Why Should I Trust You? a guest post by Tilia Klebenov Jacobs

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: You have a middle-grade kid in your life, and you want to give them a terrific book for the holidays. They're your grandchild, or a nibling (I love that neologism!) or a friend's child or your neighbor's delightful fifth-grader. I got you, fam. Tilia Klebenov Jacobs, author of STEALING TIME, has a new adventure out with her co-writer, Norman Birnbach. WHY SHOULD I TRUST YOU? is rooted in the 2020 pandemic--

Wait, come back!

Along with hoarding TP and washing groceries, the pandemic shut down inspired a LOT of creative work.  Tilia is here today to tell us about how it affected her life - and her writing.

 

 

   

         Why Should I Trust You?, my most recent book (co-authored with Norman Birnbach), is the tale of an unlikely friendship that leads to creative problem-solving, set against the backdrop of a pandemic or two. 

            So is the story behind the story.

            In February 2020, I had just started working on a new novel.  My wont was to leave the house to write; my favorite spots were coffee shops and/or public libraries. (Cue uproarious laughter.  That book is still unfinished.)  The following month, of course, the Covid-19 virus pounced upon an unsuspecting and unprepared world, altering it in ways we will doubtless feel for generations to come.  My family and I were among the fortunate, in that we had a safe and loving home to retreat to, complete with a dog, a backyard, and an internet connection—none of which was conducive to my completing my work-in-progress.  Those early pandemic days were suffused with fear and bewilderment as we confronted the unavailability of masks and sanitizer; the breakdown of supply chains in ways modern Americans had not had to consider before; and graphs showing local and national death tolls spiking ever upward, impervious to our best efforts to flatten the curve.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously said, “When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry.”  Similarly, I found that when a novelist is consumed by existential dread, she writes poorly and little.

            Then two friends who didn’t know each other combined to get me back to the keyboard.

Illustrations by Robert Thibeault

            First there was Elaine, who was a year behind me in high school.  In 2020 she was teaching fifth grade, and even after her school shut down due to the pandemic she contrived to keep in touch with her students, emailing assignments and asking volunteers to post videos of themselves reading aloud from age-appropriate books so the kids could watch them and feel safer.  It happened that a few years previously Elaine had shared my middle-grade fantasy book, Casper and Jasper and the Terrible Tyrant, with another of her classes, and this gave me an idea.  I wrote to her, saying, “I just had a thought.  Since your kids liked Casperand Jasper, might they enjoy it if I wrote something new for them?  ...You could solicit ideas, and I could weave them together.”  Elaine and her students jumped on this proposal, and soon I had a spreadsheet of their suggestions:

            “An enchanted sword.”

            An evil, terrifying person named Jeff—and “nobody even knows his name is Jeff.”

            “A quest.”

            A “demon creature [with] giant wings...and her name is Rose.”

            “The main setting is at Bridgeway High School where it’s old and rusty.”

            A “very talented and smart man named Mr. Timothy but he is a greedy, forty-year-old man...and he has a pet roach living in the school’s janitor room.”

Illustrations by Robert Thibeault

            This was all great stuff, no question, but I struggled to find a throughline.  The demons and the secret identities seemed to lend themselves to fantasy, and it seemed likely I could set all or most of it at the decrepit Bridgeway High; but beyond that I was stuck.  Any plot lurking in this crowd of fantastical notions had a serious case of stage fright and simply refused to come out and chat.

            Cut to another corner of New England, where Norman and his family had holed up to ride out the pandemic.  Norman was a successful writer, having published over a hundred op-ed pieces and articles in newspapers and magazines, but he had never penned a book.  Now that Covid had hit, he determined to use his free time productively:  he and his wife adopted their first dog, and he settled down to write a novel. 

            Writing is far more collaborative than people give it credit for, so on the advice of a mutual friend Norman reached out to me to ask if I could recommend any critique groups for his project.  (Short answer:  no.)  At this point I should mention that Norman and I had known each other but glancingly in college, where he was an editor for the campus newspaper for which I wrote one article before deciding journalism was not for me.  The fact that either of us even remembered the other is surprising, but we did; and were soon chatting about writing, kids (his and mine are about the same ages), dogs, and more.  Eventually I had a duh moment and asked him if he’d like to work together on something—say, a story for a fifth-grade class?  Happily, he said yes.  Here’s how aggressively 2020 our first collaboration was:

            We only ever met by Zoom.

            We were joined every day by Norman’s pandemic puppy, Taxi, whom we decided was our muse.

            We wrote a story about two kids suffering through two pandemics, separated by a hundred years but united by friendship forged in terrible danger. 

            Maybe it’s all in the timing, but Elaine and her students really enjoyed it.  We do, too.  Despite its grim ingredients, or perhaps because of them, Why Should I Trust You? is a sparkling tale about good versus evil, and friendship overcoming all kinds of odds.  It is, in short, the kind of story that kids like reading, and, happily, that lucky authors enjoy writing. 

 

Tilia Klebenov Jacobs is the author of two crime novels, a middle-grade fantasy book, and, with Norman Birnbach, the Silver Falchion finalist YA novel Stealing Time.  Their current book, Why Should I Trust You?, is available wherever books are sold.  Tilia is vice president of Mystery Writers of America-New England. You can find her on Facebook and Goodreads.