Short takes from NTTBF: how do you write?

 Happy day! My book shipment from this month’s North Texas Teen Book Festival just arrived, including several from members of the festival’s Fantastical Tales panel, where B. B. Alston, Prince Joel Makonnen, Kwame Mbalia, Lisa McMann, and Shannon Messenger answered questions about every aspect of their writing lives. Including (for Messenger) “Is it true you still sleep with a stuffed animal?” panel moderator Kristen Dickson asked.

Messenger, author of the Keepers of the Lost Cities series, has no bones about admitting her devotion to an adorable stuffed toy which was the basis for one of her characters. “How do you sleep without a stuffed animal,” she asked. “I don’t know what to do with my arms!”

Fantastical Tales panel, NTTBF

Mbalia admitted to a less charming animal episode – falling through mats of swamp vegetation, then walking home through a forest crawling with copperhead (snakes). “That’s when I decided the outdoors was not for me!” (Luckily, he went on to become the New York Times best-selling author of the Tristan Strong series, which requires relatively little contact with venomous animals in the flesh.)

And Prince Joel Makonnen (pronounced “Yoel”)? Yes, he really is a prince. “People ask if ‘prince’ is my first name or just a cool title I like to use.” The truth is, neither of the above. He really is a member of the royal family of Ethiopia! But when he’s not running a real-life media empire, he collaborates with Mbalia on the middle-grade fantasy, Last Gate of the Emperor, due out May 4.

OK, so we had a panel of multiply published authors. Surely, their peers recognized them early on for their genius, yes? Well, not actually.  

B.B. Alston took his debut novel, Amari and the Night Brothers, to his writing group, “and they said, ‘you’re not going to sell a kid’s fantasy with a Black main character!’” (Luckily, his agent disagreed!)

Still, there must be some deep, dark secret to success. Maybe their early reading experience? (Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, mainly, Mbalia says, but also notes “an author I probably wasn’t supposed to read – Walter Mosley and his Devil in a Blue Dress, or basically anything in Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series.)

Or maybe the secret is their play lists?

“Panda cams!” is the favorite of McMann, another one of those NYT-bestsellers, with so many series to her credit she had to count them on her fingers to be sure. (Unwanteds series, Unwanteds Quests, Vision Trilogy, Going Wild series, Wake Trilogy, plus assorted stand alones.)

Messenger prefers Ambient Sounds (various versions available, including from YouTube). Prince Joel prefers Café Jazz on YouTube but also likes – just plain silence.

And Alston? His reply makes him an author after my own heart: “I have to have noise-cancelling headphones – complete silence at all times!”

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Still to come – that secret, never before disclosed, begging to be exploited age gap in YA fiction I mentioned in a previous post? Stay tuned!