a source for Gothic fantasy and related conversations, publishing information, writer resources, inspiration, news in children's and teen literature, and author outreach
"'I literally gasped,' Smith laughs. 'I’ve always read that: 'She gasped,' and I thought no one ever really does it. But, apparently, yes, if you make The New York Times best-selling list for the first time and you had no idea it was going to happen, you will gasp.'"
A former lawyer, she now writes full time and lives with her fiancé, two fat cats and one large lazy dog in Charlotte, NC.
What were you like as a YA reader? Who were your favorite authors? What were your favorite titles?
I read anything and everything! I'm the youngest of three girls, so mostly I'd just rifle through my older sisters' bookshelves (this is probably why I got into romance novels at a very young age).
I remember spending many nights staying up late reading Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine. To this day, I credit them with making me a speed reader--I turned those pages so fast they were almost on fire.
What first inspired you to write for teens?
When I was still in high school I read an interview with a romance author who said she'd decided to write after finishing a book and thinking, I could do that.
As soon as I read those words, I thought the same thing: I could do that too.
For some reason, it just always stuck in my head that I'd write romance novels. It wasn't until 2006, when I really dedicated myself to writing, that I realized that I could write something other than romance, and that's when I realized that YA books were really exploding.
I remembered how much I adored reading as a teen, and it seemed like the most perfect fit! It sounds a bit lame, but until that point it had just never occurred to me that I could write for teens--I only needed a little nudge.
Could you tell us about your path to publication--any sprints or stumbles along the way?
I've been phenomenally lucky in my path to publication. A few months after starting in private practice as a lawyer, I realized that I didn't want to be doing that forever and I wondered what would have happened if I hadn't quit writing romance novels to go to law school.
I decided that I'd spend the next 10 years writing, revising, and submitting books (in addition to practicing law) and not allowing myself to quit when I hit stumbling blocks and rejections.
When NaNoWriMo came around in 2006, I knew I wanted to do it, but I had a collection of half-finished books and one of the rules of NaNo is that you have to start something new.
I whined about this to my fiancé, wondering what I should write next.
He said, "Write what you love."
I laughed and said, "the zombie apocalypse."
And he smiled and shrugged.
A few nights later on the way home from work, a first line popped into my head and I emailed it to myself.
Two weeks later, I'd written 20,000 words on this crazy post-apocalypse book with a voice I hadn't written in since college. I was loving every minute of it, but knew it would never sell--it was just too different. I didn't let that stop me, I kept writing because I loved it and my fiancé loved it.
When my critique partner, Diana Peterfreund, read what I had so far, she encouraged me to keep going (and I knew she was being honest cause she’d been "meh" about an earlier project of mine--thank goodness!).
I ran into the usual stumbling blocks: fear that I'd mess up the story, not knowing what happened next, etc.
Once the first draft was finished, I spent a lot of time revising--as much time or more than I'd spent writing the book in the first place!
I wanted to know when it got rejected that I’d given the book my best shot--there was nothing more I could have done.
As beta readers were going through my drafts, I spent a lot of time researching agents. I still didn't think the book had a shot (in fact, I thought agents would laugh at my query letter with the word "zombie" in it,) and so one of the agents I queried was someone I didn't know as much about but who'd recently repped a zombie book (so at least I knew he wouldn’t laugh too hard at me!).
A few weeks after I sent my query, I signed with that agent--Jim McCarthy at Dystel & Goderich. After a few revisions, he sent the manuscript out on a Friday afternoon, received a pre-empt offer Monday morning, and I'd signed by the end of the day.
Total and absolute dream come true.
Congratulations on the success of The Forest of Hands and Teeth (Delacorte, 2009, 2010)! Could you tell us a little about the book?
The Forest of Hands and Teeth is about a girl, Mary, who grows up in a village surrounded by a forest full of zombies about 150 years after the zombie apocalypse.
Her village has been totally cut off from the world and told by the ruling Sisterhood that they're the last humans left.
But Mary's grown up with stories about the ocean (which most people in the village think is a myth), and she thinks it's a place that's safe from the undead.
She just has to decide if she’s willing to risk the Forest to find out if there’s still a world beyond the fences. There’s also romance.
What was your initial inspiration for the story?
Like a lot of books, there were several random inspirations.
I became fascinated with zombies when my fiancé took me to see the remake of "Dawn of the Dead"(2004)(he then bought me The Zombie Survival Guide [by Max Brooks (Random House) and read it out loud to me when we should have been studying in law school).
Part of what I loved about the zombie books and movies was the idea of survival--how we cope with an event that totally devastates and alters our world.
It was around Halloween when my fiancé was talking about a short story idea set in a zombie world with a forest and a village. In his mind, it was right after the apocalypse and the village was at the edge of the forest. But in mine, it was generations later and the village was utterly cut off. Off and on, we talked about this world, but I really hadn’t planned on writing in it.
Then one day I read an article about the overfishing of tuna, and I thought how odd it would be for future generations to grow up in a world without tuna when most of us today have cans of it stacked away in our pantry.
This made me think about what we lose over time--how something so common in our world could be lost to another.
That evening when I was walking home from work a first line popped into my head. It dovetailed so perfectly with the world my fiancé and I’d been discussing that I ran with it!
What was the timeline between spark and publication, and what were the major events along the way?
I still have the email I sent to myself with that first line on Nov. 2, 2006. I finished the first draft that April and revised it through the summer.
In August 2007, my critique partner got tired of me waffling about sending out query letters so she sent one for me, spurring me into action. I signed with Jim around Sept. 20, 2007; and he sold the book Oct. 15 that year. Two days later, I had my first edit letter!
Much of the year is a blur of excitement and nerves--I really had no idea what to expect and what the timeline was for a book.
Definite high points included seeing the cover in February 2008, getting ARCs, going on a pre-publication tour and meeting George Romero (I got to sign a copy of my book to him, and he asked about movie rights! When I got home after meeting him, I had author copies sitting by my door--perfect timing!).
What were the challenges (literary, research, psychological, and logistical) in bringing it to life?
I'm not an outliner, so I definitely ran into challenges when I wasn't sure what should happen next in the book (I still face those challenges, but at least now I know I've figured it out in the past which gives me hope that I can do it again!).
Research was basically watching a lot of zombie movies and books and then building my own world. I spent time talking to my fiancé (who studied parasitology) and his brother (Ph.D. in biology) about the biological aspects of zombies. I also talked to doctors about wounds I inflicted on my characters, a forest firefighter about what that's like, etc.
One challenge I have whenever I write a book is the fear of closing off plots. I always think of a new book as an endless series of hallways with infinite doorways and each word you write and each plot point you decide, you're closing those doors.
It's sad to think of all the potential ideas that never make it.
What was it like being a debut author?
Amazing and terrifying and wonderful and every other emotion all combined together.
I was so lucky to be a part of a group of debut YA and middle grade authors called the 2009 Debutantes, and so we all went through the experience together, propping each other up, cheering each other on, sharing information and stories. Being with them really enriched the entire experience for me.
I go through these moments of thinking that having a book out is ordinary, and then sometimes I pinch myself and ask if this is all really real.
Congratulations on the release of The Dead-Tossed Waves (Delacorte, 2010)! Could you tell us about this novel?
The Dead-Tossed Waves is a companion to The Forest of Hands and Teeth and is told from the point of view of Mary's (the protagonist from the first book) daughter, Gabry.
Gabry grows up safe in a town by the ocean until one night, against her better judgment, she crosses the barrier to go hang out at an old amusement park with her friends (and the guy she has a crush on).
Being a book with zombies, things go terribly wrong, and she starts to realize that this safe little bubble she's lived in has really been a lie.
Now she has to decide if living a safe life is really living at all.
How was it different, craft-wise, writing your sophomore novel versus writing your first?
I'd actually never planned on writing a sequel--to me, The Forest of Hands and Teeth was a stand alone, but when my editor asked me if I would write more I jumped at the chance because I loved my protagonist and her world.
However, when I sat down to write more of her, I realized that I hadn’t set up any story arcs that would carry past the first book and this tripped me up.
Eventually I realized that Mary's story was pretty much finished, and I really wanted to write about a new character--someone who'd grown up in this town by the ocean.
But at the same time, I wanted to carry through some of the other threads and unanswered questions, so I figured the best solution was to have Mary still be a character, just not a major character.
Why spooky stories? Are you a spooky person?
What's funny to me is that I never thought of The Forest of Hands and Teeth and The Dead-Tossed Waves as being spooky stories! It was just the world my characters lived in, and I think I accepted it as much as they did.
In fact, I'm someone who is very easily scared--I still jump when I watch "Dawn of the Dead" (even though I’ve seen it a million times), and I still freak myself out at night when I'm home alone.
If you could go back in time and talk to your beginning-writer self, what would you tell her?
That it would work out and to relax a little. But at the same time, one of the things I loved about being a beginning writer is that I had all these amazing things to daydream about.
I remember after I sold my book thinking, what will I daydream about when I’m falling asleep at night now? And I realized that I had to find new dreams to focus on.
What can your readers look forward to next?
I just finished the third book in the series, The Dark and Hollow Places, which should come out in spring 2011.
For those who don't want to wait that long, I also have three short stories set in the same world coming out this year.
The first, "Hare Moon," is coming out in the Kiss Me Deadly anthology, edited by Trisha Telep (Running Press, July 2010) and is about Sister Tabitha when she was a teen.
The second, "Flotsam & Jetsam," is in The Living Dead 2 anthology edited by John Joseph Adams (Night Shade) and is about two boys on a life raft after the infection breaks out on their cruise ship.
Third is "Bougainvillea," coming out in the Zombies vs. Unicorns anthology edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier (McElderry, Sept. 2010). My story is set about 15 years after the Return on the island of Curacao--I'm so excited about all three stories!
Cynsational Notes
This is the first stop on Carrie's blog tour! Here's the whole line-up:
Peek: "If the thought of coming up with questions feels daunting, no worries. I'll be happy to talk you through it. I'll forward the questions on to Cynthia and she'll send me back her answers."
Oh, my! Oh, wow! Oh...I'm greatly honored--and stunned--to share the news that Eternal (Candlewick) has just debuted at #5 on The New York Times Best Seller List!
Children's Best Sellers - Paperback, to be exact. The full list is available to subscribers online and will appear in Sunday's paper (March 14, 2010).
It's the first time that one of my books has made the list, and to be candid, I'm a little teary and profoundly grateful.
And absolutely wowed and thrilled and, okay, I had to have both my agent and editor assure me that it was really for real, but they both said "yes!" and so... Yowza!
Thanks so much to all of you who have supported this novel and my writing for all these years!
Big heaping thanks to my YA readers--it's a pleasure and honor to work for you! In fact, it's my dream come true!
Thanks to the booksellers--a million times over! I know it's tough on the front lines right now, and I appreciate you!
Thanks to the teachers and librarians for everything y'all do! I wouldn't never made it this far without your support, and I'm hopeful that our future will be just as sparkly!
It's quite possible that this post will set the exclamation-point record at Cynsations! Before signing off though, I want to take just one more moment to cheer and reflect.
And, with All The World by Liz Garton Scanlon, illustrated by Marla Frazee (Beach Lane) listed at #8 among picture books, this may be the first time that two Austin-based children's-YA authors have made it in the same week. Note: Liz is the Austinite!
[I'm unsure on the "first-time" here, as All the World and Jacqueline Kelly's Newbery Honor Book The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate (Holt) were on the list at about the same time, but I'm not clear on whether they actually overlapped.]
And that's enough from me! Oh, wait! I have just one more thought...
Thanks to you, too, Zachary & Miranda! There's more of your story to come!
Lauren Kate is the first-time author of Fallen (Delacorte, 2009). From the promotional copy:
There's something achingly familiar about Daniel Grigori.
Mysterious and aloof, he captures Luce Price's attention from the moment she sees him on her first day at the Sword & Cross boarding school in sultry Savannah, Georgia. He's the one bright spot in a place where cell phones are forbidden, the other students are all screw-ups, and security cameras watch every move.
Even though Daniel wants nothing to do with Luce--and goes out of his way to make that very clear--she can't let it go. Drawn to him like a moth to a flame, she has to find out what Daniel is so desperate to keep secret . . . even if it kills her.
Dangerously exciting and darkly romantic, Fallen is a page turning thriller and the ultimate love story.
Are you a plotter or a plunger? Do you outline first, write to explore, or engage some combination of the two? Then where do you go from there? What about this approach appeals to you? What advice do you have for beginning writers struggling with plot?
Is it possible to be both a plotter and a plunger? Or a plunger who’s working on plotting? And sometimes a plotter who’s dying to plunge? I have struggled with plot for my whole writing career, and I’m still looking for the perfect mix of meticulousness and mystery.
Character is easy for me. Dialogue? Bring it on. Descriptions sometimes have to be pulled out of me like teeth, but I’ll give ‘em up eventually.
But plot? Most of the time I don’t have a clue. I’m the writer who spent six years working on a love story between a teen girl and her uncle—whose plot still needs a major kick in the pants to come to any sort of resolution.
I’m also the writer who kicked out four pseudonymous novels in two years with fun but very straightforward plots. You could say I was looking for a middle ground.
The two novels I have published on my own are getting closer to that. The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove (Razorbill, 2009) and Fallen were both meticulously plotted out before I wrote them. Character descriptions, paragraph-long synopses for each chapter, “big” endings, the whole deal.
Both outlines (along with a few chapters) were shared with writer-friends, agents and/or editors at very early stages.
And because the stories were larger and more complicated than I’d first realized, I actually did revisions on the outlines. Way more plotting than I’d ever done before.
At the end of plotting, when I was ready to plunge, it was comforting to sit down every day and know I had to write a chapter where X happened, followed by Y, and then Z.
But sometimes, it was also uninspiring. Suddenly, Y bored me, and Z felt really predictable. But it was in the outline, which fit together like a puzzle! What to do?
Eventually, I realized there were days when I would have to loosen my leash from my outlines, to let the story adapt and change organically as I went along. This was a very good decision, one that took me too long to make.
Right now, I’m in the middle of revising Torment (Fallen’s sequel). And honestly, the experience writing the first book and the second book has been night and day. Maybe it’s because much of the structure and world-building (see below) is already in place from the first book. Maybe it’s because I know the characters better.
But I know part of it is because I’m constantly refining my plotter-to-plunger ratio: freeing myself to stray when inspiration strikes, returning to my outline when I want to feel more grounded.
As a paranormal writer, how did you go about building your world?
When I started writing Fallen, I wasn’t really aware that I was building a world. Looking back, I wonder how that was possible. Because world-building seems like Step One in how to write paranormal fiction, doesn’t it?
I used to work in YA publishing and got to edit many paranormal and fantasy authors. Working with them, I was always very conscious of the ways in which they built and experimented with their worlds.
I even enjoyed being a task-master if they broke the rules they’d set up. "But you said a wizard could only come back from the dead eleven times! This makes twelve." That kind of thing.
But when it came to writing my own story, Fallen really began with the character. I had Lucinda and I had her conflict: she was looking for an escape from her past and a connection to something that felt real. That was where Daniel came in—bringing with him the beginnings of what I guess is called “the world.”
Suddenly, angels, demons, millennium-old curses, scores of reincarnations, and dueling forces of good and evil were all battling for a piece of the action in my little romance story. So it—the world, I mean—had to get bigger. Yank us into the world of Sword and Cross, my agent demanded when I sent him the first few chapters. Make it oppressive and inescapable and all-encompassing.
Oppressive? I had never written paranormal fiction in my life, and suddenly I wondered: could I do it?
Writers talk frequently about the worlds of fantasy and paranormal fiction, but of course, every novel has a world. A world is really just a setting, isn’t it? A setting whose bricks and mortar are really just description and imagination.
Even though, technically, Long Island already existed, Fitzgerald still had to build the world in The Great Gatsby (1925), didn’t he? You could say it’s just description, but the kind of description that informs everything else in the book—the protagonist, the conflicts, the emotional arcs of every character—that’s when description becomes world-building.
Turns out, it’s much less scary to think about world-building as imaginative description. The biggest difference between writing the worlds of straightforward contemporary fiction and paranormal fiction is that you get to make up fun new rules and dialect. I can’t say where most of these terms or rules come from. They just pop out of my mind onto the screen of my computer, and then I spend the rest of the series working through (and sometimes paying the price for) that little bit of impulsiveness.
For example, at the end of Fallen, I made an offhanded reference to a truce that is to last for eighteen days. Didn’t think too much about it, kind of just made it up. I had no idea that that one line would dictate the entire structure of the sequel, Torment. But once it went to the printer and I sat down to plot out Torment, eighteen days was what I had to work with, so eighteen days it was!
I’m not complaining, but I’ve learned to keep a notebook with a list of rules and terms for when I forget what I’ve tossed into Luce’s world. And I love the fact that I have three more books to work though, to let the world grow bigger, denser, and more complicated over the course of the series.
As you can see, building the world of my books is something I’m still figuring out, but I’m learning how to make the most of it, and sometimes even to enjoy it.
Cynsational Notes
The New Voices Series is a celebration of debut authors of 2009. Note: interviews with the debut authors of 2010 are scheduled to begin soon.
One of the most exciting challenges I face when writing fantasy is world-building.
With a brand new book in a brand new world, the challenge is to figure the world out. What cultures exist, and how do they interact? How does magic work, and what are its limitations?
This is a fun stage, though the first book in a new world is normally a mess, because I spend a lot of time walking around, looking through a character’s eyes and going, “That’s cool. What do I do with it?”
In the Forests of the Night (Laurel Leaf, 2000) was the sixth or seventh book I wrote in Nyeusigrube. It took me that long to develop the world enough in my own mind to write a coherent story within it.
Once I, as the author, have a sense of the world, I need to figure out a way to communicate it to the reader without drowning them in info-dump that slows the plot.
Imagine writing a story about a girl who has ridden horses all her life, who goes to compete at professional horse-racing. There is probably no reason that anyone in that story is going to take the time to say, "A horse is a tall animal with four hooves. It’s thinner than a cow, with slender legs…" Everyone in the story knows what a horse is; they might think or talk about technical details ("Oh, I need to remember to get new shoes for that horse"), but they will not bother to describe the animal itself. That’s fine, because most people reading the story already know what a horse is.
In fantasy, however, a writer is often faced with a circumstance where the character is encountering something that is as familiar as a horse to him, but unfamiliar to the reader. This might include animals, or land features, or cultural norms, or something else entirely.
Either way, the challenge is to somehow communicate to the reader what this thing is, and that it is normal to the character, without the narrator taking the time to make an aside that interrupts the narrative flow and seems odd for the character himself.
The Kiesha’ra Series was especially challenging in this way; I often needed to clarify the world for my editor, so she could help me figure out how to explain to the reader.
Then, of course, there is the challenge of a well-developed world: Maintaining canon.
I sometimes have people say to me, “It’s fantasy. You can do whatever you want.”
Whatever has been established for the world needs to have consistency through stories, or a very good reason for changing.
In In the Forests of the Night, Risika says there are ghosts; in Token of Darkness (Delacorte, 2010), it is an important plot-point that Ryan le Coire says ghosts do not exist. Both books are canon.
In this case, the apparent contradiction is solved by a matter of semantics: Risika isn’t a witch, and she uses the term "ghost" in a different way than Ryan does. However, since no one in Token of Darkness knows Risika (Ryan certainly knows of her, but it is unlikely that they have met), and they certainly have no access to her interior narration, I needed to find a way as writer to acknowledge and clarify the apparent contradiction without Cooper stepping aside to say, “In Forests, Risika claims…”
Some people think writing fantasy is easier, because you can do “anything.” Maybe they are right, but writing fantasy for publication is harder.
In the real world, I can assume most people are familiar with basic facts of reality.
In fantasy, even the law of gravity sometimes needs to be clarified.
Token of Darkness Giveaway
Enter to win one of five copies of Token of Darkness (Delacorte, 2010)! To enter, email me (scroll and click envelope) with your name and snail/street mail address and type "Token of Darkness" in the subject line.
Facebook, JacketFlap, MySpace, and Twitter readers are welcome to just privately message me with the title in the header or comment on the interview post; I'll write you for contact information, if you win.
Deadline: midnight CST March 6. Note: U.S. entries only. Sponsored by Random House.
Seizing that 'Some Day': KU Alum Follows her 'Eternal' Dream and Gets a Best-selling Surprise by Cathy Hamilton from The Lawrence Journal World. Peek:
