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.”
To learn about ‘Promises to Keep,’ continue on to page two of our interview!
Atwater-Rhodes is currently gearing up for the release of her new novel, Promises to Keep.
The compendium of creations (SingleEarth, the Bruja guilds, the Midnight empire) intertwine in an exciting, unsettling plot featuring happenings both accidental and deliberate that will forever change the alternate landscape inhabited by vampires, Tristes, shapeshifters et al. It all begins with a wrong turn and a crashed party, and from there it’s an epic clash of elements and the promise of more chaos still to come. At the center of the storm is Jay, a young vampire hunter that no one would ever have predicted might be Earth’s best bet to thwart the rise of a vampire-controlled slave empire called Midnight. Teens will find themselves drawn to Jay, who struggles to prove his worth even while he has his own fears that those who have written him off may be right to do so.
Some of her fans may not know this but Atwater-Rhodes also participates in National Novel Writing Month (also known as NaNo), in which writers try to write a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days. That’s actually how her new novel Promises to Keep began. The opening scene is an intentional juxtaposition against Shattered Mirror in which Sarah walks into a vampire party. Promises to Keep opened up in a similar way but with a twist. She says, “I had this character that I just wanted to try – Jay – and he grabbed it by the reins and ran for a while. Unfortunately the way NaNo’s go I got part of the way through the story in the first draft and had no idea what I was doing. Because I had a character, I had this opening scene that I really liked and my character really just wanted to take a nap instead of engaging in any real plot.”
“I had characters who could finally make it happen.”
She accredits a turn in her process of the novel to the member of her writing group who suggested to her that if she was bored of the story she either had to stop writing it or change it and do something unexpected. That’s when Atwater-Rhodes got the idea to revisit and idea she had played around with about a decade ago but hadn’t had the courage to go for. Something had changed since she first came up with the idea. “I had characters who could finally make it happen – who were powerful enough to – who were strong enough to perform the magic that I needed them to perform. I just took the plunge and I wrote the manuscript.”
This needed to happen, says the author. The humans, Bruja Guild, Midnight, and Single Earth are all at the height of their power and so something needed to give. The worlds will collide in what she says will be an unexpected way. She also explains that a lot of readers are going to be concerned about where the story ends and will want more. But she says, “That’s okay with me, I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.”
Most of her ideas and characters come to form in the most random ways, says Atwater-Rhodes. She tells us that most of her ideas start with a character’s line. “I’ll have a single line from a character or single moment of interaction that just pops into my head. Sometimes it’s something that I saw in the subway or sometimes I’m just driving listening to the radio and it just shows up. And a lot of the ideas don’t pan out and some of them like Jay and Promises to Keep are pretty big stories.”
Jay, she says, came out of nowhere. It started with a 100 word drabble about a lizard that she wrote down. “I had this character contemplating a lizard – that’s the kind of thing Jay does,” she says, “and then he showed up in All Just Glass as a supporting character and was intriguing enough that I needed to take a closer look at him.”
Fans can also expect to see many familiar faces along with some new ones. We’ll be meeting Lady Brina di’Birgetta for the first time, who is the sister of Lord Daryl from Midnight Predator. Caryn Smoke will also be playing a large part in the novel and we’ll meet her fiancé. We’ll also see one of her favorite characters from Demon in My View as well as Jaguar from Midnight Predator and Kendra. And the novel won’t just focus on the action; Atwater-Rhodes teases that there will be a little bit of romance. While she says there will be some interesting pairings, Jay and romance are a strange combination. She explains, “As he puts it – it’s hard to get a date when you can read everyone’s thoughts so everyone’s gross to you and their internal monologue is just so much more interesting than what they’re saying out loud.”
Atwater-Rhodes also says her favorite scene to write in Promises to Keep was between Jay and Xeke, which she attributes to Xeke being an outrageous flirt. “I think they’re both such brash and outlandish characters in such ways that putting them together was just hysterical,” she says. “It was really hard to get them back on task but it was a lot of fun to write.” She also adds that the two characters were just fun to have together.
“‘Promises to Keep’ has kind of left me at a loose end.”
This may be sad for some fans to learn but Promises to Keep will be the last book in the Den of Shadows series, although she’s not sure how her publisher Random House will feel about it if she says that she considers this new novel to be the last in the series that kickstarted her career. Fear not, it won’t be her last novel about the world she created. She explains, “I do have more stories that I’m planning on writing. But like I said the world is very different.”
Currently, Atwater-Rhodes is focusing on a new trilogy called the Maeve’ra Trilogy which she tells us looks back in time at a pivotal moment in the Nyseusigrube history. The first book in the trilogy called Bloodwitch is in the process of being revised. She is also working on some other stories at the same time, which she said is to play around with her world and try to figure out what it looks like now. She says, “Promises to Keep has kind of left me at a loose end, too, trying to figure out what’s next. So I’m playing around trying to figure out what the world does look like now. I’m mainly just experimenting.”
On top of that she is working on a modified Biology textbook for her students at the Special Education program where she works. Another non-writing project she tells us about is online, which she explains continues after Promises to Keep is released and depends highly on reader participation. She also jokes, “And of course I’m also rewriting the fantasy novel or trilogy that I mentioned earlier – no idea what I’ll ever do with it.”
In a final tease, the author says that everything in her world will change after Promises to Keep.
Fans can pre-order ‘Promises to Keep’ at Random House or Amazon.
Photo credit: Carolynne Bailey/Random House