are so ahead on diverse books and I owe my career to librarians and teachers.
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
#WeNeedDiverseBooks Matt de la Pena: The campaign isn't "either/or." It's "also."
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
#WeNeedDiverseBooks Woodson: "there's an idea in books that the world is white unless otherwise qualified. I want there to be no "other.""
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
#WeNeedDiverseBooks Grace Lin: I've started to realize people don't know why they're saying no to diverse books. We need to open their eyes.
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
#WeNeedDiverseBooks Lin: we hate labels but if you show a diverse book, it gets labeled multicultural. We need to put it into a category …
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
#WeNeedDiverseBooks … Put it in a category that interests them. It's not multicultural, it's adventure or romance
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
#WeNeedDiverseBooks de la Pena: there is momentum around publishing. It's coming no matter what. We need to push.
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
#WeNeedDiverseBooks Jung: it feels risky to be involved with these issues. It requires bravery.
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
#WeNeedDiverseBooks Giles: if there's a reality that diverse books don't do well, that's a reality we have the power to change.
— Kell Andrews (@kellandrewsPA) May 31, 2014
Getting Ready for Book Expo America
Am I ready for Book Expo America? I’ve been waiting for this moment a long time, so in one sense I’m ready, but I’m not sure that I’m ready ready. How hard is it hop a train and sign a few copies of Deadwood at the Javits Center on May 31st? Not hard, and yet I’m afraid I’ll miss something.
- Registration – check.
- Badge number printed – check
- Book signing scheduled for Spencer Hill booth 2567 – check
- Bookmarks stashed – check
- Plans to watch #WeNeedDiverseBooks panel – check
- Vague plans to meet up with acquaintances – check
- Outfit planned – sort of
- Train schedule planned – check
- Hair cut — well, not yet. Not sure that it will happen either…
It occurs to me that I haven’t really planned out much at all except when I’m supposed to be there, and that makes me nervous. But it’s about books, right? Reading, writing, buying, talking about books with readers, writers, publishing folks, and book buyers. I do that every day. I can do that on Saturday. I think.
I hope to see you on Saturday, May 31st, 1 pm at Spencer Hill, Booth 2567 –– or if you see me, flag me down from across the Javits Center.. You will make my day.
Now I better check the train schedule again…