Welcome to my posting for Friday! Below you will find two amazing authors to follow! Do you have authors you think we should follow? Well do a post and link up! Just add your link to the comments!
About the Author
As a freshman at the University of Colorado, N.K. TRAVER decided to pursue Information Technology because classmates said "no one could make a living" with an English degree. It wasn't too many years later Traver realized it didn't matter what the job paid--nothing would ever be as fulfilling as writing. Programmer by day, writer by night, it was only a matter of time before the two overlapped. Duplicity is Traver's first novel.
When considering a main character, who leads the story is just as important as what the story is. Iron Man would be a totally different series if Tony Stark were shy and humble. Even so, when Jessica asked why I chose Brandon to lead Duplicity, my first thought was: "Because ... he just was?" But as I thought about it more, I realized there were a lot of reasons why.
When I was trying to find a literary agent to represent the book to publishers, a couple of them rejected it with the promise that they'd take another look if I recast Brandon as a girl. They said teen stories from a boy's point of view were currently a hard sell. So I thought about it--what Duplicity would be like if Brandon became Brenda. But that wasn't the story I was writing. Brandon had to be the lead.
The main reason for that is personal, really. One of my favorite tropes is the bad boy/good girl love story, and while I've read a lot of books that show this relationship from the girl's side, I wanted to see it from the guy's point of view. I wanted to know what he was thinking when he pushed people away. Brandon often says things he doesn't mean, and outside of his head, he'd seem like just another jerk. But people are more complex than that. I wanted to explore what was going on beneath the surface. The things he was struggling with, the things he was afraid of, and what had shaped him to make him act like he did.
Brandon also had to be the bad boy because of the plot. A mirror reflection moving on its own naturally leans toward being evil in and of itself, and I didn't want to take the obvious route. So I thought, what if your mirror reflection started moving--and making you a better person? And that meant I needed a character who was flawed and had caused enough trouble in his life to attract the attention of said reflection.
And that's why it couldn't be anyone else.
Want to make an author’s day? Buy their book, write a positive book review, or recommend their book to friends. Those actions are greatly appreciated and reinforce the author’s efforts. But I have to admit I was feeling a bit like a rock star when I found this in my inbox.
Edgardo Gonzalez, an 8th grader from El Salvador, used The Undead: Playing for Keeps for his Honors English project. He was required to make a model of a symbol used in the book. Edgardo chose Eric’s guitar. (Which probably went over much better than if he would have chosen to make a scythe. He did a great job creating the guitar.
"All opinions are 100% honest and my own."
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