A Tale of Two Books

The story of The First Kid on Mars, for reasons I still don't fully understand, begins with a book mix-up. Abby has brought her "most important and favorite book, a very old book of stories called Winnie-the-Pooh," handed down from her great-grandmother. 

It turns out (first chapter spoiler alert!) her best friend Zamara has brought the same book, handed down from her bisabuela. Confusion reigns, and Abby ends up accidentally taking both books with her to Mars. That turns out to be a really important mistake, but explaining that here would give away too much.

Also, I haven't figured it all out yet.

From the beginning, I've kept my most important and favorite copy nearby, stuffed with post-it notes marking lines or moments that inspire me and inform my story. If you're looking for it, you'll find phrases and echoes from the Hundred Acre Wood throughout The First Kid on Mars.

It mostly lived on my desk in Chicago, ready when needed to help guide me. A few months later, and a few chapters later, I packed up the car and drove the family to Maine for the summer; my parents have a house on the coast, and let me tell you - if you have the opportunity to spend a summer on the coast of Maine you should definitely do that. 

I set up a writing room for myself by a window with a water view, and got back to work. Immediately, I realized something horrible: I had left Winnie-the-Pooh back in Chicago. 

I looked everywhere, hoping I was wrong. I wasn't.

Or was I? There it was, on a nightstand in a guest bedroom. Wasn't that it? What happened to my notes?

Here's what I wrote back in chapter one: 

She looked at the book in her hand, and then back at the book in her pack again. They looked almost exactly the same. The same faded green color, the same drawing of a bear and a small pig walking away on the front, the same stories inside.

So I kept the "almost exactly the same" book with me while I wrote in Maine. 

And I thought about the weird ways the universe tells you you're on the right path. 

Flying By the Seat Of My Pants

Once I was a few chapters into The First Kid on Mars, and starting to feel confident that I really was writing a book, I decided I needed to create a new Twitter account for my new life as a writer. And so I did. 

I started reading and engaging in conversations with writers about writing. I had no idea this community existed on the app, and I love it. 

One discussion keeps grabbing my attention each time I see it: the great planner vs. pantser debate. 

As I quickly came to understand it, planners make a detailed outline of their story before they start to write, and pantsers fly by the seat of their pants, making no plan at all. 

Like most of us, I'm somewhere in the middle. 

But I lean heavily towards flying. 

I started The First Kid on Mars with a couple of sentences that had been clanging around in my head for a couple of days:

Tuesday is going to be different, she thought to herself. After everything that happened today, it just has to be.

I had no idea who she was, or what had happened today, or why today is apparently Monday. I just wrote the next sentence, and then a few more, and then suddenly realized a few things: she was Abby, she had a big fight with her best friend today, and on Tuesday she and her family would start the adventure of moving to Mars. 

Then I started making plans - and now I've got lots of those. More on that later. 

But it all started with a couple of sentences and trusting myself to fly. 

Time to Make the Donuts

Finding time to write can be hard, especially when no one's paying you to do it. And when you have two little kids. And, and, and, and. It's hard; everybody who writes knows this, and I suspect a lot of other people do too. 

During the school year, my part-time teaching gig gives me two and a half days at home each week (without kids) to focus on writing.  

I don't actually use all that time to be a writer (there are always chores to do, errands to run, and I started picking up work as a substitute teacher - because people will pay me to do that) but it was enough to write a book in about a year and a half. My first book: a science-fiction epic for my kids, grounded in realism and the magic of stories, with an unexpected Winnie-the-Pooh motif running throughout.

sidenote: I think I just found my pitch!

So now it's summer - and for teachers with kids, that means it's SUMMER VACATION. 

In the Swift family, we go all out. I'm writing this on a deck overlooking the Kennebec River, about a half mile upstream from the Atlantic Ocean. We're here with family for most of the summer, and most mornings we take the canoe into the river at low tide so the kids can play on the fleeting sand bar beaches.

Most afternoons, like right now, my wife takes the kids to nearby Reid State Park, with a great beach and a shallow lagoon - perfect for wading and splashing, as long as the mosquitos aren't too bad. 

And I'm here hunched over my laptop, because it's time to make the donuts. 

I'm working on my author website, this blog (hello!), query letters and summaries, and trying to figure out who the perfect editors and agents and publishers are to help me bring this story to life. 

I get that all of this is important, but to me, it's not that much fun. And although I think the guy in the old commercial actually ended up loving his job making the donuts, what's always stuck with me is the way he woke up, muttering that it was time to get to work. 

All right, then. Time to get to work.   

Why haiku?

Again, I don't really know.

When I started writing seriously again in January 2021 (more on that later), I was thinking about a lot of different directions I could go, and trying to listen to the directions my passion wanted to take me. 

I started a crazy story about a couple of kids who move to Mars (lots more on that later), jotted down some notes about some other hazy ideas that floated through my brain, and remembered a couple of old haiku I had written way back in high school:

always the water
pounds the sand
looking for nothing

and

old men press buttons
while the next generation
can only ask why

And I thought, hey these were pretty good. Maybe I can write more of these - in fact, maybe I can write them for my kids. So I wrote a new haiku:

haiku for my kids
seventeen syllables to
tell them everything

And then I thought, I bet I can match this up with a picture and it'll be even cooler:

And it was. And then I made my very first Instagram account, and I started writing haiku every day.

And you know what? It turns out to be a really helpful tool for my fiction writing. It helps me exercise my writing muscles and forces me to be concise and precise. Plus it's a lot of fun!

I hope you enjoy the haiku too! Let me know if you have a favorite. 

haikuformykids on Instagram
haikuformykids on Twitter

 

Why Mars?

When I tell people what THE FIRST KID ON MARS is about (I mean, really the whole plot is right there in the title), one of the first questions most of them ask is something along the lines of Why Mars?

And my answer? 

I honestly have no idea. 

More on that later. I have a website to build. 

Making a Website

I'll probably come back and delete this later, but for now here are my thoughts on making a website. 

It's not fun. 

Definitely not as much fun as writing, reading, or taking a canoe out in the creek to play on sand bars at low tide.

That's all.