The Ink Splat is our monthly activity letter filled with inspiration sparking challenges and resources guaranteed to inspire your creativity. In this Ink Splat, the book and author spotlighted is Sky Jumpers by Peggy Eddleman along with an author interview!
The Challenge: Uncommon Settings
Having a setting in your book that is uncommon can go a long way toward making your book more interesting. Think of somewhere you go that is ordinary— school, home, the grocery store, the dentist, the playground— anywhere, then think about how you could change that setting to make it more fascinating. For 5-10 minutes, write about that scene, describing what is different or unusual about it.
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Sky Jumpers By Peggy Eddleman
Twelve-year-old Hope lives in White Rock, a town struggling to recover from the green bombs of World War III. The bombs destroyed almost everything that came before, so the skill that matters most in White Rock—sometimes it feels like the only thing that matters—is the ability to invent so that the world can regain some of what it’s lost.
But Hope is terrible at inventing and would much rather sneak off to cliff dive into the Bomb’s Breath— the deadly band of air that covers the crater the town lives in— than fail at yet another invention.
When bandits discover that White Rock has invented priceless antibiotics, they invade. The town must choose whether to hand over the medicine and die from disease in the coming months or to die fighting the bandits now. Hope and her friends, Aaren and Brock, might be the only ones who can escape through the Bomb’s Breath and make the dangerous trek over the snow-covered mountain to get help. Inventing won’t help them, but the daring and risk-taking that usually gets Hope into trouble might just save them all.
An interview with author, Peggy Eddleman!
Sky Jumpers will be released on September 24. Can you tell us about any challenges in getting your first book published? Do you have any special plans for the 24th?
The biggest challenge in getting my first book published was in learning everything I needed to craft a book worthy of being published. I grabbed every opportunity I could to learn more, I read a lot, I wrote a lot, and I had a lot of people read my writing and tell me where I could improve. Once I had written four books for practice, I poured everything I had learned into Sky Jumpers. Then I went through the steps of finding an agent, and then she found my publisher.
My launch party isn’t until two days after my release, so I’ll be spending my release day doing school visits. I can’t think of a better way to spend the day than with the kids I wrote it for.
The main character in Sky Jumpers, 12-year-old Hope, wants to be an inventor, but repeatedly fails. Sometimes a young writer’s first instinct is to create a perfect character with no faults. Why do you think it’s important to create a main character with faults?
I heard somewhere once– I can’t remember where— that characters are cool because of their strengths; they are interesting because of their weaknesses. You want your characters to be both cool and interesting, so it’s important to give them both strengths and weaknesses. And if you have a character with only strengths, they don’t feel real. Everybody has weaknesses. Your characters should, too.
Your book has a very unique setting— your main character and her town live in one of the craters that were made by the bombs that destroyed most of the world. How do you come up with settings that are unique?
For Sky Jumpers, I wanted a place that was wide open and empty, because it mirrored the population after the bombs hit. So I chose Nebraska. But I also needed mountains by the town, so that the people who lived there could be near both the protection and danger that the Bomb’s Breath provided. So I thought about what was most unexpected and ironic— that the people would live inside the crater made by the thing that wiped out most of the earth’s population. Sometimes, coming up with a unique setting is just like that— you try to think what would be most unexpected or what would look most fascinating and be intriguing. And other times, especially if you are writing a story that is in our time and our world, it’s a matter of choosing the more unusual setting. Why have the kids in your story walk home from school on the street, when they can walk home through a creepy swamp or a construction site? Why have a classroom in your story be normal and boring, when you can have a teacher who decided to decorate it like a jungle, or a teacher obsessed with mustaches and had one on every picture in the room? Take whatever idea you get first, and push it further. Change it, twist it, add to it. See if you can think of a way to make it more interesting than what’s normal.
What can we expect to see from you in the future? Do you have any projects in the works?
More books filled with action and adventure! Those are my very favorite to write, and my very favorite to read. I’ve been hard at work on the sequel to Sky Jumpers, which comes out in the fall of 2014.
Do you have any advice to give to aspiring writers?
Daydream.
A lot of people talk about having “writer’s block.” It basically means that when you sit down to write, no ideas come. It’s by far one of the biggest reasons why people don’t like to write, and one of the biggest reasons that stops people who do like to write from finishing their story. Do you know what is the number one way to get through writer’s block? Daydreaming! The more you think about your story, the more you’ll figure out how you want things, and the more you’ll know exactly what you want to write next. The more you daydream, even more fascinating ideas will come to you. And the more you think through your story, the more excited you’ll be about it, and the more you won’t be able to wait until you can get a chance to get that story out on paper. The best, most exciting books, gadgets, ideas, and products in the world came about because of someone’s daydreaming.
Thank you, Peggy Eddleman!
