Author Bio:
Jennifer L. Gadd is the author of The Were-Children series. The first book in the series, Cat Moon, will be published by Distinguished Press in late summer of 2015. Gadd is also a middle school reading interventionist at an urban school in Kansas City, Kansas.
What inspires you to write?
My students inspire me to write, more than anything else. I write stories I hope they want to read. For my struggling readers, I also write things they *can* read and enjoy, things that help them increase their skills so they go on and read other things that interest them. It has never occurred to me to write a novel for adults. I write for my students.
Tell us about your writing process.
With the first novel in my series, I had a rough outline. It was mostly in my head, but I jotted notes down on paper. The links and connections between scenes and the overall themes were pretty much pants-ed though. I don’t know what the magic is that connects things, but it’s real. So many accidents of serendipity in a work. I just smile and say, “Yeah, I *meant* to do that!” No, I didn’t. It was a total accident, but I’ll take it. Once it was down, I edited and edited and edited. I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. I tell my students all the time that if anybody ever told them writing was easy, they were lying. When my kiddos struggle with writing, the first thing I do is acknowledge that it’s hard work. Because it is. Once the manuscript was to the point where I wasn’t embarrassed to show it to anyone, I had some friends read it. Some of them were adults, and some were kids. After receiving feedback, I rewrote and edited some more.
The second novel took a different approach. Several years had gone by, and it still wasn’t written. I just couldn’t get started. So in late October of this year, I decided to do NaNoWriMo for the first time. And I completely and totally pants-ed it. The result is probably the roughest draft I’ve ever written. It’s scrambled and out of order and kind of a train wreck. But, it’s 160 pages of a story that wasn’t on paper before. My plan is to get a pad of sticky notes and list each scene I have written, and then to put the sticky notes on a wall so I can rearrange them. I’ll have to cut and past into a new document, I think. No idea how that’s going to work. I’ll have to get back to you on that!
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
Oh, I absolutely talk to and listen to my characters! How would I know what they’re thinking and doing, otherwise? One of the problems with the second book was that I kept waiting on the character I thought would be the protagonist to tell me the story, and he couldn’t. Once I got going in NaNoWriMo, I realized the protagonist was a completely different character. Once I started listening to her, the story was all right there.
Who are your favorite authors?
My all-time favorite is F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby is simply the best novel ever written. I love Victorian literature: Charles Dickens and George Eliot, especially. I adore Jane Austen. My favorite contemporary authors are mostly YA writers: Rick Riordan, J.K. Rowling, Eion Colfer, Margaret Peterson Haddix, and Joan Bauer. I also love cozy and historical murder mysteries; Agatha Christie, Kathy Lynn Emerson, Candace Robb, Anne Perry, Ellis Peters, Sharyn McCrumb, and Katherine Hall Page are among my favorites.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
Can we be real for a minute? I have a drawer stuffed full of rejection slips. When Distinguished Press “starred” my #SFFpit tweet, I checked them out for being a vanity press or a scam, which they are not, and then I just went for it. When they accepted the manuscript, I didn’t even think twice. I printed out the letter accepting the novel and laid it on top of all those rejection slips and shut the drawer. You have to have a very thick skin to keep sending out queries to agents and publishers. It can be brutal and disheartening and make you want to give up. I think modern technology is going to be changing to face of publishing forever, and in mostly good ways. But that’s the next question, isn’t it?
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
I think it’s changing. I don’t have the crystal ball that tells me how, but it’s changing. There are so many independent presses popping up and accepting manuscripts that mainstream publishers won’t touch. Self-publishing is also forcing changes as people bypass both agents and publishers altogether. Right now, there’s still an elitist attitude about what constitutes “real” publishing, but the genie’s out of the bottle on this, and the bigwigs are definitely going to be feeling it before long.
I think there’s a lot of good that will come out of this. It will break the cycle of having to be published before getting an agent, but needing an agent to get published. It will mean that books that will never be best-sellers will still reach readers. All those things are amazing and wonderful. What it also means is that there’s a lot of awful stuff out there being published: works with poor grammar and spelling, works with terrible plot lines and characterizations, works with stilted dialog, works with typos. There’s a bit of buyer-beware with an open publishing market. All in all, though, I think the changes will be positive.
What genres do you write?
YA fantasy, YA science fiction, mythology, hi-lo readers, historical fiction
What formats are your books in?
Both eBook and Print
Website(s)
Jennifer L. Gadd Home Page Link
