I was excited to get an early copy of Bobbie's newest book. I'd read (and loved) her previous novels for middle-grade readers. But THE DOGS OF WINTER was snow-filled. This one's full of Florida sunshine. I have so many questions!
Welcome, Bobbie. Since you're up the road a piece from me for another day or so, let's have a glass of sweet tea and chat a while.
Augusta: What are you doing down here anyhow? Other than escaping to Florida in the middle of the winter like a lot of us.
Bobbie:
This is an artist-in-residence program called Escape ToCreate in Seaside, Florida. The purpose of the residency is to provide artists
of all types a month of space and time to create, uninterrupted. They only take a
few artists (6-9) each session. They provide you with a place to live and work
(usually a lovely little cottage within an easy walk to everything, including
the beach) and explore your craft. It’s all kinds of artists—film makers,
composers, visual artists, musicians—not just writers. During your residency,
you do a couple of projects to give back to the Seaside community. It’s just an amazing opportunity!
Augusta: A perfect spot to write from!
What made you choose Florida as a setting for LUCKY STRIKE? And how did you capture the feeling of a sleepy little Florida town when you live in anything but?
Bobbie:
Place is really important to me when I write a book or
am planning a book, and usually the muse (at the risk of sounding all woo-woo)
will tell me where the story wants to take place. I’d just finished writing THE
DOGS OF WINTER and sent it off to my agent when I decided to get down to work
on this book I’d been thinking about for a while—the book that would become
LUCKY STRIKE. THE DOGS OF WINTER was set in Russia. In my mind, I’d been
“living” for months in this cold, intense place. It was such a joy to be able
to live in Florida, at least in my imagination!
It was actually
quite easy for me to write about a sleepy little fishing town on the Gulf coast
of Florida because that’s where I grew up! I lived mostly in the panhandle of
Florida on the Gulf of Mexico in what were then small fishing towns. I know
what it’s like for people to make their living from the sea and be dependent on
the vagaries of nature, boom and bust cycles, and the re-routing of the
interstate. I remember so well living in a little town like Paradise Beach
where everybody knows everybody else’s business, where all politics are local,
and during hard times folks put aside their differences and help each other
out. This book is, in many ways, my personal “love letter” to all the things I
loved about growing up in the panhandle: the quirky people, the fish fries and
shrimp boat races, the nature all around and the magic of the sea.
Augusta:
And the book is just that- a love letter. Speaking of your loves, you
always manage to work a dog into your books. I love
Mayor
Barney!
Bobbie: Ha,
you’re right! I do always manage to work a dog or two into my books, even if
it’s not technically a “dog book” like A DOG’S WAY HOME and THE DOGS OF WINTER.
I love dogs so much and they are such a part of me, my life would feel empty
without at least one, and so would a book I’m writing. Dogs ground me in a way humans can’t. When I was writing LUCKY STRIKE
and dealing with all the complex humans and their relationships, I could almost
feel that old black lab, Barney, watching with patience and doggy amusement
from the sidelines. And I will tell you that having an animal as mayor of a
small town is not unheard of. When my parents lived in Ramona, California the
mayor was a llama and his name was (brace yourself) Tony. I’m not kidding!
I
have two dogs now, a Shetland Sheepdog named Sherlock and a coyote mix named
Boo, and two cats, Mittens and Kami. All are rescues. I also do a lot of
volunteer work with a couple of different animal rescue organizations in Park
City and Salt Lake City.
Augusta: Aha! I detect a llama in a future story.
I love
the voice of this novel. It has such a storytelling quality. I can just hear
it being read out loud. How did
you decide to use this omniscient narrator?
Bobbie:
Again, at the risk of
sounding obnoxiously elusive, I don’t
consciously decide these things--it’s the way the voice of the story comes to
me. That said, sometimes I try to go a different direction, but I always end up
going back to what the story wants. For instance, when I first started writing A
DOG’S WAY HOME, the voice of the story was actually two voices: the girl, Abby
and the dog, Tam. The girl’s voice was in first person and the dog’s was in
what I call intimate third person (or dog). After I wrote a couple of chapters,
I thought it would be more acceptable (to whom, I don’t know!) to write them in
consistent POVs, so I changed Abby’s to third person. Well, that just didn’t
work for me at all so I went back to doing it the way the story first came to me
in two different POVs.
Augusta: Sadly, I think a lot of writers have had that experience of changing tenses and voices, but I'm not naming names.
What's
your writing process? Does it change with each of your books?
Bobbie:
To some extent, the
process is a little bit different for each book, but certain things remain
constant. I always think about an idea for a long time before I work on it.
Sometimes I’m writing one thing while another is percolating in my mind. It
makes me a little difficult to live with I suspect. I used to think for me
characters came first but I’m realizing usually it’s the basic plot or idea
that comes first. And the idea can be sparked by so many different things:
something I see or overhear someone say; something I’ve read, or even as a
response to what everybody’s reading.
I never outline
before I write a first draft, and I try not to edit much as I go along.
Generally, I don’t show my first draft to anyone while I’m writing it unless
it’s a shorter something like a picture book or short nonfiction or short
story.
I think the thing I’ve learned after writing a number of
books is that I don’t have a set “process” and that’s perfectly okay!
Augusta:
Anything else that strikes your fancy you'd like to share? No pun intended.
Bobbie
I often
get asked by kids if this or that book of mine is based on something that
really happened to me (“Did you lose your
dog?”) or if the main character is really me. Of course as you know, bits of us
filter through into all of what we write. That said, LUCKY STRIKE is probably
the closest to me and my childhood of any of my books. There’s a lot of me—past
and present—in Nate Harlow and a little bit of me in Gen. I did feel unusually
unlucky as a child, I did watch shrimp boat races, I did have a beagle who was
carried away in his dog house by a tornado (thankfully found unharmed two
blocks away), and I did collect single, abandoned shoes. Oh, and I still love to play Goofy Golf!
Thank you for these great answers, Bobbie. It was such fun chatting.
LUCKY STRIKE debuts on February 28, in bookstores everywhere! The reviews are fabulous (see those two bright and shiny stars up there on the book?), and I agree --the story will delight young readers. Don't miss this one.
