Introducing 2013 MCBF Author, Kimberley Griffiths Little

Kimberley Griffiths Little is the critically acclaimed author of the Southwest Book Award, Winner of the Whitney Award for Best Youth Novel of 2010, Bank Street College Best Books of 2011, Crystal Kit Finalist, and New Mexico Book Award Finalist. Her books have sold several hundred thousand copies in the Scholastic Book Fairs and have been chosen for many state reading lists. She lives on a dirt road in a small town by the Rio Grande with her husband, a robotics engineer, and their three sons. Kimberley is a favorite speaker at schools around the country, presenting "The Creative Diary", a highly successful writing workshop and has also been a keynote speaker at various conferences. She is a co-founder of SPELLBINDERS, a national newsletter for Educators and Librarians to create life-long readers.

Read more about Kimberley Griffiths Little at her website.

An Interview with E. Kristin Anderson

Q: Of which book are you the most proud? And why?

A: My first book is Dear Teen Me, and I'm so so so proud of it.  When Miranda Kenneally and I took on the project, we had no idea how much hard work would go into organizing an anthology.  But I have to say that every drop of sweat was worth it.  I'm so privileged to have created a book with so many fantastic and talented authors.

As far as my novels go (none of which are out yet) I think there's something to be said about that first novel.  I have no idea if it will ever sell, or if it does when it will come out.  But the first book I wrote is about a girl struggling with her own identity in the wake of loss, and it takes place in a small Maine town a lot like the one where I grew up.  I drew on some hard truths of my own life as a teen to write it, and I think that's what makes it the book of my heart.

Q: Patty Campbell talks about the germ for a piece of writing being like the sand in the oyster.  What is your grain of sand? Do you begin with character or setting or something else?

A: This is different for each book.  For Dear Teen Me, it was a Hanson concert.  I wrote myself a letter on my blog about seeing my favorite band for the first time at 27, which I'd been waiting to do since I was like 14.  It sparked the Dear Teen Me blog and eventually the book.  For my novels, it's usually either a character or a theme that comes to me first.  Either way, I have to work to make sure that the character has a compelling obstacle to overcome, or that the theme is wrapped around a compelling character.

Q: What do you hear from your readers?

A: One thing I really love about the response to Dear Teen Me is that we're hearing a lot from both adult and teen readers -- and they have a lot of the same things to say.  I think it speaks to the fact that the high school experience is the same for a lot of us, no matter who we were then, and no matter when we grew up.  People leave us comments on the website saying things like (I'm paraphrasing here) "Thank you for sharing your story, this happened to me, too" and "This makes me feel less alone."  It makes me feel especially privileged to be able to share these non-fiction stories.  Because high school is lonely, no matter what kind of kid you are, jock or nerd, prom queen or skate punk.  I'm happy to be able to connect kids with adults who remember that -- not all adults do!

Q: Why do you write for Young Adults?

A: This is a great question.  I think for me writing YA was a really natural choice.  I was a poet before I was a novelist/non fiction author.  And I was really struggling to find my voice in prose.  If you could see some of the work I was trying to scratch out before I found YA -- oh God, it's just wrong. I found contemporary YA when I was about 25, and I read SWEETHEARTS by Sara Zarr and THE ADORATION OF JENNA FOX by Mary E. Pearson.  Something just clicked.  I sat down and started to rewrite something I'd been working on for years, and I found that the voice I'd used in my poetry transitioned to YA better than it ever could as an adult.  I think it's a combination of two things: One being the slight surrealism that I love in poems and the fact that being a teen is a beyond surreal experience, and, two, well, something inside me is stuck at like 17, and I'm finally okay with that.

Q: Who is your favorite character you have written or read about?

A: I think that my favorite character to write about is always going to be the character I just finished writing about.  As of writing this, I just finished a first draft of a time travel novel taking place in New York City in 1986.  And I love, love, loved writing the protagonist, Eileen Archer.  She's so bubbly and devil-may-care, and she just embraces life in a way I think a lot of people will enjoy.  Plus, her love interest, Rahul, is super sexy.  (I co-wrote the book with my friend Priya Chand.  She's fantastic.  I hope she lets me work with her again!)

As far as reading goes, there are so many characters that I love.  But there are two that just always pop for me.  Hassan, the sidekick/BFF in John Green's AN ABUNDANCE OF KATHERINES cracks me up, and I've made all my friends (even the grown-ups who mostly read grown-up books) read that book for all of Hassan's jokes (and also the footnotes, which are brilliant).  And Rob, from the grown-up book HIGH FIDELITY by Nick Hornby.  This was probably the book that made me want to write a novel when I was like 19.  I love Rob's voice, I love how he breaks the fourth wall, and I love how he translated to the screen in the film that is TOTALLY different from the book, but is still so so so Rob.  Also, I worked in a record store in high school and made lots of top 10 lists in my journal, so Rob's record store and his top 5's make me all giddy.

Q: What is one thing you would like your readers to know about you?

A: I'm a giant nerd.  Seriously, huge, crazy nerd.  I watch too much TV and love mix tapes and am obsessed with postal mail.  I watch Shark Week.  I sometimes get so excited about something that I stutter and I still trip and fall in heels sometimes even after my stint in NYC where I was a fashionista in my head.  I like Nintendo and cats and poems and Mythbusters.  I am so nerdy.  And I'm okay with it.  I think you should be, too.

Q: In high school, where did you fall? (Prom Queen/King, Gamer Geek, Brainy/Book Nerd, Jock, Shy/Quiet Scholar, Skate Rat, Stoner, Class Clown, etc.)

A: I was a bit of a mix.  I was on the track team, but I did the 1600m racewalk so I wasn't one of the cool kids on the track team. (Even if I won all my races -- and I mostly did!)  I sat at a lunch table with a mix of skaters and AP students and kids who were into the swing revival (it was a thing in 1999) and the occasional hockey player.  I sometimes made my own clothes and they were ridiculous.  And I eventually gave up trying to be liked by everyone and spoke my mind a lot, which didn't get me invited to parties, but it did get me voted "Most Unique" in my senior yearbook.

Q: Do you have a pet (pets)?  Tell us about it (them) and how they help/hinder your writing.

A: I have two cats, Telemachus (Tele for short, named for Odysseus' son in the Odyssey) who is an unnaturally clever Maine Coon/Siamese mix, and Turkleton (named for Dr. Turk on Scrubs...and the nickname Kelso gives him halfway through the series) who is a not-so-clever tabby that I found under my porch when I first moved to Texas.  Neither of them are very useful to my writing.  And neither of them has a problem sitting on my laptop or notebook.

Q: What is the hardest part of waiting for a book from the end of your writing to when it is released?

A: The waiting itself, probably.  I'm pretty good at pretending to be patient, but in reality, I'm not.  It does help that there's a lot to do between turning in the final draft and having the book on shelves, though.  Sprucing up websites, booking events, printing promotional materials, setting up book trailers.  So I keep myself busy.  And I'm always writing the next book.  Best to keep myself distracted!

Q: How often do you dream about the writing you are working on?

A: Often!  A professor I had for a poetry class in college -- Charles O. Hartman -- told me that some poets felt that dreams were legitimate material for poetry -- that they were as "true" as actual life events.  I want to say that Galway Kinnell was a big part of this movement, but I can't quite remember, and either way, Galway Kinnell is brilliant and you should check out his work.  Anyway, after that class, I started writing down scenes from dreams, and, years later, a few of my novels have started this way.  Usually just a snippet of a scene, but when I wake up and write it down, I can build from there, and sometimes it works.  Other times, not so much.  But I think it's a good idea to write down dreams even just for practice -- you never know where that next great idea is going to come from.  I mean, I heard that Stephenie Meyer built TWILIGHT around a dream, and that worked out pretty well for her!

Thanks so much for your time, Kristin! We look forward to seeing you at the Festival.

Learn more about E. Kristin Anderson at her website.

Introducing 2013 MCBF Author, E. Kristin Anderson

E. Kristin Anderson grew up in Westbrook, Maine and is a graduate of Connecticut College. She has a fancy diploma that says “B.A. in Classics,” which makes her sound smart but has not helped her get any jobs in Ancient Rome. Once upon a time she worked for The New Yorker magazine, but she decided being a grown up just wasn’t for her.

Currently living in Austin, Texas, Ms. Anderson is an assistant editor at Hunger Mountain for their YA and Children's section. With her pal Miranda Kenneally, Ms. Anderson is the co-editor of the upcoming DEAR TEEN ME anthology (Zest Books, 2012), based on the website of the same name. As a poet she has been published worldwide in around two dozen literary journals from the indie-queen Fuselit, to the prestigious Post Road and Cimarron Review. She hand-wrote her first trunk book at sixteen.  It was about the band Hanson and may or may not still be in a notebook at her parents’ house.

Look out for Ms. Anderson's work in the forthcoming anthology COIN OPERA II, a collection of poems about video games from Sidekick Books and FUTUREDAZE, an anthology of YA SciFi from Underwords.

She blogs at EKristinAnderson.com and MetreMaids.com

An Interview with Jacqueline Kelly

Q: Do you have a pet (pets)?  Tell us about it (them) and how they help/hinder your writing.

A: My husband and I have three cats (Callie, Tiger Lilly, Petunia) and two dogs (Molly, Laika).  Callie Cat likes to sit on top of me when I read in bed, and she likes to sleep on top of whatever I'm working on.  She is a talkative calico, and we have long, involved conversations about reading and writing.

Q: What do you hear from your readers?

A: I get lovely fan letters, mainly from young girls, but occasionally from boys as well.  They send me drawings and little bits of nature, such as leaves and bug stickers (but not real bugs). One girl sent me a piece of her grandmother's tatting!

Q: In high school, where did you fall? (Prom Queen/King, Gamer Geek, Brainy/Book Nerd, Jock, Shy/Quiet Scholar, Skate Rat, Stoner, Class Clown, etc.)

A: In high school, I was definitely the shy/scholar type.  When I got to college, that all changed.  One of the great things about going to university is that no one cares or remembers what you were like in high school. No. One.  (Hurray!)

Thanks so much for your time Jacqueline! We look forward to seeing you at the Festival.

Visit Jacqueline Kelly's website to learn more about her. 

Introducing 2013 MCBF Author, Jacqueline Kelly

Jacqueline Kelly was born in New Zealand and moved with her parents to western Canada at an early age. She grew up in the dense rain forests of Vancouver Island, so you can imagine her shock some years later when her family moved to the desert of El Paso, Texas. She attended university in El Paso and medical school in Galveston (lovingly known as “Galvatraz” among the inmates). She practiced medicine for many years and then attended the University of Texas School of Law. She practiced law for several more years before realizing that what would really make her happy is to write fiction. Her first published short story appeared in 2001 in the Mississippi Review (one of her proudest accomplishments). Her debut novel, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, was released by Henry Holt on May 12, 2009 (another one of her proudest accomplishments). The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate was named a Newbery Honor book in 2010.

Learn more about Jacqueline Kelly at her website.

An Interview with C.C. Hunter

Q: Of which book are you the most proud? And why?

A. Don’t you know this is like asking a mother which of her children she loves the most?  LOL.  But…I will admit to being partial to the Shadow Falls series.  And I think this is for several reasons.  First, when I was approached to write a young adult paranormal series, I almost said no because I wasn’t sure I could do it.  Plain and simple, I was afraid.  It suddenly occurred to me that I was trapped in a comfort zone.  I wrote romance, had built a good audience, and felt like I knew what I was doing.  This series made me stretch myself as a writer and grow.   Writing a book in a singular point of view was a new experience and learning how to tell so many characters' stories through only one person’s POV was very educational.  The second reason I think this series is extra special is because I’ve written five books, so I’ve stayed with these characters and this world for a lot longer than I normally would with a stand-alone book.  I’m working on the last book in the series now, and it’s going to be very sad when I have to say good-bye.  Good thing I stocked up on tissues.

Q: Patty Campbell talks about the germ for a piece of writing being like the sand in the oyster. What is your grain of sand? Do you begin with character or setting or something else?

A. You know, every writer is different.  As for me, well, I’m a very character-driven writer.  Once I have my characters created, once I know who they are, what they're afraid of, what they want most in the world (and how far they are willing to go to achieve it), my plot sort of falls into place.  But until I have that handle on who my characters really are, the story doesn’t flow.  So I guess my characters are my sand.

Q: What do you hear from your readers?

A: Goodness, I get tons and tons of emails.  But more at my C.C. Hunter site than my Christie Craig site.  I think teens get so excited about books and they are just more apt to write the authors.  They all want to have their say about which hero Kylie will choose.  They also want to tell me how they love the friendship in the series.  Because Kylie has sort of always felt a bit like a fish out of water, a lot of teens want to share with me a little about how they feel the same way.  It's been an amazing experience.

Q: Why do you write for Young Adults or Children or Adult?

A: I write both adult and young adult fiction.  And I write them both for the same reason, because I love telling stories.  I love knowing that my stories are entertaining, inspiring, and are feeding my readers some much needed laughter.  One of the reasons St. Martin’s came to me to write the series was they felt my “writing voice” would work in the genre.   As a matter of fact, I actually asked my editor, “Why do you think I can do this?”  Her answer was, “Because you are a smart-a$$ and teens love that.” She was right.  My voice does seem to work.  Now, just because I’m sassy in tone and add lots of humor, doesn’t mean my books don’t have heart.  As a romance writer, I already had to delve into the reader’s emotions.  I had to write characters that a reader could fall in love with.  Then, as a young adult author, I wanted to write characters who were sort of role models for other teens.  I enjoy writing stories about characters who have to overcome something, characters who are going through some change in their lives.  I want to show characters who can laugh in the face of adversity.  Who find that friendship and love are the most important things in life.  And this is in all my books, the young adult books as well as the romance novels.

Q: Who is your favorite character you have written or read about?

A. Hmm…I think my favorite character is Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web.  She had so much to offer all the other characters of that book.  I loved her soft-heartedness and desire to save Wilber.  And let's face it, I'm just a sucker for interspecies romances.  LOL.

Q: What is one thing you would like your readers to know about you?

A: That I consider myself the luckiest person alive to do what I love and get paid for it.  And that if I can make my dream come true by becoming a New York Times Bestselling writer, they can make their dreams come true, too.  Never give up on your dreams.  I don’t care if it’s writing, losing ten pounds, running a marathon or getting a college degree.  Hold tight to your dreams and never give up.

Q: In high school, where did you fall? (Prom Queen/King, Gamer Geek, Brainy/Book Nerd, Jock, Shy/Quiet Scholar, Skate Rat, Stoner, Class Clown, etc.)

A: I was shy, but not the quiet scholar.  I was the kid who faded into the woodwork, the one that a lot of people didn’t know was in the class.  Because I was dyslexic, I struggled with my grades, but I spent a lot of time running off into my imagination and making up stories.

Q: Do you have a pet (pets)? Tell us about it (them) and how they help/hinder your writing.

A. My animals are a big part of my life.  I have four cats, one dog, and a rabbit—all rescues.  (Did you know there are actually stray rabbits?  I didn’t until my son brought one home that came up to him at work and rolled over for him to rub its belly.)  Basically, all of my animals are very unique.  I think animals make us better humans.  And I use animals in my writing all the time to help make my characters better characters.  When a person shows love to an animal, it shows that they are caring individuals.

Q: What is the hardest part of waiting for a book from the end of your writing to when it is released?

A. Just wanting to hold your baby in your hands.  Seeing it just makes it all that sweeter.  And then there’s the self-doubt.  What if this book isn’t as good as I thought it was?  Maybe I need to go back and change a few things?  After sixteen books, one would think the self-doubt would disappear, but nope.  It’s like a bad penny, it keeps showing up.

Q: How often do you dream about the writing you are working on?

A: I think my subconscious is always working on my books. So sometimes I wake up with great scene ideas.  I love it.  I try to tell my subconscious that it should do that all the time.  It doesn’t listen to me, of course, but I’m always thrilled when it does offer me a little help in the dream world.

Thank you for your time, CC! We look forward to seeing you at the festival!

For more about CC Hunter, please visit her website.

Introducing 2013 MCBF Author, C.C. Hunter

C.C. Hunter grew up in Alabama, where she caught lightning bugs, ran barefoot, and regularly rescued potential princes, in the form of Alabama bullfrogs, from her brothers. Today, she's still fascinated with lightning bugs, mostly wears shoes, but has turned her focus to rescuing mammals. She now lives in Texas with her four rescued cats, one dog, and a prince of a husband, who for the record, is so not a frog. When she's not writing, she's reading, spending time with her family, or is shooting things-with a camera, not a gun.

C.C. Hunter is a pseudonym. Her real name is Christie Craig and she also writes humorous romantic suspense romance novels for Grand Central. www.christie-craig.com

C.C. would love to hear from you. Because of deadlines, it may take her a day or so to get back with you, but she will reply.  cc@cchunterbooks.com

Read more about CC Hunter at her website or follow her on Twitter.