The wait is almost over for Den of Shadows fans, as the final installment of the series Promises to Keep is set to release on March 12. Even though the talented author Amelia Atwater-Rhodes was first published at the young age of 14, she remains grounded and thankful of her fans. Atwater-Rhodes spoke with us about her journey, writing, and her new novel.
Atwater-Rhodes recalls telling stories even as a young child, joking that she did it so often her family should have gotten sick of hearing them. Writing stories came naturally to her as soon as she could write and reveals that by the first or second grade she was using her father’s computer to write on. Her first novel was completed in the sixth grade. Soon her journey to becoming published had begun.
“Eventually I came out with something that I thought was good and worth sharing. It was not the first novel I had ever written,” she says. “I like to mention that because I know that a lot of first time writers get frustrated if their first novel isn’t perfect. It was probably the sixth or seventh book that I had ever finished. And I edited like crazy and I did a lot of research.” Next she set a goal to submit her novel by the end of 1997. She goes on to joke, “In reality I’m actually a dreadful procrastinator so it was 4:55 p.m. on December 31, 1997 that I was at the post office submitting manuscripts to agents.”
Her first submissions were rejected, which she says is important to mention because she chooses not to be embarrassed about it because it happens to everyone. She also points out that her story is unique in how rare and even unrealistic it is, because just a short time later in February she was discovered by a literary agent at, of all things, a tour of what would be her new high school. Atwater-Rhodes’ tour guide was English teacher Tom Hart who had taught and remembered her older sister. Hart asked how her sister was doing with her writing and whether Atwater-Rhodes wrote.
“I was as embarrassed as a 13-year-old can be.”
Luckily she was also joined on the tour by a friend who spoke up about the writer’s novels. She explains, “A friend of mine who happened to be with us decided that would be a good time to brag about the fact that I was trying to publish a novel. And it turned out that the man with us – who I was as embarrassed as a 13-year-old can be at the time. The man with us turned and said, ‘well you know I’m a literary agent.’”
He went on to tell her that he didn’t represent young adults or fiction but asked if he could read her books and give her tips, which Atwater-Rhodes attributes to him knowing her sister was a good writer. About a week later he called her back and offered to represent her. It was about two months later on her 14th birthday that she found out Bantam Doubleday-Dell wanted to publish her novel that would become In the Forest of the Night.
It’s a miracle just to get published, Atwater-Rhodes tells us. She realizes that a majority of manuscripts that get sent to editors and agents never even get seen let alone the chance to be read. They might even begin to get read and then the person gets interrupted or they’re just in a bad mood. Atwater-Rhodes explains, “There’s a certain amount of luck in getting published. I mean even if you have the best novel in the world. Even if you have the next great American novel it needs to get onto someone’s desk at a time when they’re in a good mood that they feel like reading it.” She adds, “It is a case of luck that the right book gets to the right person at the right time. I had my luck and for that I’m very grateful.”
“The first novel I ever finished had vampires.”
Some may find it odd that a 14-year-old girl would be interested in focusing her novels on mainly vampire characters, but for Atwater-Rhodes it was a natural transition from the supernatural and horror stories she grew up on. She recalls watching Stephen King and Star Trek as a young child, saying that it was never weird in her life. So what made her stick with the vampires? She explains, “I experimented with a lot of genres when I first started writing. A lot of sci-fi, a lot of outright fantasy, and part of it is just the fact the first novel I ever finished had vampires in it. And that was the novel that made me want to learn more about that world.”
However, she does say that she’s played around with other genres and most recently wrote a fantasy trilogy. She jokes, “I’ve considered doing something with it but I’m a little overwhelmed with revising the whole thing.” But don’t expect to see a realistic fiction coming from her anytime soon; she told us she just doesn’t find them as interesting. She explains they bore her because, “I like to be able to play around with magic and the supernatural. And the same challenges that happen in realistic fictions I try to work into my books. So it’s not necessarily anything new for me.”
Despite having an amazing story about her start in the world of writing, Atwater-Rhodes is basically like anyone else. She holds a day job as a special education teacher for Biology and in her free time loves to paint and cook. But she does say she has an obsession with birds and even goes as far as to garden almost just for her pet birds. Atwater-Rhodes also shares her phobia for cockroaches which she says actually began with a jellyfish sting. “I was stung head to toe by a jellyfish and then ended up watching the meadow bugs in Florida scuttle across the floor at night,” she says. “I think that those two things got associated and basically I don’t have a phobia of jellyfish but I do have phobia of cockroaches.”
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