We have a fantastic guest today, here at Bart’s Bookshelf!

Canadian young adult author & blogger, James Bow joins us today to talk about his latest novel, The Young City, and the previous books in his Unwritten Girl Trilogy.

I just reviewed, The Young City, a couple of weeks ago, and you can also check out my thoughts on books 1 & 2 in the series.

In a special treat tomorrow, the stars of The Unwritten Books, Peter and Rosemary will be joining us to answer some questions themselves! I just know you don’t want to miss that!

James Bow: I’m 37, living in the mid-sized city of Kitchener in Ontario, Canada. I’m the father of two beautiful daughters, and the husband of a brilliant poet and writer named Erin. I write. A lot. This includes work on the transportation-themed web site Transit Toronto, freelance journalism articles for a variety of publications, and, so far, three young adult fantasy novels collectively entitled the Unwritten Books series.

My latest novel is entitled "The Young City". It’s the third book in the Unwritten Books series following the adventures of Peter McAllister and Rosemary Watson. This story has the two characters at eighteen. They’re helping Rosemary’s brother Theo move into his basement apartment in downtown Toronto when they fall through a hole in his floor and into an underground river. When they climb out, they discover that they’ve gone back in time to Toronto in 1884. There, they have to pose as a married couple while they struggle to find a way back home, which forces them to confront questions about their relationship and what they want for their future.

James Bow: The Unwritten Books series as a whole was inspired by Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet sequence. At the time I started writing "The Unwritten Girl", back in 2001 when it was known as "Rosemary and Time", I had been getting back into reading "A Wrinkle in Time". That’s a classic story about an awkward young woman (Meg) who discovers that she is far more capable than she gives herself credit for when she’s called upon to save her father and her brother from the evil forces snaring the planet Camazotz. I especially liked the chemistry between Meg and the popular but awkward neighbour kid Calvin O’Keefe.

"A Wrinkle in Time" is followed by "A Wind in the Door", which features Meg and Calvin at sixteen. They’ve clearly grown closer in the time between the books, and are really in love, but in denial about it. Again, the chemistry between the two characters really drew me into the story, and I looked forward to seeing where Madeleine took it next. Well, the next book in their sequence happens to be "A Swiftly Tilting Planet", which features Meg and Calvin at 24, married and expecting their first child. It was very frustrating to see that Madeleine had skipped a step. It’s even more frustrating that the next book to be published in the Time Quartet, "Many Waters", while set when Meg and Calvin are 19 and off in college, focuses instead on Meg’s brothers, gives Meg little more than a cameo role, and doesn’t mention Calvin _at all_.

At the time, it was clear that L’Engle wasn’t going to revisit this period, and if I wanted to read a story where a young couple meets at an early age, share adventures, and draw closer together over the course of many books, I’d have to write it myself. And that’s what I did.

So I envisioned a four book series, where the "Swiftly Tilting Planet" story would be _fourth_ (Rosemary and Peter would be 24, married, and expecting their first child). That fourth book ended up getting lopped off, but the third book was always intended to be the book where the two characters confronted their relationship and made their decisions about it.

What made me think of a story which brought the two characters to Toronto and brought them back to time? Well, that had been a storyline I’d been wanting to use for a while. Near where I grew up, in downtown Toronto, there used to be an river called Taddle Creek. It doesn’t exist anymore; its course was bricked up and covered over, turning this natural treasure into a storm sewer. The buried rivers of Toronto have had a number of urban legends grow up around them, including the suggestion that there are these huge caverns beneath the University of Toronto or the provincial legislature. I decided to use this story idea for "The Young City", and just explored to see where it would take me.

A very organic process followed. I learned that the last section of the Taddle was covered over in 1884, and that gave me the date and the rough setting for the story. I researched more about the period, and learned that it wasn’t too long before that that the first female doctors in Canada started practising, overcoming considerable institutionalized sexism in the process. And that made the character of Faith Watson step from the shadows. Originally, she was just an off-screen source of period clothing for Rosemary, but once I learned about this aspect of the period, and saw the parallels between her and Rosemary, she practically leapt from the page and demanded that she be written in.

James Bow: Blogging has been a boon for me. I set up my blog about the same time I started writing "The Unwritten Girl" (2001-2002) because I made a decision at that time that I was going to be a writer. The first advice many writers give prospective writers about how to become a writer is simply "write, write, write." Some writers carry journals with them so they can write something every day, but the blog appealed to me because I’m something of a techno-geek. Even better, as I gathered an audience, that was a further inducement to keep writing.

These days, it can be a bit of a struggle to keep up the blog. Between that, writing "The Night Girl", trying to keep the house clean and taking care of my two kids, I end up skipping days, but I think it’s important to keep it up. It would be a bad habit for me to stop this outlet to my writing. Today, I might be stopping my blog, tomorrow it could be my
novel. So I keep writing.

James Bow: Peter and Rosemary didn’t give me any trouble. But then, I don’t think I tried to stop them from doing what they wanted to do. Peter’s motivation did flesh itself out as I was writing "Fathom Five". I’d always known that he was an orphan and he missed having a family, but I didn’t realize how much until I was well in the writing "Fathom Five" and the character of Arial took form. Previously, Fiona was supposed to be the direct competition the Sirens had against Rosemary, but then I realized that this wasn’t what Peter really wanted. He wanted family, and so he got a little sister.

James Bow: I’d always loved writing. I always loved fantasy and science fiction. I loevd telling stories. I wrote stories from before I was fourteen, starting with Doctor Who fan fiction stories that I submitted to a club fanzine. I would write a lot of fan fiction over the next fifteen years, writing over forty stories and editing three fan fiction magazines. Writing was something I did as a hobby, but I never expected to do it professionally. I tried to route my education along some lucrative professional field. Urban planning interested me, but I found myself unable to find a job in the field for a variety of reasons. My jobs have included admin assistant, database manager and circulation manager. It took me a while to realize that the one common thing I enjoyed about all of my jobs was the fact that I got to _create_ things. And it came to a point when I decided to take the leap, and try to write professionally.

James Bow: I do like the scene at the end of chapter ten of "The Unwritten Girl" where Puck has to sacrifice himself to save Peter and Rosemary. That scene came late in the writing process when I had to nail down the tone of the novel. Back then, I’d unsuccessfully shopped the manuscript to four different publishers, and the advice I was getting was that this was a middle-grade novel in feel, but with teen novel elements. The structure was episodic and the writing young, but the characters were fourteen and there was a love interest between them. As good as the story might have been for the publishers, they didn’t know how to market it. I needed to pick one and stick with it.

By and large, I took the middle-grade route, lowering the ages of Peter and Rosemary from fourteen to twelve and embracing the younger feel of the book. Except for this scene where Puck has to sacrifice himself. In the original draft, he didn’t do that. Essentially killing him off was something that was more the realm of the teen novel, but I realized that this was what the story _needed_, and I embraced that, and it gave the story a stronger moral centre.

James Bow: I loved the cover art for all three books. The Dundurn Group does a fantastic job on these. Their books really jump off the shelves for me. Jennifer Scott designed the covers for "The Unwritten Girl" and "Fathom Five", and Erin Mallory designed the cover for "The Young City", and it really does fit in well. I wrote Jennifer to thank her for her work on the third book, and she said to me, "I didn’t do it, though, Erin did."

James Bow: Faith Watson, I think, is my favourite. She really came out of nowhere and surprised me. Her story anchors "The Young City" and gives Rosemary an obvious parallel to work with. She’s also a lot of fun, with her slightly school-marmish no-nonsense attitude being very in period while at the same time being very modern. I’d like to write a book around her at some point, frankly, though in her case it would probably be more of a pure historical rather than a fantasy.

Arial from "Fathom Five" also stepped off the page. It took me a long time to figure out the nature of the siren threat, and I didn’t realize at first that this quiet little girl that was given to Peter to be his little sister was the key to it all. And when I did figure it out, it gave "Fathom Five" a very bittersweet ending that I’m proud of.

And, of course, Puck was a lot of fun, even if iambic pentameter is a pain to write.

James Bow: Though I had vague ideas for a fourth Rosemary-Peter novel, I’m going to be stepping away from the series, which I think has hit a natural stopping point. I have two manuscripts that I’m working on. My next novel (fingers crossed) is entitled "The Night Girl" and is about a young woman who finds work as a secretary for an employment agency that finds work for goblins and trolls. The book after that is entitled "The Dream King’s Daughter", about a young woman who can see what other people are dreaming just by looking them in the eye. No word on when these will be published. I’m currently rewriting "The Night Girl", but I hope to send it out soon.

Okay, it looks like Peter and Rosemary have arrived, thank you for your time James, and I’m certain they won’t say anything you need worry about…

Don’t forget the stars of The Unwritten Books, Peter and Rosemary will be joining us to answer some questions themselves tomorrow!

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