YA New York

Last week I had the honor of interviewing Kimberly Pauley, the founder of YA Books Central and the author of Sucks to Be Me: The All-True Confessions of Mina Hamilton, Teen Vampire (maybe), which will be released Aug. 26.

Though I’ll hold off a bit for a full review, I do want to rave about this novel a bit. It’s not your usual vampire book. Instead, it’s a really humorous story about a teen (almost) vampire who has to attend vamp classes in the evenings, classes that are something like driver’s ed.

On to the twenty questions!

Question One

Me: Tell us about your upcoming release, Sucks to Be Me.
Kimberly: My husband calls it “a vampire bat mitzvah story.”

Question Two

Kimberly: How do you like New York?
Me: I’ve lived here since I was thirteen, and I cannot imagine ever permanently settling down anywhere else.

Question Three

Me: In addition to being an author, you’re also the founder of YA Books Central. How did you decide to start the site?

Kimberly: I was doing book reviews for what was about.com, and they decided to get rid of all of their teen sites, and I had all this great stuff and I didn’t want to just get rid of it, so I started my own site at that point, and my goal has always been to encourage reading and to support literacy and give away a lot of books every year. (My postage bill is humongous.)

Question Four

Kimberly: Well, how did you get into starting YA New York?
Me: I was discussing with some of my friends how I couldn’t afford all the books I was reading, and I used to be a book reviewer for newspapers, so one night after Maureen Johnson’s book release party for Suite Scarlett, I came home and told my boyfriend, “I promised a bunch of authors that I’d have a book review site up by tomorrow,” and that night we stayed up late and designed the whole thing, and here it is. So part of it was selfish, I have to admit.

Question Five

Me: What do you think of all the YA Ghetto stuff that’s been floating around lately?
Kimberly: I think it’s a bunch of rot. I think a lot of the best writing out there today is YA. A lot of adult writers, who write for the adult market, are now writing for the young adult market, and there’s some just stellar writing out there.

Question Six

Kimberly: So how is your first book coming along?
Me: It’s funny because things are moving really, really quickly, much faster than I expected them to, and right now I’m sort of in seventh heaven, although I’m sure that once I reach the editing stage, I’ll be in the seventh circle of hell. I should clarify that by the editing stage, I mean self-editing stage.

Question Seven

Me: What inspired you to move from reviewing YA fiction to writing it?
Kimberly: I’ve actually always wanted to be a writer. I majored in English and I specialized in children’s lit. I started doing book reviewing partly as an outlet — I was working in the corporate world, which is really soul-draining. With my husband’s support I was able to decide to try and write full-time, and I did. I’ve always written, I’ve had some short stories published, and I’ve written for magazines and newspapers, but I’ve never taken it seriously until I quit work.

Question Eight

Kimberly: What is your second favorite movie?
Me: My second favorite movie is probably Almost Famous, but if I may say so, I think it’s probably tied with Lost in Translation and with His Girl Friday.

Question Nine

Me: What was it like sitting down and writing a full-length novel, and going through the whole process?
Kimberly With Sucks to Be Me, it was the first time I’d ever made myself an outline and followed it, which worked really well. I have a number of other in-progress books, and I’ve found that if I don’t have any kind of outline I just end up dabbling and doing a scene here and a scene there.

Question Ten

Kimberly: If you could write a book with anyone else, a little joint book, who would you want to write with, live or dead?
Me: There are a lot of living writers I’d like to work with, so instead of singling one of them out, I’ll just say that I would love to write a book with Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Question Eleven

Me: How about you?
Kimberly: P.L Travers. I love the originally Mary Poppins books, and while I like the Disney movie, it’s very very different. Every time I read those books, they’re smart, they’re intelligent, they’re a little bit subversive. … She always comes to mind as someone who nobody ever reads the original any more, they always have this whole Disney-fied version in their heads.

Question Twelve

Kimberly: What are your favorite restaurants in New York? [Kimberly explained that she and her husband are foodies and always on the lookout for great restaurants, thus the question.]
Me: I’m one of those people who always orders the same thing, and goes back to the same places over and over again, but I’ll say that I love Kang Suh, which is a Korean restaurant, and I love ACME, which is a Cajun-ish place, and those are probably the places I go most.

Question Thirteen

Me: Where did you grow up?
Kimberly: I was born in California in San Mateo, and my parents were not hippie freaks, but they decided to drop out and sell everything they owned and they moved us to Arkansas and started a rabbit farm. And then they decided that rabbits were nasty little creatures. They started doing arts and crafts shows — my mom painted, and my dad did woodwork. We ended up moving to Florida because Arkansas was too cold.

Question Fourteen

Kimberly: You’re having a dinner party with your favorite foods and you get to invite four famous people, and they can be alive or dead. Who would they be?
Me: I’ve always had a hard time answering these sorts of questions, but I would definitely want Dorothy Parker as a dinner guest, and Gloria Steinem, and obviously Lucy Maud Montgomery, and then just to mix things up a bit, I’d also invite Aaron Burr, because I’d love to see those lovely ladies team up on him and tear him to shreds, which I have no doubt they would do.

Question Fifteen

Me: What’s your next book?
Kimberly I’m working on a sequel right now called It Still Sucks to Be Me. Of course, it’s going to depend on how well the first book does, so we’ll see. [Editor's Note: I have faith that Kimberly's first will do very well. How could it not? It's awesome.]

Question Sixteen

Kimberly: If you could live anywhere, where would you live?
Me: I would live in my very own beautifully rehabbed brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, near the water, which is the thing I miss most since having moved to the middle of the middle of the middle of Brooklyn, because I spent my teen years and my early twenties living within a block of the Long Island Sound.

Question Seventeen

Me: If you could live anywhere, where would you live?
Kimberly: Italy. We spent three weeks there and we went all over the northern half and just loved all of it, so it’d be really hard to pick a spot, but oh … maybe outside Florence.

Question Eighteen

Kimberly: What did you want to be when you were ten?
Me: When I was ten … when I was ten, I wanted to be a writer, but I was dissuaded by the character Connie on Just the Ten of Us, because she said that writers were always poor and never happy and so she was destined to be one, and I thought, “I really don’t want to be poor.”

Question Nineteen

Me: What are your plans for keeping up the website now that you yourself are an about-to-be published YA author?
Kimberly: Luckily I have a number of volunteer reviewers for the site. I don’t want to review books for Mirrorstone [Kimberly's publisher] because I don’t want to have any kind of conflict of interest there. If you look, I haven’t posted a review since my baby was born. I’ve barely read since my baby was born, but that’s getting better. I do plan to keep it up, and I’m going to rely heavily on my reviewers and I might even add some more in there as well. I haven’t reviewed a vampire book in ages, I haven’t read a vampire book in ages because I don’t want to mess up the vision in my head with somebody else’s vision.

Question Twenty

Kimberly: You probably write on a computer, as most of us do today, but if all the computers in the world died and you had to go back to using paper and pen, what kind of paper and pen would you use?
Me: Well, first of all, I’d be pretty screwed, because my penmanship is terrible and because I can type about half as fast as I think, while I can write longhand about a tenth as fast as I think. But, I only use purple pens, so I would probably use a purple Le Pen, and because my penmanship is so terrible, I would go with loose-leaf, college-ruled, plain paper so I could stick it in a binder.

… Question Twenty-One!
Me: I can’t let you off the hook just yet, because I need to know what you would do in the same circumstances.
Kimberly: It would definitely have to be college-ruled paper because I can’t stand wide-ruled paper, and if I just have blank paper my writing goes all slanty, and it would have be a fine-point pen, like a really bold one, but there’s actually some new kind of Sharpie that’s not supposed to bleed through paper and I have to check that out.

And you, my friends, have got to check out Kimberly’s upcoming release. I’ll be back with more on the book on the 26th, but for now, you can find out more about Sucks to Be Me (or pre-order it!) on Amazon.com.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 11:53 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.