What Makes a Classic?

We all want to write the best book possible. For many it's a struggle just to get published. But imagine if the book you do write becomes a classic. Can you picture it? There are so many fantasies that come to mind when you think of that word. Lord of the Rings, the Oz books, Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, Harry Potter - I could go on and on. But what's the secret ingredient? What makes something a classic?


Fellow Inkie, Hilari Bell put it beautifully when she said, "I think what makes any book into a classic, fantasy or not, is how much it touches your heart and soul.  How deeply it moves you.  When I think of classics, across the genres, one thing they pretty much all have is "heart."  Also, usually, some wisdom..."


I agree! But there's something else I noticed about the books I've marked as classics, at least in my own mind. They each have an endearing, typically unlikely hero/heroine who faces adventure head on in a wonderfully fantastic world. 

Even the high fantasy books fit this description. Why not take LOTR as example? Frodo, the simple hobbit, agrees to go on a dangerous quest and leave the safe Shire in order to accomplish it. He isn't even as big as a human man and has no magic. We instantly connect with him as readers and vicariously enjoy the danger and excitement we find while traversing Middle Earth.


 I believe that when we find which of our "modern classics" endure the test of time, it will be those with characters readers easily identify with, rich worlds, and plenty of adventure. Is there anything you've read lately that falls into this category? Do you agree or disagree with my analysis? Let's chat! 

Interview with Jasmine Richards, author of THE BOOK OF WONDERS

I am delighted to introduce to the Inkpot Jasmine Richards, who is the author of THE BOOK OF WONDERS, which is a thrilling Middle Grade adventure fantasy.  As is sadly so usually the case (she says, tongue in cheek), the United States has been luck enough to get THE BOOK OF WONDERS before the United Kingdom, with its release on 17th January 2012.


THE BOOK OF WONDERS follows 13-year-old Zardi (an adventure loving young girl who dreams of magic and running away to work on one of the ships that comes into the kingdom of Arribitha) and her best friend Rhidan (who arrived in the kingdom as a baby and who wants to know where he came from).  When Zardi's elder sister is  taken prisoner by the tyrannical sultan and marked for death, Zardi and Rhidan set out to find the magic they need to overthrow the sultan's rule.  On the way, they'll encounter djinni, monsters and a roguish sailor called Sinbad ...


In this interview my questions are in bold and Jasmine's answers are in italics.


Hi, Jasmine, and welcome to the Inkpot!


THE BOOK OF WONDERS has been described as "a fantastical, action-packed response to the mythology of The Arabian Nights - but this time the sultan doesn't get away with murder".  What was it about the Arabian Nights that particularly interested you?


Arabian Nights is in a word "awesome".  Many of the stories from this collection are well known and include ALADDIN'S WONDERFUL LAMP, ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES and THE SEVEN VOYAGES OF SINBAD THE SAILOR.  For those of you who haven't read THE ARABIAN NIGHTS they begin with a young woman called Scheherazade who tells tales to a cold-hearted sultan for 1001 nights in order to escape execution (the sultan has a nasty habit of executing his new wives!).  Through her stories, she manages to melt the sultan's heart and they end up living happily ever after.


As a young reader, I loved these stories,  I loved that Scheherazade was such a good storyteller and that she always made sure that she was at the most exciting bit of the story when the sun rose so that she would get to live for another day.


However, the 9-year-old me was enraged by the idea that the sultan got a happy ending after killing lots of innocent young women!  Even back then I wanted to create a new story, where the sultan was challenged and maybe even defeated.


With THE BOOK OF WONDERS I have created an alternative version of events which I hope will keep readers guessing!


Sinbad - the original seafaring adventurer rogue - plays an important part in the story.  How did you go about adapting such a well known and well-loved fictional character and were you ever worried about how older readers would react to it?


THE ARABIAN NIGHTS is a treasure chest of great characters and creatures, but for me they were a jumping off point rather than a set of rules I had to stick to.  Sinbad had to be dashing (obviously) but I also liked the idea that he was a bit of a scoundrel and not to be trusted.  The fact that he was a familiar character made it both more of a challenge and more of a joy when it came to recasting him.  I don't think my Sinbad replaced other Sinbads and so I don't think older readers will have a problem with him ...

As a writer, are you a plotter or a pantser, i.e. do you like to plot out your story in advance or do you prefer to se where it takes you as you write it?


Ha!  I call it being a plotter or a floater!


To be honest, I am a bit of both.  I like to have a rough idea of where I am going in the narrative but I don't have all the plot points down, as I still want to surprise myself.


It is useful to think about what kind of writer you are and instead of working against it, embrace your preferred way of working and get on with it!


Zardi is a bit of a tomboy with her love of archery and dreams of high seas adventure, whereas Rhidan is quite a sensitive and bookish boy but they have a very genuine and deep friendship.  How did you set out to balance the characters with each other and develop that relationship?


I love a feisty girl in an adventure novel and am so pleased to see Zardi join the ranks of other great heroines.


Because the original Scheherazade in THE ARABIAN NIGHTS is rather cerebral and saves her neck by telling stories I knew that I wanted Zardi to be much more physical, hot tempered and immediate.


When telling a story, I think balance is incredibly important and so I wanted Rhidan to be the opposite to Zardi and to have traits that Zardi didn't have but which she clearly needs to succeed.  I wanted to make it that they always work better as a team than they do alone.  The banter between the two came really easy to me and I think these two characters have great chemistry.  I love, love, love writing them.



One of the things I particularly enjoyed about THE BOOK OF WONDERS is the sense of place - there's a real feel of the exotic in Arribitha - and I loved, loved, loved the map that's been added to the book.  Did you have a conscious and deliberate vision for Arribitha from the start and did you get to input into the map?



I must confess that I am not very good at reading maps but I do love them at the beginning of a book because you know that you are in for a treat and that you are going to go on a proper quest!


With the map in the front of THE BOOK OF WONDERS I sketched this out and the artist who did my cover actually drew the map and made it all pretty!


In terms of the setting of the book, I always knew that the first book in THE BOOK OF WONDERS TRILOGY would have a strong Middle Eastern flavour because the first book is directly inspired by THE ARABIAN NIGHTS.  It was really important to me that I got the smells, colours and the atmosphere of Arribitha right and so I did lots of travelling around the Middle East and North Africa.  However, it was actually in Zanzibar in East Africa where I really felt that I was seeing Arribitha in the flesh.  Zanzibar really helped me to add those last little details to Zardi's world.

Djinni have a fairly big role in THE BOOK OF WONDERS.  If you found a djinni, what would you wish for?


That's easy.  I would wish for the ability to stop or slow time.  Between a full time job in publishing and writing there often doesn't feel like there are enough hours in the day and boy would I just love a weekend vegging out and watching GAME OF THRONES!


In your day job you're a senior editor at Oxford University Press Children's Books.  What was it like to be on the other side of the fence in the editing process and has it changed the way you go about your day job?


I think being an editor makes me a better writer and being a writer makes me a better editor.  Because I'm an editor I know that when my editor gives me feedback it is from a position of really wanting to give my book the best chance of succeeding.  Therefore even if I don't always agree I respect that opinion and my editor's expertise.  


As a writer, I know how hard my authors work.  Writing books for children isn't just sitting in a room coming up with ideas and beautiful prose - it's about being brave enough to let your words out to the wider world and receive the praise and criticism, it's about going out and doing school visits, it's meeting booksellers and spending time speaking to readers on blogs and in newspapers and at festivals!


Sometimes doing events can be absolutely nerve-wracking and being on the other side I can really understand that nervousness.

Jasmine Richards

THE BOOK OF WONDERS is the first in a trilogy.  What hints can you give us of what to expect in the forthcoming books?


I don't want to give too much away but in the next book Zardi and Rhidan's friendship is going to be sorely tested and we may or may not get to meet a certain Prince Aladdin in the third book!


Oooh, Prince Aladdin!  I can't wait!  Thank you very much for taking the time to visit us at The Inkpot.


Thanks so much for having me on your blog!




THE BOOK OF WONDERS is available in the United States from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and all good independent book stores.


THE BOOK OF WONDERS is available in the United Kingdom from Amazon UK.

Spring & Summer Celebrations in Fantasy

As spring slips effortlessly into summer, I started wondering about these seasons in fantasy. How are they celebrated? How do they effect the story?

Growing up in Hampshire, England, down the road from Stonehenge, I'm used to the celebrations and rituals of May Day, with Morris dancers, May Poles, and cheese rolling. Even donning masks and dressing up as animals, as depicted in The Wicker Man.

And such celebrations of the coming of Spring, the return of the sun, growth of the crops and fertility - Easter eggs and maypoles occur all across the world. So why not in world fantasy literature?

In fantasy, rituals and settings place an important part of world building. The seasons reflect challenges and emotional journeys, weather itself can become a character so in the same way rituals, or celebrations can add depth, intrigue and texture.


But it was way harder to find any references than I thought it would be..

My first thought was GREENWITCH by Susan Cooper - which is set in Cornwall - an ancient place rooted in Celtic tradition, with an awesome ritual of weaving a Greenwitch from twines and flowers, and throwing it into the sea, around Spring. But it may be that Susan Cooper is such a fantastic writer, she just convinced me that was a real festival as I can't find the real roots anywhere. Cornwall does have many celebration though including May Day! So, the feel of her setting was spot on!

Then I remembered the bear festival in TENDER MORSELS by Margo Lanagan, where the young men of the village dress in bear costumes and run around the village harassing the young women. Now, that is based on a real festival, la journée de l’ours (the day of the bear).

The Bears!

Prats-de-Mollo's town website says, 'The young people of Prats meet up at Fort Lagarde, for a boozy meal during which the bears, chosen several weeks before, are prepared for the festival. Some will play the bears (usually the fittest amongst them!) and others will be the hunters.' It happens in late February - early March.

Trying to reach out further than my Anglo-Saxon roots I thought of Holi - a Hindu celebration that takes place in spring, a jubilant festival celebrating and renewing relationships and friendships.

In MOLLY MOON - by Georgia Byng, which I've stretched to be fantasy, Molly travels back and forth in time through India, and experiences Holi first hand.

Next, I combed through THE OWL SERVICE, Alan Garner, THE NEW POLICEMAN, Kate Thompson and THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, Neil Gaiman - I was convinced the Macabray was based on a real yearly event - but not one I could find! I think it may just be a twist on the Dance Macabre which would be more Halloween-ie anyway.

So, I went to the Inkpot!

Amy Greenfield (CHANTRESS (McElderry/S&S, April 2013)) shared some of her Oxford memories,

I live just north of Oxford, which has a fabulous May Morning festival every year...I can remember standing in the crowds on Magdalen Bridge listing to the choir, glimpsing a Green Man in the hubbub, hearing the jingle of Morris dancers everywhere, watching fire-eaters by the Bodleian, and being offered fertility cake from a man’s sword. Good food for the imagination. She also came up with more titles!

Laura Lee Sullivan’s UNDER THE GREEN HILL is a recent one. Julie Hearne’s The MERRYBEGOT (called The Minister’s Daughter in the US) is another from 2005. And there’s Mary Stewart’s WILDFIRE AT MIDNIGHT, but that’s a real oldie.

Amy also mentioned Nowruz, 'the spring festival celebrated in Iran (and elsewhere)...It's rooted in the Zoroastrian religion and marks the spring equinox and the start of a new year. I can't think of any book connections, though.

Lena Coakley (WITCHLANDERS) shared these pictures from a recent trip to Oxford UK.

(The man with the cheese on his head is the "fool" a traditional character
in Morris dancing who causes havoc and gets all the steps wrong.)

Lena Coakley

And William Alexander (GOBLIN SECRETS) told me something I never would have thought about his home town of Minneapolis...

One way that we cope is by banishing winter with a huge parade and puppet show. Mayday!

May Day is a spring holiday. The sun is coming back, and this is cause for tremendous relief because there's nothing like a Minnesota winter to make you doubt your knowledge of our heliocentric solar system and believe--if only a very little bit--that mythic wolves might actually devour both the sun and moon. But then warmth returns, and one of our local theater companies builds an enormous sun puppet and paddles it across a recently thawed lake. Everybody cheers as though the puppet were actually the sun, as though it really could chase away arctic wind, as though everything might be okay from now on.

Which just sounds like an amazing event looking for a fantasy story to appear in!!

So, it's over to you. Can you think of any spring or summer celebrations, real or invented, in children's fantasy writing? Not including, of course, the really obvious one I forgot to mention by a certain Bard!

Shameless Celebration!

YAY!  Lots of news this week.  I love weeks like this.  :)

Starting out with a bang, Lena Coakley's WITCHLANDERS is a SCBWI Crystal Kite Award winner!  Chosen by SCBWI members, this is like being voted prom queen by your peers!  Such a huge honor.

We have another book with honors this week: Dawn Metcalf's LUMINOUS was picked as a Top 40 Pick for the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association.  What an awesome line up of books!!!

In foreign rights news, Nancy Holder sold Polish rights to WICKED, the NYT bestselling YA series she writes with Debbie Viguie. Copies of WICKED: WITCH, the first novel in the series, arrived on Friday.

In blurbage news (hee), William Alexander landed an amazing blurb for GOBLIN SECRETS from none other than Ursula K. Le Guin!

"It was hard to stop reading Goblin Secrets, and I didn't want the book to end! The author's imagination is both huge and original, taking us to a truly new place, rich with lively, vivid scenes, fascinating people, and marvelous inventions. He doesn't explain things, yet everything is clear. And he tells his fast-paced story in language that's a pleasure in itself -- subtle, tricky, funny, beautiful. More, please, Will Alexander!"

And perhaps most excitingly of all this week, long time Inkie P.J. Hoover has not one, but TWO book deals to announce!

P.J. Hoover's SOLSTICE, about a near-future global heating crisis and a Texas teen who uncovers the strange untold ending of the Persephone myth, only to find that she is part of the story -- and that her choices in love, in family, and in friendship will determine the destiny of her world, to Susan Chang at Tor Children's, for publication in Spring 2013, by Laura Rennert and Lara Perkins at Andrea Brown Literary Agency (NA).

P.J. Hoover's TUT, in which a young immortal King Tut, who has been stuck in middle school for over 3,000 years, must defeat an ancient enemy with the help of a dorky kid from school, a mysterious Egyptian princess, and a one-eyed cat, to Susan Chang at Tor Children's, for publication in Winter/Spring 2014, by Laura Rennert and Lara Perkins at Andrea Brown Literary Agency (NA).

Excuse me while I squee all over myself.  :D

Hmm.  There's something else.  Something I'm forgetting...  Oh yes, winners in the Tu Book drawing!  I gots them:

Natalie Aguirre
Julia@ThatHapaChick

Congratulations!

Interview with Alethea Kontis, author of ENCHANTED

I’m thrilled to welcome to the Inkpot Alethea Kontis, author of Enchanted, which apparently is the monster of all fairy tale retellings. I mean, why retell just one when you can retell them all, right? Read on and find out….

Enchanted isn't a retelling of any particular fairy tale -- rather, it's a mosaic of many of them. Was there any particular fairy tale that got you started? Or did you intend from the beginning to borrow from as many fairy tales as possible?

The original story that Enchanted is based on was an entry in a fairy tale contest the Codex Writers had in the summer of 2005. The stories had to be inspired by at least one of four "seeds": "Fundevogel," "The Princess and the Pea," the Irish legend of Cú Chulainn, and the nursery rhyme "There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe." I couldn't choose between them, so I chose them all...as well as all every other fairy tale and nursery rhyme that was suggested. They just all fit together so well, you see...

I hate the "where did you get the idea" question as much as anyone. And yet: Where did you get the awesome idea for seven sisters named after seven days of the week?

That particular tidbit came from the "Monday's Child is Fair of Face" nursery rhyme. As a Sabbath Day child myself, I've always been slightly disappointed in my generically optimistic lot in life as prophesied by that poem, so I instantly had a great deal of empathy for Sunday. The reason anyone would have so many children in the first place would surely be the goal of a "seventh child of a seventh child" legend, and this dovetailed perfectly into the old rhyme of counting magpies ("One for sorrow, two for joy"). Sevens and threes are very powerful numbers in fairy tales.

I happen to know (looks mysterious) that the original title of the book was Sunday, the name of the main character. And having gone through title changes myself, I know there were probably a bunch of titles you considered before you hit on Enchanted. Care to share any of them?

Yes, the original title of the novel was Sunday, which was the name of the novelette of this tale as it appeared in Realms of Fantasy in 2006. The publisher was afraid that this title would not immediately convey a fairy tale sensibility, so they suggested something "more like...Enchanted." I had about two days to come up with new title ideas, which included: Blithe, Fanciful, Dreamer, Glister, and Perchance. But by then, Enchanted had already settled in everyone's brains, and there you have it!

You are also the author of the bestselling picture book, Alpha Oops: The Day Z Went First (side note: my kids LOVE that book). Obviously the writing process is different, but how similar or different the process of getting a picture book published vs. getting a young adult novel published?

*hugs* I love you and your kids! Thank you! Oh, yes, I learned an incredible lot during the production of the first AlphaOops, not the least of which was that writing a picture book was far more like writing a script than a short story or novel. There is so much one doesn't need to say in prose when given illustrations, and there needs to be room left for the illustrator/collaborator to step in and shine on his/her own. Almost like in acting, where the words in the script are a guideline by which the actor bases his or her motivation and fills in the blank with talent, imagination, and personality. Thankfully, I've had some little experience acting on stage and television, so when I sat down to write AlphaOops: H is for Halloween, I wrote it as a script rather than in story format. I think the editing process for that book went a lot more smoothly.

All that said, the award for strangest format in which I've ever written a story goes to "Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome," a month-long twitter serial illustrated by Eisner Award winner J.K. Lee. Because of the 140 character limit on each daily mini-story, it was easier to construct the project on an Excel spreadsheet so that I could see the stories one on top of the other and keep track of the characters all at the same time. It was an odd endeavor, but the unorthodox approach ultimately worked out to everyone's advantage. My advice to writers: Always keep an open mind. We live in an ever-changing world, and you'll never know what hoop you might be asked to jump through next!

So true! As long as they’re all fun hoops, right?

You can read more about Enchanted at http://aletheakontis.com/about/enchanted/. You can also go out and get it if you want – it went on sale yesterday!