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MEET KATE COOMBS
by Bonnie O'Brian

What did you most like to do when you were a child?

Kate Coombs

Read, of course! I was a classic bookworm. I remember propping a book on my knees under my desk in grade school. Now I realize I never fooled my teachers one bit. But I did manage to trick my mom—I would get out of bed late at night as if I were simply going to the bathroom, then I would stay in the bathroom reading for hours. I had to finish my book!

Did you write stories when you were growing up? at school? Or at home as a hobby? As a young child, or as a teenager, or both?

I wrote stories, plays, and poetry, both at home and at school. I wrote a short Nancy Drew clone for school when I was in 3 rd or 4 th grade. In my plays, I would cast myself as the Glorious Queen and my little sister as the Servant Girl. She was a good sport—now she’s an attorney! I remember writing a poem about fairies, but I was most proud of my first sonnet, which I managed to come up with when I was about 12.

Was your first book accepted immediately? or did you experience a number of rejections?

I wrote for about 13 years before making my first sale, racking up rejection letters from various publishers and becoming a regular at SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) conferences. However, my first sale was actually the first real children’s story I’d written years earlier. I soon learned that “sale” does not equal “instant publication”—the book didn’t come out for another 6-1/2 years, mostly due to the illustrator’s busy schedule. It felt like forever, but my picture book, THE SECRET KEEPER, is truly beautiful, so it was worth the wait.

Do you do other types of writing - for example, educational, nonfiction, magazine work?

Yes. Right now I’m working on a book called SEASONS OF MARRIAGE, based on a forty-year longitudinal study of 150 marriages conducted by my father, a UCLA professor. He passed away before he could finish the project, so this is a very meaningful book for me. I’m also working on a long-term project about maverick methods for teaching basic elementary school skills.

What kinds of things inspire you to write?

I mentioned an itch, but it’s more like a wild and windy feeling in my soul that seems best satisfied by writing something. I am inspired by all kinds of things. For example, I’m very visual, and I find small snatches of daily life to be astonishing and eye catching—the way a flock of birds turns against the sky, the way teenagers huddle together and giggle, the color of new leaves in amongst the duller, older leaves on a bush I’m passing... The truth is that just about any fragment of reality can make my heart sing, and all of that adds up to inspiration. On occasion, I will say, certain performances strongly push my creative buttons. I once saw the Alvin Ailey Dance Company in concert at UCLA and came home overflowing with the need to write.

Where do you get your ideas?

Whenever I feel like writing something new, I make “what if” brainstorm lists till something catches my fancy. Right now I have concepts and notes for another 14 or 15 intermediate fiction novels. Sometimes I feel specifically like writing a poem or a picture book-length tale, so I fiddle around till I find something worth writing about. A couple of my fantasy influences are Diana Wynne Jones’s convoluted plots and Terry Pratchett’s humor. THE RUNAWAY PRINCESS was inspired partly by my love of M.M. Kaye’s book, THE ORDINARY PRINCESS, and partly by a short story I’d written in which a suitor correctly surmises that the princess locked up in a tower is in cahoots with her father in order to solve the kingdom’s ills. Once I got going, though, the manuscript bounded off in all kinds of new directions. One question that propels plot is “How would character X react to this particular turn of events?” Reactions build on reactions, creating actions.

Have any of your books earned special recognition?

I have two books out so far, with three more in the works. My picture book, THE SECRET-KEEPER, was a Junior Library Guild pick and won a Parents’ Choice Recommended award for 2006. My intermediate fantasy, THE RUNAWAY PRINCESS, was an American Library Association Notable Book in 2007 and in the 2008 Middle School California Collection. Both books were also well reviewed in the major review publications, which made me very happy!

Which of your books did you most enjoy writing?

I laughed a lot while I was writing THE RUNAWAY PRINCESS, which is nice because now I picture people laughing while they’re reading it. The sequel was also very fun to write, though both were plenty of work, as well. Any writing project takes hours of plain old work to complete. Oh, and I got a real kick out of designing my website—I pictured it in terms of DVD extras and threw in some funny stuff, especially for THE RUNAWAY PRINCESS. Here’s the ever-so-tricky web address: www.katecoombs.com .

When is your next book going to be in book stores? What’s it about?

Okay, I have no patience whatsoever, so in that sense, this is the wrong career for me, as publishing seems to function on geologic time instead of ordinary clock time. I’ve sold three more pieces, and all three, even the sequel to THE RUNAWAY PRINCESS , aren’t scheduled to come out till Spring 2010. The sequel is called THE RUNAWAY DRAGON, and it’s about how Meg’s dragon runs (flies) away from home and she and her friends go on a quest to find him (Farrar Straus & Giroux). I also have a fairy tale retelling called HANS-MY-HEDGEHOG (Atheneum), with illustrations by John Nickle of THE ANT BULLY fame. STREET OF SONGS/CALLE DE CANCIONES is a book of bilingual poems from Chronicle Books—I wrote the English, and they’re being translated into Spanish by Kito Young and illustrated by the wonderful Raul Colon. The poems are slices of life about Lily, a young Hispanic girl growing up in the Pico-Union area, so they’re very L.A.!