Many writers dream of quitting their day job to work full-time as an author. Author Tracy Barrett is one of the rare writers who managed to take this momentous step.
Barrett (pictured, via) taught Italian at Vanderbilt University for 28 years, but decided to leave her day job and write full time in 2012. At the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Summer Conference in Los Angeles last weekend, she shared lessons for writers considering the same step.
“Leaving your job is like having a baby, you can’t wait for the perfect time,” she explained. “The time is never perfect.” She had tried to balance her busy writing life with teaching, but discovered “I only had a certain amount of creative juice, it burned up the spark.”
(more…)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
We have a special treat here today on our
TeachingAuthors blog: a
Writing Workout from a
Mystery Guest TeachingAuthor (
MGTA). This is a new feature we're trying out, so I hope you'll let us know what you think.
[Note: I'm still waiting to hear from Mary Ann about our giveaway winner. Sorry for the delay--we'll be posting the lucky winner's name soon.]
Now, here's the plan for today: I'll share our
MGTA's bio before giving you his/her
Writing Workout. See if you can guess who our guest author is before I reveal the
MGTA's identity at the end of the post. (No fair looking up the
MGTA's books online to find out the author's name!) Then let us know if you guessed correctly, or if the
MGTA is someone who's work is new to you. You can respond via a comment, or
send us an email.
Our first
MGTA is the author of numerous books for young readers.
MGTA's most recent publications are two young-adult novels,
Dark of the Moon (Harcourt) and
King of Ithaka (Henry Holt), and the four books in the middle-grade series,
The Sherlock Files (Henry Holt). Nonfiction includes
The Ancient Greek World and
The Ancient Chinese World (The World in Ancient Times, Oxford University Press). This author was the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ Regional Advisor for the Midsouth from 1999 to 2009 and is now SCBWI’s Regional Advisor Coordinator.
MGTA was awarded the SCBWI Work-in-Progress Grant in 2005 and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1994.
MGTA holds a B.A. with Honors in Classics from Brown University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval Italian Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. This author lives in Nashville, TN and recently retired from teaching at Vanderbilt University.
Have you identified our guest
yet? Perhaps this
MGTA's description of his/her path to becoming a
TeachingAuthor will help:
Hi, everybody! So glad to be here at TeachingAuthors.
I was a college professor for 28 years, but not of creative writing! I taught Italian, and my students had to write in both English and Italian, especially when I taught Grammar and Composition. My students told me that they learned a lot about writing in general, not just writing in Italian, from that class! Occasionally I also taught classes in children’s literature and in writing for young readers. A few years into my teaching career I started writing for young readers, starting with nonfiction. I added fiction and now happily write both.
I like reading and writing stories that explore a familiar story from a point of view (POV) that we don’t usually hear from. I’ve written King of Ithaka, a version of the Odyssey as told by Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, and Dark of the Moon, the myth of the Minotaur as seen by the Minotaur’s sister, A
I’m chatting today with Tracy Barrett, the author of several middle grade novels, including the ghost story Cold in Summer, the time travel adventure On Etruscan Time, The Sherlock Files series, about descendants of Sherlock Holmes who tackle his unsolved mysteries, and the brand-new YA novel King of Ithaka. Post a comment on this interview, and we’ll randomly choose one lucky winner to receive a copy of King of Ithaka.
Chris Eboch: Tell us about King of Ithaca.
My YA novel King of Ithaka is based on Homer’s Odyssey, and is about the search for Odysseus by Odysseus’ son, Telemachos. I realized that my hero needed a sidekick, and for some reason, this sidekick popped into my head as a centaur. I think the reason is that while I was writing this book centered around a teenage boy, there were a lot of teenage boys in my house, they often seemed half beast, like a centaur!
Once I had committed to the centaur, I felt free to use other “critters” who turn out to be important to the plot, including a sphinx-like seeress, a triton (half man, half sea-creature), and various nymphs.
CE: what inspires you to write speculative fiction?
I wrote Cold in Summer (which features a ghost) after swimming in a lake that had been formed when a dam was built on a small river, drowning a town in the valley. That seemed creepy to me, and when I heard that there was a hole in the hill that cold air came out of in the summer and warm air in the winter, I just knew I had to do something with a ghost.
The impetus for my time-travel novel On Etruscan Time came from a trip to Italy with my then-13-year-old son. One day he stepped into a Renaissance church in the middle of Rome and said, “I’ve gone back in time 500 years.” Then he stepped out on the street and said, “I’ve gone ahead 500 years. Rome is a big time-travel machine.”
CE: Are there special challenges in writing speculative fiction? How do you deal with them?
The challenges I faced in King of Ithaka were enjoyable, since I like solving puzzles. For instance, how do you get a centaur onto a small boat without tipping it over? What language would a half man, half sea-creature speak? What does a sphinx eat?
The big challenge in On Etruscan Time was that I set it up where the time-traveler couldn’t communicate with anyone in the past and couldn’t move objects in the past (this is to avoid the paradox about what if you go into the past and do something that makes your grandfather never be born? Then you wouldn’t be born either, so you wouldn’t go to the past, so your grandfather would be born, and so would you, and you’d go to the past and do something to prevent his being born, etc.). But my hero had to prevent an Etruscan kid from being unjustly executed for a crime he didn’t commit–2500 years earlier. How could he do that if he couldn’t warn the boy he was being framed, or move the objects that caused him to be condemned? I lay awake at night a lot about that one, but I solved it!
CE: If you could live in a sci-fi or fantasy world not of your own making, which would it be? Why?
Time travel to the past, hands down. I’m curious about so many people and events of the past—much more so than about the future. But I’m reliant on modern things like dentistry, running water, zippers, cameras, etc., so I would have to have a guaranteed return ticket
This sounds like a fabulous book!
viz time travel– I wouldn’t mind taking a digital camera back to the library of Alexandria….and for my work life I really should travel back to 17th century New England and do some cultural anthropology….but for myself, I think I would like to go have a picnic at the Hanging Gardens of Bablyon….
Great interview. This book sounds great.
I wouldn’t mind traveling to middle earth to meet hobbits, elves, etc. I wouldn’t go back in real time because women really weren’t treated that well. I’m too independent.
If it’s by Tracy, it’s a great book! I’m looking forward to her latest — King of Ithaka!
I’ve bought several of her books to share with nephews and enjoy them myself. I love her shared quote: “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” –Madeleine L’Engle
I think if I were travel back in time it would be to meet Queen Victoria. I would love to be a fly on the wall in her court. I love everything about Victorian times.
I really enjoyed Tracy’s “Beast of Blackslope” and would love to read more of her historical novels. If I were to travel back in time, it would have to be to a time and place were women artists were appreciated, and I’m not sure when that would be, maybe to the time of the Druids and their deep reverence of nature. My next choice would be the 1950′s and early 1960′s to London for the Pop explosion in British rock music.
Interesting interview and sounds like a fascinating book.
If I could travel back in time, I’d want to visit with Jesus while he was on earth.
I would go back in time to England in the 1950s so I could meet The Inklings. Then I would go to the 1960s to Liverpool and see the beginning of a little band called The Beatles. But…IF I had an invisibility cloak, I’d visit Stonehenge during the reign of the druids and find out what really happened during their ceremonies. But only if I could be invisible.
Haley
I am confident that I will enjoy Tracy Barrett’s King of Ithaka because she is both erudite and imaginative (qualities not guaranteed to pair off!). I’m happy to gather from this post that her son takes aftr her.
As a Kentuckian, my time travel would have to be to the days of Boone and Walker. Imagine coming through the Cumberland Gap to see the grasslands of Central Kentucky. Bison, antelope and giant Burr Oaks everywhere. I’d sprawl by the river at Boonesboro and listen to the sounds of unspoiled nature.
I love Tracy’s Sherlock Files books. A big congrats to her on this one.
I would travel back in time to hear Jesus speak in person, but I love modern day life so I wouldn’t stay too long.