Happy Monday Everyone! Today I’m excited to have Nancy McCabe here to share about her MG Fires Burning Underground. It sounds like a great contemporary story that also has an element of danger, and I’m looking forward to reading it.
Here’s a blurb from Goodreads:
It's Anny's first day of middle school and, after years of being homeschooled, her first day of public school ever. In art, Larissa asks what kind of ESP is her telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, or telekinesis? Tracy asks how she gay, straight, bi, ace, pan, trans, or confused? And thus kicks off a school year for Anny in which she' ll navigate a path between childhood and adolescence, imagination and identity. In a year of turmoil and transition, with a new awareness of loss after the death of a friend, Anny struggles to find meaning in tragedy, to come to terms with her questions about her sexuality, and to figure out how to negotiate her own ever-shifting new friendships. And when her oldest friend's life is in danger, she must summon up her wits, imagination, and the ghosts that haunt her to save them both.
Hi
Nancy! Thanks so much for joining us.
1. Tell us about yourself and how you became a writer.
It’s
great to be here! I don’t remember when I started writing—composing stories in
my head and then on paper is something that I always did. I can remember
narrating stories in my head while falling asleep at night; writing stories
with friends or my cousin based on board games we played, doll dramas that we
enacted, and games of pretend in the backyard; and standing waiting for the
school bus trying to figure out how to describe snowflakes. I always read a ton
and always wrote, so when I went to college I was ecstatic to discover that I
could major in creative writing. And then excited to find out that I could go
to graduate school and study it some more. And that I could go on writing and
sharing the craft as part of my job as a college professor.
2. Yes, it sounds like a dream job. Where did you get the idea for Fires Burning Underground?
There are many autobiographical elements. When I was twelve, a friend died in a fire, and a few weeks later a neighbor’s house caught fire. Moving from a small country school to a larger junior high that year, I also made a friend with a creative, imaginative girl. Her friendship and our creative activities were a refuge from so many impending adult realities. I really wanted to write a story that captures that in between state, reluctance to leave behind childhood combined with a longing for the independence to break away from family expectations.
Your
Writing Process
3. You’ve written nine books—YA, adult fiction, and memoir. What made you decide to write a middle grade story? How was writing for this age group different than what you’ve written in the past?
I feel like genre chooses me rather than the other way around. Some stories just needed to be creative nonfiction/memoir because they lost their drama if I tried to write them as fiction while other stories were just more interesting if I allowed myself to make things up. The identity questions I wrote about in my YA novel Vaulting through Time felt like they would resonate a lot more with Teenage Me than adult me, and Fires Burning Underground was the sort of story that felt like it could have helped Middle Grade Me make sense of complicated issues when I was twelve. So I suppose that’s the starting point for me—when would I have found this story most meaningful? What audience do I think it will speak to most?
The main challenge of writing for middle graders was finding the voice of a twelve year old, a process that involved rereading my childhood diaries, listening to my daughter and her friends when they were that age, and rereading middle grade novels. Some of my college students assume that writing for middle graders means “dumbing down” the vocabulary, but of course that isn’t it at all. Kids are pretty smart, with often sophisticated vocabularies. For me, it was more of a process of thinking about how kids understand the world. They’re not innocent or ignorant. They just see the world differently than adults do.
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Finding time has often been a huge challenge, especially because while raising my daughter I was also a single mom and my child’s only parent, so there were never any breaks. I spent many years being very, very disciplined—writing as soon as I took her to school and before I had to be on campus, finding summer activities for her so that I could write. Since she left home a few years ago I’ve been able to relax my schedule a little, but I still try to write for at least an hour every morning. Sometimes I’m more successful than others. I also usually teach one advanced writing class at night each semester, and I make a point of putting aside all of my other work and writing along with them. I’ve produced a lot that way—and it makes me a better teacher, having faced the same kinds of obstacles and dilemmas my students do.
5. It sounds like you’ve figured out a way to squeeze in your writing to your daily schedule. Reviewers have said that you do a good job of showing the emotional rollercoaster that middle graders go through in Fires Burning Underground. Share a bit about how you weaved these themes into your story and about Anny’s character development as you told her story.
I remember so strongly my own emotional rollercoaster at that age. I felt things deeply—joy, grief, terror. I really wanted to portray the way emotions felt when I was new at navigating them. Anny has never faced the death of a peer and that comes with a whole slew of bewildering emotions—not just sadness, but fear and awkwardness and embarrassment. Her friendship with Larissa is all the more intense in the face of that. It brings her joy but there’s also a bittersweetness as it changes and evolves. Anny also has many searching questions about her own identity, ones that she will have to face as she matures, another reason she wants to postpone growing up. Those questions cause her anguish and concerns about her ability to be accepted.
Your
Road to Publication
6. Tell us about your journey to becoming a published author and how you got your publishing contract for Fires Burning Underground.
I started writing Fires Burning Underground many years ago, returning to work on revisions every few years or go to conferences to learn more about writing for middle graders. In between, I wrote and published my five memoirs with university presses and two novels with good traditional small presses. So I was pretty experienced by the time I decided to send out Fires Burning Underground. I’d heard a lot of good things about Fitzroy/Regal House, so I decided to try them, and was thrilled when they were interested. With other books, I had done some pretty extensive developmental editing processes, but my editors didn’t feel that this one needed that kind of overhaul. After all, I’d already received great advice from writer friends and editors at conferences.
7. How did working with your editor on Fires Burning Underground make it a stronger story?
I’d
already gotten a thorough critique from a writer friend about the book’s plot,
followed, a few years and revisions later, by a thorough critique from an
editor about its voice, and a whole lot of other feedback from readers about
other elements. So by the time I worked with my editors at Regal House, we were
focusing on smaller issues. They pointed out a couple of things that they felt
might be problematic, and I reworked those. I love to revise and would have
been happy to tackle anything else they suggested, but they felt that it was
done.
Promoting
Your Book
8. I love to revise too.What did you do to celebrate the release of your book? How are you promoting it?
Our community library partnered with our campus library, arts programming office, and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program to hold a release party. We had flame-shaped cookies and I gave a brief talk and then had some young actors from the community do a table reading of some scenes from the book. It was so much fun to see the kids bring those scenes to life. I’ve been doing lots of interviews, podcasts, and guest articles to promote it and have some travel coming up.
9. Your release party sounds fun. What have you learned about building your author platform and marketing your books since you were first published? What advice do you have for other authors?
When I published my first books in 2003, if there were social media platforms I could have used to market my books, I was unaware of them. It wasn’t until my third book in 2011 that I had a Facebook account. Eventually I also tried out Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, Threads, and Bluesky, but I’ve never gotten comfortable with them—and I know that Tik Tok might be a better way to reach the age group I’m writing for. I’ve appreciated that some influencers shared my YA novel on Bookstagram and Book Tok, and hope for a similar outcome for Fires Burning Underground.
I finally decided that for myself, it’s better to stick to what I’m comfortable with. I do post on Facebook in the hopes that my network of parents, grandparents, teachers, and librarians will be inspired to share my books with kids. I do think that school visits are one of the best ways to get the word out. I’ve done a couple of them, and having worked as a writer in the schools in a couple of states in the past, I have skills to offer to schools who host me in the future.
10. What are you working on now?
I always have a pile of projects in progress. I’ve started a sequel to my YA novel, have a very rough draft of an adult novel written, am working on putting together an essay collection about my daughter’s mysterious chronic illness when she was a teenager, and have a contract with University of New Mexico Press for a craft book on writing about trauma, Creating Some Measure of Beauty: The Healing Power of the Artful Essay. I’m retiring from undergraduate teaching this semester so that I can really focus on all of these projects!
Thanks for sharing all your advice, Nancy. You can find Nancy at https//www.nancymccabe.net.
Thanks so much for these great questions!
Giveaway Details
Nancy and her publicist are generously offering a paperback
of Fires Burning
Underground for a giveaway. To enter, all you need to do is be a
follower of my blog (via the follower gadget, email, or bloglovin’ on the
right sidebar) and leave a comment by June 21st. If I do not have your
email (I can no longer get it from your Google Profile), you must leave it in
the comments to enter the contest. Please be sure I have your email address.
If you mention this contest on Twitter, Facebook, or other
social media sites and/or follow me on Twitter or Bluesky or follow Nancy on her social media
sites, mention this in the comments, and I'll give you an extra entry for each.
You must be 13 years old or older to enter. This book giveaway is U.S.
Marvelous Middle Grade Monday is hosted by Greg
Pattridge. You can find the participating blogs on his blog.
Upcoming Interviews, Guest Posts,
and Blog Hops
Wednesday, June 11th I
have an agent spotlight interview with Mark O’Brien and a query critique
giveaway
Monday, June 16th I’m
participating in the Dad-o-Mite Giveaway Hop
Monday, June 23rd I have
an interview with author Michael Spradlin and a giveaway of his MG Threat of
the Spider
Tuesday, July 1st I’m
participating in the Sparkle Time Giveaway Hop
Wednesday, July 2nd I
have an interview with author Nia Davenport and a giveaway of her YA Love
Spells Trouble and my IWSG post
Monday, July 7th I have
an interview with author Natalie Richards and a giveaway of her MG Survive This
Safari
I hope to see you on Wednesday!
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