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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: Christopher Paolini
Publishers always hope for a new author to create a buzz, but few could imagine the level and intensity of attention that 20-year-old Christopher Paolini has generated. He began work on his debut novel Eragon (Knopf), the first in a planned trilogy, when he was only 15 years old; when it was finished, his family had the book printed by on-demand printer Lightning Source.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts
Six first-time authors and artists talk about their fall '03 debuts.
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Ali Bahrampour
In Ali Bahrampour's picture book Otto: The Story of a Mirror (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the shiny, oval title character runs out on his dull job at a hat shop after dealing with an especially vain customer named Curly Joe. Otto becomes a wayfarer on the high seas, "not knowing where the waves would take him, but happy nonetheless."
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Kathleen O'Dell
And to Think That I Saw It on Klickitat Street. No, it's not a new Dr. Seuss title. But it could perhaps serve as a thumbnail summary of where Kathleen O'Dell found inspiration for her novel Agnes Parker... Girl in Progress (Dial). "Several years ago I was working on a historical novel and had done months of research," recalls O'Dell. "I had just read the first volume of Beverly Cleary's memoirs [A Girl from Yamhill]. One afternoon I took a break and fell asleep. When I woke up from that nap, it came to me; I shouldn't be writing something historical, I should be writing something more like the Cleary books I loved as a child. I grew up in Portland, Ore. [as Cleary did], and all our street names were in Beverly Cleary's books. I knew those places and felt like I knew those characters. I guess you could say the idea came to me during a nap. That, and I think my subconscious decided it didn't want to do any more research," O'Dell jokes.
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Derek Anderson
Derek Anderson's career in children's books began one fortuitous afternoon. "Just as I was graduating from college," he recalls, "My mother, a third-grade teacher, returned from a book conference where she'd met all kinds of authors and illustrators. She took armfuls of children's books back with her, which immediately caught my eye." They were books the likes of which he'd never seen before, like The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs. "I was blown away by them," he says. "The pictures were works of art."
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Michael Simmons
Michael Simmons knows that Brett, the narrator of his novel Pool Boy (Roaring Brook), is something of a brat. "All he does is complain," he says. "He's completely self-absorbed, he doesn't really care about anyone else."
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Boris Kulikov
Once you know illustrator Boris Kulikov's background, all the vintage clothing makes perfect sense. In Lore Segal's Morris the Artist (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Foster), Kulikov's unconventional debut, he dresses his young characters in puffy knickers, sailor suits, huge rust-colored fedoras and long, flowing scarves. It's a pretty daring juxtaposition to Segal's modern "everykid" tale of a boy who yearns to keep the paint set he takes to a birthday party, but it blends seamlessly.
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts: Jeanne DuPrau
Jeanne DuPrau grew up in the 1950s and 1960s with a fear of the world coming to an end. "People were building bomb shelters, and I was afraid of the idea that we could wipe out the human race," she says, citing one inspiration for The City of Ember (Random House), which is set in a postapocalyptic underground world in which the power supply, food and other necessities are dwindling.
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Spring 2003 Flying Starts
Six first-time children's authors and illustrators talk about their road to publication
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Paul Elie: Reading Books With Our Lives
From Paul Elie's office at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a small cubicle with a big window looking south from 19 Union Square West in Manhattan, any New Yorker would notice, beyond the tangle of chimney-potted roofscapes, what was not there—the twin towers, which used to stand about two miles away.
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Fall 2002 Flying Starts: Tanuja Desai Hidier
After writing and publishing several connected short stories about first- and second-generation South Asian Americans, Tanuja Desai Hidier, a Brown graduate who has been involved with filmmaking, music and editing as well as writing fiction, felt that her material was growing “too big” for a short story format. She wanted to create a novel about an “ABCD,” an American-born confused Desai, or, more specifically, a South Asian teen caught between two cultures. She also wanted to capture the “exciting multicultural scene occurring in New York City, where she lived after college.
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Fall 2002 Flying Starts: Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson
For Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, finding the right audience was a matter of trial and error. She has written poetry her whole life, but says she was continuously searching for her true voice. "I tried to write short stories for adults, I tried to write picture books and short stories for kids," she recalls. "And the stuff for the adults was too young, and the stuff for the kids was too old."
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Fall 2002 Flying Starts: Heather McCutchen
Don't be surprised to find Heather McCutchen signing her debut novel, LightLand (Scholastic/Orchard), while comfortably attired in her protagonist Lottie's favorite fashion statement: pajamas. Entire schools have held pajama days in honor of her visits. "I love meeting with kids; they're so enthusiastic," McCutchen says. "They really are more fun than adult audiences. I quoted one in the back of my book--one of the first readers out of Norwich, Vt., who said she loved this book 'because it could really happen.' " The child's belief that a magic portal through an expanding "StoryBox" could open to Lightland, a world where an evil NightKing roams and steals memories, thrills the author.
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Fall 2002 Flying Starts: Tim Johnston
As an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, aspiring author Tim Johnston happily availed himself of offerings from the school's prestigious Writers' Workshop. When it came time to pursue a graduate degree, however, "I didn't think of applying there," Johnston says.
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Fall 2002 Flying Starts: Shirin Yim Bridges
Shirin Yim Bridges listened with special interest when her grandmother started to tell her how she dreamed of going to university in an era when most Chinese girls looked forward only to marriage. Bridges was already writing children's books, and she felt her grandmother's tale was full of possibilities. The story of the girl who loved to learn became Ruby's Wish (Chronicle, Sept.).
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Fall 2002 Flying Starts: Ross MacDonald
MacDonald needed Jack's superhuman stamina in his early years, when he began his illustration career in his native Canada. He had moderate success in selling his linocuts and woodcuts to magazines, but he also painted houses to make ends meet. In 1985, he became a full-time illustrator; two years later he moved from Toronto to New York City. Today, he works out of his own printing studio, Brightworks Press, behind his home in Newtown, Conn.
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Fall 2002 Flying Starts
Six first-time authors and illustrators discuss their fall debuts
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Spring 2002 Flying Starts: Kevin Brooks
If you cross two of Kevin Brooks's favorite authors—J.D. Salinger and Raymond Chandler—you might approximate the hardboiled humor of the British author's first novel, Martyn Pig (Scholastic/Chicken House). The eponymous narrator, a hapless and motherless teenager, spends his Christmas vacation coping with the corpse of his alcoholic and abusive father, in a plot that gets thicker (and funnier) with every twist. British and American reviewers have praised the book for its edgy wit and intelligence.
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Spring 2002 Flying Starts: Rachel Cohn
Rachel Cohn remembers how the rich and rebellious narrator of her novel Gingerbread (Simon & Schuster), was born. A friend named Rob Coffman sent her a card he'd drawn: "[It] had a picture of this weird-looking girl on it with a doll trailing from her, and she had these combat boots on," Cohn says. She kept seeing the image during her morning walk through the hills of San Francisco's affluent Pacific Heights neighborhood, and the misfit girl—named Cyd Charisse after the famous actress and dancer—living among the huge houses came alive to her.
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Spring 2002 Flying Starts: Janet Lawson
"Persistence pays off." The adage trips readily off the tongue of author/illustrator Janet Lawson, who shares a spunk and steadfastness with her debut book's character, Audrey. While her young heroine's tenacity pays off in an entertaining adventure to India with her cynical cat, Lawson's has resulted in the publication of her humorous picture book, Audrey and Barbara (Atheneum).
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