Here’s a little interview between (heh, heh!) the blog (B) and Fred (F) about “The Girl Who Writes the Future,” currently running in Cricket Magazine.

B: Part 3 of this story is on bookstore and library shelves now. What about people who missed Parts 1 and 2?

F: They need not despair! With a click here, they can read Parts 1 and 2 on Cricket‘s web site. Cricket is posting the parts about a month behind their published appearances. Don’t forget that Cricket is available for tablets now, too. As I understand it, there are additional features and there’s extra material in the digital version.

B: Readers have been excited to see the reunion of you and artist Emily Fiegenschuh for a Cricket story. Has that been fun?

F: It’s always wonderful to work with Emily! You can (and should) read her blog post about sketching the characters here! It’s been a true collaboration this time, as I’ve seen some of her artwork before writing later parts of the story. I tailored one scene in particular to a picture she’d already painted (the cover of the November/December 2014 issue). She stays quite faithful to the characters as their young creators described them. I try my very best to do that, too. But yes, it’s fun conferring with Emily about what certain things should look like, about what I had in mind with a particular place, etc. And it’s always exciting to see how she depicts things I’ve written. There’s always a surprise or two!

B: Is there anything unique about this Cricket story, or unique for you as the writer?

F: Absolutely! First of all, this was born out of a project called Crowd-Sorcery, which the editors thought up — and it is a brilliant idea! The youthful participants on the magazine’s web site (who most often also read Cricket) created the characters for this story, as well as many fantasy words/objects/concepts that appear. So it’s been a privilege and a delight to work with other people’s ideas, to be faithful to them as I weave them into a coherent story. Some of the combinations have been unexpected. (I don’t want to give any spoilers!)

But also, this is the first time in my history with Cricket that the early parts of the tale have gone into production before the later parts have been written. When I started out in 2000 (wow! That long ago?!), I would write the whole story on speculation and send it in, and sometimes the editors and I would send it back and forth several times, working and re-working it before it was even accepted. And then it would be a year or two until it began to appear in the magazine. This time, Part 1 was published before I’d written Part 4 (of a total of 6). That indicates a high level of trust on the part of the editors. I’m truly honored for their confidence that things will work out. I don’t take that lightly. It’s scary in a way, because the early parts of the story cannot be changed. Till the end, I was gritting my teeth, hoping I hadn’t forgotten some crucial fact that would throw everything off-kilter. I think everything got accounted for; I think we brought the story in to a safe landing — by grace, fear and trembling, sigh of relief!

What’s especially fun about deliberately writing the story in parts like this is that I can give a little arc to each installment and end it with a kind of cliffhanger. Back when I didn’t know where my stories would be divided, of course I couldn’t do that.

B: The prompts for Crowd-Sorcery encouraged the young contributors to build on one another’s ideas. Did some do that?

F: Yes! One of the best instances of that was that one Chatterboxer created a certain magical place and gave it a name. Then another participant came along and used that place in a poem. I worked that poem into the story, so it was a nesting of ideas. I really hope all the kids who posted ideas are still with us, still reading along. It’s fun for me to imagine how they feel when they discover that an item, place, or character they thought up appears in the published story.

B: So only three of all those hundreds of submitted characters are in the finished story?

F: No — actually, I think there are seven. In addition to the main three elected by all the Chatterboxers, some of the runners-up have made cameos. The kids who developed those characters won’t know about that until they read it in the magazine! (The editors put a list at the end of each part honoring the kids who contributed ideas or characters. Because kids use nicknames on the web site, they’re thanked by nickname rather than any form of real name — but I suppose the kids know who they are!)

B: What was the hardest thing about this project for you?

F: There were two. One was having to narrow down all those fantastic character submissions to lists of 10 – 15 finalists in each category. So many of the entries were so creative, fun, clever, and well-written that it was awful having to single out just a few. Emily and I, each in a different part of the world (I was in Ukraine for some of that), pulled some very long days and nights as the deadlines drew near, but we read every single submission. Independently of each other, we made a list of about 20 – 30 “favorites.” Then we compared the lists, and when we were lucky, the overlap in our choices could become the finalist list for the kids to vote on. In some cases, one of us went to bat for a character that the other hadn’t chosen, and sometimes we had the magazine’s editors help us break ties, etc. Those editors were also extremely helpful. If one of us felt strongly about a character, we erred on the side of putting him/her onto the ballot. What added an extra challenge was that Emily and I work in different media: she’s a visual artist, I’m a writer — so she would notice characters that would be fun to draw, and I would favor characters that would be fun to write about. So it should be clear that we knew there was no such thing as finding “the best” characters. With so many good ones, there was a lot of personal preference involved — ours, and that of all the kids who voted. Hopefully we had enough people voting that the characters best-loved-by-most made it into the story. But we want to stress just how much we also admired the ones that didn’t, and we keep urging kids to use those characters in stories of their own. There’s nothing to stop anyone from writing a story!

The other hardest thing was holding down the word-count for each installment. We had so much intriguing material to work with that this could easily, easily have become a very long novel. But we just didn’t have that kind of space at our disposal. I did a lot of weeding and shrinking of my manuscripts before turning them over to the Editor-in-Chief.

B: Well, it’s a terrific idea that Cricket had, and we’re all elated that it’s been going so well. We’re glad there’s talk of doing similar projects in the future, perhaps in other sub-genres of fantasy, with other writers and artists.

F: It’s all about helping kids discover the joy of creating their own stories — and seeing how stories take shape, how accessible the process is. You don’t have to be magical or a professional or an adult to write or draw. Stories change the world. They can make it better. Anyone can be a part of that!

B: I was going to ask you for concluding thoughts. Were those them?

F: No, this is: THANK YOU to everyone involved in Crowd-Sorcery, from the editor(s) who dreamed it up, to those who helped and discussed it along the way, to the web-wranglers and voting system administrators, to Emily, and especially to all those kids out there who joined us. I am on my feet, applauding you!