Two Captive Audiences

I feel like I'm cheating. Like this is just too much awesome to be fair. 

Also, I don't know why I didn't think of this years ago. 

I've got two beta reader groups (7 to 10-year-old kids, right in the target audience) reading my WIP The First Kid on Mars and giving me instant feedback. And I mean instant.

(record scratch) You're probably wondering how I got here.

Well, even if you're not, I'll tell you. I've been a K-8 drama and audio/visual arts teacher at a Chicago public school for a long time. I make movies and play drama games with kids, and I direct the school musical every year. And now my kids are students at the same school I teach at-- one in first grade, and one in fourth.

It's fun to see them in the hall sometimes, and it's a blast to make movies and play games with them, and they both had fun in Mary Poppins.

Earlier this school year, I signed up to be a guest parent reader for my son's first grade class. Usually the guest reader brings a favorite book from home or picks one out from the classroom library, but I thought it would be fun to read them the first chapter of The First Kid on Mars.

And it was. 

They sat quietly, listening the whole time. If you've ever spent time in a first grade classroom, you know this is not a common occurrence. They told me they loved it and asked me sharp questions about how and why I wrote it, what's going to happen next, and when it's going to be a real book.

They asked me to come back to read chapter two. I did, and they loved that too. 

I ran into the teacher in the teacher's lounge after that, and asked if I could sign up for more guest reader times. Like maybe once a week, and read all twenty chapters by the end of the school year? It's easy for me to stop by during my lunch break, and it keeps her students quiet and focused for twenty or thirty minutes. 

If you've ever spent time in a first grade classroom, you know what her answer was. 

So once a week, I read them a chapter and watch their expressions as they listen. I can see when they sit up and lean forward; I can see when they get bored. When we're done with each chapter, they can ask me questions and I can ask them questions. 

After chapter two, his sister found out and got jealous. She asked her teacher if I could come in to read it to her class too. 

Her teacher also did not mind if I kept her students quiet for twenty or thirty minutes once a week. 

And now her class tells me they love it too. And they're giving me great feedback and asking great questions.

And now I get to do this twice a week. That's a lot of awesome.

Resolutions

Happy New Year!

I posted a few goals for 2025 on Bluesky and Twitter as 2024 came to an end the other day, and I wanted to put them out into the universe here too. 

The biggest one is publishing THE FIRST KID ON MARS with Big Sea Books. This is the story that brought me back to writing for the first time since I was a kid, and it's the story that my kid fell in love with as I was writing it. I'll be editing/revising this spring, and the plan is to publish it by the end of the school year. 

I've only been able to write a little bit of SEVENTEEN MINUTES OF RAIN in the present so far - the rest exists only in my imagined future. I'm planning to catch up to that future this year, with a full first draft complete before the calendar flips again.

With three published short stories (BLUE SKIES and FROM NOW ON in The Accidental Time Travelers Collective Vol. 1 and Vol. 3, respectively, and DAY TEN in the first issue of Bunker Squirrel Magazine), I'm starting to feel like a real writer. I've got two more ready to publish this year (BLIND LUCK and (almost) out of the woods), and a whole bunch more in the works. How many can I get published this year?

Speaking of Bunker Squirrel Magazine, I'm planning to submit a flash fiction piece based on their prompts every month. You should too - it's run by great people, and it's putting some great writing out into the world. 

I want to write more haiku this year. Lots and lots and lots of haiku. I gave my parents a @haikuformykids calendar, and maybe it's time to start selling them somewhere. 

And finally, I want to blog more regularly. I guess I can check that off my list.

For today, anyway.

Don't Judge a Book by Its--Actually, Go Ahead

I may have pantsed my way into a cover reveal on Twitter yesterday. 

Let me explain.

I started playing with ideas for the cover of THE FIRST KID ON MARS a few days ago. I'm not an illustrator, but I figured I could find my way around Canva well enough to put something together. 

After a few days, I finally created something that expressed the idea in my head: a teddy bear sitting on the surface of the red planet. It wasn't really very good, but I didn't hate it. 

So I posted it on Twitter, thinking I'd get some feedback on the concept that might help me figure out how to move forward. 

I never could have expected what happened next. 

A complete stranger, who happens to be an illustrator in Germany, saw my post and the comments and replied:

I got inspired by your concept and had a little fun as a daily challenge. 😊
It's yours if you like it.

I do like it. I like it a lot. I need to give it some thought and figure out some logistical things, but I think we may have just accidentally revealed the cover of my first book. 

What do you think?

 

 

 

Psycho Killer, Qu'est-ce que c'est? (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being a Serial Killer)

I didn't plan to become a serial killer; it just kind of happened.

Hang on, I should probably back up a little bit here. And, before anyone gets the wrong idea, no, I have not killed anyone and I don't think I ever will. Sure, like most writers, I have a questionable internet search history, but that just comes with the territory, right?

Right?

Anyway. 

As I've mentioned before, one of my favorite things about Twitter (or the platform formerly known as Twitter, if you insist) is the use of prompts that get me thinking and writing. I spent many years of my life not writing any fiction at all, and when I started again there were some old muscles that hadn't stretched in a long time. And so I stretched, grateful for the exercise. 

I stretched my way into my first published short story, an opportunity that grew from responding to daily #TimeTravelAuthors posts. I'm working on a sequel that tells the same story from a different character's point of view; those muscles are getting stronger and more confident.

This past winter I found #CreativityStir prompts, daily inspiration for stories, poems, or wherever the photo may lead you. The images were interesting, and the community in the comments welcomed me immediately. And if the first few months hadn't been lovely pictures of things like doves and castles and a guy walking in the woods, I probably wouldn't be where I am today. 

Last month the prompts turned spooky, with supernatural pictures (and now video clips) to inspire us all. I came up with a couple of fun ghost stories, but I didn't have time to participate every day. I knew I'd have more time for mental workouts in August, and I looked forward to finding out what the next theme would be.

And then at the end of July, the announcement came: August would be Serial Killer Month.

Well, friends, I had to think about that. You see, I've been hard at work for two years now on a middle-grade science-fiction epic ten-book series that I'm convinced will be the biggest thing since that kid discovered he was a wizard, and I think I'm supposed to think about my image as a middle-grade author. Or at least not confuse the marketing team for my future bestsellers by writing in a wide range of genres. 

So I had to ask myself: should I stretch my writing muscles with some dark, definitely not middle-grade story ideas? Or should I sit out this month to protect my image?

I decided to stretch, a little tentatively at first. Other writers in the group encouraged me, and one in particular gave me permission to be someone else for the month: #NatTheRipper. 

So now I spend a few minutes each morning sipping coffee and trying to put myself in the head of a killer. Usually the rest of my family is getting ready for today's summer vacation adventure while I'm doing this; sometimes I write on my phone while we walk on the beach, and they don't suspect a thing. 

I'm really glad I found this group - all of the writers are brilliant and the conversations are hilarious. We've all stretched in ways that we didn't expect, and created worlds and characters that never would have existed without these prompts. 

Oh, that picture of the guy walking in the woods I mentioned earlier? That turned into a short story that I think will be published in an anthology of stories inspired by these prompts soon, and that one stretched to some very weird places. More on that later. 

I don't think I'm going to be a thriller writer, but it's fun to stretch in that direction, and it feels good to strengthen those muscles. Maybe under a pen name...

Location, Location, Location

 When I was a kid, I had a big backyard. Maybe not the biggest, but there was room for a football game plus a basketball court, sandbox, playset, and a little stream that would freeze in the winter so you could go ice skating. Behind the yard, and going on forever as far as I could tell, there were thick woods filled with trails and secret treehouses. For a kid growing up just outside of Detroit, it was heaven.

For a young writer (and voracious reader) it was more than that: it offered a never-ending choice of perfect spots to hide with a good book, a notebook, and a pencil until mom's voice found its way through the branches to beckon me home with the promise of lunch or dinner or bedtime. I remember one spot in particular that I loved, and to this day I still believe I did my best writing there.

Thinking back on it now, I'm sure the tree was no more than fifteen feet high, but in my memory it's at least a hundred, and I would climb up to the very top with my writing tools and brilliant ideas. There were a couple of thick branches that bent perfectly around each other to create a seat, complete with places to tuck my feet to make sure I didn't fall while I wrote. 

I don't know how often I really sat up there to write, or for how long, or even what stories I wrote up there. It's possible my recollection is colored by the warm sepia-toned filter of nostalgia; I think I stayed up there all day most days, and I think I wrote the greatest short stories and poetry the world had ever seen.

If any of that is true, I'm giving all credit to the greatest writing spot in the world. 

Since I started writing again, I hadn't given much thought to where I was writing. We have an office in our home that didn't get much use until the pandemic made me a virtual teacher, playing drama games with faces on a screen in an empty room. I slowly started to claim the desk there as a writing space, and suddenly it started to look like this:

No branches, no view, nowhere to tuck my feet. 

I didn't think much of it, and I got some good writing done in that mess. A few months later, we took the family on a summer road trip, and I found new writing spots:

Right now I'm sitting on a screened-in deck overlooking a thick forest on a hill that slopes down to what we call "the creek" here on the coast of Maine - really it's a narrow tributary of the Kennebec River just before it joins the Atlantic Ocean.

 

I've got a chair, and I don't need to hook my feet around anything to keep my balance, but the view is everything I remember. It's a spot that makes it easy to feel like a kid again, inspired to write the greatest stories in the world. 

In fact, I should get back to that now.

 

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future

 Last summer, I started responding to daily #TimeTravelAuthors posts on Twitter, sharing snippets and details from a book I hadn't written yet. I thought it might help me develop a story, or at worst be a not-very-funny joke that would disappear into the ethereal nothingness of the Internet.

The first post was a simple introduction with an explanation of what I was going to do (or what I had already done in the future), and a promise that things would get weird.

Spoiler alert: things got weird.

The next day, the prompt asked for a single line from your book. I imagined myself looking into the future, holding my book in my hand, and flipping it open to a random page. Here's the line I saw and shared:

Hannah ran, her feet splashing in the rising puddles, but she knew it was too late.

I didn't know what that meant then, and I still don't know now. I don't know why the puddles are rising (or even if puddles rise), and I don't know what she's too late for. 

But I do know this sentence will appear on a random page in SEVENTEEN MINUTES OF RAIN whenever future me writes it, and I'm confident that I'll have figured it out by then. 

Oh, that title -- I discovered that a little over a month in, when the daily prompt asked for the title of your book, and I had to time travel to find out what future me had decided to call it.

Around the same time, one of the other authors participating, one of the ones who had actually written a book already, sent a message to some of the other authors, including the one who was just making this all up (that's me). Who's interested in a crazy idea? he asked.

As you can probably guess by now, I'm a sucker for a crazy idea. 

He wanted to see if we were interested in contributing a short story to a new anthology of time travel fiction. I was definitely interested, and this time the fact that I hadn't written anything yet wasn't a problem. 

That was in September. Today is December 8th, and my story BLUE SKIES is available to purchase for e-readers as part of the anthology The Accidental Time Traveler Collective. It's my debut as a published author, and I still can't quite believe this all happened so fast. 

But then, I guess time is relative when we're talking about time travel stories. 

What's in a Name?

A few days ago, someone told me that I always have "snappy" titles for my stories. I felt some pride, but also a lot of humble gratitude for what I see as a lucky streak of stumbling into a title. 

It got me thinking: where do these titles come from? How did I get lucky with snappy ones? Here's a quick run-down...

THE FIRST KID ON MARS

• This is the story that brought me back to writing (a story that I still need to tell here), and the title fell out of the sky halfway through chapter one. All I knew at first was that there was a young girl in a classroom. When the principal called from the office, I found out that the girl, Abby, had been picked for a mission that would make her the first kid on Mars. I did a quick google search to make sure no one else had already used that title, and that was it. 

SEVENTEEN MINUTES OF RAIN

• This story started out as a Twitter joke and took on a life of its own; I discovered new details about it every day, and about a month in I discovered that the 2016 World Series was an important event for the main characters. The 2016 World Series finished with a dramatic rain delay in the 9th inning of a tied game 7. Nobody knows exactly what happened in the locker rooms, but after seventeen minutes of rain the Cubs came out to rally for the win.

BLUE SKIES

• I was invited to contribute a short story to an anthology of time travel authors (I still can't believe this really happened), and jumped into a story that starts with a skydiving accident and time hops to 2142 and back, so a dad can help his daughter save the world. I looked up skydiving lingo and found "blue skies" - a phrase that can mean hello, goodbye, and good luck in the skydiving community. And then it matched up with the lullaby dad used to sing to his little girl, so it had to be the title.

LOOKING FOR KISMET

• I saw a book on a table at the school I teach at, part of a messy pile of books next to a note that said "FREE!" The title of the book grabbed me - Searching for Serendipity - but I didn't grab the book. I did let that phrase kick around in my head for a few days, until it was joined by memories of my old cat Kismet, and an imagined story of neighborhood kids looking for Kismet when she runs away. 

Looking at this list, I guess I do feel like I've gotten pretty lucky with snappy titles. Any other name might not smell so sweet.

Time Travel

One of my favorite things about the writing community on Twitter is how everyone supports each other. There are so many writers sharing work and encouraging each other to write more. I love sharing excerpts from The First Kid on Mars, and I've become addicted to haiku challenges, six-word story challenges, photo prompts, and more.

And that's probably why I did a really weird thing last week: I started writing a book in the future. 

That probably needs some explanation, unless you're reading this from the future (which I guess you are, really - please let me know how the book turns out!).

I saw that someone had created a month-long series of prompts for writers of time travel stories (#TimeTravelAuthors), asking authors to share quotes, character notes, and other details from their time travel books. 

I decided I wanted to play, but there was only one problem:

I haven't written a time travel book. 

But if we're talking about time travel, that shouldn't be a problem, right? 

So I decided that I will write a time travel book in the future, and respond to each day's prompts from the perspective of my future book. And then after the month is over, after we've all traveled to the future together, I would write the book and find out what all these answers meant. 

I'm up to Day 9, and so far I've learned that it's the story of 8th-grade geniuses Hannah and George, who accidentally create a time machine when they have to combine their science fair projects. I've seen a couple of quotes, and I know they start in 2016 Chicago and travel to 1984 Detroit (and somewhere else in the future, but I don't know where or when that is yet) to meet Hannah's dad. Everything else is still a mystery. 

I'm trying hard not to cheat, not to think past the daily prompt, to let this future book tell me what it is. I don't know if I'll see this through to the end, but I hope so - I'm excited to see how the book turned out! 

Why Winnie-the-Pooh?

If you've been reading this blog from the beginning, Loyal Reader, you can probably say it along with me:

Also, thanks for reading!

Here's what I do know:

This book, The First Kid on Mars, is the first time I've taken writing seriously in over twenty years. I found myself with a good amount of free time when my son started preschool, and still no clear path back to live theatre with two toddlers, and Covid still keeping small theaters closed. 

I wrote a lot when I was a kid, stopping after college to focus on acting and directing. But now I hadn't written anything since a very long time ago, and I didn't know what to write about. 

I thought I would write picture books -- I'd restart the old Adventures of Aardvark and Axolotl stories my dad used to tell us when I was a kid, and they'd be the next Elephant and Piggie -- but it turns out I can't draw pictures.

So I did some serious thinking, and started seeing the loose threads of a longer story starting to weave together: there was a little girl who loved books and adventures, and her love of books would help guide her through her adventure. It would have to focus on one book in particular, and that book would inform the prose and the structure of my book. I came up with a short list of books I knew well enough that I thought might work:

I tried to think about each one, and how it could help guide a little girl through an adventure (and how it could help guide me through writing a book), and the answer was obvious.

The first chapter started writing itself: 

It all started during Morning Meeting, which on Mondays means Show and Tell. Abby had brought her most important and favorite book, a very old book of stories called Winnie-The-Pooh. Her mom had read the stories to her when Abby was little, and she said that her mommy had read the stories to her when she was little, from the very same book!

I wonder sometimes what the story would have been if I picked a different book.

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.