The Stepsister's Tale Blog Tour (and GIVEAWAY!): Interview with Author Tracy Barrett

I'm thrilled to be a stop on Tracy Barrett's The Stepsister's Tale Blog Tour (See below to enter the giveaway).

Full disclosure: Tracy and I met at an SCBWI regional conference a few years ago (okay, it was like, 10 years ago) and ever since, she's been supportive and generous with her advice and time and friendship.

This month Tracy's hit a very cool milestone: her 20th published book. I read it over the weekend and loved it. Not a surprise. I've enjoyed every book of Tracy's that I've read, and this one's already racked up a couple of starred reviews--from Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly. Page one and I knew I was in the hands of a master storyteller.

I'm always curious about how books come together--and I do want to hear the story behind Stepsister, but since I have Tracy on the line, I'm going to keep her for a while and pick her brain about her other books too, and what it's like to have the kind of career that most of us can only dream about...

Jody: Tracy, let's start with a summary of The Stepsister's Tale.

Tracy: My usual shorthand description of The Stepsister’s Tale is “Cinderella from the point of view of one of her stepsisters” but that’s not really accurate. Instead, it’s the story of a girl who’s struggling desperately to keep her family going despite a dead father and a mother who has checked out of reality. Her life is further complicated when her mother unexpectedly marries a man with a beautiful and spoiled daughter who whines that she’s made to do all the work when in reality she’s just being asked to pull her own weight.

Jody: It IS so much more than a retelling of Cinderella. The world-building, particularly, was what drew me in. And poor Jane (the MC)! The reader feels acutely what she does. I suspect that this wasn't an easy book to write.

Tracy: It took me a long, long time to write. I think that from the time I started it to the time when I signed the publishing contract was seven years! I don’t mean that I wrote all day, every day for seven years, of course—I’d write for a while and hit a snag and put it away for a few months, and then take it out and delete a lot of it and write some more and hit another snag. Finally, with help from my agent, Lara Perkins, I managed to whip it into shape and get it submitted to Annie Stone, my editor at Harlequin Teen, who gave me excellent editorial notes to bring it to a publishable state.

Jody: Why do you think it took so long?

Tracy: Several reasons. First, it was hard to keep Jane in the center—Cinderella, as I could have predicted, kept trying to steal the show and I kept having to wrench the tale away from her. But the toughest challenge came near the end of the story. If Cinderella isn’t the main character and if she doesn’t behave in a way that makes her deserve to live happily ever after, why does she get to marry the handsome prince? This was a problem that took me a long time to break through. The answer (don’t worry—no spoilers!) came to me, as many answers to this kind of problem tend to do, as I was falling asleep. When I woke up, I wrote the ending.

Jody: I love that--that it took sleep to come up with the answer. This is the magical part of writing. Of course, there was also the seven years of thinking and rewriting that you alluded to. When I first started writing, I'd give up when I hit snags like that. If I couldn't figure it out, I'd quit on the project. But you seem to take the struggle as part of the process. Maybe that comes from seeing so many books through from beginning to end--from idea to revision to publication.

And about all of those books...(see the end of this post for the complete list) You've written for elementary, middle grade and young adults. You've got non-fiction and fiction. You've got different genres represented. Mystery. History. Fantasy. Do you see a common denominator--besides the obvious one--that YOU wrote them?!

Tracy: It’s hard to trace a thread through both my fiction and my nonfiction, although I think you could say that history is a big player in all of them. For my novels, I’ve realized recently that most of them tell us more about a character—usually a secondary character—either from history or from a well-known literary work.

Anna of Byzantium is an imagined re-creation of the life of a Byzantine princess who’s well known to historians but not to the general public; King of Ithaka tells part of Homer’s Odyssey from the point of view of Telemachos (Odysseus’ teenage son), and Dark of the Moon is the tale of the minotaur as told by the minotaur’s sister, Ariadne, and his killer, Theseus.

Of course I hope that my readers enjoy these books for their own sake, but I also hope that by reading my novels, they’ll see another layer to the familiar works that inspired me.

Jody: Do you have a favorite?

Tracy: My favorite is always the book I’m working on, so Fairest (to be released in 2015) would have to be the answer to this one.

Jody: I've heard writers say that each book wants to be written in a different way. Is this true in your experience?

Tracy: I pretty much write all my novels in the same way. I almost always have the first chapter—or at least the first page—written in my head before I put anything on “paper” (I write on my computer). All my novels, whether historical or not, involve some research, so I start with general research and gather every interesting or potentially useful fact that I can. I do that until I feel so stuffed with information that I’m going to burst and then I start writing.

Once the story is underway my research gets much more focused—or at least it starts off that way. I might realize I need to know what kind of door locks they had in the Middle Ages, for example, and before I know it an hour has gone by and I know not only about locks but about keys and hinges, and whether doors opened inward or outward, and what the doors were made of, and how they forged the iron for the keys, and all sorts of fascinating details that I’ll never use!

Jody: Do you outline ahead of time?

Tracy: The only time I do is when I write nonfiction and also when I wrote a mystery series (The Sherlock Files). I have a general idea of where things are going but if I know too much, the thrill of discovery is gone and the actual writing feels like homework.

Jody: I noticed that you've worked with several publishing houses. What's your experience been like with different editors?

Tracy: I’ve been fortunate. With one exception (who is no longer in publishing) my editors have been smart, interesting, hardworking people who make my prose sound more like me. I’ve also had terrific copy editors. One was so good that I thanked her in the acknowledgments, which I don’t think is the usual thing! She copy edited King of Ithaka and I know she re-read the Odyssey in preparation, plus she had to have had a dictionary of ancient Greek in front of her as she worked. She caught some awfully subtle things. Better her than a reader!

Jody: That's actually my motto. Copy editors are brilliant people. I thanked mine too. Among other things, she helpfully pointed out that I'd used the word "clench" over 30 times in my book Thin Space.

Okay, now to a subject near and dear to my heart: marketing and promotion. Your first book was published in 1993 and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the business has changed since then for authors.

Tracy: Yes. Promotion has changed a lot and the internet is responsible for much of that change. You know how they say that with the increased ease of doing household chores, we actually spend more time at them than when everything was done by hand—you have a washing machine, so you wash your clothes more often, etc.? I think it’s the same with the internet and promotion. It used to be so difficult and expensive that authors weren’t expected to do much of it.

Now that everyone can hop on-line and make a bookmark or send a mass email or put out an e-newsletter, it’s expected that we’ll do it. This isn’t in my skill set, nor is it in the skill set of most authors, but we have to suck it up and blow our own horn as much as we can.

Jody: Do you have any advice as far as what works/what doesn't? Did any of your books have an unexpected breakout success?

Tracy: I think the success of Anna of Byzantium, my first novel, was unexpected. Its sales (almost 200,000 to date) are largely due to its being required reading in a lot of schools.

Jody: No help from social media back in 1999--

Tracy: No! But now... I’m trying an experiment and have hired an outside publicist for The Stepsister’s Tale, even though Harlequin is doing a more thorough job of publicity than any other publisher I’ve had. I don’t know how I’ll quantify if it made a difference, but I’ll report back after a year if you like!

Jody: I'm going to hold you to that. Thanks so much, Tracy, and congratulations on the publication of your 20th book!

Here's a complete list of Tracy's books to dig into after you read her latest The Stepsister's Tale:  

Nat Turner and the Slave Revolt, The Millbrook Press, 1993
Harpers Ferry: The Story of John Brown’s Raid, The Millbrook Press, 1993
Growing Up in Colonial America, The Millbrook Press, 1995
Virginia, in series Celebrate the States, Benchmark Books, Marshall Cavendish, 1997
Tennessee, in series Celebrate the States, Benchmark Books, Marshall Cavendish, 1998
Kidding Around Nashville, John Muir Publications, 1998
Kentucky, in series Celebrate the States, Benchmark Books, Marshall Cavendish, 1999
Anna of Byzantium, Delacorte Press, 1999; paperback Laurel Leaf Books, 2000 (YA)
The Trail of Tears: An American Tragedy, Perfection Learning Corporation, 2000
Cold in Summer, Henry Holt Books, 2003 (MG/YA)
The Ancient Greek World, in series The World in Ancient Times, Oxford University Press, 2004 (with Jennifer Roberts)
The Ancient Chinese World, in series The World in Ancient Times, Oxford University Press,  2005 (with Terry Kleeman)
On Etruscan Time, Henry Holt Books, 2005 (MG/YA)
The 100-Year-Old Secret, Book 1 in The Sherlock Files, Henry Holt Books, 2008; paperback Square Fish, 2010 (MG)
The Beast of Blackslope, Book 2 in The Sherlock Files, Henry Holt Books, 2009; paperback Square Fish, 2011 (MG)
The Case that Time Forgot, Book 3 in The Sherlock Files, Henry Holt Books, 2010 (MG)
The Missing Heir, Book 4 in The Sherlock Files, Henry Holt Books, 2011, paperback Square Fish, 2012 (MG)
King of Ithaka, Henry Holt Books, 2010, paperback Square Fish, 2014 (YA)
Dark of the Moon, Harcourt Children’s Books, 2011, paperback Graphia, 2012 (YA)
The Stepsister’s Tale, Harlequin Teen, 2014 (YA)
Fairest, Harlequin Teen, 2015 (contracted) (YA)


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About The Stepsister’s Tale:
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What really happened after the clock struck midnight?

Jane Montjoy is tired of being a lady. She's tired of pretending to live up to the standards of her mother's noble family-especially now that the family's wealth is gone and their stately mansion has fallen to ruin. It's hard enough that she must tend to the animals and find a way to feed her mother and her little sister each day. Jane's burden only gets worse after her mother returns from a trip to town with a new stepfather and stepsister in tow. Despite the family's struggle to prepare for the long winter ahead, Jane's stepfather remains determined to give his beautiful but spoiled child her every desire.

When her stepfather suddenly dies, leaving nothing but debts and a bereaved daughter behind, it seems to Jane that her family is destined for eternal unhappiness. But a mysterious boy from the woods and an invitation to a royal ball are certain to change her fate...

From the handsome prince to the evil stepsister, nothing is quite as it seems in Tracy Barrett's stunning retelling of the classic Cinderella tale.

About Tracy Barrett
Website | Twitter | Facebook

Tracy Barrett is the author of numerous books and magazine articles for young readers.

She holds a Bachelor's Degree with honors in Classics-Archaeology from Brown University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval Italian Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly interests in the ancient and medieval worlds overlap in her fiction and nonfiction works.

A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study medieval women writers led to the writing of her award-winning young-adult novel, Anna of Byzantium (Delacorte). Her most recent publications are King of Ithaka, a young-adult novel based on Homer's Odyssey; and the fourth book in The Sherlock Files, The Missing Heir (both Henry Holt) and Harcourt's young-adult retelling of the myth of the Minotaur, Dark of the Moon.

From 1999 to 2009 Tracy Barrett was the Regional Advisor for the Midsouth (Tennessee and Kentucky) with the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. She is now SCBWI's Regional Advisor Coordinator.

Tracy has taught courses on writing for children and on children's literature at various institutions and frequently makes presentations to groups of students, librarians, teachers, and others.

For an example of Tracy's presentations at writers' conferences, please see this article from Clarksville Online.

She recently resigned from Vanderbilt University, where she taught Italian, Women's Studies, English, and Humanities. 

Tour Schedule:

Monday, June 9th - Fiktshun (Character Interview)
Tuesday, June 10th - Harlequin Blog
Wednesday, June 11th - Xpresso Reads (Guest Post)
Friday June 13th - About To Read (Guest Post)

Monday, June 16th - The Irish Banana (Author Interview)
Tuesday, June 17th - On the Verge
Wednesday, June 18th - Refracted Light Reviews (Guest Post)
Friday June 20th - The Book Cellar (Guest Post)


Contest Info:

Each tour stop is offering up a copy of THE STEPSISTER’S TALE as well as some very fun Cinderella-themed swag, and one winner will receive a fantastic Grand Prize Package including the following HarlequinTEEN titles: 2 copies of THE STEPSISTER’S TALE as well as copies of THE QUEEN’S CHOICE, DROWNED, WITCHSTRUCK and OCEANBORN. Giveaway is open to US/Canada.

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Interview with Tracy Barrett

As promised I have picked the creative brain of another writer friend. Tracy Barrett is the author of nineteen books for children and an inspiring teacher and mentor to countless beginners and not-so-beginner-writers. Disclosure: I consider her my mentor. Several years ago we met at a Nashville SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) conference, and later, I wrote a grant for her to be a visiting author at a school where I taught. She did an awesome job working with the students and collected quite a few fans that day. I’ve read three books by Tracy—the creepy ghost story Cold in Summer, On Etruscan Time, a cool YA time-travel/historical fiction novel, and recently, her critically-acclaimed, newest novel, a twist on the minotaur myth, Dark of the Moon. 

Jody: So Tracy, I have to ask you, even though I am sure that this is a question you have been asked a million times: where do you get your ideas?

Tracy: Hi, Jody, and thanks for having me on your blog!  Almost always, my ideas come from questions I have. The best way to answer a question is to write about it. So, I asked myself:

1. What would happen if Sherlock Holmes had access to a crime lab? (The Sherlock Files series—and I thought of this before the wonderful BBC series with a similar premise came out!)

2. While Odysseus was trying (not very hard) to get home after the Trojan War, what was his son Telemachus up to? (King of Ithaka)

3. I had lots of questions about the minotaur—it's a very wacky myth! Why is the minotaur the only half-human, half-critter monster in Greek mythology whose lower half is the animal? Whenever there's only one of something, you have to wonder why. Why on earth was a labyrinth sufficient to keep a man-eating monster confined—okay, he's not too bright, but he might stumble out, right? Why not put a door on it? If Theseus needed help getting out of the labyrinth, why didn't he need help getting in? Why did he take Ariadne (the minotaur's sister) away after he killed her brother but then dump her on an island with no explanation? Why did he sail a black sail on his homeward journey, knowing that his father would think this meant he had died in the labyrinth? (Dark of the Moon)

Jody: I love the idea of questions sparking a story. Which makes me wonder what the next step is in your process. Do you do any planning/outlining before you begin writing?

Tracy: For the Sherlock Files, I did a meticulous outline. I had never written a detective novel before, and I wanted my editor to help me make the clues sufficient to solve the mystery but not too obvious, and the red herrings distracting enough without being too distracting. But otherwise, I just have an idea where I'm starting and an idea where I'm ending. The journey takes many unexpected turns along the way.

Jody: That’s what I’ve found too. I’m guessing that Dark of the Moon was one of your more organically-developed books, although I bet you had to outline at some point. When I read it I was so impressed with how you wove the myth of the minotaur and the characters Ariadne and Theseus into something original and compelling. I brushed up on the myth before I began reading because I wanted to see what you started with. Your story grounds the Greek myth in reality, so readers get a vivid sense of the time and place. Many of your books, I’ve noticed, feature a historical or mythological figure. How do you fit research into your writing process?

Tracy: Research is cyclical. I start looking for answers to whatever question prompted me to write the book, and then start writing. More questions come up as I write, so I research them, and then the research often takes the story in a different direction, which leads to more questions--> more research --> new direction --> more questions --> more research --> new direction, etc.

Jody: Sounds like the research aspect could be very absorbing and time-consuming, and yet you've managed to write nineteen books. Have you written books that haven’t been published?

Tracy: Oh heavens, yes. And thank goodness. I think of those manuscripts as my "scales"—a music student's scales aren't to be listened to, but the student must play a lot of them in order to learn how to play something that someone else would want to listen to. I didn't realize that those projects were practice for a book that someone else would like to read, but they were. Plus I plunder them for scenes and descriptions all the time, so it's not wasted work.

Jody: Hmm, the scales metaphor makes me feel better about my own never-to-be-published manuscripts still stuffed in a drawer. Those were my practice.... Now I have to ask you: have you gotten any rejections along the way?

Tracy: I started off writing nonfiction, which is a different process. My first novel was accepted by the first editor I sent it to, so I got all puffed up and thought I was hot stuff. Of course there was a comeuppance: my second novel received 23 rejections before it was accepted. And one more after, from an editor I forgot to tell about the acceptance! The book (Cold in Summer) got good reviews and some nice awards, so I don't think it was really the book's fault. I just hadn't found the right editor. I've now published eight books with her.

Jody: Thanks, Tracy, you’re giving me hope here. I follow your blog so I know that this is your last semester working as a professor of Italian at Vanderbilt University and soon you'll be writing full time. At this point how do you balance your writing projects with your other obligations? And how do you think that will change after you quit your day job?

Tracy: I've had to work hard at balance, and if it were a matter of writing and teaching, I think I could still do it. The way I balanced it was by not throwing myself fully into academe—I've never gone for tenure, so my summers have been my own—and by streamlining my writing process. But since authors are required to do more and more of their own promotion, and since much of that promotion happens during the school year, I have to say farewell to my day job.

I would say that I'm very organized, only I don't think that organization is a thing you are; it's a thing you do. It was a conscious choice on my part to organize my life carefully. If I wanted to do all the things I wanted to do, I couldn't afford the luxury of sloppiness. So I worked against my natural tendency to let things slide, to create piles, to allow paperwork to back up, to leave things where they dropped, and organized my life to the point where I had the time to do the writing and the teaching—and the wifing and the mothering and the friending and all those other things!

Jody: Okay. Must remember this: Get organized! You mentioned that authors have to do more of their own promotion these days. What kinds of promotional things do you do to find new readers of your books?

Tracy: As a writer of historical fiction, it's very important for me to reach teachers and librarians, since they're often the ones who will guide readers to books like mine. I try to go to events where those people will be present and tell them about my work, as well as to school visits where I meet my actual constituents! I love doing school and library visits and am really looking forward to having the time and the flexibility to do more of them.

Jody: Well, as I said, you did a great job with my students. In fact, I’m thinking you’re my mentor for successful author visits too. It was great talking to you, Tracy.

Tracy: You too! Thanks, Jody.

Books for Boys

A college professor of mine once lectured about how it was harder for boys to read books with female protagonists than it was for girls to read about males. I’m not sure I’m going to get her argument right—seeing as how I heard this lecture a couple of decades ago (yikes!), but the gist of it is that most of what we read is from the male point of view, so women from a very early age become adept at seeing though a male lens. (Think of how often you see the word man or the pronoun he. Men for most of history have been the default sex in literature. This likely applies to race too.) When a girl reads a book with a male hero, even if the point of view is first person, she doesn’t have a problem imagining herself in the guy’s shoes. But when boys read a book with a female “I,” according to this professor, it can be jarring.

Who knows if this is true. (For the record, I’m a female.) For research purposes, I did a little survey. Okay, the truth is I asked my teen son this morning while he was eating breakfast:

Me: Does it seem jarring to you when you read a book with a girl narrator?

Son: Um. I don’t know. Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.

So there you have it.

I’ve heard editors at conferences say that girls will read “boy books” (see Harry Potter) but it’s generally accepted that boys won’t read “girl books.” (Have you ever seen a guy carrying around a copy of Twilight?) Everyone’s looking for what they call crossovers, series like Hunger Games that both sexes seem to enjoy. But for the most part, it’s girl readers who are driving the industry, with some editors giving up on boys all together, saying that boys either don’t like to read or they’re drawn to non-fiction. This trend is not surprising to me. I’ve read a ton of contemporary YA novels, many of which star girl protagonists caught up in love triangles with gorgeous, supernatural guys. Or girl protagonists surviving in bleak post-apocalyptic landscapes while caught up in love triangles with gorgeous, not-supernatural guys. Can’t imagine many boys gravitating toward any of these books.

Not sure where I’m going with this, but I’ve been thinking about it since I finished reading Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. This is a book by a male writer about a male hero with a stereotypically masculine-looking cover, all brownish and gritty with a grim guy’s face hovering over an oil tanker. I confess that I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if it hadn’t been for the prominently displayed medals on the cover. (It won the Printz Award in 2011 and was a finalist for the National Book Award.)

Not exactly my thing—with lots of technical description of the inner workings of ships and some violent interactions between our hero and his enemies and a chase on the high seas that echoes the pirate adventures of Treasure Island—and yet, I found myself after a few chapters sucked into the story. It’s another post-apocalyptic novel but one I haven’t quite seen before, a world decimated by super storms and environmental disasters and a poor boy and his crew trying to eke out what they can as scavengers of ruined oil tankers. But the heart of this story is the boy’s growing awareness of the unfairness of life, of the stark differences between the haves and have-nots, and the role that luck and fate and smarts play when you’re trying to survive. Still mulling over the questions raised and glad I gave an obvious boy book a chance.

Okay, so maybe this is where I’m going with this post. Now I’m thinking of other boy books I’ve liked. If you know a teen boy (or a teen girl growing weary of Twilight-related novels) take a look at these:

1.      Ripper by Stefan Petrucha. An orphan boy in turn of the century New York City, who dreams of being a detective, stumbles onto a mystery involving Jack the Ripper. Page-turning adventure with a Steampunk feel. What’s Steampunk, you  might ask? Even after being told numerous times, I still don’t quite get it, but this trendy genre features gadgets and sci-fi-ish urban settings. Think: Golden Compass and movies like Wild Wild West and Sherlock Holmes.

2.      Maze Runner by James Dashner. Clear your schedule for this page-turner. A boy wakes up in a freaky forest at the edge of a maze. There’s a group of other boys, shades of Lord of the Flies, all named after famous thinkers in history. Our hero, Thomas (after Edison) is compelled to figure out the maze and solve the mystery of why the heck he’s there.

3.      Anything by John Green. I’ve blogged about his books before and ended up sounding like a gushing, over the top groupie. I love every single book this man has written. Please Lord, bestow on me one tenth of his talent. See, I’m doing it again. Here, read this for elaboration on John Green’s genius.

4.      Across the Universe by Beth Revis. A good example of a crossover. Book alternates between boy and girl narrators. The girl has been cryogenically frozen on a ship leaving the dying earth for a more sustainable planet. Unfortunately someone thaws the girl out early. The boy is the king-of the ship-in-training trying to figure out the mystery of the girl and the secrets behind the community he’s supposed to govern. (There’s a reversible cover on this one. The “girl” version has a boy and girl kissing ala Sleeping Beauty. The “boy” version has a blueprint of a space ship.)

5.      For the philosophical/questioning kid in your life, try this year’s Printz winner Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley, (full review) or

6.      There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff (see review)

7.      Like history and/or mythology? Check out Tracy Barrett’s latest novel The Dark of the Moon, (also a crossover) a cool twist on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and

8.      Alan Gratz’s Samurai Shortstop, about a boy in turn of the last century Japan struggling to reconcile his samurai past with his interest in baseball

9.      A soon to be published novel by the writer of this blog… (I’ve got to clamp my hand over my mouth to avoid spilling the beans yet on this one—the deal I’ve been tiptoeing around for months now—can’t say anything more; promise to reveal all soon, but one teaser: it may possibly star a male narrator…)