Forget Family...Which MG Characters Would You Invite To Your Holiday Feast?

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Headless turkeys, ill-fitting pants, family estrangement due to polarized political viewpoints and, er…feelings of gratitude all point to the lard-laden holiday of Thanksgiving which will soon be upon us here in the States.

Living hundreds of miles from our nearest relatives has meant that my family is either traveling on some of the busiest, craziest, kerfuffliest days of the year with a 97.5% percent change of getting stranded in an airport overnight…OR opting to spend a quiet day of thanks hunkered down at home with our small crew of six.

We lean towards hunkering. 

After years of celebrating with our large, extended family, we’ve found the positive side of these lonely-ish holiday observances is the lack of bodily injury and/or need for noise cancelling headphones. On the downside, we miss the energy and camaraderie of these domestic get-togethers, as well as the lively and eclectic discussions that only seem to occur when people are forced together in a small space with large quantities of food, alcohol and fire code violations at hand.

Though my family will once again be on our own this year, I thought it would be fun to conjure a Thanksgiving gathering of all my favorite middle grade book characters in the absence of my blood-related characters. I mean, who needs real live people when you can live in a fictitious world created solely in the mind of another writer’s outrageously warped imagination!* See? Fun! (And not crazy at all!) 

So, please visualize the toasty glow of a fire in the hearth, the smell of rosemary and thyme wafting from the oven, and the repeated BANG!!! of semi-permanent disfiguring spells breaking through the silence as you ponder my Thanksgiving Day (dream) guest list (table for 10):

• Matthew Cuthbert sits at the head of the table next to a trough of brown sugar, while attempting to transfer his calm, loving energy to the motley bunch surrounding him. (Spoiler: He will fail. And now I'm sobbing, because...Matthew!!!) 
• Harry Potter is sitting closest to the cupboard looking alternatingly thoughtful and bemused, while practicing his Expelliarmus spell on...
• Percy Jackson who continuously siphons water from the kitchen sink to both douse Harry in retaliation AND refresh the water goblets while...
• Farley Drexel (Fudge) Hatcher whimpers next to Percy, because he needs some Pepto Bismol after the turtle he ate this morning, but...
• Stanley Yelnats is chastising Fudge for being a wimp, teasing, "Eat it or wear it!" because the soggy old onions Stanley ate were so, so much worse and--BAM BAM BUM...
• Steven Alper cuts Stanley off from his sorry-for-himself tirade by playing a righteous drum solo on the gravy boat, while...
• Meg Murry mulls over the stupidity of boys and her frizzy hair as she watches...
• Sunny Baudelaire gnaw on the leg of the mahogany table in vegan protest of the soul-killing meal, while
• Hermione Granger gives a speech on the "Rights of House Elves" (as they lovingly labor over the Thanksgiving Feast) next to...
• Raina who is adjusting her headgear, so she can actually fit something bigger than a cranberry into her mouth, and...
• I...have been relegated to the kiddie card table in the sub-zero front entryway.

Ahh...can't you just feel the passive-aggressive tension colliding in the air above stomachs that have been stuffed to five times their capacity?! In other words, the perfect Thanksgiving feast. 

~Amanda

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Interview with Jen Petro-Roy, Author of GOOD ENOUGH & YOU ARE ENOUGH

I recently had the opportunity to chat with author Jen Petro-Roy about her upcoming books GOOD ENOUGH and YOU ARE ENOUGH.

Welcome Jen to Middle Grade Minded! 

First of all, what should readers know about your new books that are set to release tomorrow?

First of all, I want YOU to know how honored I am to be here. I love that there are blogs out there that cater specifically to middle grade readers and it’s so wonderful to be able to connect to your audience. And, yes, I have TWO books releasing on February 19th, one fiction and one non-fiction. I’m pretty sure that this is a rare occurrence in publishing and it’s so exciting to have two books to promote and talk about at the same time.

Good Enough and You Are Enough are both about eating disorders, an illness that I suffered from for twelve years, in varying degrees of severity. Good Enough tells the story of twelve-year-old Riley, who was just hospitalized for anorexia nervosa. As she navigates her feelings about recovery, she has to deal with her gymnastics star younger sister, parents who just don’t understand, and a fellow patient who may or may not be trying to sabotage her progress.

You Are Enough is a self-help guide for teens and tweens that is also informed by my experience (I discuss my personal journey), but also by a ton of research. I’m super proud about how inclusive this book is—I talk about males with eating disorders, the LGBTQIA+ population, and how fat acceptance is central to eating disorder recovery. I write about common situations kids could find themselves in that could interfere with their recovery, how to combat body image woes, and so much more.

Can you speak to how your journey to eating disorder recovery has informed your novel, GOOD ENOUGH, and your nonfiction self-help book for young readers, YOU ARE ENOUGH?

As I wrote, I drew upon my past emotions a lot—the initial ambivalence about recovery, the shifting feelings during hospitalization, the frustration with family and friends who may not understand how the person struggling feels. It was hard at some points to recall those feelings and experiences, but I’m glad that I forced myself to go through them again, because I think it made the book richer and more realistic.

I’ve heard from some early readers that Good Enough helped them to understand more about eating disorders—a few who had been through recovery themselves even let me know that I captured the emotions perfectly, which was wonderful to hear. 

 I also hope that including parts of myself in You are Enough will help readers looking for help understand that they are not alone—that others have been through this struggle and they too can survive and thrive.

What unique challenges did you face in trying to tackle the issue of eating disorder recovery in both novel and nonfiction format?

One of the things I was incredibly conscious about was making sure not to write anything that could possibly trigger a reader…that might make them think that they weren’t sick enough or that might give them an “idea” about a behavior they could do. When I was younger, most of the books on eating disorders were very “after school special” like. They showed people engaging in harmful behaviors, accompanied by dramatic music.

This is the exact thing I aimed to avoid. In Good Enough, I didn’t include numbers, whether that meant Riley’s weight, the calories she was obsessing about, or how long she used to exercise. I never want kids to read my books and think that they should or could do specific disordered behaviors. Above all, I aimed to instill the recovery process with hope, instead of just suffering. Riley grows a lot in Good Enough, and as she recovers she gains parts of herself that she had lost. There’s joy in that process, and it’s wonderful to see that progress in life and in books.

I read that you were also a former librarian (yay!). What did working in libraries teach you about writing for young people?

I loved being a librarian. I worked with teens and children, and the most important thing that I realized was that children are smart. They are wise. A lot of gatekeepers believe that children need to be talked down to and sheltered from what they believe are “tough issues.” But kids deal with a lot in their lives and need to know how others handle things. Tweens and teens are resilient and compassionate and want to feel for and learn from other kids in the books that they read. 

Thanks so much Jen for stopping by!!!

Jen Petro-Roy is a former teen librarian, an obsessive reader, and a trivia fanatic. She lives with her husband and two young daughters in Massachusetts. She is the author of P.S. I Miss You, Good Enough, and You Are Enough: Your Guide to Body Image and Eating Disorder Recovery. Jen is an eating disorder survivor and an advocate for recovery.    

You can find out more about Jen and her books on her website.

Breathing Room: Or, what the ocean taught me about pacing

If you’ve been hanging around me or my social media sites much at all, you know I love the ocean. One of the things I love about it is how it always changes. Last week on one of my beach-walks, the ocean was quiet. No wind, so no waves – no crashing over the rocks, barely even any noticeable gentle-breaking against the shore. The gulls were strangely quiet, too. Perhaps they’d already had a good feed and were snoozing somewhere while their breakfast digested. In all that absence of noise, the sound I became aware of was the scritch scritch of crabs scurrying about under the rocks.

This was a very different experience than the beach on a stormy day – wind howling past my ears, surf pounding relentlessly against the rocks. The ocean on a stormy day is all about power, and not so much about subtle scritch scritching.

It’s not just the water that changes, of course. Every day the driftwood has been rearranged and new flotsam and jetsam has been offered up. There’s always some new shell or stone or piece of sea glass to catch my eye. And have you noticed how different the air smells at low tide than at high tide? All these things – the changing sights, sounds, smells – keep the beach interesting and make me want to go back again and again (and I do!).

Recently I was thinking about pacing in fiction. And just as a walk by the ocean every single day might get dull if things never changed, if it was predictable, if there was never anything new to grab my attention, so it is with fiction. If scene after scene is the same pace, I’m likely to put the book down. If it's all fast, I get tired; if it's all slow, I get bored. But if it changes, if it has both quiet moments that allow me to discover hidden treasures, and dramatic moments that take my breath away by their power or action or suspense, then I keep reading.

The variety in pacing comes naturally if you use an “action/reaction” or “scene/sequel” structure when you’re writing and revising. If you’re not quite so intentional while you’re first-drafting (like me), just think of pacing as giving readers time to breathe after those scenes that make them hold their breath.

Great pacing = giving readers time to breathe
after making them hold their breath.

(tweet this!)

Those slower scenes shouldn’t put your readers to sleep, however. You’ve likely heard the advice to “leave out the boring parts”. Think about it – which parts do you skip when you’re reading? Probably excess backstory, or some “set-up” or exposition that somehow missed getting cut during revisions. If it’s not essential, leave it out.

So what can go in the slower scenes? Each scene still has to move things forward plot-wise or character-development-wise, but the quieter scenes likely contain things such as:

• a character reacting to what just happened
• the aftermath of an action
• description or essential backstory
• introduction or continuation of a sub-plot. 

And of course, the pace can be slowed by word choice and sentence structure. So, conflict and tension, yes – you want the reader to keep turning pages – but vary it. Think breathing room.

If the ocean never changed…well, truth be told, I’d probably keep going to the beach, lol. I just love it that much. But if the pacing in a story never changes – whether it’s constantly fast, or constantly slow – I’m probably going to close the book. Want to keep me reading? Make me hold my breath, then give me time to breathe.

A Tough Question: how much are you willing to change for success?

Being published is a dream for so many writers, and each story is important to us. We want this story to be read, we want people to love it. We want to see it on bookshelves. (We wouldn’t be putting ourselves through this agony if we weren’t passionate about getting our book published.)

But… the book is also important to us. The characters have meaning. What happens to them is important! (Most of us wouldn’t be able to go through all the work to write and edit a book if we didn’t LOVE the story and characters.)

So what happens when publishing doesn’t agree with the story you have completed? What if, in order to reach the dream of being publishing you have to change something you don’t want to?

This month, I worked as a mentor for #teenpit, where high school writers submitted some of their writing to be mentored by some awesome writers. During the process, my mentee asked me this super deep question about choosing art or business. 

We were discussing a possible shift in perspective of her book and she asked me this:

“No matter what I do, I know that if I took the whole thing [insert suggested book changes here] it'd be a million times more marketable, and I'd have a better chance at being published… And I don't want to deviate from my story just because I want to appease the industry, but at the same time, this is my story, and I want more than anything to see it in the world.”

Oh man. That’s a seriously heavy question! 

How much are we willing to change to be published? 

It’s a very personal question. For some people the answer may be “EVERYTHING! I’ll do whatever it takes to be published!” for others it may be “Nothing! I won’t change for you!” (In which case, I suggest self-publishing). But for most of us the answer is going to be somewhere in-between. 

I don’t have a definite answer for you—only you can answer this question for yourself— but I do have some advice that might help if you’re ever in this predicament. 

This was my response to my mentee (with a few tweaks to make it less specific, more universal): 

"I went through a long R&R process with Entangled for my first book. We totally re-plotted it. It meant an almost total rewrite. I was okay with the changes because it made the book stronger. But there was one thing my editor suggested that I didn't agree with. 

There's a scene at the end of the book that my editor wanted to cut. I took a long time to think about it and decided I wasn't willing to cut it. That scene felt like such an important part of Anna's story and honestly, it fit the new focus of the story (A huge theme was about her lying, this was her big moment of telling the truth. Even facing the truth). I told him I wasn't willing to cut it, and he said we'd make it work (a relief because I was really willing to walk away from the deal for that scene). When he read the final version he said he teared up during that scene. 

My suggestion is for you to decide what the heart of this story is for you and stick to it. What don't you want to lose? 

For me is was Anna. Is was her journey, her emotions, and her sweet relationship with Jackson (though he used to be Arney. They changed his name!) Everything else in the book could change, but so long as those emotions stayed, I felt confident about it. 

What is that thing for you?"

It's a hard line to find sometimes. You will need to change things to be more marketable, that’s just part of publishing and if you want to be successful in traditional publishing, it’s a thing you will have to do. BUT this is your story. Please don’t ever forget that YOU make these choices. And it’s okay to walk away from a situation that you feel uncomfortable with, even if it means walking away from a potential publishing deal. 

 Finding the line you aren’t willing to cross... that parts up to you. It isn’t always easy but you’ll feel better if you are willing to compromise without losing the heart of your writing and story. 

Good luck!