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| Tim Capehart |
I wished whole-heartedly when I was small (Mom will tell you
I have never been young…while my husband Trent will tell you I haven’t grown up
yet) that someone would pay me to read. I realized a few years ago as
I was approaching 700 books reviewed for Kirkus Reviews, School Library
Journal, VOYA, Hornbook, Publishers Weekly (can you believe there’s an
Etc. here?) that my childhood wish had come true.
Between reviewing and my
daytime gig as a Children’s Librarian who has to read ‘em before I can buy ‘em,
I was actually getting paid to read. I also wished as small-Tim that I could
get paid to write. Because that fabulous feeling of a world coming to life even
if that world is only a sentence nicely wrought, that feeling, a physical sensation
of expansion at the back of my head, was and is the best feeling ever. Writing
reviews even when blurbed on book covers or quoted back to me by managing
editors of publishing houses just did not satisfy.
I had written short stories (with an undergraduate degree in
Creative Writing, that’s not surprising) and seen some published. I had also
written a couple novels no one wanted to put into print. So I put on my
editor’s hat and published the stories myself. I polished off the novels and
thought, “These are as good as some of what I review.” I set to work on
one that started with a walk down a blustery Dorchester, Massachusetts street
years ago when something dark and fluttery that wasn’t a bird or a bat up under
the eaves of a triple-decker caught my eye and my imagination. When I
considered it done, it met agents and editors who did not share my opinion of
its doneness…or its good-enoughness. I wanted that traditionally published book
(Even when reading, I don’t do eBooks, you’ll have to pry the paperback from my
cold, dead hands…) I wanted to be published the normal way.
In Shadowangel, sixth-grader Josh is dragged
from Dayton (my hometown, too) to Rock Hollow in the hills of south-central Ohio
by his newly-divorced mother. He’s visited there many times; it’s his mother’s
hometown. Rock Hollow is boring and full of odd characters not the least of
which is his Granma who, as the retired town librarian, is full of tales of
strange happenings and quirky family members. Josh just wants everything to get
back to normal…to be normal. His new friend Marylis can’t wrap her head around
that. She can’t imagine wanting to be normal; she, in fact, doesn’t even
believe in normal. As she says, “Everyone since cavemen and until the sun dies
is, was and will be weird.” So I decided not to spin my wheels for another year
waiting for normal, and Shadowangel
saw print and met the world in December. The other two from the
trunk may follow, and then we’ll see what happens next. It will definitely be
normally weird.
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