Spring Flying Starts
After years as a freelance musician, becoming a stay-at-home dad afforded David Arnold, author of Mosquitoland (Viking, Mar.), time to agonize over what direction he wanted to take his career. “In the first few years, taking care of
my son was special, but there were definite moments of
[wondering], what do I do with my life?” he says. And as
his new son played with his toys on a mat, Arnold was
steps away, writing his first book.
At first, Arnold wrote middle-grade stories. “I love
the whimsy inherent in middle grade,” he notes.
He also tried his hand at picture books: “I thought
anyone could do it. I know now that it’s one of the
hardest things to do.” Initially, the main character of Mosquitoland was a boy
in Mississippi, but as Arnold
grew closer to the heart of
the story, he moved the focus
toward Ohio (where he grew
up) and fine-tuned the
character to create Mim, a
16-year-old girl who
embarks on a road trip from
Mississippi to Ohio to see
her ailing mother, while
dealing with her own
struggles.
Getting pub-
lished for the first time
was an almost paradox-
ical process. For Arnold,
the deal happened rather
quickly, after starting to
send out query letters to agents in May 2013. That
July, he was signed by Daniel Lazar at Writers House,
and the book sold to Ken Wright at Viking in
September. This may seem rapid, but, Arnold says,
“one of the things I learned is the importance of
taking time.” He adds: “Rejection hurts but [avoid]
submitting before it’s ready. I spent a lot of time on
the manuscript before I ever started querying
agents.” Arnold thinks the extra time and attention
that he devoted to his manuscript paid off.
“I feel like the luckiest writer in the world,”
Arnold says. “Ken and his assistant, Alex Ulyett,
are so brilliant and so insightful.” Arnold has also
relished being part of the community of YA writers.
He joined his regional chapter of
Society of Children’s Book Writers
and Illustrators before he had a
finished manuscript and finds that
“the industry as a whole is so kind
and welcoming.”
Arnold and his wife have
recently bought a house in
But eventually he found the motivation and carved
out time, even if it meant “staying up until
three or four in the morning and feeling like
a zombie the next day.” He says, “Sometimes
I’d take my son to the Y day care, and you
can’t leave the premises, but I would just
write in the lobby.”
When asked what drives him to work
this hard, Arnold replies: “I’m driven
by character. If I care about the
character, I’ll work through any
plot issues. I have to write for the
character, I have to finish [the
story] for them.”
—Natasha Gilmore
s
r
.
r
David Arnold
Iwas an utter bookworm growing up, a book-a- day reader,” says I. W. Gregorio (the pen ame of Pennsylvania
surgeon Ilene Wong). “When I
was in elementary school I would
say, ‘I want to be a writer.’ Then
reality hit.” For Gregorio, reality
was the need for a stable job in what
her family considered a practical field.
“I was raised by typical first-generation
immigrants who were one step removed
from poverty. The idea that anyone would
go into the arts was frightening for them.”
As a child, despite her voracious love of
literature, Gregorio was encouraged to study
science, and she later went to medical school.
“I convinced myself that I could do both—that
being a doctor and being a person outside of
writing would give me the insight and the stories
that I wanted to tell.” So Gregorio pursued her day
job. “It paid the bills, but I also had a discrete and
targeted time to get [writing] done. I’m a procrasti-
nator by nature, and my choice to not
pursue writing wholeheartedly allowed
me to actually become a writer.”
Gregorio fits her writing into a two-and-
a-half hour block at the end of each day. She
scrapped her first manuscript, a thinly veiled
fictionalized memoir. Eventually, an experience
with an intersex patient inspired a new story,
which became None of the Above (HarperCollins/
Balzer + Bray, Apr.).
The novel follows Kristin Lattimer, a high school
senior who discovers that she is intersex (she has
both male and female genitalia). Kristin’s classmates’
I.W.
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