 So I'm just going to introduce the two of you quickly. I'm Kelly Blue. I'm the teen librarian here at Portland Public Library. So that means I'm in charge of all of the teen collections and the teen programming and all things teen. So Gillian French is the author of three books for young adults, Grit, The Door to January, and The Lies They Tell, which comes out in May 1st. Grit has been nominated for an Edgar Award, and The Door to January has been nominated for a Brom Stoker. A main native, Gillian holds a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maine, Orinno, and currently lives in Herman with her husband and two young sons. Megan Fraser-Blakemore is an award-winning author for children and young adults. Her middle grade novels include The Firefly Code, The Friendship Riddle, The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill, and The Water Castle, all from Bloomsbury. Her books for young adults are Good and Gone, Very in Pieces, and Secrets of Truth and Beauty. Megan's books have been honored with inclusion on state lists as junior library guilt selections and as best books from Kirkus, Bank Street College, and Amazon. A school librarian, Megan has a BA from Columbia University and an MLS from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science, your fellow librarian, where she is currently pursuing doctoral work. She has taught writing to students in elementary through graduate school. She lives in Maine with her husband, children, two cats, a leopard gecko, and sometimes a hive of bees. So I'm just going to ask a couple of questions. One really important question I especially like to ask YA authors when we're talking in front of adults is, why write for teenagers? I would say that that time was just very significant for me in my life. It's something that has really stuck with me over the years. It was, in many ways, a really dark and difficult time, as I think it is for a lot of us. And reading was a major escape of mine. To get away from that, books were so important. I really can't overstate how important they were to me. And I already knew I wanted to write at a very young age. And I kind of pinpointed YA when I was in high school because I knew I wanted to give kids my age who were going through what I was going through an escape. And maybe a little help, a little direction. That's really what inspires me to write for YA. I feel the same way I, when I was a teenager, there was some YA, but not as much as there is now. And I really wanted to write sort of smart books for smart kids is what I told myself as a teenager. Now I write middle grade and young adult. And for me, the difference is middle grade is figuring out the world around you. And young adult is figuring out yourself. And there's so many firsts that make it really interesting to write about. I know when I was a teen and I actually worked in the library, the only teen books were a required reading shelf from the local high school. So it's really the publishing industry in YA. It's just been an incredible flourishing in the last couple of years. So picking up on that, what draws you to writing realistic fiction for teenagers as opposed to fantasy or sci-fi or another genre? I don't know. That's sort of a tricky question. Because again, my middle grade does tend to be fantasy or science fiction or have some sort of magical elements. But I think it's sort of what you were talking about. I just feel right back the way I was as a teenager. And I wasn't interested in fantasy as a teenager. And I think those realistic experiences come to the front. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, fantasy didn't appeal to me as a teen. And I still don't read much of it. It's kind of rare for me, too. But yeah, realistic was the way that I kind of could see my own world reflected back in me and try to make some sense of it. And so that's why I write realistic, is that not that you can't have those truths in fantasy, because you certainly do. But I feel most comfortable in reality, I guess. You write fantasy for middle grade. Do you think you'd ever try to write fantasy for young adults? Or realistic, I'm sure? And I wouldn't. I guess calling my middle grade fantasy is a little bit of a stretch. There's magical elements within the real world. So maybe I can see myself doing that. And there's a hint of that in Good and Gone, where there's the fairy tale that plays out in each chapter. But yeah, I just, I don't know about that. I can't imagine a story that would have that for teenagers in my, obviously. I can imagine those that exist, but not in my own head. So you're both, you both live in Maine. You're from New Hampshire, and you're from Maine originally. How does living in this part of the country in Maine specifically influence or impact your writing? I tend to set things in small towns because that's where I grew up. Our school was tiny. We had 250 kids, middle school and high school combined. And so a large part of the experience of my teen years was suffocation, feeling smothered, feeling limited, and seeing myself through that same narrow lens in regards to what I was capable and how far I could go. I really, I had very low confidence and didn't really reach for the stars. And so as I grew older, I could kind of see that I was limiting myself. But in teen years, I think that's a very universal feeling for kids from rural areas and those who live in small towns is feeling trapped, feeling smothered. And that's something that I like to explore in my writing. It definitely inspires me. This isn't really answering your question, but that's sort of interesting, because I grew up in Durham, New Hampshire, which is a university town. And I feel like we never had limits placed on us because so many people's parents were professors and they came from other places to that town. And we were always taught to look out and to aim high. So it's sort of interesting to sort of show you how much your community can hold you back or push you forward. So as a relative new manor from away, I think for me, it influences how I think about how people see Maine and then how Maine fits into the rest of the world. But again, it's interesting because most of my young adult, the characters are from New Hampshire, which is where I grew up. So I think that's part of drawing back to that. Why did you, you kind of touched on this already, but how did you start writing and why did you move into becoming an author? I started writing, I finished my first book like manuscript when I was a freshman in high school, it was totally terrible and I wrote one about one a year after that and I had total faith in them and I shopped them around literary agents and they got tons of rejections like well up to a hundred rejections before I would stick it in a box and start a new one. I think it just, my parents really encouraged reading out of my whole family as readers and so I think that that just really inspired me to be a writer from a young age and then as time went on, I kind of honed my skills a bit and kind of lagged off a little bit in college, kind of getting some of those new social experiences because I went to University of Maine, Orano, which was huge for me, coming from Searsport District High School, it was like this whole new world and so I kind of did the social thing for a couple of years and then got back into writing and kind of kept on plugging after that, I wrote some short fictions, some short horror fiction for adults as a way to try to break in and make a little money because I just still wasn't having much success with acceptances and that did help me get in, I placed in some contests and stuff and then many years later I signed a contract with Island Port Press in Yarmouth and that kind of was the beginning of my career opening up. So my school, we learned to write before we learned to read, so sort of like this emergent literacy approach and so the writing workshop was part of every grade from kindergarten through 10th grade and 10th grade you would require a writing workshop class and then we also had advanced writing that you could take in high school so it was just part of my daily life to write and revise and share and all of those things that you need to be able to do as a writer and then I went to college and I was in the writing program and I sort of went and be like, I'm gonna write, I don't think I even knew they were called to go adult, I'm like, I'm gonna write for teens and no one ever said no but there was like this definite like. That's not a good use of your time. So then I started trying to write short stories for grownups and I would share my short stories on novels for grownups and people would say, well you know the most interesting character is the teenager and so after hearing that a bunch of times I finally sat down and wrote for young adults and I also have a terrible high school novel which like it's so melodramatic like a girl who lives in Mexico and her mom has already died and then her dad meets the sailing instructor and then of course the sailing instructor has an aneurysm, it's like terrible but the process of like knowing that you can do it I think is one of the most important things. Yeah, finishing that first draft I think is a huge affirmation of like I can do this and maybe not everybody in the whole world can so maybe that means something. Yeah, I can really can keep you going even when the rejection start pouring in. Do you have a plot you're embarrassed of or? Yes, I wrote this ridiculous, ridiculous book called The Island where this girl went to a writing conference on an island and there was this insane family that had three sons and one of them had been accused of murder and she ended up having to stay at their house because like the only motel was closed or something like that and getting embroiled in the whole mystery and it was, oh it was so bad and I still send it to agents which is the worst embarrassing thing. Can you describe your writing process? So this is my biggest thing is we're both parents of young children. My father-in-law was visiting and he's like, so do you write better in the morning or at night? And I was like, I write when there's time and that's when I write. And I write really messy loose first drafts. I call them skeleton drafts. Oftentimes there will just be dialogue or it'll say like something exciting should happen here and then I go back and revise and revise and I'm a major reviser. Good for you for letting yourself write that first draft and not getting bogged down in revision in that first draft just letting yourself go because I have a hard time with that and I know it's the best way but every single time I just, I'll hit something I can't get past it'll block me because yeah, I write. Now we kind of have a system down at my house. I usually write in the morning if I can unless something unusual is going on but yeah, I don't really outline. Sometimes I'll write a chapter by chapter outline as I'm going just to sort my thoughts out because I find that my brain has just gotten fuzzier and fuzzier with sleep deprivation and all that stuff from having young kids. I just, I have a hard time keeping my thoughts straight now. So that helps but if I went too far ahead I don't know if you feel this way. It would kill the fun. Like it would kill the experience of discovering the story for yourself as a writer because I think that's definitely a part of it at least for me. I know there are some authors that were very organized and draft everything out chapter by chapter and they know exactly what's gonna happen but for me the discovery really is the fun and what makes it the thing that I'm most passionate about. I agree, I don't outline it. I will write that messy draft and then I'll outline and sort of figure out what my actual story is what needs to stay, what needs to be added and I do that sort of continuously throughout the revision process. That's interesting. I should try that. So now we're gonna get into the meaty questions. I want you to speak about all of your books but I base these questions on the fact that I read back to back Good and Gone and Grip and was so excited that they had so much, I feel that they have so much in common. So both books show us that it's not always easy to recognize abuse or assault in a relationship or in general, it's not always black and white. It's not always easy to recognize manipulation in relationships. So can you talk about why it's important to write about these teens having these experiences? Yeah, it's very close to my heart and something, those subjects tend to pop up in my writing generally in one form or another. I think because when I was a teen, I definitely ran into those experiences myself and I didn't know how to react. No one had ever talked to me about how to respond when someone came at me sexually, especially a man who was a lot older than me. I just, it's totally unprepared and during some of those instances, I froze, I just froze, like I couldn't speak, I couldn't move and it stayed with me. It was just a feeling of being totally powerless and I think that is something that, and I'm sure these days, I'm kind of old, I'm sure things have changed, but these days maybe you talk about it a bit more, it's a bit more out in the open, but when I was growing up, that was nothing that was done in health class. My parents would never have felt comfortable talking to me about something like that so I'm hoping that my books can provide an outlet for teens and young people and adults who haven't fully processed things that may have happened to them when they were that age and why they couldn't just fight back, why they couldn't just scream no. It's like sometimes you are so unprepared and so young and so naive, you can't, you don't have a voice and I hope that my books will help kids find their voice maybe years down the road, but in some way. I think, and obviously the conversation has changed so much. The Good and Gone I think came out pretty much the same because the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke and I had been thinking like, oh, this is a way to start conversations about consent and now I feel like these books are more about how to support conversations. I think people are very quickly much more willing to start and have those conversations and I think books can be a way to do that and for me, I was just sort of thinking about how we've done a really good job teaching like no means no and everybody should know that when somebody says no, that means stop. But the more complex, when you don't say no but you don't say yes, when you do freeze and understanding that and I think there's also a lot of stereotypes about who the aggressors are and as we've seen, often it's the people who are sort of self-proclaimed good guys who are actually the manipulators and that's Seth in my book, Good and Gone, he claims he's a feminist, he's like he's the artsy guy and I think we do readers a disservice when we're like it's the jock that's always gonna be the rapist and being more subtle and showing all of the different sides is important. Yeah, good for you because that's just so refreshing at least from what I've read to see that sometimes it is the artsy, it could be the theater guy or something like that or just the overachieving way student, it's not the football player or because that's just such a tired old cliche and so untrue and just so good for you, I'm glad you did that because it needs to get out there. And I also wanted to talk about within relationship abuse because I think there are some really great books and movies and things out there to talk about that but a lot of times when we have politicians saying things like real rape, I think I did to try to push back against that and this is the way that I can do that. Yeah, absolutely. What was really interesting to me is that both Lexie and Darcy don't necessarily realize themselves that they are being abused or that the situation was not what it should, like that you weren't, yeah that's with Darcy, yeah that's what I do, I'm comfortable having sex but that wasn't right. So yeah, those varying degrees. I think that it, looking at it from those kind of those gray areas that was what part of the root of where grit began was me wanting to remain, statistics say that two out of three sexual assaults are not reported in this country and there are many fantastic books out there that could tell a reader exactly what to do if they were sexually assaulted, could even give them the steps, almost like a manual and that's wonderful because we need those. I wanted to write about one of those girls who didn't report and why she didn't, how she came to that, because sometimes they can be hard, like how could you not tell someone that someone did that to you, how could you not go to the police? And I just wanted to talk about how it's kind of a victim's right to work their way through these things their own way. Just because you're a victim does not mean that you are suddenly canonized and becoming an advocate or an activist. You need to fight back in your own way and there are a lot of different ways to do that and I think it can take a very long time for an individual to find out how to do that. I think one of the things that's made me upset and uncomfortable about the current conversation, especially in terms of Hollywood, is when people are like, well, why didn't she say something she wasn't looking out for other actresses? So even people like Guana Paltrow and who have made, who are arguably untouchable, you still, it's putting yourself out there in a way that I don't think is fair to ask victims and that's one of the things that Lexi struggles with in the book is she knows that he's moved on to somebody else and what is her responsibility? And what can she do? How does she protect herself while still protecting other people and is that even her responsibility? Yeah, it's a really important and fascinating discussion that needs to be had. I think, yeah, it's like, suddenly you've been attacked or somehow abused and now you have a responsibility on your shoulders. You know, it's like, how is that fair? Where does that come from? But does that make it any less true? Yeah, there's so many angles to look at it. It really does, it just gives you, you know, you go so many directions with the book. Another thing that Lexi struggles with is how girls and women tear each other down and don't support each other. And that was really sad to watch and sad to see her recognize that. So that was really interesting as well. So we talked a little bit about the character of Seth, the artsy guy that wears the feminism t-shirt. The first time we see him, he's rescuing a mouse out of a pool which seems like such a sweet and tender thing to do and obviously is appealing to Lexi. But then the male characters start to develop in a way that's kind of horrifying as the female protagonist is realizing. How do you write a male character like that or how do you get inside the head of Adolas and Boys? Because all of your male characters, not just the antagonists are really complex and interesting. I mean, I work, I'm in an elementary school now but I work as a school librarian and I have worked in high schools and I think just sort of paying attention and having conversations with those teenage boys. Yeah, and they're not all monsters. Like some of them are very nice teenage boys because they do exist. Yeah, it's really important to me to not tear down the majority to build up the minority. I love guys. My friends were always boys growing up and I think that's part of what has really helped me to get into their heads for any sort of male character. I had a couple real close female friends and growing up I had a big pack of boys that I ran around with right up through graduating college and that's definitely informed my writing. It really helped me to see, to kind of see from their angles a lot more, especially with sexuality, especially in college because everybody knows how it's out of control and college is crazy. And I was lucky that I was friends with a lot of nice guys but I also saw them get themselves into situations that afterwards they'd be like, oh my God, what was I thinking? And it wasn't necessarily hurting anyone, it was just being so impulsive and being young and figuring out the ropes of sexuality and girls and boys are doing it at the same time and I just, I think it's really important to try to show all these different variety of male character and that they're also struggling at the same time to figure out what's okay. What do girls want? How far can I go doing, should I be asking or should I just be figuring it out? I think that's a danger that boys and girls both run into. They're also bombarded with messages that create a toxic masculine culture or a sexist culture. So we forget that they're still children and that they're constantly being surrounded by these messages too. It's so true. Yeah, it is a little scary. There are biases on both sides and boys are struggling with stuff at the same time that girls are and so that's why I think we're so lucky that we get to write about this age group even though I know sometimes people kind of are like, Pasha, that's okay with me. I think it's just, it's an honor. If you do a good job and you hear from a kid that says, I loved your book, then you did something right and yeah, it's just a real honor. You also have a character that's very clinically depressed and I thought if I was a teen reading that, that would have really been helpful to me. And depressed not for any major life reason necessarily but just suffering from depression. I think showing those characters too is really important. Right, and that was hard to write too because Lexi is her brother who's depressed and she doesn't have a lot of sympathy for him at first and trying to make sure the audience knew that I, not that I have sympathy but that his character deserved sympathy as well and trying to find that balance was hard. Seeing their interactions with her and her brother, they were so, I have a brother so it was just so painful to see how they tore each other down whereas in your book you have siblings that are incredibly supportive. Do you have brothers and sisters? Did that inform your writing? I have an older brother, yeah and I just idolized him and in some ways I still do. It just, he was two and a half years older and he was good at sports and he was so nice and he was just this really great guy. Like he's just a great guy and so I was really lucky. We didn't have that close relationship that I depicted and not having any sisters. I don't know if that kind of made me, I've always been a little curious of what it would be like to have sisters and I guess I kind of wanted to write about the relationship that I would have liked to have had if had I, did I have sisters and that I hope exists out there for people. And I have an older brother and the relationship between Lexi and her brother is different than the one I had with my brother although we did not get along especially while he was four years older than me. He was, he struggled a lot in school and so we just had different roles in the family that were a little tricky to navigate but I definitely drew on that when I was writing and there's one scene where Lexi calls him for help and he won't come and get her and that actually happened to me not, I had food poisoning and I didn't want to walk. So nowhere near as drastic as in the book but I just like, I remember it, I'm still like angry that he did not come to get me and I think, yeah, just drawing, being able to think back to what our relationships were but I think it also helped me to try to figure out some of the ways that he acted. Whenever we write we're trying to figure some many things out and for me I think that was trying to figure out the, the tension between our relationship because we're friends now and we should have been friends then but. They're so mean to each other. It was, like, there were a couple of times where I was like, oh, and they can't break out of that routine. To be kind to each other, that's part of what's happening. So it was really hard to read but also really fascinating. Can you talk about, obviously when we were talking through email that feminism is important in your work, can you talk about feminism in YA literature or your work in particular? I think these days, I mean what's happening right now in our culture, it's a little more popular to be a feminist. I would say, I would say early 90s when I was like middle school, it was still popular then. It was still considered cool. It was kind of like hold over from the 80s where it was still considered cool to be a feminist. It wasn't necessarily me and you were a lesbian and hated men, you know. And then I went through, I think it really seemed like a time where it was like I would not have described myself that way because I think it would have put people off. I would say like mid, I don't know if you guys feel that way and I was like mid 90s, kind of through the early 2000s, it just came kind of like a dirty word I felt like and it's striving for equality is what's important to me. You go on Twitter and it's terrifying, you know, the stuff that you see on there, you know, I know you can only take it with a grain of salt because it's Twitter but it's still, you see in it, oh, it hurts, you know, they're just seeing man hating and then down in the comments, woman hating, somebody's hitting back, you know, and it's just, it's like a war and that's not what I want to propagate in my work. I want to try to show, you know, kind of like Essie Hinton says in The Outsiders, it's tough all over, you know, things are tough all over. Equality, understanding, trying to get into the heads of the other gender is what's important to me and that's really what drives my writing. I mean, I think, so I hear what you're saying about like the feminism sort of being pushed back but I would like, now it's like, oh. So I went to Columbia, which became coed fairly late, it was 1987, I believe that they started allowing women and I was there 95 to 99 and I would be in classes and women would say, I'm not a feminist but and they'd probably be like, they'll leave because we've fought so hard to be here. And so I've always sort of been pushing and then I feel like, you know, life happened and I was like, well, let's take care like things are equal, we're fine. And then the past few years have been really eye-opening for me in that respect and then also sort of learning about like more sort of intersectional feminism and things like that in terms of my writing. So like Good and Gone is a road trip novel and typically in road trip novels, I mean the character meets different people along the way that help them through their problems and in early drafts, some of the people she met were guys who were teaching her things and I realized I'm like, if I really want to write a feminist road trip novel then it should be different women who are teaching her different things about what it means to grow up as a woman in American society today. So I changed some of the characters, either changed them into female characters or changed characters so that where they are and had them play a different role. And I do that a lot actually, like if I'm writing in a sort of secondary character or tertiary character comes in, I sort of question like, well, why did you make them a man? Why did you make them a woman? So like I'm working on a middle grade novel now and there's a like a animal control officer and so at first it was a male character and I'm like, well, why not have it be a woman? Like it doesn't impact the story in any way so I might as well flip it and see what happens. That's really great that you are constantly thinking that because I don't think it's a given for all authors and I catch myself sometimes, and sometimes I don't catch myself. And so then afterwards, people might make a point online that's like right to the heart, but it's too late, can't take it back. That's what published and that's really good that you've always kind of got the gears turning with maybe I can portray this from a different gender standpoint or yeah, that's fantastic. It was also great for her that I think because those characters she could see herself mirrored back and you see her start to recognize some of her own tendencies in those female characters. She's like, I just want to tell her to stop, stop doing that, but I can't find the language to do it. So she's finally recognizing like I do this too. So that was really important. So a little anecdotal upstairs in the teen library. So February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month and we tried to put together a display on YA books that feature healthy and positive relationships. It is really hard. It's much more easy to find really questionable relationships, really questionable behavior. I remember one book I read that everybody loved and I'm not going to tell you what it was where I was like this, the men in this book grab women all the time and like push them or like I was like, does anybody else notice this that they're being handled all the time or and they're teenagers. Or just having like a positive healthy relationship. It's really hard to find those books. So I'm wondering if you can talk about that imbalance in teen lit or maybe in literature in general. Yeah, I think, I am constantly so I don't read any of the, I'm just throwing her name out here, but like Sarah Dessen or Suzanne Colesanti, people like that who write fun, there are issues, but they write fun, light romances. Yeah, feel good romances. I will say I don't see those books getting nominated for awards, which is sad, because I'm sure they're deserving plenty of the time. I've read a lot of Sarah Dessen and they just don't get the nods that the dark stuff does. Now that is not what fuels me to write what I write. I tend to try to write the story I wanna read and I also don't read a ton of that stuff and so that's part of it, but I know what you mean. It's very hard, I've heard people say that before that it's very tough to find positive relationships or healthy relationships and even when I'm writing a couple I want to get together in the book, excuse me, I'm constantly afraid of it being saccharine or corny or people not buying it and so then I, you know, like should I add something in? Here's, there'd be more trouble, I don't know and yeah, it's definitely out there. It's a thing in YA that I don't know if it'll ever change and it's definitely in the back of my mind when I write. Yeah, I mean I think so, I mean a story has to have some sort of struggle, so a story about a good relationship would actually have to be about something else where the good relationship is sort of the context or the setting, so I mean I think like the seradescent books they, you know, they're not often, sometimes they're not about the relationship, they're about whatever else is going on in the girl's life and you know, whether, you know, in some of them they're not good relationships but the ones where it is a good relationship it would be good and sort of like thinking about what we were talking about earlier, I wish there were more sort of sex positive books about girls but more books about boys who don't want to have sex or who are scared about it or who are reluctant because I think the messaging is, that's a true message and I think like you were saying we're just sort of a sense of who boys are supposed to be and if they don't see that it's okay and normal to be like ah, I'm not ready for this. Yeah, that's true, because yeah boys get push, push, push, pushed and if you don't do it your friends are gonna rip you to shreds, you know, it's just a part of male culture. It's just, it's so ingrained. Even girls I think, even we might be like ah, you know, if you hear about when you're that age, you know, that what's the matter with him that he's not going for that, you know and it's like kind of just so ingrained. When you're older and you have your own kids you're like horrified but you know, when you're in that moment, yeah, I think those cliches and those stereotypes just embed themselves in society and you just see it over and over again on TV and in books and then just playing on front of you and it can be very hard to kind of write a book that doesn't reflect those things. No matter how much it might bother you to see it out there. I think it, I mean, and in both of your books I don't think you're unintentionally trying to show, I mean you're very intentionally trying to show like unhealthy relationships in those gray areas but I'm thinking there's a lot of fantasy where the relationships are problematic. Really problematic. Twilight is not a good relationship. It's not a good relationship, you know. So I do think it's in realistic fiction it's absolutely important to show that. I'd love to see, we could not come up with any fantasy where, except magical realism, good and gone by, and not good and gone by. That's true. There's another one. That's true. We knew it was ours, which was the one book that had like magical elements to it where the relationship was healthy. I've only read the first Graceling book but I've heard that's what it is. Those are good. That's positive book, which is another thing. You have a character who's very comfortable in her sexuality and likes having sex and that's almost revolutionary to write about. Yeah, and that was a stretch for me because it was definitely not, I was not in my comfort zone writing her. It was really important to me to write that and afterwards it was so fun and so freeing to write certain aspects of Darcy because she just, she did like having sex and if she saw a boy she wanted, she went after him and was really cut down and criticized by a lot of people in her life and had developed a bad reputation because of that, whereas it was, swap the genders, it wouldn't have been that would be like, hey, he's a player, you know, and so I really wanted to talk about that. But for me, I was so shy, so not there when I was in high school and I was just like very naive in a lot of ways and yeah, I think that it can be hard to find one, even with the slut shaming that's in my book, it's hard to find one that doesn't have the slut shaming that is sex positive. I can't think of one right off the top of my head, which is too bad. I'm sure I've missed some fantastic titles, but I... Graceland is one, but it's a totally different situation. It's not even a world that we live in, so yeah, the slut word is thrown around a ton and good and gone too by everybody, girls, boys, that double standard, it's just so toxic. What are you guys working on in the next year, 2018? What are you looking forward to? You have a book coming out in May, but... I do, my next book is coming out on May 1st, it's called The Lies They Tell and it's a straight up teen mystery. I think it has good crossover potential, it's set in a Bar Harbor-like town and centering around a girl who works in a country club and she's trying to solve a recent murder of a summer family that has happened in town and she does that by infiltrating a group of privileged summer boys who are a part of this country club and things get more dangerous. It was so much fun to write and it's very close to my heart, a lot of the emotions in that book came from my own life and so it just, I'm really happy to share it with people and I just submitted the manuscript for the book I have coming out from Harbor Teen in 2019, literally just a couple weeks ago and so right now I'm on vacation and then I'm gonna see where I'm at and hope maybe they're interested in something I can pitch to them. Well, tomorrow I'm supposed to submit something to my editor, but... Really, oh, so exciting. It's a middle grade novel, it's called The Story Web and it's, so this is one where fantasy elements come into it. There's the main characters, her father is gone and you find out particularly it's because he has PTSD and has sort of checked himself into a hospital and so she stopped doing a lot of the things she likes, namely playing hockey. But the background story is that there's an actual web, a story web that connects us all and it's a literal physical thing and the story web is in their town and it's starting to fall apart and so she thinks she needs to fix it. There's some other kids who think that they need to fix it and as happens in pretty much all of my books then they come together because they need to fix it. That sounds fantastic. Together, so that's the number one, that's for the animal Morden thing you made into it. And then I also just sold a series of books for like grades one through three that are, it's Frankie Sparks, the world's greatest third grade in a mentor and she solves all of her day-to-day problems by inventing things. Oh my gosh, that is so cool, the stem tie in. Good for you, that's fantastic. I'm excited about this. Awesome, cool. Do you guys wanna ask each other any questions? Yes. Yeah, actually, how long have you been writing now? So, I mean, like published, yeah. So this is what I always tell people. So I, if you wanna get an agent, plan something else at the same time. So I was getting married and sending out queries to agents and I, I mean, I sent out millions of queries before this, but for this, my first young adult novel in Sarah Crohn, who's my agent, called me the Thursday before my wedding. And I was like, I'm a little busy, but yes. So, and so I wasn't like constantly checking my email. So that was 2007 and the first book came out in 2009. Good for you, that must have been like mind blowing all at once. I think you're so right though, it's true, plan something else. I had been holding off on having kids because I kept thinking, well, if I do that, I won't become a writer, there won't be time. And I finally was like, this ain't happening, let's have kids, you know? And then I had my son and then, you know, it was just, oh geez, how old was he? He was like about a year when I heard from Islandport and then a couple months later, I got my agent and then signed with Harper Teen. And so it really is, it's like, while life is happening, I think that's really when it takes off. And I don't know, maybe it's just freeing for the muse, I don't know, I don't know. But I really wondered about that. And my second part of my question with that for you is what has been your biggest challenge as a published author? You know, has it been getting the word out about your books, you know? Has it been kind of giving your publisher what they're looking for with ideas? So, I mean, they sort of mentioned, my first Young and Old Novel was published in 2009, it was published with Hyperion, Disney Hyperion. And it was like, it was realistic fiction and then it was like, Twilight. And then so, if you were writing realistic fiction, there was no interest. And so that's when I started writing Middle Grade. And then when I came back into Young and Old, it was post-John Green. So then realistic fiction was huge, but the market is so tight that getting your publisher to support your work or getting, like anyone to sort of pay the blogs or whatever it is to pay attention is a lot harder. And that's not anything that I'm especially good at. And so I feel like that's the struggle. Like, you're so proud of a book and then you're trying to get it out and what do you do and how do you do it? It's like a, has it been a learning experience? Cause that, I mean, it'll be a year in May, you know, May 16th will be a year of me being out there as a published author. I already feel like I have learned so much about what's not worth it, what, oh, I wish I'd done that. You know, there's just, there are all these things, there's so many parts to promoting a book and getting it out there. And when you, especially when you live in rural Maine, it can be very tough cause you aren't just immersed in that author culture that you would be in NYC or in some ways like that. It's, you're so far away from the hub. It can be really tough. And yeah, online seems to be one of the ways that you really can't get a figure out. And I'm still so far from figuring it out. Maybe I never will. Maybe you can't figure it out. But I was curious about that. And I would put in a plug for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, which I'm on the board so, but they didn't tell me I had to say anything next time. Because that's where I felt like I've really found my community of writers of all different kinds of poets, SESs, fiction writers, crime writers. And now I feel much more involved in the writing community. That's great. I just, I joined them. And it's, it has been nice. I feel more like I'm part of something now. And I don't feel like I'm all alone. So that it has been really nice. Well, Rachel, I think you're telling me that we are, we wanna open it up to questions to the audience. Does anybody have any questions? How about in the back first and then or? All right. I have two questions. Can you hear me all right? No, yeah. I have a 13 year old adopted daughter. I have older children. And she is so much now into graphic novels. And I came in a little bit late and I don't know if you touched on that at all. But it's almost an obsession. And that kind of being an older adult that came out of the blue for me. And I wonder if you, either you have any experience with that or with kids who are just so enthralled with that. And then the second question is, is that do you find most of your readership to be girls and not boys? Who is writing boys? I'm gonna jump in over to that. Right, you got writer and librarian here, so. I'm also a librarian. And I personally do not read graphic novels well. So I just read the words and I'm done in five minutes. But people who really are reading it, it's a visual literacy as well. And I think it's ever been as much a story as a novel. And you're just reading it in a different way. So I am a big fan of graphic novels and I find them on par. And it's just like anything else. Like, you know, some of them are literary graphic novels and some of them are like later fluff. And just like all of us are gonna have a varied diet. You know, I think you would have a varied diet of graphic novels as well. So I really like them. I would say that my readership for young adults is probably mostly girls. I hear more from my middle grade and that's mixed boys and girls. And I think lots of people, I think one of my big things is like there's no such thing as boy books and girl books. There's the reader and there's the book. And a job as a librarian is, or a teacher is to match the reader and the book. And I personally, I hope that boys, teenage boys are reading our books. I hope it's not just teenage girls because they need the messages and they need to be able to have those discussions as much as the girls do. I think you're absolutely right. And yes, I'm so glad that you jumped in because I was like, I bet she's got a lot to say as a librarian because yeah, the graphic novel question, I think I did work as a librarian before I became a full-time writer. And there, you know, I think there, even maybe like 10 years ago, there was a lot of bias against graphic novels, saying it's not a real book, it's a comic book. Put that down, pick up a real book. And unfortunately, there's a lot of reluctant readers who will not pick up a real book. And I think if you take that graphic novel out of their hands as being fluff, just because there's pictures, this could be really hurting a reader. And if they're like crazy about it right now, just load them up on them, you know, just as many as she can handle, you know, just, and I think she will naturally seek out more stories. I think she's learning a love of storytelling from these graphic novels and possibly art, you know, which is awesome. You know, that's a really good thing. And so I think that they're really good things too. And yes, some are more just silly fluff and some are just as much a story as a prose novel. I think they're good things there. And personally, I wish I could do art so I could write some, but I have no talent in that at all. And the other half, yeah, I'd say it's probably mostly girls who I hear from tend to be women in their 20s. That's really who I've heard from. I'm not sure why, but every now and then I've had a teacher contact me. I spoke at Bucksport High School a few months ago and the librarian was so cool. And she sent me a picture she took afterwards of one of the football players in the library reading my book and that he had stopped to say how much he loved it on the way out. And it just, even talking, but I'm getting choked up. It just, it meant the world because I, you know, there are no girl books, no boy books. Unfortunately, cover designs can be a problem with that. Boys are embarrassed to check out some of these books from libraries or pick them up in a bookstore, so they won't read them. And that's really, it is a shame, but I think they do get in the hands of some of the boys. And the author usually has very little control over the cover. Yeah, yeah. What was your question? I don't know, but I think it's okay. Yeah, I think so, yeah. I just wondered if you, you know, I hear a lot of people talking about writing from different cultures, so culture, and creation, and I just don't know what year or class or gender or creation, if you ever write from a point of view of, you know, we're going to talk about, you know, we're writing from a girl's point of view of boys, and not what are four boys. Have you ever talked about writing year and first or third, first point from a boy and a lot of middle graders do that, writing any character to the way they care to you, but not so much as much as my age? I never thought of that. Yeah, I mean, I know you've read The Water Castle. So my book, The Water Castle, is third person, but it's primarily from a boy's perspective. And I don't know that I really thought about it too much then, but I don't know. I mean, I mean, we talked a little bit about how like personal the YA is. So, I mean, I'm not going to say no, but I, and I feel like, I mean, I could do it, but again, it would come down to the story, and I'm wondering what, right now I can't think of what story I would want to tell that would be from a boy's perspective. Yeah, I have, when I was in high school, I wrote almost primarily from a boy's perspective. It was so much more comfortable for me to write those short fiction assignments for school and some of my stuff at home as well, from a boy's perspective, because I felt like I didn't have to delve into the sexuality, which is terrible and wrong, but the girl's sexuality angle, if I was writing with this male mask, you know, and now, at that time, I wouldn't have ever said that. I was a huge fan of Essie Hinton. I already referenced her and I couldn't, I write her books again and again and again, and I think it felt safe at that time, and I keep, I do think about it, and I do worry about it with appropriating because, you know, there's so much at that. I don't want to steal anybody's stories, you know, and so, I think it would be more acceptable within the current climate for me to write from a male point of view, being a woman, flip that, I think that a male author could really get torn apart, maybe online, and maybe I'm not correct on that, but it's definitely a risk. You are taking a risk when you do it, yeah. So right now in Maine, there's an author named Sasha Kaufman, who writes so well from a teen boy perspective, and you know, that's just what, I think she's a middle school teacher, she goes, you know, she's there every day, and she can really see it, so. I guess I did, I did just write, Target is gonna carry a special edition of my next book, and I had to write some bonus material for that, and which was really cool to hear, you know, it was wonderful, but I did write it, they wanted a scene from the angle, from the viewpoint of another character in that scene, and the protagonist of that book is female, and so I did write it from a boy's perspective. I didn't even think of that just now. It was a lot of fun, and since it was just one chapter, I didn't worry about it, it was a whole book, I think I would worry that, oh no. I think the question with appropriation is like, how do you know what you don't know? And I feel like we're sort of steeped in a male culture, and so there are things that we would probably get wrong, but I think it's much less likely to happen, and I think we would sort of know the questions to ask like, what a boy think that? What a boy, what is that like? And we might not even have a question to ask about a culture that was different than a story. That's true. Well, thank you both very much for being here. Thank you all for attending. You should buy and read all of our books. I had last week off and I spent all week reading your books, and it was the best way to spend my time off, so thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks, thank you all for coming. Thanks.