I’m pleased to have one of my colleagues, author David Patneaude, as a guest on my blog. The first time I met David was in the mid- to late-nineties, when we were both just beginning our literary careers. Along with another YA author, we showed up for a book talk at Elliot Bay bookstore in downtown Seattle. The three of us milled around nervously, waiting for the throngs of fans to arrive. Alas, like so many painful, early booksignings, no one came. We blamed it on the hot summer day . . . of course, no one in their right mind would go to a book talk on a hot summer day. From that day forward, though, David and I have forged a nice writerly relationship. I respect David, not only for his kindness, but for his thoughtful, meaningful books that touch on deeper issues. David’s most recent book, EPITAPH ROAD, was released earlier this year.

1. The premise in Epitaph Road is intriguing, to say the least. How did you come up with your idea?

It definitely wasn’t an overnight process. Like all of my stories, it evolved out of a spark of an idea. A lot of thinking, a lot of false starts, a lot of backtracking, a lot of writing, and more than a lot of revision. I think the spark came from asking myself that old What if? question, and this time the question was, What if women were in charge—not just a few here and there trying to out-macho men, but really in charge? How would that happen? And what would things be like? So what prompted that What if? in the first place? Disappointment, I guess. And frustration. And embarrassment. All generated by the way the world is being run and has been run over the past few thousand years. And who has been running the world all that time? Men. What if they were no longer a factor?

2. Though Epitaph Road is set in the future, it seems that it would have required an enormous amount of research. Did you find the research more difficult or time consuming than you had first anticipated?

I think I went into it a bit blindly, driven by the story and characters, convinced that I knew a lot and could fake the rest. Neither of those turned out to be true, of course. I knew a little and decided that faking it wasn’t really an option if I wanted to do the story justice and give it that old verisimilitude thing. So research, especially during the revision process (even after I got into the process with my editor at Egmont), became a big part of what I was doing. We can’t know what the world will look like ninety years from now, naturally, but we can look at the past and present and extrapolate and make educated guesses. I did a lot of that. And there are experts who make predictions about stuff like population growth and future numbers. The Internet gives you easy access to those kinds of statistics. Studying the past was fun. My trips into the past for information for some of my other books (THIN WOOD WALLS, in particular) have given me an appreciation and fondness for history I never believed I would have. What I don’t appreciate is that those guys running things seem to have no ability to learn from the past.

3. What was your biggest challenge in writing Epitaph Road?

I’ve heard this before, and it turned out to be true for me. When you’re writing anything set in an era unfamiliar to the reader, your biggest job is to build the world they’re entering. I think this is especially true of speculative fiction set a significant period into the future, especially a post-apocalyptic future. Very little remains the same. A good deal of time has to be spent building the framework for this future place in the reader’s mind. How much? That’s the tricky part. Overkill isn’t good. You have to decide when to let the reader’s imagination take over. You have to trust the reader.

4. What is your favorite book you’ve written and why?

I get that question a lot, and I can honestly say that I always have a hard time coming up with an answer. I mostly tell people it’s like trying to choose your favorite kid. I like to leave that “favorite” thing up to my readers, and they vary a bunch on what they think my best book is. If really pressed, I can usually narrow it down to a few favorites. SOMEONE WAS WATCHING was the first, so I have a warm spot in my heart for that story. It had been rejected a number of times when Kathy Tucker at Albert Whitman picked it out of the slush pile and decided that it deserved to be published. By then I was having my doubts, but I wasn’t about to give up. Seventeen years later it’s still going strong. It’s been published in several European countries, recorded as an audio book, won state awards, been nominated for a bunch of others, and made into a movie. I still remember the thrill of going into a bookstore and seeing it on a shelf the first time. Other titles that stand out in my mind for one reason or another: HAUNTING AT HOME PLATE, THIN WOOD WALLS, and this new one, EPITAPH ROAD.

5. What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

There’s no magic. There’s no shortcut. I’ve often wished for one or both of those, but when it comes to writing, the process is much more boring and ponderous. My first piece of advice seems obvious, but believe it or not, some people I’ve talked to ignore it. The advice? WRITE! Write something every day. Write poetry. Write an essay. Write a story, especially the kind of story that interests you (not whatever happens to be “hot” right now). Writing is like shooting a basketball or playing a violin or dancing. You don’t get better by thinking about it. When I got the idea for SOMEONE WAS WATCHING, I still had my day job and two little kids at home and a real shortage of time. But I was riding the bus back and forth to work, and I figured if I could sit in the back of the bus where it was nice and quiet and write a page a day, at the end of a year I’d have a novel. And that’s what happened. The next piece of advice is to learn to love revision. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve learned that first, second, or third drafts don’t get published. They’re called “rough” for a reason. Get that rough draft down there and then get to your real work: making your manuscript better than those thousands of others you’ll be competing with when you finally send it to a publisher. Next piece: READ! I’m surprised by the number of would-be writers of children’s fiction who haven’t read a children’s book since they were children. Things have changed. You have to be aware of what’s being done and who is publishing what. Besides, many “kid’s” books are better than most of what’s being written for adults. You’ll enjoy them! Final piece: PERSEVERE! I think every one of my books has been rejected in one fashion or another. I didn’t give up. J. K. Rowling didn’t give up. It’s been said that Dr. Seuss’s first book was rejected 28 times. What if he’d given up after ten or twenty? How many hopeful but not so persistent writers are there out there who have written something so good it would make you laugh out loud or shed tears or stay awake all night reading or thinking, but what they wrote never got published? We never got to see it. We’ll never get to see it. Someone rejected their manuscript, and they gave up. Don’t give up!

You can learn more about David and his books at www.davidpatneaude.com. Thanks, David!