As part of my book’s release, I have several juicy tidbits to share. First, I’m excited to say that Publisher’s Weekly just published an article about my research for The Case of the Terrible T. rex. Woo-hoo!!! Click here to read.

Also, in celebration of this momentous occasion, Drake, Nell, and I have developed a book trailer. We invite you to share it with your friends, with teachers, educators, budding scientists, and readers of all ages. If you share it with at least five friends, please let me know. I’ll enter your name in a drawing for a FREE AUTOGRAPHED COPY of The Case of the Terrible T. rex!

Thanks so much to all you Doyle and Fossey fans!!

– Michele

Click here to download the classroom guide.

“Accessible, understandable, and hilarious science for the youngest problem solvers.” — Kirkus Reviews

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!

Signed TMAS books!

TMAS t-shirts!

Fan-made bracelets by Hannah S!

Music that inspired the book!

Sneak Previews!

Bookmarks and Handmade Magnets!

and…

A Tell Me a Secret handmade necklace made by Gypsy Wings!

HOW TO WIN? Share the Trailer Love!

1. Click here to go to YouTube, then click the Share button to send to your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or blog! 5 pts each

2. Click here to tell us where you posted and enter to win!

Plus Holly will be featured at readergirlz for the entire month of August, with a live Twitter chat coming up! Hope you enjoy the trailer, and thank you so much for being part of the virtual tour and party!

Ten-year-old Liam gives fossil-hunting a try.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure whether I’d like squatting in the dirt all day long under the hot Montana sun, chipping away at dirt or at a rock wall with my dino-hammer. PaleoWorld warned me when I signed up: “This is not a tour.” They weren’t kidding. If one doesn’t like heat, bugs, dirt, thundershowers, squatting, sitting on rocks, or hammering until your arm falls off, then maybe a visit to an air-conditioned dinosaur museum would be a better choice.

Some people didn’t tolerate it too well; after five minutes of chip-chip-chipping with the ol’ sweat drip-drip-dripping, they’d sit and yak with their neighbor, or check their watch to see if it was lunchtime yet. Not me, man. Turns out, fossil-hunter blood flows through my veins. I was content to dig for eight hours a day, heat or not, fueled by the anticipation of discovery.

Violators have been warned!

At first, the discoveries were modest: croc teeth and croc skin (called scute), dino dung (coprolite), small therapod teeth, mini-vertebrae, fish scales, weathered fossil bone, hadrosaur teeth, tortoise shell, and pieces of triceritops frill. But then came the day when we went to one of Jessica’s must-watch microsites.

Now Jessica Martin is PaleoWorld’s intrepid, ever-patient paleontologist and field leader. For the past three years, she had been dutifully keeping an eye on this area as it was sloughing off large pieces of rib bone. Three times a year she scouted the area, looking for the source — the dinosaur embedded in a sedimentary layer, eroding off bits of bone as it gradually became exposed and weathered. . . .

So on this day, while prospecting, I spotted a bone sticking out of a hillside and sounded the dinosaur-call. Jessica hurried over to the spot and, while clinging to the side of the hill, announced that it was, indeed, fossil bone. She called for her tools. The excitement was palpable. Would the bone continue into the hillside, or was it just a little piece temporarily embedded in the surface on its gravitational journey to the bottom? Jessica chipped away at the hillside while I stood alongside. At 10 inches the bone was still going strong. At 14 inches, still going. Finally, at a whopping 20 inches, the bone came to its natural end. Ecstatic and anticipating a soon-to-be-completely-exposed dinosaur, we named our discovery, Judy.  We even held a little Judy-celebration party which consisted of big smiles, plenty of woo-hoos, and the dancing of jigs. (Although identification is not yet absolute, we believe the bone to belong to a carnivore. A BIG carnivore!)

The next day, which was to be my final day, we precariously dove back into the hillside with our rock hammers and excitement, officially creating site #4 for PaleoWorld. Seven of us chipped and hammered away until the opening was so large we could stand in it. In the course of the day we uncovered a perfectly preserved tooth belonging, again, to a BIG carnivore! Possibly and hopefully, the same one! It was a thrilling end to what, I hope, is only the beginning. . . . I’ll keep tabs on the team and on “Judy” through their daily logs at www.paleoworld.org (click “2010 Field Investigation” in the upper left corner).

Not all treasures are millions of years old!

Dino-hunters come in all sizes and ages

Hannah preps a fossil for removal from the field

This happened most recently while researching my book, The Case of the Terrible T. rex, book six in my Doyle and Fossey, Science Detectives mysteries series. I was neck-deep researching paleontology, including compiling a list of museums of natural history, and places where kids could go on summer dinosaur digs. As I investigated the dino-digs, I thought, I want to do that . . .

So here I am on the Levrick Homestead, thirty miles north of Jordan, Montana. Which is to say, in the middle of nowhere. This morning I packed sunglasses, sunblock, water bottle, TP, rain gear, camera and video equipment and headed off with a team of paleontologists, students, and amateur bone diggers like myself. In good spirits, we bumped our way along rutted tracks into the far north of Hell Creek basin, where some of the finest dinosaur fossils have been discovered, including the first Tyrannosaurus rex ever found in the world. (Prior to that, we never knew T. rexes existed!)

With picks in hand, we went to work on one of the excavation sites. For a while it was nothing but the soft thuds of our picks. As our intrepid leader, Jessica says, “There’s something about the sound of picks hammering in the early morning.” It’s a musical melody that rings of adventure. You never know what you will find . . .

Every now and then someone would stop and say, “I think I found something.” Sometimes it was nothing more than a rock. Sometimes a rather nondescript fossilized bone. But throughout the day, covered with dust as the Montana sun bore down on us, we unearthed mini-treasures millions of years old: fish scales, a rib bone, a toe bone, turtle shell, dinosaur teeth and dinosaur dung. . . .

I’ll be here for the next seven days. I’ll try to blog, but I’ll admit, I’m pretty wiped by the time we get back to camp. (Plus the Internet is touch-and-go.) In the meantime, I’ll keep playing that musical melody– discovering history, and having an adventure of a lifetime.

Holly is a long-time acquaintance from SCBWI (Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators). I frequently saw her at our local chapter meetings “way back when,” learning the craft of writing, immersing herself in language and story. It’s a joy and a privilege to see her perseverance come to fruition. Congratulations, and thanks for joining us, Holly! 

How did you get started in writing? Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

First of all, thank you, Michele, for inviting me to visit your blog!

I think my first documented instance of fiction (the first my mom saved, anyways), was from circa first grade—a donut goes on a voyage, strolling down Candy Street, Pizza Street…you see what captured my attention back then. The stories continued, culminating in two teen romance novels in eighth grade. This was before I actually experienced teen romance. Afterward, I wrote some achingly forlorn poetry and short stories.

In college, I thought I wanted to write for adults so I studied literature. When I was just about to go on for my PhD and a teaching job, I realized I had abandoned my love of writing—and specifically, writing for a younger audience. So I joined SCBWI, took some classes and formed a critique group, and spent some years learning the craft.

What was your inspiration for TELL ME A SECRET?

I thought I wanted to write and illustrate picture books—I had this (I kid you not) 1,600 word epic rhyming picture book about the sun, moon, and stars. I still can’t believe they didn’t kick me out of SCBWI for that. But even though I wasn’t getting to the heart of anything meaningful, I value those years for teaching me how to write.

The story had to come from something much harder—first, the loss of a dear friend’s older sister, followed by the loss of our first child at birth. I almost gave up right there, but some very encouraging friends wouldn’t let me. TELL ME A SECRET fell out of the sky as a fully formed idea. I knew it was the book I was supposed to write, I just had to find the courage.

Miranda’s story isn’t mine, but much of her emotional journey came from the path I walked. I originally meant for the story to end differently, but it didn’t turn out that way—both stories finished with far more hope. (Our second little one just turned five!)

TELL ME A SECRET is your first novel for young adults. Describe the moment you first learned that the book had sold.

I was just about to catch a flight to the SCBWI conference in L.A., 2008! My agent sold it to the editor of my dreams, one I didn’t even dare hope would love my novel, in a two-book pre-empt. So I’m pretty sure I didn’t get on a plane. I flew myself, on a cloud of bliss.

Who inspires you?

My friends, my family, my memories, the world. I’m no longer afraid to write the things that are meaningful to me, which has freed me on so many levels. The next book is about a suburban girl who runs away to the streets of Seattle, leaving secrets in her wake. It’s gritty and romantic, and it’s about what it means to love. Slated for Fall 2011!

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Classes and books and friends can teach you how to write—living can teach you the story. It’s a slow process, like a bud opening. Be patient and gentle with your writing self—and wrestle her to the ground when necessary.

Thank you again, Michele!

(Join Holly online at www.hollycupala.com and www.TellMeASecretNovel.com. On June 22, she’s having a virtual party on her blog with giveaways, quizzes, food, and “all kinds of craziness.” Sounds fun, Holly!)

As writers, it’s our job to draw the reader in, to make them care enough to keep turning the pages. One of the tricks-of-the-trade is to ask a story question. Story questions are statements that beg answering, situations that must resolve. Story questions can be monumental or minuscule and are woven throughout a story from beginning to end. When a story question is posed at the beginning of a book, it is called a hook. In general, hooks should occur within the first few sentences of the beginning of a story. Here are three examples of hooks (all first sentences):

• “The morning the wagon came to take Monette away, the air was biting crisp and a sheen of frost covered the canefields.” — The Dreaming by Michele Torrey (manuscript) (The hook: Why is a wagon coming to take Monette away, and where is it going to take her?)
• “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” – To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (The hook: How did Jem break his arm?)
• “It was almost December and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.” — The Giver by Lois Lowry (The hook: Why is Jonas beginning to be frightened?)

If you think about it, the word “hook” describes the art perfectly. We “hook” the reader; we cast a line baited with some yummy curiosity, a juicy worm that will pull the reader along, sometimes mercilessly. . . . They want to know the answer, they must know the answer. . . . Some story questions are quickly resolved, and rightly so. It would be a gross misuse of pacing to wait the entire novel to find out why the wagon is coming to take Monette away. As the story questions are resolved, you must introduce new story questions to take their place. Yet other story questions aren’t resolved so quickly, and some carry through the entire book. Jonas in The Giver only gradually begins to realize the extent and reason for his fear. It isn’t until the end of To Kill a Mockingbird that we discover why Jem broke his arm.

Now, compare the above examples with story openings that lack a story question:

• The yard was freshly mowed and the smell of baked bread wafted from the open window.
• Bored, Jeremy sat down to play with his toy soldiers.

These hook-less examples wouldn’t entice anyone. So unless you have a hook coming in the next sentence or two, or at least by the end of the first page, folks like me will likely put your book down and continue the hunt. After all, folks like me want juicy worms.

If you’re feeling some literary friskiness, try your hand at writing some hooks with these exercises:

1. Write a one-sentence “hook”

Examples:

“As soon as his mother arrived home, Jack knew he was in trouble.”

“Cassie knew the lump under the carpet was alive.”

2. Write a story opener with a hook

Example:

“It was an old photo, wrinkly-yellow, thumb-printy and dog-eared. Melanie traced Grandpa’s outline with a finger. Tears welled. If only I’d listened, she told herself, angry as on the day she’d thrown Mama’s best dish on the floor where it slammed and splintered, slivers under her slippers for weeks. If only I’d listened. He’d told me where to find the map, but I was too busy. And now it was too late. Grandpa was gone. All Melanie had left was her shoebox, stuffed with a few old photographs, a dried pansy, and a piece of fishing line. Not even a roof over her head. . . .”

Feel free to post your hooks. Most of all, have fun! Until next week . . .

If even the pros fall prey to such yawningly slow beginnings, how much more susceptible is the novice writer? Very, as it turns out. Often novice writers begin their stories thinking that they have to tell us everything up front in order for us to understand what’s going on. I’ve read middle grade manuscripts in which twenty or more characters are introduced in the first chapter alone, not because those characters were necessary to the chapter, mind you, but because the writer was under a “can’t-leave-anything-out” evil spell. The irony is, these tell-all openings are less intelligible than if the writer used a “need-to-know” approach.

So where should you begin your story? The general rule of thumb is to begin your story at the moment your character experiences a dramatic life change:

• On the day the girl’s father mysteriously disappears.
• On the day the high school valedictorian opens the letter from Harvard, declining him admittance.
• On the morning of the fire.

You would be surprised at how little information is really needed before the story is off and running. The Newbery Honor book, HATCHET, by Gary Paulsen, makes a great example. Chapter one opens with the teen character, Brian, the sole passenger aboard a single engine plane bound out of New York. Already we know something unusual is happening. Where is Brian going and why? Soon we discover his parents have divorced; it was messy and there is a secret involved. Paulsen doesn’t divulge the secret, because keeping secrets creates suspense. So we keep reading . . . We soon learn that Brian is headed to his father’s home in Canada for the summer. We’re flying over northern Canada now and, even if we hadn’t read the back cover, we have a gnawing sense that something bad is about to happen . . . Paulsen uses the escalating suspense as an opportunity to feed us tidbits of information. When we have enough information to understand Brian’s situation, the endless custody battles, to feel sympathy for Brian as a character, sure enough, the pilot has a heart attack and we are, henceforth, riveted . . . in it together. We crash-land in a freezing cold lake with a dead pilot beside us. It’s a fight for survival and no one knows we’re here . . .

Note that Paulsen begins the story on the day everything changes for Brian — the day the plane crashes, leaving him stranded in the wilderness. Note also that Paulsen frames his beginning– who his character is, why we need to care about the character, what the character is doing and why — within the context of a scene. We learn all this while Brian is flying, while a cold certainty comes over us that something bad is about to happen. Present scene, overlayed with backstory, creates a perfect balance for a perfect beginning. Once the plane has crashed, Paulsen continues to weave backstory into the present survival story.

Now, just so we’re clear, the beginning didn’t have to work this way. Paulsen could have thrown you immediately into the action: the plane crashes. The challenge for Paulsen would then become how to introduce Brian and make us care. It can be done, but it’s tough. Or, Paulsen could have had just the plane ride, followed by the crash, followed by the backstory. All or nothing: action / inaction. The challenge for Paulsen would then be to avoid stupification. To pace the story appropriately so that it had a compelling balance of action, thoughts, dialogue, and narration. So while the beginning didn’t have to begin the way it did, it was nevertheless perfectly written, a suspenseful scene interwoven with need-to-know info, all quickly leading to the one event that changes Brian’s life forever.

Hope that was helpful. Let me know if there are other beginnings you admire.

Next week? Story questions and hooks. Stay tuned . . .

In her Pulitzer prize-winning book, MARCH, author Geraldine Brooks writes from the perspective of Mr. March. She bases his absent character upon what is known of Louisa May Alcott’s actual father. (LITTLE WOMEN is based upon Ms. Alcott’s family life, Louisa May being the impetuous, aspiring writer, “Jo”.) While MARCH is slow to start and seems to initially flounder about without a sense of direction, it soon sharpens into a compelling, focused narrative. Mr. March’s abolitionist idealism is juxtaposed against the realities of slavery and the depredations of war, an idealism which eventually costs Mr. March his innocence. Ultimately, it is a story of love and war, betrayal and heartbreak. The imaginative, heart-felt story, the poetic language and rich tapestry of setting, make MARCH a classic in its own right.

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