A Novel Idea

In other blog posts, I’ve mentioned two friends who separately sent out queries to 100 literary agents.  I’m not suggesting that this number is the norm.  It’s possible, that on average, one has to send out forty queries before getting the nod… or, God forbid, 200. The daunting 100 queries serve as a reality check.  [...]

Savo Heleta wrote a book.  And it was published. But not before he and a family friend showed up at my door, several years ago, with the proposition that I help Savo ready it for publication.  (Savo had begun learning English only three years earlier and had just started to flesh out his account of [...]

As I noted in the previous post, I wanted to ground the novel’s setting and characters in an everyday world, but ensure that one family mirrors for a number of young readers a way of experiencing reality that is actually – if too often, still secretly – their own.  For the rest, my hope has [...]

There’s no question that the paranormal is hot right now in teen and middle grade fiction.  Vampires.  Werewolves.  Ghosts.  In the award-winning The Graveyard Book, for instance, an orphaned toddler is taken in by the dead and raised within the confines of a cemetery.  Readers come to these books, ready to tacitly accept the fantastical.  [...]