Author Interviews
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Interview with Lindsay A. Franklin #2
7/17/2018
About the AuthorLindsay A. Franklin is a best-selling author, award-winning editor, and homeschooling mom of three. She would wear pajama pants all the time if it were socially acceptable. She lives in her native San Diego with her scruffy-looking nerf-herder of a husband, their precious geeklings, three demanding thunder pillows (a.k.a. cats), and a stuffed wombat with his own Instagram following. You can learn more about Lindsay on her website. The InterviewFun Questions1. What is your favorite dessert? This is the hardest question anyone has ever asked me. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but I have a terrible sweet tooth. I like ALL the desserts. Today I feel like pumpkin pie, but tomorrow, it might be a white chocolate orange cupcake. Mmm. 2. What is your beverage of choice? Coffee and tea! If not those, usually water. 3. What is your favorite movie and/or TV show? Gah! I'm a person with 50 different "favorites" of everything. But if I had to pick one, I'd say Sherlock is my favorite TV show of all time. And I can watch the Lord of the Rings movies over and over without getting sick of them. 4. Where is your favorite place to go on holiday? London. When I last visited, I was ready to move my family halfway across the world and stay forever. Author Questions1. Who or what inspired you to become an author? I've been telling stories and writing them down as long as I can remember. But writing never occurred to me as a career option. I wrote my first novel when I was eleven and I still didn't understand writing was what I was supposed to do with my life! I had the most amazing English teacher my junior year of high school. She was highly educated and could have been a professor at a university, easily, but she chose to teach high school. In her class, I think it finally clicked for me how deeply impactful literature could be in a person's life. It took another eight years for me to realize I had the ability to create said literature, but I don't know that I ever would have realized the worth of that gift if not for my awesome American Lit. teacher. 2. What did you want to be when you grew up? Did becoming an author ever cross your mind? I had a whole career path mapped out from the time I was in elementary school, which is probably why being a novelist never occurred to me. I was going to become an attorney and enter politics. Then I would be the first female president. Obviously. The older I got and the more I saw the binary nature of American politics, the less attracted to that field I became. Though I loved almost all subjects in school, I switched my focus to English and wanted to be an English teacher in my later teens. 3. Who are some of your favorite authors? Do these authors inspire your own writing? Oh, what a question. I loved the weirdness of L. Frank Baum's imagination in the Oz books as a kid. My favorite book in childhood was Lynne Reid Banks's The Farthest Away Mountain. I read children's fantasy constantly, then switched to classic literature and literary fiction in my teens, so I have a weird gap in my fantasy-reading background that I've been working on filling in. I love Jane Austen's snarky sense of humor. In my teens, I felt like J.D. Salinger was the only person on the planet who understood me (angst, you guys). And I like Steinbeck and Poe and Hemingway and Charlotte Bronte. J.K. Rowling blows my mind with her world-building and her ability to write friendships. Andrew Peterson's Wingfeather Saga is delightful and funny, and then sneaks up and punches you in the feels (in a good way). There are so many great storytellers out there. But I remember the moment in my writing journey when I realized I was allowing myself to be influenced too heavily by all the stories I love, and it occurred to me that I hadn't figured out what stories I wanted to tell or how I could tell them in a way that was uniquely me. That was a game-changing moment in my life and career. So I'd say I admire my favorites deeply (I haven't even listed half of them here!) but I make a point to preserve that which is unique to my own stories and the way I tell them. 4. When you are not writing, what other "hats" do you wear? My biggest "hat" is my wife and mom hat. My day job is freelance editing, and I also homeschool my three kids part time. They're getting older and more independent now, and after eleven years of homeschooling exclusively, they are enrolled in part-time classroom programs at our excellent local charter school. And my oldest is taking college classes. *wail.* Book Related Questions![]() 1. What inspired the idea for The Story Peddler? I was sitting in a workshop at a writers' conference, and an acquisitions editor for a large publishing house was explaining her role in the publishing process beyond what aspiring writers typically saw her doing (rejecting our pitches, mostly). She talked about how she understood our struggles in pitching because whatever tiny handful of stories she liked and wanted to acquire, she had to turn around and pitch those projects to the publishing board, including sales team members, marketing folks, and executives. She made a little throwaway comment at the end of that explanation--something like: "I have to peddle your stories to executives. At the end of the day, I'm just a story peddler." Then she moved on to something else I didn't hear because my fantasy brain went wild with that phrase. I thought of what a "story peddler" might look like if we added a little wonder and a sprinkling of fairy dust to the equation. Then I imagined a story around it, and the rest is history. 2. What do you want readers to take away from reading The Story Peddler? Creativity is a gift that reflects God, and everyone has it in some measure. We might express it through story, art, song, or on stage, but we might also express it by building things, designing things, growing things, or even figuring out a solution to a difficult problem. There are a lot of threads in The Story Peddler fabric--humor, heartache, magic, intrigue, politics, adventure, coming-of-age, the search for purpose, and even a little romance--but I think this celebration of human creativity is at the core of the story. 3. What is your current WIP? What can you tell us about this project? Ooh, I'm not sure if I've announced this publicly yet, but... I'm working on the second book in The Weaver Trilogy, and it's titled The Story Raider. Avoiding spoilers for The Story Peddler, I'll just say that The Story Mage follows a desperate quest around the world as the veil between my heroes and the darkness haunting them grows ever thinner. Lives and the future of the empire hang in the balance--naturally!
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