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Edited and with a Foreword by Holly Thompson,
Tomo
Stone Bridge Press, 2012.

Ages: 12+

‘Tomo’ means ‘friend’ in Japanese and the purpose of this Anthology of Teen Stories is to offer friendship to Japan following the Great East Japan Earthquake of 11 March 2011: specifically, the book is dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives and to “all the young people of Tohuka”.  Author Holly Thompson (The Wakame Gatherers, Orchards) has gathered contributions from creators of prose, poetry and graphic narrative, as well as translators, whose shared connection is Japan.  Their work makes for a remarkable collection.

Many of the contributors’ names such as Alan Gratz, Wendy Nelson Tokunaga, Debbie Ridpath Ohi,  Shogo Oketani, or Graham Salisbury may already be familiar to readers; others such as Naoko Awa (1943-1993) or Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) will be less so, though famous in Japan.  A great deal of Tomo’s success lies in its blend of expertly translated older stories with contemporary, new writing, and this is true also of the stories’ content.  Many modern Japanese phenomena colour the stories, such as the particular fashion of Harajuku girls (“I Hate Harajuku Girls” by Katrina Toshiko Grigg-Saito) or the Purikura photo sticker booths (“Signs” by Kaitlin Stainbrook), yet these sit easily alongside more traditional stories such as the magical Ainu fable “Where the Silver Droplets Fall”, transcribed and translated into Japanese by Yukie Chiri (1903-1922) and translated into English by Deborah Davidson.  The anthology is all the richer for its varied array of writing, and its success is also in a great part due to the skill of the different translators involved.

The thirty-six stories are divided into sections: Shocks and Tremors, Friends and Enemies, Ghosts and Spirits, Powers and Feats, Talents and Curses, Insiders and Outsiders, and Families and Connections.  The opening story, “Lost” by Andrew Fukuda, is the gripping account of a girl regaining consciousness in a hospital bed following the Kobe earthquake in 1995; the other four stories in that opening section, including Tak Toyoshima’s graphic strip “Kazoku”, all have the raw immediacy of being set in the aftermath of the March 11^th disaster.

Among the other stories, readers will find stories to suit every mood: thought-provoking tales of conflict, spine-tingling ghost stories (I’m glad all these happen to have fallen to my reading in hours of daylight!), ostracism and friendship, romance, magic and surrealism.  Yearning to belong is a thread running through many stories, and the intensity for those characters seeking their identity is heightened where they are part of a bicultural family.  Nor does the collection flinch from addressing racial prejudice or the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.

As with all good short-story anthologies, Tomo needs to be read slowly in order to savour the intense individual flavors of its contents.  Framed by an extract from David Sulz’s translation of Miyazawa’s thought-provoking poem “Be Not Defeated by the Rain” as well as Holly Thompson’s moving Foreword, and a glossary and note on the book’s contributors (a rich mine for future reading), Tomo is a very speci

I'm back, writing friends, with more info about the workshops at The Writer's Plot 2012 Conference. Alan Gratz  Words from Alan Gratz Alan is a highly successful children’s/young adults’ author right here in the Carolinas. His presentation was fun and informative. If you ever get the chance to hear him (like at the SCBWI-C Conference this September) DO! Alan drilled into our

For all you folks who want a fabulous way to spend a hot July day… consider this: http://www.thewritersplot.com/ I’ve posted some of the info from their website below (hope that’s okay, Pam!) and I hope some of you can go. I want to hear Harold Underdown speak so badly! He is a fab presence on [...]

I’m happy to report that my master plan for world domination is well under way.

Yes, I’ve got Vermont!

Yes, Kentucky too!

And now, at long last, Oklahoma is mine! All mine!

BWA-HA-HA-HAAAA!

Three states down, 47 to go. I feel like Alf Landon in the 1936 elections, staring up at the big board as the electoral vote trickled in. How’d that work out for old Alf, I wonder?

Answer: He lost to FDR, 8 electoral votes to 525.

This Alf might have fared better.

Seriously, what an honor to be nominated. It’s so great when you throw a book out into the world and something positive bounces back. (Imagine, I just griped about this the other day.)

I received an email from Christopher Elliott, which said:

Congratulations!! You have been nominated for the Oklahoma Library Association’s Sequoyah Book Award. The Sequoyah Book Award program is one of the most prestigious of the state student choice awards in the nation.

<snip>

I am pleased to notify you personally that your book “Bystander” has been nominated for the 2011-2012 Intermediate Masterlist. I am attaching a list of this year’s nominees. You have been nominated for the 2011-2012 program that will be promoted from May 2011 until the voting deadline of March 31, 2012. Votes will be counted in early April, 2012 and the winning author(s) will be notified by April 30, 2012.

The OLA Conference will be held either late March or early April 2013. If your book is selected as a winner, I look forward to contacting you to arrange for your trip to Oklahoma to accept the Sequoyah Award from Oklahoma students.

Here is a list of the Nominations for the 2011-2012 Intermediate Award. Remember the students of Oklahoma will choose the winner.

Chasing Lincoln’s Killer, James Swanson
Darkwood , M.E. Breen
Watersmeet, Ellen Abbott
The Girl Who Threw Butterflies , Mick Cochrane
Closed for the Season, Mary Downing Hahn
The Brooklyn Nine, Alan Gratz
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice , Phillip Hoose
The Amaranth Enchantment, Julie Berry
Positively

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The Brooklyn Nine Alan Gratz

9 generations of a family, 9 short stories from each one, 9 innings of baseball.

We meet the garment industry workers on Lower East Side tenements in the 1840s, Civil War soldiers, numbers runners, and All-American Girls Baseball League players. The Schneiders move from Manhattan to Brooklyn, they change their name to Snider, baseball is codified as a sport, the Dodgers move to LA. The family confronts racism in baseball and is the victim of anti-semetism. They fear the Russians and Sputnik, and one of them pitches a perfect game.

There is much more baseball in this book than in Samurai Shortstop, but I liked this one even better. Gratz perfectly captures these slices of America-- the people, the time, the culture, the fears, as well as giving us a history of the game. These are short stories, one for each generation, but in a matter of a few pages, we come to love a character (and I loved it when they appeared again in later stories as parents and grand-parents.)

And of course, the archivist librarian in me loves the story of how, in 2002, Snider Flint tries to trace the provenance of one baseball bat and then tries to authenticate his findings. But, my favorite story was how in 1926, when Frankie Snider runs numbers for the crime boss Mickie Fist. It broke my heart that in the next story, Frankie who was such a whiz at math, only got to finally be an engineer when all the boys went off to war.

Over all, super fantastic.

Book Provided by... my local library

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Samurai Shortstop Alan Gratz

Toyo Shimada lives in a changing Tokyo, in a changing Japan at the end of the nineteenth century. Japan is teetering between tradition and new Western ideas and inventions. Toyo embodies this, the new Japanese man, while his father is of the old school, which causes much tension.

At his elite boarding school, Toyo lives in fear of the ritual hazing by the older students, and desperately hopes to make the baseball team. For, at it's heart, this is a baseball novel, and one your sports books fan will love. But at the same time, Toyo's father is teaching him the ancient way of the Samurai, a way of life Toyo tries to fit into this new world. Baseball might be the bridge.

The baseball parts I could honestly take or leave, but I love how accurate Toyo is. He doesn't always do what we expect a hero of a teen book to do, which is great, because so often in historical fiction, we have a hero that is essentially modern shoved into a different time and place. When Gratz needs to make the decision between "likable hero" and "historically and culturally accurate person" he goes with accuracy. I loved the portrait of a changing country and the class issues that were explored, and the cultural tensions between the Japanese and Americans. There's enough here to give it to your reader who usually can't stand sports books.

Super Fantastic.

Book Provided by... my local library

Links to Amazon are an affiliate link. You can help support Biblio File by purchasing any item (not just the one linked to!) through these links. Read my full disclosure statement.

Hi Alan! Thanks for joining us today.
Before we get into marketing, can you tell me a little about yourself.

My first published novel, Samurai Shortstop was an ALA Top Ten Book for Young Readers the year it came out. I followed that up with two contemporary YA murder mysteries based on Shakespeare plays: Something Rotten (based on Hamlet) and Something Wicked (based on Macbeth). My latest book--which just came out March 5th!--is a middle-grade novel called The Brooklyn Nine, and is the story of nine "innings," nine generations, of an American family and their connections to baseball from the 1840s to the present.

Do you/your agency/your house have a website/blog?

I have both a web site and a blog. My web site (features more information about me and my
work. My blog is called "Gratz Industries," and I share it with my wife, Wendi. On the blog, we
generally post about our attempts at living creative, productive lives. I designed and manage my own web site, and my wife and I both write, edit, and design the blog.

I've had the web site longer than I've been a published author. It began it as a way to feature the manuscripts I was trying to sell. I doubt it was very successful in that regard. I was under no delusions that editors were going to *chance* upon my web site and e-mail me with six-figure offers (or six thousand dollar offers, for that matter) but I saw it as a step toward presenting myself professionally. What I hoped was that if an editor got a manuscript of mine across her desk and decided to Google me, she would find a well-designed, informative site that would give her an idea of what to expect from me if she bought my book.

The last book I promoted on my site this way was Samurai Shortstop, which became my first sale. After I sold Samurai, I immediately transitioned the site from one that discussed many projects to one that focused on my forthcoming work. I really went to town on that site--this was my first book!--with elaborate web buttons made out of mon, Japanese family crests, and features like pictures of the actual school I had written about, and a recipe for miso soup. Once I began selling other books, of course, I had to decide: a separate web site fr every book, or one that featured them all? One that featured them all was the way to go, of course, so the Samurai Shortstop site was subsumed into the larger one and I just made the pages from the previous site part of the Samurai portal.

That transition was time-consuming, and forced a complete overhaul of the site. If I had it to do all over again, I wish I would have planned for selling more books from the outset, and designed an initial site that could be easily augmented as new books were added. I have that now, but it could have saved myself a lot of nights at the computer if I had made the original site focus on me, not a single book.

In your opinion , what are the top 3 things every author should and must do to promote their book?

Whew. That's tough. The top three things? I think maybe the way I'll answer this is to break it down into three main groups you have to appeal to for your book to be successful. As a children's author, teachers and librarians are a tremendously important group of people to know, and cultivating those connections is vital. You can do that by attending conferences like IRA and ALA, and by visiting individual schools.

I've also done direct postcard mailings to YA librarians in public libraries across the country. It's hard to know how much that helped, but it certainly couldn't have hurt anything except my wallet--and it wasn't really that expensive.

Next up are the booksellers. One motivated, enthusiastic bookseller can "handsell" the Dickens out of your book--that is, talk it up and put it in the hands of likely readers. To get to know booksellers, regional trade shows like SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) and
national trade shows like BEA are great ways to meet many people at once, but getting there can be costly if your publisher doesn't bring you--and they bring only the biggest authors. A more tedious and time consuming process--though perhaps even more effective than the trade
shows--is simply *visiting* as many bookstores as you can and introducing yourself to their children's buyer or manager. I'm mainly talking about the independents, of course. You can make great connections with some managers at the big box stores of course--I had a great connection with the woman who ran the children's department at the Alpharetta, GA, Barnes & Noble, for example--but that one connection is not going to get you into all B&Ns, and you'll find that many big box store managers aren't as involved in handselling.

Indies NEED to handsell to survive, and they love getting to know authors so they can
say something personal and meaningful when recommending their books. Drop in on bookstores wherever you go. Better yet, call ahead, tell them you'll be in the area (when you can), and ask if they'd like you to do a stock signing. This is where you don't do a publicized reading/signing,
but instead pop in to meet the booksellers and sign whatever books of yours they have. The booksellers come away knowing an author and his work, and you leave knowing your books are going to be faced out with "AUTOGRAPHED BY THE AUTHOR" stickers on them and handsold to kids and their parents.

And let's not forget the kids, of course, the audience you're writing for. This is the toughest group of all to reach. School visits can build fans by the hundreds, but are few and far between--particularly as schools have to tighten their financial belts. To reach a broader geographical audience, you can turn to social networking sites and make yourself available. But beware: kids can smell "fake" a mile away. They don't want to visit a promotional site. They want to get to know *you.* That's a difficult thing to understand about this kind of marketing, and
a level of familiarity that some people are uncomfortable with.

In your opinion, how important is social networking?

I'm beginning to think this vital. When MySpace became all the rage, I built a MySpace site for myself, but mostly as a link to my other existing sites--my web site and my blog. I was already blogging on my own blog and updating my web site--why update a *third* personal page as
well? And MySpace seemed overrun *already* with people "friending" others not to really be friends, but to network to sell their own books. It began to feel as though everyone with a book to sell was just friending each other.

But I'm becoming a real fan of Facebook and Twitter. Both allow me to send quick, almost real-time updates about what I'm doing, reading, writing, or thinking. Again, this is a level of transparency that some may be uncomfortable with, but the power of these tools became obvious the moment I tweeted about a recent post on my blog and doubled my hits.

Twitter and Facebook allow people to "follow" you without having to go visit your web site or blog every day. And while we wish 500 people WOULD check out our web sites every day, they just aren't going to do that--but they WILL read the one or two Facebook comments we post every day. Am I selling my book on Facebook and Twitter? Not overtly, no. (Unless
it's the day my book releases--in which case I feel I have license to crow.) What I'm selling is *me,* the author. I hope that if people like me, they'll support me by going out and buying my books.

Did you think about marketing before your book was published? Did you start prior to getting an agent or selling your book? If so, when and what did you do?

I thought a LOT about marketing before my book was published.

In fact, the day I got the call from my publisher saying they wanted to buy Samurai Shortstop, my wife and I sat down to brainstorm all the ways we could sell it. We created a marketing plan that set deadlines for 12 months, 9 months, 6 months, and 3 months prior to pub day, and that encompassed things like: revamping my web site, creating postcards for direct mailings to booksellers and librarians, and press kits that we sent to all kinds of media, from geographic media (hometown papers) to media we thought would be interested in a book about Japanese baseball (towns with Japanese major league players; in-flight magazines for airlines with service to Japan).

The results for so much of what we did are hard to quantify. Samurai Shortstop sold out its first print run in the first six months, and went on to get some great reviews and recognition. How much of that was because it was a good book with a good hook, and how much of it was my
promotional efforts? It's almost impossible to know. Perhaps good publicity requires both, in the end--something to ring the bell that announces your book is on shelves, and then something good on the shelf to back up the bell-ringing. :-)

What other advice do you have for authors/writers regarding marketing?

It's said that the greatest challenge facing most authors today is obscurity. We do everything we can to write the best books we can, but we could write the next great American novel and it wouldn't matter if no one knew it existed. I think what we have to do is begin, as authors,
to see the dissemination of our work--in any format, for any price, including free!--as a means to an end, and that end is *notoriety.*

One of my favorite authors, Cory Doctorow, offers up copies of every one of his published novels and short stories one his web site as FREE downloads while his books are still for sale on bookstore shelves. His works are downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and yet his latest book still made the New York Times Bestseller List. His argument--and one that I'm coming around to more and more--is that he would rather have 100,000 people in his tent, no matter what they paid to get in, rather than 5,000 he knows bought a ticket. I think it's a great point.

To that end, I petitioned my publisher to post Something Rotten, my first Horatio Wilkes mystery, for free, in its entirety, online for a month. It got hundreds of reads and, I hope, brought more fans into my tent right when the second book in the series, Something Wicked, was hitting shelves. My real regret is that you couldn't download the book; you could only read it online. Ideally, it would have been available free and clear, to be downloaded to any eReader. Maybe next time.

Publishers are understandably leery of giving away for *free* something they're trying to sell.

What creative things have you done to promote a book?

Besides offering up Something Rotten for free online, perhaps the most creative attempt at marketing I did was try to do a book signing at a minor league baseball stadium. The experiment, alas, was a failure. I sold very few books, despite the efforts of a strong independent bookseller, and visible placement at the ballpark. Ultimately, I just don't think too many people came to the stadium that day to buy a book--they came to watch a game, have a hot dog, maybe buy a foam finger. We got a few interested parties, but not enough to make it worthwhile.

The best part, for me at least, was that they let me throw out the first pitch. :-)

Thank you Alan for sharing some of your tricks of the trade!

Thanks Shelli!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Faeriality?alt=rss

I've been reading Alan Gratz's Twitter comments about how many chapters/words he's gotten done on recent days, and it made me yearn for those days! I miss that. It was so exciting when I was working on my novel, adding word count. What a sense of accomplishment when I'd had a good day or a good week. There's nothing more tangible than that word count building and that feeling of building a story towards a culmination.

Now, though I need to do a lot on that same story, I yearn for that feeling of working towards something like word count. I've had several different story ideas, but I can't decided which one to work on, or even if I want to work on one of them. When I had the Everett on Everest idea, there was no doubt. I knew that would be a story that I would follow through till the end. I long for another of those ideas. I have never felt such accomplishment as when I was working on that book. That makes me think it will be someday be a big success. I have never worked so hard on something that I have written. There's a lot of work still do, and I have to get into that 'editing' mode, but I think it will be a really good book someday. Meanwhile, I'll be on the lookout for another one of those stories, one of those you just can't say no to, one of those that just has to be told.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to ask Alan Gratz (author of Something Rotten and Something Wicked) some questions on his Shakespeare-themed books (and on his feelings about Shakespeare). Today, I want to know what YOU have to say on the subject of the bard.

What was your first introduction to William Shakespeare? Was it love or hate?

Which Shakespeare plays have you been required to read?

Do you think Shakespeare is important? Do you feel you are a “better” person for having read the bard?

Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play?

How do you feel about contemporary takes on Shakespeare? Adaptations of Shakespeare's works with a more modern feel? (For example, the new line of Manga Shakespeare graphic novels, or novels like Something Rotten, Something Wicked, Enter Three Witches, Ophelia, etc.) Do you have a favorite you'd recommend?

What's your favorite movie version of a Shakespeare play?

To learn more about Alan Gratz, Something Wicked, and/or Shakespeare...visit these other stops on the tour:

the 160acrewoods, A Christian Worldview of Fiction, All About Children’s Books, Becky’s Book Reviews, Book Review Maniac, Cafe of Dreams, Dolce Bellezza, Hyperbole, KidzBookBuzz.com, Looking Glass Reviews, Maggie Reads, Never Jam Today, Reading is My Superpower

Today I want to tell you a little bit about Alan Gratz, the author of Something Wicked:

Alan Gratz is the author of the historical young adult novel Samurai Shortstop (Dial 2006), which was named one of the American Library Association's 2007 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults. His second book, a young adult murder mystery based on "Hamlet" called Something Rotten (Dial 2007), was named an ALA 2008 Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Readers, and a sequel based on "Macbeth, " Something Wicked (Dial 2008), is on sale now. He is also the author of the forthcoming novels The Brooklyn Nine (Dial 2009), and Nemo (Knopf TBA). A former bookseller, librarian, eighth grade English teacher, and TV and radio scriptwriter, Alan is now a full time novelist for young readers. He lives with his wife and daughter in Penland, North Carolina.


If you would like to read one of Alan's books you can of course go to a bookshop or the library to get a copy. You can also go to his website where there is a complete copy of his book Something Rotten for you to read. There are also reader's guides for both Something Rotten and Something Wicked. These guides will really enhance your reading experience of both books.

Please visit the other blogs that are participating in this tour:

the 160acrewoods, A Christian Worldview of Fiction, All About Children’s Books, Becky’s Book Reviews, Book Review Maniac, Cafe of Dreams, Dolce Bellezza, Hyperbole, KidzBookBuzz.com, Looking Glass Reviews, Maggie Reads, Never Jam Today, Reading is My

I am very pleased to be a part of Alan Gratz's blog tour for the release of his novel, Something Wicked!

I love these two Horatio Wilkes novels because they make Shakespeare so relevant. It’s like you’ve taken the heart of these Shakespeare stories and added wicked crazy humor and fun to make for some incredibly awesome reads. What was your first introduction to William Shakespeare? Was it love or hate?

Thanks! I can remember the first time I READ a Shakespeare play--Julius Caesar, my freshman year of high school--but I can't tell you the first time I was introduced to Shakespeare and his plays. Shakespeare is such an integral part of Western popular culture that it's difficult
sometimes to tell when he's having an influence on us. So much of our everyday language is based on words or phrases or metaphors he coined or introduced, and so many of his plots and characters are co-opted for other purposes. Kids today watch The Lion King and never realize how many Shakespearean overtones it has (from Hamlet to Henry IV and Henry V), and popular teen movies like She's the Man and Ten Things I Hate About You are direct adaptations (Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew, respectively). So there's no telling when I first encountered Shakespeare. Probably on Sesame Street!

As for my first deliberate introduction to Shakespeare, I remember not particularly liking or hating Caesar. It wasn't until I read Henry IV later during my senior year, and had by that time seen many productions of various Shakespeare plays, that I really began to appreciate his work, both as a fan and a scholar. That was when I began to actively seek out his plays and read them on my own, for fun. I went on to take two Shakespeare classes at the University of Tennessee--one on Shakespeare's tragedies, the other on his comedies, and finally understood the meaning behind much of what I'd been seeing in the theater and reading on my own. I do hope that my Horatio Wilkes mysteries are an entree into that world for young readers.

Which Shakespeare plays were required reading?

Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry IV. Oddly enough, I was never assigned to read Hamlet OR Macbeth, at least not until I took that college Shakespeare course. I read both of those on my own before ever studying them. I also taught Romeo and Juliet as an eighth grade English teacher.

Do you think Shakespeare is important? Do you feel teens (and adults) are “better” people for having read the bard?

The great thing about Shakespeare is that his work continues to be relevant not because teachers SAY it is, but because it is so ingrained in our culture. I think Shakespeare has to be taught because his work forms the foundation of everything in literature and popular culture
that has come since, in some way or another. Contemporary storytellers echo his characters, his plots, his language, his themes. I watch The Wire, HBO's fantastic drama about crime and punishment set on the streets of Baltimore, and find myself describing its characters and
themes as "Shakespearean," even if there aren't specific allusions to the Bard. It's the modern way of telling stories that he established, and that we've yet to truly improve upon.

Do I think people are "better" for having read Shakespeare? Not inherently. Not in a "reading the canon makes you better than everyone else" kind of way. But I do think reading Shakespeare--more importantly, UNDERSTANDING Shakespeare--leads to a greater understanding of our own contemporary culture, and in that way I think it makes people better. It makes them better informed consumers of contemporary entertainment, better creators and audiences.

What was your inspiration for the character of Horatio Wilkes?

The first inspiration, of course, is his namesake, Horatio, from Hamlet. As a fan of Hamlet, I always had a special place in my heart for Hamlet's best friend from school, Horatio. It's Horatio who is first shown the ghost of Hamlet's father, and Horatio to whom Hamlet confides
the truth when to all others he feigns madness. And it's Horatio, of course, who gets in some of the last words of the play--"Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"--as he stands over the body of Hamlet in the final scene. I loved that Horatio was down to earth, that he was a man of science and action, not philosophy, and most of all that he survived a play that has one of the highest body counts in all of Shakespeare! :-) This, I figured, was the hero for me.

I also knew that I wanted to echo the tone and patter of noir detectives, and my all-time favorite is Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. So I threw Horatio from Hamlet and Marlowe from The Long Goodbye into a blender, added a dash of teen snark, and the result was the daiquiri I named Horatio Wilkes.

In your first novel Horatio is in a modern day Hamlet, now in your second novel, he’s in a modern day MacBeth. Do you have plans for more Horatio adventures? Which plays are next? (Please say there are more in the works!)

I do have plans for more. If there is a third novel, it will be Something Foolish, based on A Midsummer Night's Dream--a particular challenge, as there's no murder in Midsummer. I thought after Macbeth I might want something a bit lighter, so I'm taking Midsummer and putting Horatio at an all-night keg party where no one dies, but someone behind the scenes keeps messing with people's relationships--slipping date rape drugs in their drinks and engineering screaming break-ups and scandalous hook-ups. Horatio's also down on love at the end of Wicked--for reasons that should be apparent to those who've read it--and I wanted a book where he dealt with love in its many aspects, and had his faith in it restored. Midsummer, though something of a farce, is a many-layered examination of love's motley forms, and thus really works well for that.

If I get to write more Horatio books, I'd love to do The Tempest, my favorite Shakespeare play, and send Horatio to a Disney World-like theme park in Florida, where a Prospero-like man rules over his little amusement park island of animatronic creatures and furry-costumed
servants. Horatio will be a summer intern, and meet the owner's daughter, a sheltered but intelligent and beautiful girl who has decided to learn her father's business by working her way up from intern to CEO. Which is, of course, how she meets Horatio. And oh, what a brave new
world that has such interns in it... I also have designs on throwing Horatio into Julius Caesar with a college visit toga party that turns deadly. :-) There are a lot of plays left, and I have a lot of fun ideas--now the first two books just have to sell well enough for my publisher to want to do more!

How did you decide which Shakespearean details to include in your novels? Both in Something Rotten and Something Wicked?

The number one rule for putting any Shakespeare allusion or plot device into my novels was, "Does this move Horatio's story forward?" That was very important, and it meant losing the graveyard scene in Hamlet, as well as the scene where Claudius is praying and Hamlet stands behind him trying to decide whether killing his uncle now will send him to heaven or not. It also meant taking out a lot of allusions to dialogue, like the long speech that Polonius gives Laertes that famously includes, "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." I had a lot of things like that in the first draft, until I understood that too many in-jokes and superfluous scenes slowed things down and weren't necessary to my story. Those are things I would never have included had there been no antecedent play, and so those were the things that ultimately had to go.

But that meant that I could also beef up those scenes that got short shrift in Shakespeare's plays, like the scene where Ophelia drowns herself. In Hamlet, that scene takes place off stage. But that's good plot! And important to my story. So in Something Rotten we see that scene--and Horatio's impact upon it--where we never see that in Hamlet because it's not necessary.

Macbeth is a much shorter play, so there was less to cut out. The real challenge with Macbeth though was that much of the good stuff in the play is Macbeth and Lady Macbeth plotting the murder of Duncan and then dealing with the effects of their actions--while my novels are written in the first person, from Horatio's point of view. It was difficult from the outset to turn an intimate look at two killers into a whodunit where we DON'T hear the killers plotting. Thus I have a few scenes where Mac and Beth--my Macbeth and Lady Macbeth characters--are interrupted in the midst of heated, unheard whispers: whispers that in the play were whole
scenes of terrific dialogue about courage and ambition.

Do you expect your readers to pick up all clues and references?

I don't expect readers to pick up everything. Someone who is intimately familiar with the plays will probably catch most of the allusions, but for the most part I put things in to delight those who pick up on them. Some are broad and obvious--like a dog named Spot that Beth tells to get
out--while others, like the "Dunsinane Picnic Area" are allusions to place names. Wittenberg Academy--the school Horatio and his friend Hamilton go to in Something Rotten--is a sly reference to the name of the university they both attend in Hamlet, although Wittenberg is only mentioned four times in the entire play. It's little stuff like that that I enjoy. In my notes for the third book, I have Horatio dealing with one of the boys from the school football team, which is the Wittenberg Bears. That's totally and completely a set-up for if I ever get a chance to do a book version of The Winter's Tale, so I can have Horatio chased by someone from the football team, and thus "exit, pursued by a bear."

How much fun is it write these stories, to spend time with Horatio and his often unfortunate friends?

I have a blast writing these. I love the challenge of puzzling out how to translate characters and scenes and themes into a contemporary setting, and I really enjoy coming up with snarky insults for Horatio to hand out to people everywhere he goes.

Do you have a favorite scene in Something Wicked? How about Something Rotten?

I think my favorite scene in Something Wicked might be Horatio's second trip to see Madame Hecate, the roadside psychic who stands in for the three witches from the play. The first scene with her is fun, but in this one I get to do a couple of things that make me happy. First, I
turn that scene into a plot device where Horatio is baiting Mac into doing something stupid--a traditional detective's trick--and thus make it fully a part of Horatio's story, and not just included because it happened in Macbeth. Secondly though, after Mac leaves, Madame Hecate reads Horatio's fortune, and she's dead on--not just about what will happen in the rest of the book, but about the other adventures I want to write with Horatio in them! If I get a chance to do more books, you'll see Madame Hecate's fortune continue to play out long after the events
of Something Wicked are over.

My favorite scene from Something Rotten is actually one that I added in a later draft, and one which has no precedent in Hamlet. I wanted to ramp up Ford N. Branff--my Fortinbras character--as a real suspect, and that meant having Horatio receive a "warning" from Branff's henchman in the Prince home, a colorful servant named Candy. (Warning off the detective being, of course, yet another classic trope of detective fiction.) So I wrote a scene in which Candy waylays Horatio in his bedroom, giving him a little bit of a beatdown. But my favorite part is that it's a professional beat-down. There's no malice in it, just a message, and Candy actually seems to respect Horatio--and answer some of his questions. Rather than become a true antagonist, Candy even becomes something of an ally when Horatio realizes that Branff really didn't have anything to do with Rex Prince's murder. As a big fan of detective fiction, it thrilled me to be able to write a scene I thought could be right out of Raymond Chandler!

What do you love about writing? What do you find the easiest? What do you find the hardest? What’s a typical day like for you as a writer?

The easiest thing by far about writing is coming up with ideas. I have notebooks full of them. The hardest thing is finding the time to write them. If they ever invent a pill that will replace whatever the body needs to do while you sleep, I will pay a king's ransom for it. I could use that extra third of the day where I otherwise have to sleep.

A typical day for me as a writer is a long one, and unfortunately isn't just writing. I get up in the morning and take my daughter to school, then come home to see if there are any e-mails I need to immediately respond to. I get to my office as quickly as possible--where I purposefully DON'T have e-mail access, and try to get in five or six hours on whatever book I'm working on--but that work can be doing research, creating a detailed outline, actually writing the book, or doing revisions. After that I come out and try to be a human being with my family, and the in the evenings, after my wife an I have spent an hour or two together being sociable, I often do much of the housekeeping things associated with being a professional writer--responding to interviews, updating my web site, arranging school visits, blogging, and all the other myriad things I do to publicize my books. I rarely have a night off--let a lone a day off--but I wouldn't trade what I do for anything. Except perhaps for being independently wealthy. I think I might trade it for that. Which would of course just mean that I could take more time with the books that I want to write--not that I would stop writing. :-)

How do you find time—do you find time—to keep reading? Do you have any favorites of the year?

Oh yes, reading! I forgot to add that into the schedule. Which is of course the challenge. With the new books coming out, I've been spending even more of my evenings working on publicity for Wicked, but I usually try to get in a little reading time most nights before I go to bed. I
also read a lot when I'm on the road alone, as I've found that I just don't work well in the hotel room when I come back from an all-day school visit. Reading is far more relaxing, and still an enjoyable part of my "job." This year, my favorite reads have been M.T. Anderson's Feed, E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie-Landau Banks, Jo Walton's Farthing, Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen, Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, and Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier.

If you had twenty-four hours, a time machine, and a limitless supply of money, what would you want to do?

I would go into the future, not the past. I would drop in every hundred years or so to see how things are going for humanity. I want to see how it all turns out. :-)

Thanks, Becky! Oh, and if I can add one more thing: To celebrate the debut of Something Wicked, my publisher is putting Something Rotten online for FREE until the end of November. Not just a chapter, not just an excerpt, but the WHOLE BOOK. I'm really excited about this offer, and I hope a lot of people take advantage of it. To read Something Rotten for FREE, go to www.alangratz.com and click on the link to the free ebook.

To learn more about Alan Gratz, Something Wicked, and/or Shakespeare...visit these other stops on the tour:

the 160acrewoods, A Christian Worldview of Fiction, All About Children’s Books, Becky’s Book Reviews, By The Book Reviews Book Review Maniac, Cafe of Dreams, Dolce Bellezza, Hyperbole, KidzBookBuzz.com, Looking Glass Reviews, Maggie Reads, Never Jam Today, Reading is My Superpower

Gratz, Alan. 2008. Something Wicked: A Horatio Wilkes Mystery.

Horatio Wilkes is back in his second adventure, Something Wicked. We first met our mystery-solving hero (who is wonderfully snarky) in Something Rotten. A modern adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet set in Denmark, Tennessee. In this second adventure, we have a modern-day spin on Shakespeare's Macbeth set on Mount Birnam during the Scottish Highland Fair. (And although this is his second book, it is not necessary to have read Something Rotten in order to enjoy Something Wicked.)

So who are the stars of Something Wicked? Well, there's Mac (Joe Mackenzie), Beth (Mac's girl friend with attitude), Banks (Wallace Banks, cousin and friend to Mac), Duncan (Mac's grandfather, owner of the mountain and founder of the fair), Mal (Duncan's son and Mac's uncle), Mona (Desdemona, Horatio's older sister), and Megan Sternwood (Horatio's love interest from the Macduff clan). Of course, there are many others as well including a fortune-telling road-side psychic named Madame Hecate.

Here's how the novel begins:

History is full of guys who did stupid things for women. Paris started the Trojan War over Helen. Mark Antony abandoned Rome for Cleopatra. John Lennon gave up the Beatles for Yoko Ono. You can say I'm a dreamer, but they're not the only ones. Like my friend, Joe Mackenzie: He was about to jump off a five-story building just to impress a girl.
"Come on, you wuss!" Mac's girlfriend Beth yelled. "If you don't jump off that tower, you're not getting any more of this!" She lifted her sweater up over her head, showing her bra and her extraordinary breasts to Mac, me, Banks, and the five or six other people milling around Kangaroo Kevin's Bungee Jump-O-Rama in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. They actually inspired a small round of applause. I won't say what they did to me, but Beth's fun cushions certainly inspired Mac. With a Scottish war cry he charged the end of the platform and jumped headfirst, screaming all the way down. His kilt opened like a daisy as he fell, and everyone saw his stamen. (1)

Something wicked this way comes,
and only Horatio Wilkes can stop it.

A Scottish Highland Fair turns foul when Horatio discovers the games' founder, Duncan MacRae, dead in his tent. All signs point to Duncan's son as the murderer, but Horatio's not so sure--especially when his friend Mac and Mac's girlfriend Beth start acting like they own the place. And that's just one of many mysteries: Like why are Mac's and Beth's fathers acting so suspiciously? What's the deal with the goth-punk bagpiper corps threatening Horatio's friend Banks? Who is the hot girl spying on everyone? And why, exactly, are there men in kilts tossing telephone poles around?

the 160acrewoods, A Christian Worldview of Fiction, All About Children’s Books, Becky’s Book Reviews, Book Review Maniac, Cafe of Dreams, Dolce Bellezza, Hyperbole, KidzBookBuzz.com, Looking Glass Reviews, Maggie Reads, Never Jam Today, Reading is My Superpower