“My Audience”—A Guest Post for MG Book Village

Art by Antonio Javier Caparo

I had a lot of fun writing this guest post for the great website MG Book Village, which is dedicated to celebrating middle grade fiction. Here are the opening lines:

“Most authors have some sense of who their audience will be when they write a novel, and I certainly did with The Mad Wolf’s Daughter: I wrote it for me, for my son, and for middle graders who wanted a fast-paced adventure to make them almost miss the bus in the morning.

The Mad Wolf’s Daughter is the book of my heart. It stars Drest, a scrappy 12-year-old girl who takes swordplay, cliff-climbing, and swimming through dangerous seas as her daily exercise. When her warm and loving family—a notoriously brutal father and five vicious brothers—are captured by enemy knights and shipped off to a castle to meet their doom, she goes after them, hauling along a young injured knight as guide and hostage. On her journey, she follows her family’s war-band codes of honor, but also develops her own codes. Oh, and she rescues pretty much everyone she runs across.

Let’s start with why I wrote this book for me.…” Read more

(By the way, only five more days until Drest is out on bookstore shelves…)

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