The Kernel

Well, I did it. I completed a second round of edits on my middle grade novel, using feedback that I received from my full requests to make it so much better. I am eternally grateful to those agents, who took the time to tell me what they loved, and what didn’t work. I think it looks better than it ever has and is a more cohesive narrative with the emotional impact punched up in some key places. I sent out four queries last night and I feel hopeful and downright giddy to be back in trenches.

When I get to the last page of my 48,000 words, my heart swells. Reading “The End” fills me with such pride. I freaking did that. I took a tiny kernel and fleshed out a whole book – characters that I love who make me laugh and cringe and smile. I think that is how it should feel when you put your heart and soul on the page and create. And it’s amazing.

But that got me thinking, what was the kernel? What started me on this difficult, incredible, turbulent, awesome journey?

At the heart of my book is time travel. Not in a DeLorean at 88 miles per hour, but in small moments. There are so many great time travel stories that influenced this interest for me, but I think the biggest is also the most obscure. Unless you also happen to be a 90s kid who loved “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” Then I think we just became best friends.

There was an episode of that show that I remember watching as a kid in which a girl finds a bead necklace in her locker at school and when she puts it on, she is transported through time. She is still in her school, just thirty years in the past. I think she also sees the ghost of a girl she ends up saving from an accident in the science lab but the time travel is what really stuck with me. I remember thinking what would that be like - to see a place that is so familiar to you in an unfamiliar time? It fascinated me.

And so many, many years later, Natalie Price was given the ability to transfer – to move in a suspended world through time. It’s involuntarily at first, a product of overwhelming emotion, which conveniently happens often when you are twelve years old and dealing with mean girl drama at school. It was so fun to write Nat’s transfers and imagine what stood in place of her middle school cafeteria a hundred years in the past. Building in elements of social media and Nat’s hobby of thinking cinematically was equally fun. I can only hope readers enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

It’s wild that a single episode of a random 90s tv show got me here but that is how the creative process works, I suppose. We are constantly internalizing ideas and inspiration that find their ways out in the most unexpected channels. I’d love to hear about your “kernel” – what was that tiny spark that got you started on your current project? Or maybe it wasn’t so tiny. Either way, it is so interesting to learn where ideas are born!