Do You Have Your Ducks in A Row?

Congratulations DianeR, last week’s winner of Leslie Karst’s MURDER FROM SCRATCH. Diane, send your mailing address to Leslie at lesliekarstauthor “at” gmail dot com.

 And the winnners of Jeff Siger's Murder in Mykonos are  (US only please,...let me know if that's not you) Jana Leah B. and Robin!  Email me at Hryan at whdh dot com 

Hurray!  

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Talk about the universe aligning. Yesterday morning, I looked out the backyard window and saw--SEVEN ducks. In a row. On the edge of our pool. A seven duck day--remarkable!

 And so when I read the amazing Cindy Callaghan's post for today I though--ducks in a row! And the karma is good all around.

Cindy is a treasure, and we go way back, and she has such a wonderful and inspirational and educational story--I've just gotta let you read it. 

 In writing and in Life:  

            Make Your Own Luck

     by Cindy Callaghan

As a writer and reader, I spend a lot of time in my head.  I imagine, daydream, and as Pooh says, “think, think, think.”  Perhaps you share a fondness for deep thinking?

I get excited for long car rides to plan plots, characters, or scene sequences.  (And to sing very, very loudly to the radio.  I’m a chart-topper in the car.)  At those times when I’m in my head, I manipulate the destiny of my story in any way I want.  In this respect, fiction writing is a great career for a control freak like me.  However, the business of fiction writing can be challenging for those of us who like every duck in a neat row. 

My book Lost in Ireland was originally launched under the title Lucky Me.  When I’d sign that book, I’d add a message to my ‘tween reader:  Make your own luck.  I believe that in writing and in life we make our own luck, but the business end of writing holds variables that, despite our best-laid plans, are out of our control.  I’m referring to things such as:

·      Will critiquers be honest about what’s working and what’s not? 

·      Will the cover be appealing to my target market? 

·      Will I submit the same time someone else is submitting a similar premise?

·      Will a huge competitor launch a similar book at the same time as mine? 

·      Will a bookstore stock its shelves? 

·      Will it snow on the day of my big launch event?

For Type A personalities, these uncertainties can be maddening.  For sanity’s sake, I’ve practiced being laid back, which for me truly takes effort.  But, it was at one of these trying moments when something magical happened.   

Circa 2003 my daughter, about nine at the time, and her friends were baking in my kitchen - flour everywhere, icing in hair and on counter tops - you get the idea.  I was twitching, but trying to be chill.  I exhaled and let them go.  In that moment I saw how much they loved it.  

Think, think, think. 

I began to imagine a cooking club for tweens.  That’d be fun, right?  In fact, that’d be a cool idea for a book. 

Think, think, think.

What if it was a secret cooking club?  And at that moment the idea for Kelly Quinn’s Secret Cooking Club was born…you may know it as Just Add Magic.  (Original 2010 cover and revamped 2016 cover)

         

In Just Add Magic Kelly Quinn and her besties stumble on an old recipe book in Kelly’s creepy attic.  When they make the recipes strange things happen around town. Thus begins the girls’ quest to understand the rules of the magical potions and the book’s history…a history that involves Kelly more than she ever imagined.  

I would go on secure literary representation who would sell this book to Simon & Schuster, and in 2010 Just Add Magic hit the shelves.  But that book was only the first half of Kelly Quinn’s story; there’s untold backstory and loose ends that aren’t tied up in book one.  I not only wanted to tell readers the rest of the story, but I also wanted them to see Just Add Magic.  But uncontrollable factors played out.  

In 2011, my agent and I separated, putting my aspirations for both a sequel and screen adaptation out of reach - my ducks had fallen out of row.

But my story continued:  About this time I connected with a college friend.  We lunched, and she suggested I send the book to a friend of hers for film/tv tips.  Making a long story short, that friend turned out to be a film agent who repped the book and sold it to then new-on-the-block Amazon Studios.  Starting in 2016 and each year thereafter a new season of Just Add Magic has dropped.  What a thrill! 

In light of the show’s success, I hoped the book sequel, which had been pitched many times over the years, would happen.  After several years of “no,” my magical agent sold Potion Problems (2018).  Even more recently the book was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best in Children’s/MG/YA Mystery.  It makes me giddy that readers can now know what only I’ve known - the previously untold backstory and ending, which holds many surprises.  After years of waiting, the ducklings are aligned.

The point I want to make in this piece, my friends, is this: 

In writing and in life make your own luck.  That is, do the work, take control of your ducks, your career, and your future.

BUT, when despite your efforts, you find yourself in a floury mess or otherwise detoured from Plan A, just maybe, something magical can stir.

So, tell me, are you a planner and how to you manage when things derail?

Hank: I had a little discussion with myself yesterday about that very thing--I realized: If I stoped spending time worrying about how my plans might not work, I'd have more time to think about the other possibilities. So I try not to think about fail as much, and instead think: plot twist! 

How about you, Reds and readers?


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About Cindy Callaghan: Cindy Callaghan is the award-winning author of two ‘tween series: The mega-popular Just Add Magic and Just Add Magic 2: Potion Problems, the five Lost in books: London, Ireland, Paris, Rome, and Hollywood, and two stand-alones: the award-winning Sydney MacKenzie Knocks ‘Em Dead and Saltwater Secrets (2020).

Cindy’s first book, the much-loved Just Add Magic, is now a breakout Amazon Original live-action series in its third season.  And the upcoming Saltwater Secrets is set up at a major studio.

Cindy holds an MA and MBA and has over twenty years of business experience. The Delawarian (by way of Los Angeles (USC)) is a Jersey girl at heart. She lives in Wilmington and escapes to her PA mountain retreat whenever time will allow.

www.cindycallaghan.com

from Nancy to Alexandra to Devlin: the sleuthing adventures continue!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Hurray. And all the Reds are giving a standing ovation. (Can you see us?) We are thrilled to welcome the fabulous Linda Fairstein--who, after so many bestselling years writing a smart, tough, determined prosecutor—is now also writing a smart, tough,  determined teenager.

Linda, welcome! And where did YA  heroine Devlin Quick come from?

((And whoo hoo--Linda is giving THREE Devlin Quick "packages"--including books--to lucky commenters!)

LINDA FAIRSTEIN: Thank you! And hello Reds and readers. Let’s see.  I’ve published nineteen crime novels in a series about New York City sex crimes prosecutor Alexandra Cooper, who has the tough job that I held for thirty years, and which gave me plenty to write about.  I thought I had the perfect forum for all I wanted to say.

 But two years ago, something deep inside me kept bubbling up until it became impossible to ignore.  I had been devoted to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew when I was a young reader, and I kept thinking about how much I wanted to give kids an updated view of sleuthing, through the eyes of a 12-year old city kid who didn’t have a roadster but who had a keen curiosity about forensics and doing justice.  So I set out to tell my first story featuring Devlin Quick, whose mother just happened to be the city’s first woman police commissioner.

HANK: Was that a big step? What came next?

LINDA:  Then I worried - as did my agent - about whether I could change speeds and write for pre-adolescents instead of adult thriller-readers.

HANK: But obviously—and successfully—those questions were answered.  And hurray. Still, it must have been such a transition for you! I mean, Devlin is, ahem, so much younger that Alex.  Usually the big obstacle is coming up with the plot—was that the case here?

LINDA: Plotting a caper wasn’t the issue since I had done that so many times in my career.  Instead of the story-telling being my problem, I was worried about capturing the voice of a kid, and so I spent an inordinate amount of time with friends and family who had readers that age, and found myself listening to dialects and slang words and conversational tones of pre-teens.  The good news is that writing for young readers lessened the intensity of my emotions - no murders, no deaths, no dealing with medical examiners and post-mortems.  

HANK: Oh, right! I never thought about that. But thinking about a mystery through the eyes of a pre-teen must have been so—entertaining?

LINDA: Yes! It has actually become fun to go into my writing room and enter a zone where all the mystery-solving is less stressful than adult detective work.  Sometimes I feel like I have a split personality - channeling a 12-year old on some days, and a 38 year old on others.  But it’s been enlightening to develop both characters and I am certain that they will meet in the pages of a crime novel before very long.

HANK: That’d be so much fun to read! And my writer-brain is already imagining how that might work. Either way, right?   Devlin meets Alex, that could be fun. Or—Alex encounters Devlin. Love it. Do you feel like—a new Carolyn Keene?  

I know you’re a fan—you had that wonderful essay in the Washington Post! Hey—let’s give the reds and readers a taste of it.

Here’s just part of Linda’s essay from the Post—with a link to the rest!

Nancy Drew was my fictional role model throughout most of my youth. I was more fortunate than she in some ways. Nancy had lost her mother when she was 3 years old. She was devoted to her single dad, but they were living in a town rife with crime. I had both loving parents — it was my mother who read to me every night before I went to sleep — and Mount Vernon, N.Y., seemed a much safer place than River Heights.

 But I did envy Nancy the blue roadster and the steady partnership of Ned Nickerson. That was true until I found my real-life colleagues — mostly guys in the early days — in the D.A.’s office, and we started to solve cases with the great men and women of the NYPD, riding in unmarked black cars on our way to crime scenes. I didn’t leave home with Nancy’s trusty flashlight, but there was plenty of her moxie driving my desire to do the right thing.

  

I smile whenever I hear an accomplished woman mention Nancy Drew — who made her first appearance in 1930 — as an inspirational figure. Former justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote about being pulled away from Nancy’s exploits to do more serious work on the family ranch; Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg responded to the young woman’s adventurous nature and her daring; and Justice Sonia Sotomayor — who has described reading as her “rocket ship out of the second floor apartment” in a South Bronx housing project — admired Nancy’s character and her courage. Hillary Clinton, too, is a fan, respecting how smart and brave Nancy was, also her ability to multitask: taking care of her dad’s house, keeping up with her schoolwork and solving capers on top of it all. Laura Bush also loved reading Nancy Drew mysteries.

Though the Nancy Drew books have been updated to eliminate racist stereotypes, they suffer from a striking lack of diversity. The folks in River Heights were all white, and the bad guys were always foreign and usually dark-skinned or swarthy. And yet the appeal of the girl detective — she was originally penned as an 18-year-old and later adjusted to 16 — remained widespread.

 My friend Faye Wattleton spent her pre-adolescent years in Nebraska, an African American child whose mother pastored an all-white church. Wattleton told me that Nancy’s “indomitable independence, fearless inquisitiveness and determination to get the job done — never forgetting to ‘freshen up’ her appearance — was a bridge, from multiple layers of isolation to imagining the power of challenging the conventional in order for good to triumph over evil.”

For me, both dreams that emerged from the pages of Nancy’s adventure have come true. I have spent 45 years as a lawyer, fighting for justice for women and children who have been victims of violence. And I have written 21 mysteries — two of them for young readers — in which my protagonists, one a prosecutor and the other a 12-year-old sleuth, channel the character and courage of a fictional heroine. I never wanted to imitate Nancy Drew in either career. But I ached to run along beside her, and that has been a run well worth taking.

 HANK: And we love that you took the risk! Reds and readers, Linda will stop by today to chat and answer your questions—about her books, or the law, or Devlin Quick.  Or even the next Alexandra Cooper!

I’d love to know more about changing mindsets—and vocabularies—to channel a pre-teen.

Do you all have any pre-teen pals? What do they do—or say—that surprises you? Or that you don’t understand? What are their favorite phrases?

((And remember--Linda is giving THREE Devlin Quick "packages"--including books--to lucky commenters!)

 And don't forget to come meet Linda in person!

(And here’s a link to Linda's essay.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/why-nancy-drew-is-an-ideal-role-model-for-todays-girls-and-boys/2017/11/02/33fd763c-a9ed-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html )