The long view of how "Portents" started goes all the way back to when our children, Christopher and Alexandra were very young. I started reading chapter books to them when they were very young, beginning with Harry Potter. We then read C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, Lemony Snickett, Madeliene L'Engle's time trilogy... we even took 9 long months and read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in their entirety aloud. They were steeped in good books and good fantasy. Meanwhile, my son, like his father, found himself drawn to library books about the mysterious, unprovable phenomenon in the world... Bigfoot, UFOs, Nessy, etc. He read up on them from the Freedom Elementary media center.
The long view goes back to a walk the three of us took several months ago. The subject of Roswell came up, and Alex asked what it was. Christopher explained, and I think I said something along the lines of, "Wouldn't it be cool to write a story that took all those things like Roswell and Area 51 and Bigfoot and Nessie, and combined them into one big, coherent plotline? And that was how it started...
More later.
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Thanks David!
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of collaborating with my kids (my 10-year-old daughter at the moment...) on a project like this. We are both still reading your book (I was going to read it to her, but she keeps getting impatient and getting ahead of me, and I refuse to read ahead of where I've stopped, etc.)
I'd be particularly interested to know the mechanics of the co-writing process (Do you edit each others' work? How do you resolve creative differences?); as well as the publishing angle... why lulu? Did you shop this with traditional publishers first? Does it help that you have previously published in this genre?
I look forward to reading more about it... Keep up the good work!