In September I will have my third book out in the world and as I write those words there is a HUGE part of me that has difficulty believing it. Seems like it wasn’t that long ago that I was trying to get an agent and amassing a massive pile of rejections.
MAPMAKER was a book I started working on several years ago. Initially it was titled Three Wishes because I have had such a long fascination with wish-making and what I would wish for if ever given the opportunity and how I would phrase the wish exactly right so that it wouldn’t go wrong…even though we all know that wishes ALWAYS go wrong. But when I created Walt, from the very beginning he was a map-loving boy, and I imagined his first wish would of course be to go to a world he created. And suddenly the idea of drawing a world that then actually exists took over my brain.
Maybe because the idea of “escape” was big with me. I was a kid who dreamed of escaping my usually humdrum but sometimes difficult life in order to inhabit the world I found in books. I spent a LOT of time imagining elsewhere. What if? What if? I wondered it even as I knew with absolute certainty that if I ever did get transported to one of my favorite stories, things wouldn’t go well. I’d be eaten by an ogre or forever lost jumping to the island of Conclusions.
But perhaps the most significant thing about this book is that I knew it contained a story. I knew I had to chisel away at a whole bunch of other stuff to find that story, but it is the first pages I wrote where some young readers got really excited and said they loved what they read, and an editor thought the beginning showed I had the “stuff” to get published. I knew that if I could just get it “right,” it was the book that would finally land me an agent and a book deal. Ironically, it wasn’t. A Good Kind of Trouble was the right book at the right time and became my debut, but I never gave up on the book that ceased to be about wishes and transformed into a book about belonging, and home, and inner strength, and family and friendship and magic.
I have no idea how the book will be received. But I know I love the story as much as I always have and I am so eager for folks to come along for the ride.