Noa Wheeler, Henry Holt Books for Young Readers editor and Manhattan bicycle daredevil, and whom I suspect would have let me name the book anything I wanted, occasionally tweets her favorite title of the day, and What We Found in the Sofa recently made the cut. Had the book been named Never Moon a Werewolf, I can’t help but think it might have received the honor sooner...
Never Moon a Werewolf was my second choice for the title of What We Found in the Sofa and How it Saved the World, after the much pithier Hellsboro, but my editor pointed out there are no werewolves in the book, and nobody moons anybody, so I had to settle for Never Moon a Werewolf becoming the title of Chapter 15, the chapter most thoroughly devoid of both werewolves and mooning. (What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World was my forty-third choice for the book’s title, by the way.) Noa Wheeler, Henry Holt Books for Young Readers editor and Manhattan bicycle daredevil, and whom I suspect would have let me name the book anything I wanted, occasionally tweets her favorite title of the day, and What We Found in the Sofa recently made the cut. Had the book been named Never Moon a Werewolf, I can’t help but think it might have received the honor sooner... Someday I may write a book called Never Moon, a Werewolf, about a native American lycanthrope. Then again, maybe not.
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The headline sounds impressive. At first glance, it suggests the book has sold a million copies, or made a million dollars. All it really means is, someone has pre-ordered a single copy of What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World from Amazon.com and moved the book very briefly from where it was yesterday – at position 3,751,233, right between Fletch Your Own Arrows and How To Make Hats Out of Pork – to a position within Amazon’s list of top million sellers.
I know from experience that over the next few days, the book’s position will slowly creep back to 3,751,233. And then I’ll have to order another copy. Yes, Publishers Weekly’s Silly Superlatives were given out last week, and What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World won in the coveted Best Motivation for Furniture Destruction category, an unheard-of honor for a debut novel. The six other books nominated in this category -
The Ottoman That Ate Detroit The Lawn Chairs are Trouncing My Cousin Leon (translated from the Ukrainian) How To Train Your Footstool Night of the Living Bed Suzie Swallowed the Hassock Again! and Celebrity Love Seat: My Life on the Red Carpet – made for some fierce competition. (I feel bad about the way the fashionistas trashed the Love Seat just for wearing a see-through plastic slipcover. The Love Seat was expecting company; what did you expect her to wear? Lighten up.) The winner of the first Silly Superlative back in 1977 was Taro Gomi’s Everybody Poops, and the award trophy was designed with that book in mind. It is not a trophy one is eager to display on one’s bookshelf. Fellow Little, Brown author Karen Harrington has invited me to participate in a blog chain called The Next Big Thing, in which the participants answer ten questions about their latest project while eating Doritos and getting crumbs all over the keyboard. (Actually, Karen said nothing about Doritos, even though she lives in Texas, the home of Frito-Lay, and she should be promoting local mom & pop businesses, but I decided to include them as an added insight into my creative process.)
Here are my answers to the ten questions of The Next Big Thing:
What is your working title of your book? The working title was Hellsboro, which is the name of the 800-acre underground coal-seam fire my three young heroes live on the edge of, but somehow that title got changed to What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World, which is more descriptive, but won’t look anywhere near as cool on the spine of the dust jacket. Where did the idea come from for the book? An article I once read about Centralia, Pennsylvania, where there’s an underground coal fire that is expected to burn for at least another century. There was something intriguing about a fire just below the surface that couldn’t be put out. Metaphorical, even. What genre does your book fall under? MSSFWLHO—Middle School Science Fantasy with Light Humorous Overtones. There is, I believe, an actual Amazon.com category with that title. It’s right next to CMMTTRWPU—Cozy Murder Mystery Time-Travel Romance with Philosophical Underpinnings. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? Of the adult characters, David Tennant, best known to American audiences as the tenth Doctor Who, would be perfect as Alf, the eccentric owner of the Underhill estate. The villain, billionaire industrialist Edward M. Disin (rhymes with listen) would, of course, be James Woods (rhymes with goods). The kids are harder to cast, since child actors, even those who have had work done to retain the youthful look of 12, grow up too quickly. If I could pick and choose child actors from a specific point in their careers, the book’s narrator/protagonist, River, would be Ron Howard as he appeared at the midpoint of The Andy Griffith Show’s eight year run; his friend Freak would be the circa 1964, pre-Goldie Hawn Kurt Russell, and the pivotal role of Fiona would go to Eden Sher, who so amusingly portrays Sue Heck in the ABC sitcom The Middle, as she appeared in the show’s first two seasons, before she turned 20. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? Three kids who live on the edge of an underground coal fire find some unusual objects between the cushions of an abandoned sofa that put them in the way of a billionaire industrialist’s plan for world domination. (What, again?) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? Little, Brown will publish the hardcover on July 2, 2013. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 114 days, averaging 612 words per day, which turns out to be about the fastest I can write. It took me the better part of a week—and four bags of Doritos—just to fill out this questionnaire. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? MSSFWLHO doesn’t really have a wide range of titles. I’d like to put the book in the same company as Terry Pratchett’s YA Discworld entries, such as A Hat Full of Sky or Wintersmith, but that would be presumptuous. Who or what inspired you to write this book? All the books I read while I was growing up, from E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It trilogy and Eleanor Cameron’s Mushroom Planet series, to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Harvard Lampoon’s LOTR parody, Bored of the Rings. They all contributed, to greater or lesser degrees. What else about your book might pique the reader's interest? If you glue the cardboard tubes from four rolls of toilet paper to each of the book’s four corners, the book can be used as a small table. (I’ve done this. It easily supports a snack-size bag of Doritos. And it looks great with yellow drapes.) For those of you who did not find a copy of Little, Brown's 2013 Young Readers catalog in with the advertising supplements of last Sunday's newspaper, clicking here or on the picture to the left will take you to the catalog's two most interesting pages: the pages describing What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World. There's even an excerpt from the book. And this strikes me as a good place to discuss the serial comma. The serial comma, for those of you who are not hung up on minutiae, is the comma used before a coordinating conjunction (usually the word "and") just before the final item in a list of three or more things. For example, "Winkin, Blinkin and Nod" does not contain a serial comma, whereas "Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod" does. You can see the difference.
It is, however, the editorial policy at Little, Brown that the serial comma be used, so What We Found in the Sofa came out about a page longer than it really had to be. I protested to my editor at the time, but I finally acquiesced.
I knew enough not to argue that the company logo itself proudly displays the Cambridge Emptiness. This, then, is the author’s photo as it will appear on the dust jacket of What We Found in the Sofa, unless somebody comes up with a better idea, like a picture of a sock puppet. This is me, after getting the memo from my publisher that all Young Readers authors, with the exception of James Patterson, are expected to appear in publicity photos dressed as the Belgian comic book character Tintin. (My publisher is the American distributor of the Tintin books, so I suppose it makes some sort of sense, although, now that I think of it, the e-mail telling me to dress this way did end with the words snicker * snicker * snicker, in exactly that size font, so I’m beginning to wonder.)
This is what the people who saw the photo early on liked best about it.
Little, Brown just sold the French rights to What We Found in the Sofa to Editions Des Grandes Personnes (or, as I would have translated it in my third year of high school French, Big Huge Person Books, which should tell you how well I did in high school French and further tells you why I will not be trusted to translate my own book. The name of the company is somewhat better rendered into English as Grown-Up Books, but that doesn’t make much sense, since WWFITS is aimed at a Middle School audience and not adults, unless there’s some sort of nationwide conspiracy in France to convince young people they’re actually older than they are so they can be gotten into the workforce earlier to boost the economy. When I was last in Paris, there did seem to be a lot of twelve-year-olds driving taxis.)
What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com! Official publication date is July 2, 2013. Amazon's price for the hardcover is only a buck-fifty more than its price for the Kindle edition. Get the hardcover. It will come in a box with a smile on it that you can cut out and do jocular things with. How could you resist? Especially these days when wax lips are so hard to get. And if you ever meet me, it will be much easier for me to autograph the hardcover than it would be for me to autograph the Kindle - I might not have a Magic Marker on me.
You can get to the book's Amazon page by clicking here, or by clicking on either of the photos. (I would go with the photo on the left, me being a naturally upbeat person. The photo on the right is probably going to get me sued by the estate of Emmett Kelly.) Here is the poster promoting my book from yesterday’s Little, Brown Young Reader’s Spring Preview. I’ve included a Box of Boogers to indicate scale. (It occurs to me that some of you may be unfamiliar with the size of a Box of Boogers. A Box of Boogers is the size of a Volkswagen. Meaning the poster my publisher printed for me is the size of a Times Square billboard. It’s nice that they’ve really gotten behind the book.)
No, wait. Seriously. I swiped the Box of Boogers (not to be confused with Box O’Boogers, the famous Irish pugilist) from the desk of my editor. She seemed relieved to get rid of it. It seems LBYR is about to publish a book with the word “Booger” in the title, and the candy just found its way into her office. (There are precedents for books - not even specifically children’s books - with “booger” in the title. I can cite De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Booger-Eater; Dickens’ A Tale of Two Boogers; and, of course, Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Boogervilles.) My editor assured me she had not tried any of the box's contents, but would be interested in hearing back from me after I had. Even though I didn’t go to Yale (I went to the P.T. Barnum Museum in Bridgeport and the Mark Twain House in Hartford; I couldn't, after all, cram everything into a one week vacation) I was allowed into the Yale Club in Manhattan today to participate in Little, Brown’s Young Readers Spring Preview. We authors sashayed up and down the runway, showing off our wares, flashbulbs popping, and I almost had a dust-jacket malfunction, an inner flap flying loose at one point but I caught it and tucked it back in; nobody noticed and it wasn’t caught on camera, thank God.
Around 2:30 I was given ten minutes to address the assemblage and try to convince them my book What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World is the greatest children’s book since Edward Gorey’s The Deranged Cousins, which turned out to be easy since most of the attendees had never heard of The Deranged Cousins, but things still went off on a possibly unfortunate tangent when I tried to justify the length of my book’s title by explaining that I grew up at a time when there was a fad for long titles and you could go to the movies and see Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb or attend a Broadway play called The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, or see an off Broadway play called Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad or even take a flashlight under the covers with you and read Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, which might have been giving out too much information about myself, and may have been the reason I noticed eyes starting to glaze over so I tried to get back to my prepared speech but discovered I had completely forgotten it, so I waded out into the audience and read the bumps on their heads instead, having been a phrenologist in a previous life. The meet-and-greet later was easy, since everybody kept their distance. |
Henry ClarkPictured here on the day he sold What We Found in the Sofa. His mood is cautiously optimistic. Archives
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