Interviu Sarah Prineas III

Today we have an exclusive interview with our wonderful children’s author, Sarah Prineas.
Sarah is the author of the Magic Thief series, a series which has sold all across the world. The trilogy features Conn, a young street thief who steals a wizard’s magic stone and changes his fortunes forever. Quercus are delighted to be publishing Sarah’s next trilogy, starting with Winterling in 2012.

Parul Bavishi: Firstly, and importantly, I heard you hurt your leg while playing football. Are you better? Has the enforced rest also enforced more writing?
Sarah Prineas: I am much better, thank you! Old ladies like me should never play soccer against teenagers, that’s for sure. But after three weeks of crutches and continuing rehab, I’m hobbling around pretty well now. Sadly, being stuck on the couch didn’t mean I got any more writing done, though I did get caught up on my email and this online word game that I’m addicted to…
Parul Bavishi: The third in the Magic Thief trilogy has now been published. How does it feel?
Sarah Prineas: If it were the last Magic Thief book, I’d feel terribly sad about it, but I couldn’t bear to say goodbye to the characters yet, so I wrote a fourth book about Conn and Nevery and that bad baby dragon, Pip.
Parul Bavishi: What’s next on the cards for you?
Sarah Prineas: Well, aside from the fourth Magic Thief book, there’s this new book that still doesn’t have a title. I’ve been calling it ‘The Crow Book‘. It’s about a girl named Fer who travels to a magical land where she has to discover who she truly is while putting right a terrible wrong. She’s helped by a tricksy puck-boy named Spook and a wild horse named Phouka. It’s very different from the Magic Thief books, but I hope readers will like it just as much.
Parul Bavishi: You’re a fast writer. What’s the fastest time you’ve completed a book?
Sarah Prineas: Let’s see. I wrote the first Magic Thief book in about four months, but that doesn’t count revisions. The first draft of the Crow book took about that long, too, but revisions always take longer.
Parul Bavishi: Has it been easy working with multiple editors all over the world?
Sarah Prineas: Only my US editor actually edits my work and gets the books fit for publishing, and I don’t usually work directly with overseas editors (except for my lovely editor at Quercus, of course!). The more interesting thing is working with translators. Some of them are terrific, and really get the spirit of the book.
For example, the Italian translator emailed to ask about my character Rowan Forestal’s name. In Italian, ‘Rowan’ is ‘Sorbo,’ and as the translator said, ‘Sorbo is not a good name for a girl!’ Instead she named Rowan ‘Rosselva’, which she said meant ‘red forest,’ an excellent name for a red-haired girl.
Parul Bavishi: Have you ever considered writing adult books or are you firmly enamoured by the children’s writing world?
Sarah Prineas: Somehow my writerly voice and vision match up much better with children’s books. Maybe someday I’ll discover that I have an adult book in me. Who knows!
Parul Bavishi: Do you find the audience in England differs from the US audience?
Sarah Prineas: Yes, I do! It seems to me that kid readers in England like darker stories than US readers do. Also, I find that the plots in English children’s books are often a bit more complex than in US books. Both of these things, in my opinion, make UK children’s books interesting and exciting.
Parul Bavishi: One of my favourite characters in The Magic Thief is Benet, a thug who bakes. Tell me about how he evolved.
Sarah Prineas: Benet was such a surprise to me. When I started writing The Magic Thief, Benet was only going to be a tough guy – a bodyguard. Then I started thinking about what bodyguards do. They knock heads together, yes, but they also look after people. So Benet started looking after Conn and Nevery in other ways: by baking them biscuits and knitting sweaters.
By the end, this sort-of unimportant thug character had grown to become one of the most important characters in the book, and the real center of Conn’s new family.
Parul Bavishi: You’re quite linked to the UK knitting community, how did this happen?
Sarah Prineas: Oh, it was funny how that happened. In the back of the Magic Thief books are extras, like recipes and tips about swordfighting, that kind of thing.
My US editor suggested that we put a knitting pattern in the back of the third book, The Magic Thief: Found. I’m on the social networking site Twitter, so I tweeted a question: ‘does anybody have a free knitting pattern for a scarf that I could use?’ Somehow a knitter found this tweet and wrote back that she would design a pattern of the scarf that Benet knits for Conn in book three.
And she did! It’s beautiful, with a keyhole design, and it’s knitted in gray yarn so it’s perfect for a thief lurking in the shadows. As it turns out, the knitter-twitter is a sort-of godmother of knitters, and is part of Knit the City, which does secret knitting projects all over London.
Parul Bavishi: Were your family surprised by how quickly your writing career took off?
Sarah Prineas: It probably didn’t seem quick to them! I’d been writing for eight years before my first book was published, ever since my son was a tiny baby. But things did happen quickly once The Magic Thief started getting out into the world, and things changed a lot for us. Now that I’m working at home as a writer, instead of at a full-time day-job, I have a lot more time to spend with my family, except when I’m traveling to promote the books.
Parul Bavishi: Do they all read your books?
Sarah Prineas: They do! Or I read the books out loud to my kids as I’m writing them.
Parul Bavishi: An oldie but a goodie – what is your advice for aspiring writers?
Sarah Prineas: I have three pieces of advice for writers. Don’t worry, this won’t take long.
One. Write and read a lot.
Two. Finish what you start.
Three. NEVER SURRENDER.
(Maybe I should explain number three a bit more. Writing is hard, and seeing your work rejected is hard, but if you really want to make a go of it as a writer…well…)
Parul Bavishi: Is there anything you’d like to add about your book, your lovely UK publisher or what you’d like for dinner?
Sarah Prineas: My lovely UK publisher just took three more books from me, which I’m particularly delighted about!! I could also tell the funny story about the UK and US covers (below left and below right, respectively). At first, I didn’t like the UK cover at all, and I fussed about it, but I’m glad my Quercus editor went ahead with it because every single time I show the book covers to a bunch of kid readers, either here in the US or in the UK, they like the UK cover a lot more.

As it happens, it’s dinnertime here in Iowa. All of my family are vegetarians, so if somebody could bring me a juicy hamburger, that would be lovely, thanks.
Cheers!

sursa: http://www.quercusbooks.co.uk/blog/2010/09/09/interview-sarah-prineas/