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The Kid in the Nehru Jacket

Posted on by Diane Zahler

Eight years ago, I wrote this post for author Heidi Schultz’s blog series HEY KID! You can see the original and the rest of the series here.

 

Hey, Kid!

It’s me — future you. No, time travel isn’t happening yet. And I haven’t figured out Mrs. Whatsit’s tesseract. But I don’t need it. I can still look back and see you as if it were yesterday.

I can see you in fourth and fifth grade reading all the different-colored Andrew Lang fairy tale books, and C.S. Lewis, and Edward Eager, and wishing so hard for magic to happen that it almost hurts. You wish on coins, on four-leaf clovers. You push your way to the back of every wardrobe, hoping to come out in Narnia.

Hey Kid Zahler6thgradephoto

I can see you hiding under the piano in the hallway outside your sixth grade classroom while the boys in the class make fun of you. You’re overweight, and they’re despicable. How do they come up with those awful nicknames? But you don’t cry. They never see you cry.

I can see you huddled in the corner of the schoolyard at the alternative junior high, writing in your notebook. You really, really want to be Harriet the Spy. The notebook defends you from what the other kids might be saying or thinking. You could be writing anything; they all wonder about it. It’s your shield.

I can see you reading and re-reading all your favorite books, even when your parents shake their heads in bewilderment, wondering why anyone would want to read a book twice when there are so many books to read. But you love them so much – Betsy, Tacy, and Tib; Harriet; Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter; all of All-of-a-Kind Family; the Melendys; Meg and Charles Wallace; Ged the wizard; Claudia and Jamie. They’re your friends when real kids aren’t. Why wouldn’t you want to visit them over and over?

I can see you at the library every Friday night with your family. Your dad toting a big box of books to return, you and your brother and sister filling it up again with the new books for the week. Everyone in your family reads at every meal. You won’t even realize it’s weird until the first time you have a friend over for dinner, in seventh grade, and when you all sit down at the table with a book she just stares, her mouth open.

I can see you lonely and lost, and I’m sorry that you can’t see me. Because here’s the thing: that loneliness, that lostness – it all has a purpose. Your longing for magic leads you to invent your own magic worlds. You endure the bullies, and you figure out how to be brave and persistent. You watch people and write about them, and you begin to understand how to create a character. Your love of the library starts you on the path to what you – what I – do now. Because you hang out in the children’s room so much, you’ll wind up working there, all through high school and college. You’ll realize that you want children’s books to be your life. You’ll work in children’s publishing for a while, and then you’ll start writing yourself.

It’ll take you a long time – a REALLY long time – to get your first children’s novel published. You’ll get more rejections than you can count. You could probably paper a whole room with them. Or a whole houseful of rooms. But you learn, wishing on coins, hiding under the piano, sitting in the corner of the schoolyard, reading at the dining room table, working in the library, that children’s books are what you love, and that patience and persistence will get you where you want to be.

So listen, kid, don’t give up. Remember the feelings. Write it all down. And keep pushing to the back of every wardrobe. Narnia might not look quite the way you imagined, but you’ll get there.

Love,
Future Diane

p.s. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I can also see, from the future, that your Nehru jacket is a TERRIBLE mistake.

Sic itur ad astra

Posted on by Diane Zahler

I had never had a starred review. Many of my reviews were wonderful (even Kirkus reviews, except for that really mean one). Positive. A few were almost rhapsodic. But not so much starred. So I had a thing in my head, that I wanted a starred review. That was my end-all and be-all. I was quite sure it was never happening.

To non-writers, this probably seems bizarre. What’s a starred review? you ask. Well, In the main children’s book review journals — Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, School Library Journal, Booklist, Horn Book — a star means a book is something special. Libraries and bookstores are much more likely to order starred books. It makes a difference, though many, many deserving titles don’t get stars.

And then, a month or so ago, Publishers Weekly gave WILD BIRD a starred review! It was…well, I guess I don’t quite have a word. Awesome is dumb. Amazing is overused. Startling, astonishing, staggering, stupefying. All of that.

And then a few days later, School Library Journal gave GOBLIN MARKET a starred review. Overwhelming. Shattering. Staggering. All of that.

And then, a week or so later, School Library Journal gave WILD BIRD a starred review! Astonishing, etc. Three stars in a month. After twelve years with none.

Does this actually mean anything? Has my writing improved? Or is it a longevity thing, a sort of Oscar or Rock & Roll Hall of Fame lifetime achievement award?

I prefer to think I’ve gotten better over time. Like a fine wine, or a smelly cheese. After this, maybe I’ll turn to vinegar, or develop mold. Or just fade away. Whatever. Still, I got what I wanted — more than I wanted — and not many writers are lucky enough to be able to say that.

 

Wild Bird Takes Off

Posted on by Diane Zahler

It’s been an astounding few weeks for Wild Bird!

The book has gotten blurbs from some of the best writers in middle-grade fiction: Laurel Snyder, Karen Cushman, and Donna Jo Napoli. The wonderful things these authors have said include:

“Exciting, touching, and compelling, Wild Bird celebrates the important things in life: courage, persistence, friendship, and love. It’s something special. Don’t miss it” — from Karen Cushman.

“The Sickness of Europe in the 1300s rings relevant to today’s readers, as we travel with an orphaned girl through so many losses, and witness her transform them to comfort, joy, even laughter through the truth of song. A quick-paced treasure” — from Donna Jo Napoli.

“I came away from this powerful book with tears in my eyes and a little more hope for the future. A deeply moving tribute to the power of art and memory” — from Laurel Snyder.

I was utterly floored by these reactions to a book that means so much to me.

And Wild Bird has been chosen as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection!

Then yesterday, I learned that Wild Bird got a starred review from Publishers Weekly. This is my very first starred review. EVER. I could hardly believe it. The reviewer wrote:

“Zahler unflinchingly depicts a world in chaos due to disease, drawing contemporary parallels and thoughtfully highlighting issues of power structures, collective trauma, and remembrance.”

Wow.

A Long Silence

Posted on by Diane Zahler

It’s hard to write about writing when the world is falling to pieces.

There’s a pandemic. There’s a war. We’ve even been visited here by a third Horseman, Pestilence, who gifted us with a grotesque infestation of spongy moth caterpillars that dangle from trees and leave welts on the skin of the unsuspecting.

 

 

 

 

We’ve lost so much:

Time

Money

Trust

Family, friends, loved ones.

 

But writing has been an escape for me, as I’m sure it is for a lot of writers. And I’ve kept on doing it, because — well, what else can one do?

My book Goblin Market will be published in August. I’ve seen an ARC, and the cover is beautiful. There’s interior art, which I love. It’s all very Polish, because my version of the story takes place in a fantastical version of Poland — for no real reason except that I visited there and was fascinated by it, and that it has storks, which are fabulous, and that it has a long history of goblin stories.

Wild Bird, my novel about the bubonic plague, is also moving right along. Another gorgeous cover, more lovely interior art, even a map. I do love a good map.

And Daughter of the White Rose will be published in paperback in August!

 

So life goes on, regardless. I hope you are well. But if it’s all too much, then another reality — an invented reality — might help.  Open a book. Take yourself out of the here and now. Exist somewhere, sometime different for a while.

 

You deserve it.

Zooming Around with Books

Posted on by Diane Zahler

I’m in Maine right now, enjoying the lake and the lobster and an astonishing crop of mushrooms (it’s been a little damp) and not enjoying the mosquitoes and the deerflies. But before I left, I was invited to be part of two online forums to publicize Daughter of the White Rose. The first was hosted by my beloved local bookstore, Oblong Books and Music, to celebrate the launch of middle-grade author Alysa Wishingrad’s fabulous new novel, The Verdigris Pawn. My agent Jennifer Laughran moderated as authors Rebecca Ansari (The In-Between), Heather Kassner (The Bone Garden) and I talked with Alysa about our books, our writing process (or lack thereof), and our lives as writers. After spending over a year in near-isolation, it was strange and wonderful to connect with people who weren’t close relatives (and challenging to speak in full sentences). You can view the whole video here (and yes, I know my lighting was terrible! But I improved it for the next event.)

 

The second was a Zoom session hosted by Symphony Space/Thalia Kids Book Club Camp, which has a book club for young readers that features an amazing assortment of renowned middle-grade authors. I was honored — and more than a little terrified — to be part of such company. I think it went well,  though — the kids were all really engaged, their questions were thought-provoking, and their responses to the writing activity I gave them were wildly imaginative. There’s a blog about the event here.

 

I know that a lot of people find Zoom events distancing and difficult, but I’m way more comfortable sitting in my writing nook in a comfy chair talking to a screen than standing in front of a group talking to their actual faces. I have a feeling I’m not the only one — many writers tend to be solitary, introverted types who perspire profusely when speaking to real people. Right? Or is it just me?

Cool and calm on Zoom
Perspiring in public

Wild Bird Builds a Nest

Posted on by Diane Zahler

I wrote Wild Bird before Covid-19 hit. Really I did.

I’ve been kind of obsessed with the bubonic plague since I was in high school. I wrote my first research paper on it. I’ve written an entire nonfiction book about it. There’s something about the combination of the time period — the Middle Ages — and the event itself — a disaster that wiped out at least a third of the population of Europe and truly changed the course of history — that has gripped me for decades.

So a couple of years ago, I started writing a middle-grade novel about the bubonic plague. It was inspired by a story I came across while researching the nonfiction book, in which shipful of sailors found a Norwegian village where everyone had died of plague — everyone but one young girl. That girl became my main character.

When Covid hit last year, I was nearly finished with the manuscript. I got very nervous (I mean, about the book. I was already nervous about the disease, and about everything else. Everyone was. This was just a little extra nervousness).  I wondered: Would anybody want to publish a book about a plague during a plague?

Well, it turns out the answer is yes. Much to my delight, my brilliant agent sent the manuscript to exactly the right editor. She fell in love with the book, and Roaring Brook Press will publish it in 2023!

And with luck and science (neither of which they had in 1350) our current plague will be only a memory by the time Wild Bird flies into bookstores and libraries.

 

 

Daughter of the White Rose Sees the Light of Day

Posted on by Diane Zahler

February 16th was Daughter of the White Rose‘s book birthday!

It’s my first historical novel — and actually, one of the first novels I ever wrote. When I completed the earliest version of the book, it included flashbacks (now gone), a third-person narrator (now first-person), a prologue (gone, gone), a different title, and a different ending. Also, it was really pretty bad.

It took decades to whip the story into shape.  As I revised it or let it languish on a hard drive, I had a son — and he grew up. I moved twice. I lost both my parents. I found a fabulous agent. I had six other novels published. I despaired about getting this one published, and I figured out how to deal with the despair. I’m not suggesting that any writer should purposely take this long to publish a novel, but my experiences did, I think, enrich my writing, both directly and indirectly.

I love this book now, for so many reasons: its subject (Wars of the Roses! Imprisoned princes! a brave girl facing terrible danger!); the things it taught me about writing and revising; the opportunity it gave my husband at long last to say I told you so; the fact that it’s been a constant throughout my publishing life that I’ve returned to again and again, improving it, or so I hope, with each rewrite.

I’m excited to see how Daughter of the White Rose does out there in the world and how readers react to it. If you’d like to be one of those readers, you can buy copies here, or you can go to YA Books Central and try to win a copy in their giveaway (and also read an interview with me about the book). And please let me know if you liked it!

Goblin Market!

Posted on by Diane Zahler

It’s been a long, strange year.

But I’ve been writing, and I have some news to announce: my new middle-grade fantasy novel, Goblin Market, has been accepted for publication by Holiday House! I’m thrilled to be putting out another book with this wonderful publishing house (Daughter of the White Rose — see the cover on the left — comes out from Holiday House on February 16).

 

 

 

 

 

Goblin Market was inspired by the 1862 Christina Rossetti poem of the same name. It’s a tale of two sisters and what happens when the elder falls under a deadly enchantment cast by the goblins who sell their bewitching wares at the local market. The strange spell threatens her very life, forcing the younger girl to battle her own limitations to try to save her beloved sister.

Backwards up the mossy glen
Turn’d and troop’d the goblin men,
With their shrill repeated cry,
“Come buy, come buy!”

Christina Rossetti

 

 

Happy 2021, everyone! May it be a vast improvement over 2020 in every possible way.

Not Your Ancestors’ Plague

Posted on by Diane Zahler

This is a very weird time.

We wake up every morning with a sense of impending doom. How close will Covid-19 come to us today? What vacations or conferences will be cancelled, what sports teams will stop playing, what schools will close, what businesses will be forced to shut down? How far will the stock market plunge? Will our Purell run out?

I hesitate to say that all things are relative, because it feels like rules have been suspended. Maybe all things are not relative. Maybe this will be worse than we can imagine. But I’ve written a book on bubonic plague (and just finished a novel set in the time of the Black Death), and thinking about that disaster does seem to put this one in a different perspective. Here are some reasons why we are slightly better off than the potential plague victims of the fourteenth century — and one reason we aren’t:

  • We know what causes Covid-19. This will enable us to create a vaccine for it eventually and allows us to take measures to contain it in the meantime. In the 1300s, people thought the plague was a punishment for their sins, or the effect of bad air, or the work of witches, or the result of a bad astrological conjunction. Their reactions ranged from wearing garlic and other herbs around their necks (okay, some people are doing that now) to closing themselves indoors to avoid the air (yes, we are doing that too) to attacking and/or burning those they felt were responsible (right, more on that later.) There was also some self-flagellation, which I haven’t seen yet on CNN.
  • We know how Covid-19 is transmitted. In the 1300s, people had no idea that the fleas that bit them were imparting a death sentence. (Fifty to seventy percent of victims died.) And when the plague morphed to pneumonic and septicemic versions (with a death rate of nearly 100 percent), they didn’t understand that touching, breathing on, and bleeding on others would transmit the disease.
  • We are generally healthier. One reason plague victims died in such huge numbers is that a famine years earlier had weakened them. Plus it was the Middle Ages, when life expectancy at birth was around 35 years.
  • Many of us have toilet paper, food, and hand sanitizer to hoard. In the 1300s, there was little to squirrel away even if people had thought to do so. People who didn’t contract the plague often died of starvation. And though medieval folk washed and bathed far more than most people imagine, “Cleanliness is next to godliness” wasn’t a thing until John Wesley said it in 1778.

One similarity, however, between the plague years and now is the obscenely bigoted reaction coronavirus has generated. Terror breeds intolerance in every age, it seems. Just as medieval people blamed the Jews for the plague, some today are blaming the Chinese. In 1350, oddly enough, Pope Clement VI issued a papal bull proclaiming that Jewish people were NOT at fault for the disease, stating, “It cannot be true that the Jews, by such a heinous crime, are the cause or occasion of the plague, because through many parts of the world the same plague, by the hidden judgment of God, has afflicted and afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them.” A sensible man, it appears — sensible enough to remit the sins of all who died of the plague. (He did, however, believe in sending Crusaders to fight the Ottoman Turks.)

If there’s a takeaway from this post, I’d hope it would be this: Covid-19 is not, and will not become, the Black Death, which killed between 30 and 60 percent of the population of Europe at the time (possibly as many as 25 million people). And we are not, and I hope will not become, the victims of our own fear, turning against each other as we search for something or someone to blame. In a world that seems utterly out of control, the one thing we CAN control is our own behavior.

 

 

Also: WASH YOUR HANDS.

 

Pod Person

Posted on by Diane Zahler

No, not THAT kind of pod person

For the first time ever, I’ve been interviewed on a podcast! This one, The Not-Starving Artist, is out of New Zealand, which is 16 hours ahead (behind? no, ahead) of me timewise. It was a little difficult to choose a time when the host, Angie Noll, and I were both available. Luckily, she is a morning person and I am most definitely not, so we found a New Zealand morning/New York afternoon when we could both talk.

And talk I did! If you know me, you’re probably aware that I’m a little uncomfortable speaking in public. But speaking from my bed, with my computer in my lap and the dog at my feet, turns out to be no problem at all. It helped a lot that Angie had great questions. So I went on about publishing, the slush pile, submitting, agents, how I write — basically everything you ever might have wanted to know about how my career developed and how I work, and then some. After we were done talking — nearly an hour’s worth! — I had no idea what I’d said, and I had to wait anxiously while she edited it and readied it for prime time. But it turns out I didn’t use any profanity, didn’t insult anyone, and sounded more or less like I knew what I was talking about. Who’d have guessed?

Here’s a link to the podcast. Enjoy!