Spy Princess is out
The Spy Princess is out.
I wrote the first draft of this one just after I turned fifteen. No, it wrote me, that is, it was one of those that took me over and wrote itself--unfortunately during my make-up class in Algebra, as I'd failed Algebra one in ninth grade.
I can still remember trying to hide the page under a worksheet, and laughing helplessly at a scene halfway through, in a kitchen. Of course I failed the summer course, and had to take the class a third time, but by then I'd half-memorized the book, so even though I still had no hope of making any sense of Algebra, I scraped by with a bare pass.
But anyway. I tried hard to keep that kid's eye view as I rewrote it, because now I had the adult comprehension as well as the words for certain scenes. Like when my heroine's brother is on trial for his life, when I was fifteen, I could see the packed room, the ochre rays of light slanting in from the high windows as the sun sank, I could feel the breathless heat of summer and too many bodies, I could even feel the grit of stone as my heroine crouched on a balcony above, sweltering in her triple layer of disguises, but I couldn't hear the words. And I hadn't quite learned yet that what I saw so intensely wasn't always getting to the page--the words I wrote, except for dialogue, were almost hyperlinks to memory. So that scene got barely a half a page.
Now I could hear the entire scene, because I was old enough to understand the adults that my fifteen year old self could see but not comprehend, because the story is not only about revolution, it's about families and friends.
This story always felt YA to me (revolution?) but these days, the definitions of YA and middle grade have slipped upward: young adult now has to have romance, maybe sex, certainly older protagonists, and my central group of kids are all twelve, though the next in importance are nineteen and twenty, and then older.
Middle grade meant a shorter page count (in this case, it could be no longer than 81.5 k) so a few scenes got cut, and pretty much all the references to other stories, save one or two very oblique hints.
Those I regret, and when the rights come back, they'll be restored, but otherwise, Sharyn November of Viking was extremely patient with my efforts to find my way between the adult writer of now, the kid's-eye viewpoint of then. It took three full drafts, a lot longer than most do, because of that struggle to keep Lilah's voice.
Plus there was what I'm sure seems insufferably pretentious to anyone who hasn't been doing paracosm: that inward sense that you can't change history,' so I couldn't summarily change the age of this person, or send that one somewhere else, or rename various characters because it would look better on the page, or make a neater plot.
Like history, all these stories are interconnected, and I am grateful to her for putting up with that.
Anyway, there it is!