The Three Rules of Everyday Magic

Middle Grade Minded is excited to welcome author Amanda Rawson Hill to the blog today. Her debut middle grade, The Three Rules of Everyday Magic, will be published on September 25, 2018, by Boyds Mills Press. Amanda was kind enough to answer the following questions about her inspiration and writing process for her novel: 

1. When Grammy tells Kate the three rules of everyday magic—believe, give, and trust—Kate tries to believe in the power of everyday magic to bring her father back home and heal her relationship with her best friend. What inspired you to write about a girl who believes in the magic of giving?

I discovery wrote this story. And so I didn’t know that it was going to be about the power of giving until after I wrote the scene with Grammy teaching Kate to make the knitted hats. That’s when it all started clicking into place. As I developed the story further, I realized that many of the themes in the story are about letting go. And I think giving as a form of holding on was an important aspect of that idea that needed to be played out. Kate is losing so much against her will. Having her give and letting that giving create relationships was an important part of providing her some relief.

2. The Three Rules of Everyday Magic deals with tough topics—depression, divorce, and dementia. How much research did you have to do in order to portray Dad’s depression and Grammy’s dementia accurately?

I did a lot of research for the portrayal of depression. I’ve never experienced more than a situational depression, so I wanted to get it right. I read articles about how depression manifests in men and then I crowdsourced on Facebook, asking those who have had depression or had parents with depression to message me with some of the beginning signs and what happens as it progresses. This turned out to be a wealth of information and stories that I was able to glen and put straight into my book. People were so wonderful. They came to me with vulnerable hearts and shared their own struggles, the heartache of watching their spouse not admit to having depression, and what a child misses when their parent slips into depression. It was heart breaking, eye opening, and a privilege to get their perspectives.
For Grammy’s dementia, I relied a lot on my memories of my grandpa’s Alzheimer’s. There are several scenes in the book lifted straight from my memories of him. I was also lucky enough to have a reader who had recently cared for a relative with dementia who was able to point out things I got wrong (like how irresponsible it would be for Grammy not to have an identification bracelet.)

3. I love when Grammy says, “You have to trust the magic. That means you can’t give it away expecting a certain outcome. You can’t put demands on it and say it only worked if everything goes how you wanted it to, or when you wanted it to. Magic has its own timeframe and its own ideas about what should happen. You can hope it will cause some event, but sometimes it will do something else entirely. That doesn’t mean it didn’t work.” 

When I read that quote, I immediately thought of my writing journey. For me, the magic was being accepted as a Pitch Wars mentee. Since you were involved in Pitch Wars as well, can you share your writing journey with Middle Grade Minded readers? Did it, as Kate’s friend Jane says in your novel, involve “…lots of practice and waiting for the right moment”?

Yes! So I started writing in April of 2012. By August of 2014, I had a MG fantasy novel that I’d been working hard on and I entered it into Pitch Wars. Miraculously, I got picked! I couldn’t believe it. But my mentor had a bunch of stuff come up and wasn’t able to read or critique my manuscript. When I told Brenda about it (almost a year later because I really needed to learn self-advocacy) she found three fabulous mentors who volunteered to just take me on. But by this time, I’d queried that first book to death and written a new book that I knew was better. So I had them work with me on the new manuscript. 

That new manuscript was titled, WINGS, WRINKLES, AND WRAPPERS, and it was about a girl named Kate, whose dad left the family months earlier when all of a sudden her two long-dead grandmas show up as guardian angels to try and help her fix her life. Well, as you can tell, it got a major overhaul in Pitch Wars. In fact, it got a total rewrite. I got rid of the angels, and replaced them with just Grammy in the early stages of dementia and added in the idea of Everyday Magic. I changed the tense, the format. Phew! I worked my butt off for two months right up to the agent round. About 6 weeks after the agent round, I got an offer of representation and the rest was history, right?

Well, not really.

I did more revisions with my agent. She sent it out. We got rejected. I did more revisions. More rejections. I also wrote another book in the meantime. A book I was SURE would be my debut. I had given up all hope for THE THREE RULES OF EVERYDAY MAGIC when my agent said she had a thought about an editor who might love it and asked if I was okay with her trying again. I said fine, but had zero hope.

And the rest was—

Nope. Not yet. That editor LOVED it. But her colleagues wanted some revisions before they approved it. So I revised again. Rewriting probably 30-40% of it in the process. Almost all over the course of a week because of a few crazy circumstances.

And the rest was history.

Seriously this time. 😊 

Thank you, Amanda, for taking the time to join us today! Kids are going to adore this story about believing, giving, and trusting, no matter what.

To pre-order The Three Rules of Everyday Magic, go here:

Amazon

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