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.
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.”
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.
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Like many people of, ahem, a certain age. I'm not wild about driving after dark. Which makes it unfortunate that I live in southern Maine, where the sunset time swings between 4:30 to 4:00 and back again in the two months surrounding the solstice (this Sunday! Get your bonfire wood ready!)
Driving over the long bridge from Woolwich to Bath, the skyline is dominated by Bath Iron Work's iconic "Big Bertha," a maritime crane strung with lights and carrying a whole Christmas tree at the top of its boom. 
