December 7, 2024 • 60 mins
Catch Polly Holyoke, a former Social Studies teacher and an award winning book author, on Off The Shelf #Books on Saturday, December 7, 2024 at 11am/EST (New York City time). Polly wrote her first book, 2 Days at Eagle Pass Ranch, with her friend when she was in the Fifth Grade. Today, Polly writes books for kids and is the author of the Neptune Triology and the Skyriders series. In addition to reading and writing, Polly grew up hiking, skiing and camping in the Colorado mountains. She also loves scuba diving, a water activity her husband introduced her to. A true outdoor enthusiast, Polly has climbed 48 of the 53 fourteen-thousand-foot peaks in Colorado. Tune in to discover what inspires Polly to write page-turning stories. Get the inside scoop on what Polly is working on now! See you Saturday at 11am/EST! Listener dial-in number: (347) 994-3490 You can also join right here in the chat room!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to the winning literary show Off the Shelf
Books Talk Radio Live with host Denise Journey, author of
the books Long Walk Up, Porsha, Love for Over Me, Spirals,
Love Has Many Faces, and Rosetta's Great Hope. Turn up
your dials and get ready for a blast of feature
author interviews four one one on book festivals, writing conferences,
(00:22):
and so much more. Ready, Let's go, Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Sometimes later becomes never. Do it now. My grandfather told
me that he was in his oh my gosh, he
was in his eighties, and I told him there was
something I wanted to do and I was working on
it as my writing, my novel writing. That's what I
want to do full time, and he's like, do it now.
He said that when you get older, your energy everything
(00:48):
can change, and your mind is still sharp, but maybe
your body's like, well wait a minute. So sometimes later
becomes never for maybe different reasons. Something changes in your
life and you can't see it coming, and it's something
you wanna do, so do it now. And that quote
is anonymous, but I'm sure that many people who have
given people that advice. We are waiting for our guests
(01:12):
to join us this morning. And so I'm gonna kick
it off anyway. One thing I've learned. If you are
one of our loyal listeners, thank you, thank you, thank you.
If it's your first time turning into the show, thank you,
thank you, thank you. But if you've listened to Off
the Shelfs, We've been on for seventeen years. If you've
been listening to Off the Shelfs, you know, I always say,
(01:35):
you gotta be flexible. You gotta know how to pivot,
and no matter what happens, you gotta be ready to
keep it moving forward. Cause things happen in all of
our lives. If you do a TV show, a radio
show like TV, they probably have other stand by guests.
Cause you getting ready to go on the air. What
is somebody who supposed to be there in an accident,
(01:55):
they fell sick, they had an emergency in their family.
That second guests is coming on and the audience never
even knows they want to first on deck. You gotta
always be prepared in life just to keep moving with
a real smooth flow. So I want to ask you,
if I often ask you were coming up on a
(02:17):
holiday season, it is December the seventh, you guys in
less than twenty days for those who celebrate Christmas Quansa.
And I'm trying to remember when Hanaka is. All these
winter holidays we write in it, we're write in it.
(02:37):
There's not like a lot of more time to prepare
for it. So if you're looking for gifts for yourself,
and I think there's no better gifts than a book,
you're looking for a gift for yourself, or you're looking
for a gift for someone else. If you love mystery
and suspense, but not just mystery and suspense, you also
(03:01):
value relationships. There is an an amazing this is a
real love story and these this couple meets in college
in Pennsylvania and they are really supposed to be together,
but one of them grew up he's raised by his
father separate from alcoholism, and it's it impacts Raymond. Raymond
(03:28):
is a track and field We just had the Olympics.
Raymond with a gold medal at the Olympics in middle distance,
no doubt about it. And he's an academ's academic it
very talented, so in both and he gives a full scholarship.
And that's where he meets his soul mate Brenda, and
her background is different from here. She's grown up with
(03:48):
more with some people might call privilege. But she's grown
up in the South, and Raymond grows up in Ohio,
in the in the in the mid in Midwest, and
oh my goodness, they do belong together. But now you
gotta deal with all the baggage that you've from your
childhood programming. But there are these five friends. Women have
four friends. These guys are friends for life, these dudes
(04:11):
or and it's read that I find a story about
like even women or men who are like these tight
type friends. And in there is a murder of mystery
kept in the story. So if you like suspense and
you romance and love and the a a a real
depth to a relationship, I encourage you to get Love
for Over Me. It's an ebook and print and I'm
(04:35):
trying to think if it's in hard back as well.
You can get it any retailer online. You can also
get it offline. You get at the library. If you
don't see it at the store, uh uh, you know,
the the local independent book stores as well where you live.
Just as the store clerk to order a copy for you,
they can get a copy because it's carried by the
(04:55):
largest book distributors. Well and again as love poor ol
for me? Who doesn't want that? Love pull over me?
Don't you want love to pull over you? Love pull
Over Me? By Denise Ternity. And now we're going to
c introduce you to today's special Office shelf guest. And
(05:17):
today's guest is Polly Holly Oak. And if I pronounce
her last name r Uh incorrectly, I hope she corrects me.
She is a former social studies teacher and she has
loved reading books since she was a child. She wrote
her first book Two Days at Eagle Pass Ranch with
her friend when she was in the fifth grade. That's
(05:38):
the same ten when I started writing. In addition to
reading and writing, Polly grew up hiking, skiing, and camping
in the Codlorado Mountains. She also loves scuba diving. She's
a outdoors person, y'all. She loves scuba diving, a water
activity her husband introduced her to. And she's, like I said,
she's a true outdoor enthusiast. She has climed forty eight
(06:00):
of the fifty three fourteen thousand foot beaks and cadd
o'roddal Wow. Polly is also the award winning Neptune trilogy
and the acclaimed Skywriters series Arthur And please check Polly
hollyoakad online and it is Pollyhollyold dot com, p O
L L y h O L y oke dot com,
(06:24):
p O L L y h O l y oke
dot com. We are just so excited and honored to
have Holly with us here on Off the Shelf Books
this morning. Welcome to Off the Shelf, Polly.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
I'm very happy to be.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Here and we're so excited to have you here with
us this morning. I enjoyed, as I do with all
of our guests. I really enjoyed researching and preparing for
your interview today. I learned so much about the authors
when I'm getting ready for the shows. But the first
three questions, the first three questions I'm going to ask you.
I asked every guest just to give our listeners a
(07:05):
little backstory on the office before I start talking about
their stories. So the kick off this morning show, Probaly,
can you tell off the Sholf listeners where you grew
up and what life was like for you growing up?
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Well, I grew up in Colorado, so I am definitely
came by my outdoorsiness spuder naturally and organically, so to speak.
My father was a mountain climber. He was a doctor,
but he was also a mountain climber, and so hiking
was just part of our weekend deals.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
And then my parents.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Very sadly split when I was in seventh grade, and
then you have that typical divorce agreement where the kid
goes back and forth on weekends, and so the every
other weekend I had with my father, we started climbing
mountains and doing camping, and so I saw even more
of the great outdoors and I really enjoyed my dad.
So those are some of my favorite memories. Also, Colorado's
(08:05):
took place with an outdoor lifestyle. I have lived in Texas,
which was very good for my career, and people were
lovely there, but it's much more of an indoor lifestyle,
and I'm very happy I moved back to Colorado three
years ago, so I'm back to skiing and camping and
hiking and doing all those things.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
What city Denver was city in Colorado? Did you say Denver?
When I did? I did?
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Actually, after the parents split, my mother moved to Aspen
before it was a really fancy place, so I remember
Aspen when there were cute little Victorian houses that people
were still fixing up. Unfortunately, Aspen has really become the
billionaires have pushed out the millionaires, and so it's a
it's almost a ghost town now because a lot of
(08:51):
those houses are third.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
Homes or fourth homes for folks.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
It's still a very really beautiful place with a great
ski mountain, but I lived in Steamboat Springs, which is
much more of a real town with real people and
real schools, and I really really love it here.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Can you know what's interesting when you said that about Aspen,
I saw it show I forget what it's It wasn't
about Aspen. It was something that had happened decades ago,
but they were seeing just what you said. It was
a people don't realize it, like people say Austin, Texas.
You go way way way back, these are They said
it was nothing like what it is now, but it was.
(09:29):
It was like a small town. I'm thinking a new
town Pennsylvania. It probably was like that, with these quaint
shops and these towns. And then they said it just
took over. The wealthy just came in and it just
took over this this area there are different parts that
you see that. Harlem is another area. Some people say
it's changing where you see people with money coming in
(09:50):
and it just changes as a dynamic of the area. So, now,
when you were a young girl, what did you dream
of being? Polly? When I grew up, what did you
want to become when you grew up?
Speaker 3 (10:03):
Well, I have always always loved animals. So my great
three when I was a kiddo was I wanted to
be a veterinarian, and that was what I was really
thinking I would be. And then I was fortunate enough
the high school that I went to had a work
program and on Wednesdays we actually went out into the
community and had a chance to experience different jobs.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
And so I might have was in Washington, D C.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Area. So I on junior year, I worked on Capitol
Hill and realized I really wanted nothing to do with politics.
And then either year I got to work and a
vet's office, and I loved being with the animals. But
veterinarians have to spend a lot of their afternoons during surgery,
and a lot of that surgery is making sure that
animals can't make babies, and so there's a lot of
(10:47):
sterilization that goes goes on, and there's a lot of sewing,
and you know, I don't really like sewing that much.
So at the end of my internship that senior year,
I realized that being a vet was not for me.
So I decided to be a teacher and study and
that was a wonderful fit and something that I still
get to do on and off now as an author.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
But I do think it's very useful for young people.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
To figure out what they don't want to do along
with what they do want to do, and that school
is hard enough and so expensive. Now I am so
fortunate that I figured out early on there I really
probably did not want to be a veterinarian.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
You make a great point, and this is where you
have to take advantage of an internship. We spend so
much of our lives at work, and I feel like
I'm thinking back to my grandparents and my parents. Back then,
my parents, a woman really rarely worked outside the home.
But I think back to those times and I remember
(11:47):
my elders telling me, do something you love, because you're
going to spend so much time at work. And I
tell you, that was before the internet, and when they
worked we spent even more time at work. It's this
constant connections you could have from your cell phone to
your laptop. You can be attached to work almost twenty
(12:08):
four to haven. Now, where before you went in the
office and when you came home you were home. It
was pretty much it. It's really case. So it is
even more important to find out what you like and
don't like. You said you love the animals, and then
you go in and you learn about whats veterinarians really
do and you're like, no, that's not for me. And
(12:29):
I've had other people say the same thing. That is
so so so important. Who or what experience inspired your
love for not just reading but writing books.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
I think that it probably started with a grandmother I
had who used to come see us again growing up
in Colorado, so she would come from Nebraska. And I
was almost the youngest of all the cousins, so I
was the youngest grandchild, and so she's gotten quite frail
by the time I came along, but she still was
just such a fun, pepy lady. And she would sit
(13:05):
on the couch because she, you know, had off the
softer process. My dad hugged her at the airport and
broke two of her ribs once, so she couldn't move
around a whole lot. But she loved to read, and
so she would read great, big, thick books to me.
I read that she read The Jungle Book to me.
She read Black Beauty to me, and looking back, those
are those are really big books. And then you know,
(13:26):
I would act out all the parts.
Speaker 4 (13:28):
Running her out on the floor, but.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
I just couldn't wait for her to finish a meal
and put on her reading glasses, and then she would
transport me into this other world. And I think she
must have been very good at reading, too, because those
stories are still so real and edited to me, they're
not particularly easy reads.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
So that was part of it.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
And then writing. I had this wonderful experience with my
best friend Laurie, who was actually still one of my
best friends.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
And she had her family had a ranch near Kremlin, Colorado,
And the.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
First time we went to this ranch for us sleepover,
I was in fifth grade and it was all cold
and snowy at the ranch. It was actually in January,
and it was just this magical experience they led us her.
The parents said go play in the hay barn. So
there was this hay barn where there were stacks of
hay bills with little trails between them and ladders and
trap doors. We thought it was there to play hide
(14:20):
and go seek. I think it was probably there to
store hey, but that was wonderful. They let us ride snowmobiles,
and again marn Fith grades were about ten eleven years old.
Snowmobiles are fast and they're powerful, and we kept getting
them stocks but it was still very fun.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
And then another thing they us do was.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
Right the horses bare back in the snow.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
That's kind of fun because if you pull off the horse,
you land in a snow.
Speaker 5 (14:41):
Drift and it doesn't hurt.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
The one thing they said to be careful about were
the breeding bowls.
Speaker 5 (14:46):
Those are the big male dad cows.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
They had them in special pens and they can be
kind of grumpy.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
We snuck up to the hay up to those corrals
a couple.
Speaker 5 (14:55):
Of times and waved at them and tried to get
us to charge.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Us, which they never did, but we thought was really so.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
It was really cool and really dangerous.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
So we got to school.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Our little private school in Denver had study hall in
the middle of the day, and that is waste that
is a total waste for fifth and sixth graders. Nobody
I know what that age really gets the homework done.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
But for two weeks, I think.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
We used study hall pretty well, he said, Lory, but
trying to book about your ranch because it had just
been such an incredible.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
Experience for me, and so we wrote. We sat down
him every day.
Speaker 5 (15:24):
At study hall.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
We wrote another three or four pages.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
We wrote until we got to about fifty.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Seven pages, all handwritten, and so we took a lot
of our adventures and we turned it into a story
about two girls out smarting bad guys who'd come to
the family ranch.
Speaker 5 (15:39):
To steal the prize quarter horses.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
And the funny thing is, again all the stuff we've
done on our weekend showed up. So one of the
bad guys in the story, one of the bad guys,
they got him on the back of a snowmobile out
in the hayfields. We handed over an irrigation ditch, so
he fell off the back.
Speaker 5 (15:52):
And got a concussion.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
And another bad guy they kind of lost them in
the hay barn where the girls knew all the ladders
and the secret exits, and they locked him in there,
and the very nasty bad guy. The leader they tempted
him is they loaded him into the bullpen and got
him trampled by the breeding bulls.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
So what we really did.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Was write Home Alone, because that's really a story of
a little boy, you know, beating up on the burglars
and beating the burglars.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
We wrote Home Alone Goes to the Ranch, and we
had so much fun we couldn't wait to get to
study Hall.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
And that's when I realized that when you write stories,
if you have a visitive imagination, as I seem to
and as I think a lot of writers do and
a lot of kids do, it's like you get to
live the adventures yourself. And so now I've figured out
a way to turn my daydreaming into a job that
to get paid for.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
So that's that's.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Really wonderful for me.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Yes, have you ever thought about revisiting this story two
days at Eagle Pass Ranch? And actually, whether you do
it solo, get your friends permission to incorporate her part
of the story and do it write it as a
solo author, or revisit it with your friend. Have you
ever thought about revisiting it as an adult now and
(17:05):
publishing it? Maybe you publish it for middle schoolers. As
the idea ever come to you, I think.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
It really it's on my list. There are just so
many books that are kind of knocking on the door,
but I think that's the second to next book that
I might try to write, because every time, you know,
I start to explain it, I use this story when
I go to schools. One of the great joys in
my life is again I was a teacher, and now
I get to go back into schools for a day.
And I think it's just this kind of God given
(17:33):
opportunity to share my message. And my message is really,
kids need to read, they need to write, They need
to unplug from their gadgets, to leave time to daydream
whether they want to be a scientist or a mathematician
or a writer. We need more creative time. And I'm
afraid all the cell phones and the iPads.
Speaker 5 (17:50):
Are stealing that from kids.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
But another part of my author assembly is I do
talk about writing this story with my best friend, and
it's just wonderful see kids light up, and I hear
from teachers from months after I visit a school that
they've got all these kids that are trying to write stories,
to write and that's just the most wonderful thing that
I get to do that. You know, I'm at a
(18:11):
stage in my life where it's like, how can I
give back? And it makes me so sad that the
kids are, you know, so dialed into their into their games,
and into their iPads and into their TV. I have
a friend who keeps arguing that video gaming actually can
be creative, and I understand that there are some games
where you get to kind of invent your adventures. Certainly
D and D Dungeons and Dragons can be quite creative.
(18:34):
I think some of those kids who write their own
fantasy stories based on the D and D worlds that
they build. But a lot of this stuff is not
so creative, and I think it's very distracting from what
you and I probably did when we were younger. If
you had spare time, you sat there and you've made
up adventures in your head. And usually I or I
took a book that I loved, and then I imagine
myself into the story, and somehow I usually ended up
(18:56):
being the hero and the star.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Oh yes, you know, y. Even with artificial intelligence, there's
a lot of good. It can reduce errors, particularly for
things at the at the been the more ma uh
manufacturing corporate environments. But it's it's a a are people
going to continue to really use their brains as much? Uh?
(19:21):
There will always be inventors, there will always be scientists,
There'll always be people who'll be researchers and be curious
and creative. But will that expand across the masses? And
if it doesn't, what will we see in another fifty
seventy years? It be? It will be interesting. And I
do encourage you know, exploring and be in creativity. It's
(19:42):
a great way to express what's going on inside that
you do. So now we're gonna start getting to these books.
What drew you to horses? Was it the time at
the ranch, PA, but particularly the pegasus. When I think
about the pegasus myth, would you two horses? So I
(20:04):
relate the myth?
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Yes, Okay, so we've established I definitely was an outdoorsy
and a horsey kind of kid.
Speaker 5 (20:12):
I think that there's just a special relationship between girls
and horses, you know, with perspective, I see, I was
so privileged.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
To be able to have that, But I think that
there are a lot of kids from world backgrounds that
get to have you know, through four age programs and
so forth, that get to have very strong relationships with animals.
I think that friendship between kids and animals, that's a whole,
really important theme in a lot of kids books. I
think kids need that feeling that there's something, there's a
(20:40):
creature or a person who loves them, understands them, and
accepts them unconditionally.
Speaker 5 (20:46):
So we're always going to have horse and dog books.
That's part of it.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
But what you're really asking is.
Speaker 5 (20:51):
About the Pegasus myth.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
So when I was a little kid, I had my
parents gave me this beautiful, beautiful version of the Pegasus
myth with these more for watercolor illustrations, and I read
and re read that picture book a bazillion times, as
actually retold by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who actually told the myth,
and it was it was just this beautiful book. But
(21:13):
I kept thinking how lovely it would be to have
a flying horse, and I think I probably daydreamed flying
around on.
Speaker 5 (21:18):
A flying horse.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
So during COVID, I needed to come up with another
story idea. It had a pretty successful series with Disney
about genetically engineered kids who have to go live in
the ocean because climate change is out of control. That
was very science y and very science fiction orator that
series was called the first book was called The Neptune Project.
Speaker 5 (21:37):
Was actually quite successful.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
In terms of getting on state lists and being well received.
So I needed to come up with something else, and
I knew that I also really loved fantasy. And for
your listeners who are writers, I think it's terribly important
to write the kind of book you want to read
when you were a kid you wanted to read, or
that you still like to read. You can't go chase
(22:00):
a market trend and write something in the genena that
you don't enjoy, because it's not going to be authentic
and organic and it's not going to work. So I
love fantasy novels. I'd really wanted to try my hand
at one. And I also used to teach Colorado history,
and so in that I became very aware of something
called a pony Express, which is very sad to me
when I tell kids about this, how many kids have
(22:21):
not heard about the American pony Express.
Speaker 5 (22:23):
But of course we had this.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
Time period when around eighteen sixty we didn't have a
train across the Noble country, and we didn't have a
telegraph yet, and so it took three months to get
the mail from Washington, d C. To San Francisco because
the ships had to go all the way around South
America and we didn't have a Panama Canal yet. So
these businesses businessmen decided to hire a bunch of young
(22:45):
writers to ride day and night eighty miles shifts on
four different courses, each handing off the mail like a
relay baton. And they thought, maybe they get to cut
down the time to get letters to San Francisco, and
indeed they did. They did do it in about eleven
days from Missouri from Saint Louis to San Francisco, which
(23:06):
is kind of amazing, and itways, it's just this very
colorful little period in and we lasted eighteen months, and
then they strung the telegraph lines across and then the
Pony Express became redundant. And so I said, always been
interested in that. And I love the Pegasus myth which
Pegasus and Blerophon fight this terrible three headed monster called
a chimera. And somehow I think sometimes creative ideas when
(23:27):
you mash two totally different ideas together. So I thought, oh,
what about a pony Express.
Speaker 5 (23:32):
With flying horses.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
What if you had young riders delivering the mail across
the vast empires so big they have to use flying
horses that fly really fast. And so that was kind
of the original premise of the story. Is two totally
different things, the record Pony Express and the vegasust. Myth
put them together and that's what I came up with
sky Riders, which is a story of brave young couriers
on a flying horses delivering the mail. And my heroin Ki,
(23:56):
loves her jobs, she loves her sky steep, she loves
her Uncle Dougs, even though he's always pestering her to
practice sky fighting. Well, everybody knows that's a waste of
time because the chimera, which is the creature you would
fight in skyfighting, that once ravaged their world are long gone. Well,
in the course of the story we discover that Kimera
are not long gone. Uncle Dougs is terribly hurt fighting
(24:17):
the first wave of chimeras they attack Pricault, and he
makes Kai promise, with what we think might be as
dying breath, that she will take his manual on ancient
sky fighting tactics to the Capitol and convince people there
to read this manual before it's too late, because in
the hundreds of years since there have been chimera problems
and call people have forgotten how to.
Speaker 5 (24:39):
Fight these monsters.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
And that's a pretty tall order for a shy girl
with dyslexia from the borders of the empire and the
fringes of it of the Empire. So that's kind of
a quest. In the first book, it was just a
ton of thing to write, you know, shy girl making
a difference, being brave and aerial battles was just a
great book to write.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Oh my goodness, I was getting ready to ask you
to give us the synopsis of Skyriders and thank you,
thank you for introducing us to the story. Can you
tell us a little bit more about Keissandra? You call
her key? Oh, you say she's shy, but what more
you mentioned her uncle? What are her parents, her if
(25:20):
she had any siblings, good friends? And exactly what are
her superpowers? Not a horse flies? So I'm now interested
in are these regular humans with these animals with superpowers?
So give us a little bit more about her personality,
her family backgrounds, and just what are her superpowers?
Speaker 5 (25:41):
Okay, so I did see that she really had a
lot of superpowers.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
I suppose the one thing that makes her different from
other young writers or young sky fighters and skyriders. She
discovers that she can link and speak to all the
sky steats, any sky steaeds that she touches.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
And by the way, I call the pegason, so the
when good horses or called sky.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Steps in my story, she's very shy and doesn't trust easily,
and that's kind of a sad thing that it came
out of the fact that she had to board during
the weeks the weekdays at the school in the village
because her her dad had an orchard out in the
foothills so long a distance she couldn't go back and
(26:22):
forth every day to go to school, so she had
to stay in town, and the kids.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
In town were really mean to her because you don't.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Often see because she has dyslexia, you don't often see
that in fantasy novels. I think the big series that
does it well is of course with Percy Jackson books,
and that are Perscy Jackson actually is very has definitely
has dyslexia, but otherwise you don't usually see those kind
of learning differences. And my daughter had dysgrapha when she
(26:50):
was younger, and it really made school hard for her.
So I think fantasy can be can take some of
these realistic, everyday problems and let kids sort of see
them being used or dealt.
Speaker 5 (27:02):
With in a fantasy world.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
And I really wanted to do that and try and
do that well. So Kai doesn't trust well because she
was teased at school because reading was so hard for her.
She doesn't have a lot of friends. She really really.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
Loves her sky steeds. And I guess the magical power
or the thing that's special is in this world.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
If a sky steed accepts you as you're as their writer,
then you can communicate with your sky steed telepathically. That
would be the scientific term in a magic word. A
lot of times it's mind speech. They can just understand
each other. So usually one writer can understand just their
sky steeds. So the one thing that is very unusual
(27:41):
about Kai, when she goes to the Capitol and she
starts working with other sky Steeds, she starts to realize
that she can understand every sky Steed that she touches,
and that becomes more and more important as the story
goes on, because by the end we're in this terrible
battle between the sky Steeds and the writers and the camera.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
The ways of.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
Camera that are coming in and the fact that she
can communicate with all these sky steage really helps. She's
kind of the communications center and she ties everybody together
and makes it much more.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Oh my gosh, you took like the little kind of
outcast girl and now she's like the hero hero. She's
the one that the town needs to lean on, the
hated tie and almost narrob meat. What's their relationship like?
Speaker 3 (28:30):
So I think I love these questions. You did a
good job on your homework.
Speaker 4 (28:35):
Here they met.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
She really wanted a sky steam. So in this world,
the rich folks have been breathing over the years, they've
made the horses bigger and bigger, so they're almost like
chargers that would carry armored knights, and those big domesticated
sky Steas are very valuable and they fight with their
noble riders on.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
Them in tournaments.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Well, as the horses get bigger the skysty get bigger,
they actually get less agile in the air, and that
becomes a real problem with that Timilar return. Whereas Kai
because she doesn't have any money, but she desperately wants
a sky steed when she was only eleven years old.
She goes up into the mountains and she tries to
find a wild sky steed. The wild sky steeds are
(29:18):
based on our present day mustangs, and their mustangs tend
to be a little bit smaller than domesticated horses because
they don't have as much food out on the range.
So as a species, the mustangs are a little bit
usually smaller than our mainstream horses or domesticated horses. So
she spends a whole summer camping up on the mountains
and get trying to get close to wild skysteats, and
(29:40):
finally Nia sees her and he's very curious about her.
And you find out more in the second.
Speaker 5 (29:45):
Book, by the way, which is called The Sky Kingman
is Out.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
Now you find out more about these wild sky steeds
and you find out more about his story. But in
terms of his personality, I really had fun making a
lot of these sky steeds that are partnered with skyriders,
different from their studies, from their howls, from their writer.
And so Naurah is incredibly outgoing. He's comfortable where he goes.
(30:08):
He loves talking to the big domesticated sky steeds. He
loves meeting new sky steeds and new people, and that's
sort of the opposite of Kai.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
And so.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
At the beginning of the book, you hear him saying,
you know, she's you need a bigger herd of your own.
I wish you'd build a herd of your own, because
horses are very herd animals, and they're very comfortable in
the group. They're very lonely. If you just have one horse,
you should feel sorry anytime you see one horse to
beget a feel because that's not a horse.
Speaker 5 (30:34):
In its natural environment.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
They really love to be around other and so that's
I had a lot of fun with sort of the opposites.
And you know that he's always trying to get her
to be more outgoing, and I think that's important anytime
somebody is writing a story, you need to think about
what your character wants and what your character needs. And
what she thinks she wants is just to become promoted.
(30:56):
She wants to make more money as a skyrider. She
wants to be a sky courier, she wants to be
a senior sky scorier, and that's what she thinks would
make her happy. But the underlying context is that she
would definitely be happier and more content if she had
more friends. Ay, interesting, and that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
I love how yes, Oh my god, Now did Uncle
Doug's did he raise Kai? I know he's passing away
and he'd make her make this promise, but did he
raise her? Not? How did? How did he support her?
In the story Skyriders?
Speaker 3 (31:31):
So at the at the beginning, he actually doesn't have
a huge role in the story. He's just there at
the beginning. And so what you find out is that
her her dad died two years earlier from a fever,
and he really raised Kai. Turns out thats a mom
did not like this hard scrabble life in the foothills
(31:52):
in an orchard, and so she actually leaves Kai when
Kay is, you know, young enough to remember her and
be hurt broken when her mother just writes off with
a peddler, the mom just and so now you'll find
in kids books a lot of times there's a tough background,
even going back into fairy tales. If there's a happy
mom and a dad and if everybody is getting along beautifully,
(32:15):
there's not nearly as much scope for a story. So
it's a very sad thing. But I often tell kids
when I'm tell you know, I help them coach them
to write stories. You probably have to be really mean
to your character if you're going to be an author,
because if you're not mean, there's not any story so
far that's true.
Speaker 5 (32:33):
So Uncle Beso, you look at all the Disney things,
you know, there's always a dead parent.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
It's a Disney story or the or the parent's gonna die.
Speaker 4 (32:40):
Because again, that's one of the most terrifying things for.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
A kid is is to lose a parent. So anyway, yes,
so she is almost taking care of uncle Doug's as
much as he's taking care of her. At the start
of this book, she has got a load, you know,
she's taking care of an orchard, she's taking care of
her uncle. She's got a lot on her plate. A
very capable young person.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Now, would you please give us an overview of the
sky King.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Well, so part of Kai. It turns out that Kai
discovers that she is the Nexsara, she is the Connector,
and this is the sort of a legendary job and
everybody'd sort of forgotten about it because again, the last
big battle of the Chimera happened three hundred years earlier,
so people forgot there was such a thing as a nisara.
But when the camera come again, part of the magic
(33:30):
that links sky Steeds and humans, that magic was forged
three hundred years earlier, so the sky seats would help
humans fight back the camera that we're going to just
destroy this whole continent and take all the most of
the life form, the larger life forms off of it.
So this is a very important alliance that.
Speaker 4 (33:50):
Was forged, but it has changed over time and people.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Human beings have almost made the sky steeds almost into
their caves or they're certainly not their equals anymore. And
originally the alliance between the when the sky seeds agree
to join the human beings and bind with them, it
was supposed to be an equal partnership. So by the
second book, Kay is starting to realize that that sky
(34:15):
seeds are not treated fairly anymore. They are owned by
human beings. That was never the plan, No, and in
the second book she goes a lot of sky Stets
and writers get killed at the end of the first
book in a terrible battle. They need the Empire needs
more sky steeds, and so her job becomes to go
to the wild sky steed herds and the head of
(34:35):
all of them, which is the sky King, and try
and convince him to let more of the wild smaller
sky seats bind with young writers so they have a
chance of fighting the Chimera when they come again. And
that sky King himself is very bitter about how the
relationship between humans and sky skieds is gone astray, and
(34:56):
he does not want to for the first of most
of the book, he does not want to that his
wild wild herds fight with humans against the Chimera because
the relationship has deteriorated. So she becomes really an advocate
for the sky steeds, and by the end, I don't
want to give too much away, but by the end
she has found the original meeting place where sky steeds
(35:18):
met as equals with human beings, and she makes sure
that they get some more of their rights back.
Speaker 5 (35:24):
Another thing about dealing with grief.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
It sounds like a funny thing in a fantasy novel,
but I do think that fantasy, when it's done well,
kind of dress just as many problems as contemporary fiction
for kids. And so one of the things that's always bothered
me about old fantasy novels like the Lion, the wooch,
and the wardrobe. These kids go off and fight these
terrible battles and there's no.
Speaker 5 (35:44):
Cost, there's no trauma.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
I have two daughters that are there a social workers,
so I hear a lot about trauma and how it
impacts people. I wanted to make sure in the second
book that Kai has got some weight on her from
the losses in the first book, and this King helps
her learn to face that grief and to share that grief.
Speaker 4 (36:04):
Because she's spoke into the loner, you know.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
She thinks it's a weakness to show her grief, and
the sky King shows her that she needs to be
with other people, with her herd and share her grief.
So that was a lot of fun. I sometimes I
just say that the Sky King is like the origin
story of the sky Steech. You find out a lot
about the wild herds and a lot about sort of
the origin of this beautiful relationship between human beings and
(36:29):
sky streets.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Okay, now the tamera you've got, I'm saying it right.
As you've mentioned these monsters, can you describe what they
look like and what are their powers? They sound like
they're like real formidable foes. Are they huge, like fifty
feet cold? They look like dragons? What are they like
(36:53):
and what are their powers?
Speaker 3 (36:56):
I'm so the original kimera that Billerrathon fought in the
Greek myth. So, going back to the Greek myth, Blerethon
was a Greek hero who wanted to make a name
and a reputation the way you did that ancient Greece
if you went and found yourself a terrible monster to kill.
And so when Bleophon was looking to make a rep
for himself, the monster of the day was something called
(37:16):
a chimera, and it was laying waste to Lycia. And
that chimera had three heads, the head of a serpent,
the head of a goat, and the head of a lion,
and it was about the sides of dragon. It had
leathery wings so it could fly, and that chimera could
breathe fire. I've always had sort of an issue with
how woods, something that has feathers and wings cite something
(37:38):
that breathes fire the wind. I think the thing that
brings fire, the monster with the fire, is going to win.
And so when I went to the plot the Skywriter series,
I decided that my chimera would have three heads, the
head of a goat called a blood goat in my book,
and a sand dragon. These are all deget creatures, and
a lion, but they would not rereads fire, so I
(38:01):
didn't want them to. My skywriters have to say a
spell or something it would save them.
Speaker 5 (38:05):
From the fire.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
But I did make the serpent had incredibly poisonous, and
part of that was I was bitten by a rattlesnake
when I about fifteen years ago, when I was hiking
in the Utah Desert, so I know what it feels
like to have a very strong neurotoxin in your body.
Writers are always taking their adventures and then putting them
into their books in one form or another. So this
terrible chimera that I've created doesn't breathe fire, but it
(38:28):
is incredibly fast, and it's always hungry. It was created
to always be hungry, so it's always trying to kill
things and always trying to eat things. And then again,
this one head is very poisonous. The size wise, it's twice,
if not three times the size of.
Speaker 5 (38:45):
The largest sky states.
Speaker 3 (38:47):
So they're big, but I didn't want them to be
too huge. They just there fast, and I wanted to
make it possible for two or three sky states to
take one down one camera. But it's like the book
one camera. So the sink there is a chimera and
then a peor olds chmeira. I get tripped up and
everybody else gets tripped up doing that, right, And so
they have these battles. As the books proceed, we find
(39:10):
out that the evil mage that is making the chimera
has made a couple of them that are really big,
and that those are harder to fight. But your garden
variety Hymier in this story is twice the size of
the sky steed, with three heads and very hard to kill.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Wow, it sounds like it. Oh my gosh, can you
before we start talking about the Nettube project, what time period?
This is fantasy? But if in the in a person's
mind it looks at, you know, today's time to what
what time period I'm fall in advance? Is the story
set in compared to the day's time.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
So the way to kind of tell that a lot
of times it's just a look at the technology. So
we would call this more of a medieval fantasy. There's
not power yet, there's not gunpowder, okay, so it would
be it's definitely not Earth. It's just another reality. But
it's in a pretty low tech world and so horses
(40:13):
flying horses, but yeah, not no electricity yet, no no
steam power, so a pretty basic technology in this in.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
This world, I was thinking in my mind, total opposite.
I'm going way far in the future. So I'm going
to ask you that what age, what age group are
the books written for?
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Okay, so this series is definitely a fantasy series for
ages eight.
Speaker 4 (40:41):
To twelve is what the publisher says. But I am finding.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
That even Junior high, which goes up into seventh and
eighth grade, which would be more like eight to fourteen,
I have some thirteen and fourteen year olds that seem
to be really liking it. And I think it's because
there's so much action and excitement, and you know, she's
an older for this type of book. She's thirteen, so
that's an older protected kids like to read about kids.
Speaker 5 (41:06):
That are older than themselves.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
They really don't like reading about kids that are younger
than themselves, and so that's why, you know, there's been
thirteen and fourteen year olds that are actually enjoying the series.
But I would say it's definitely a little bit younger
in its field than my Nepkin books.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Okay, now can you please give us a brief synopsis
of the Neptune Project.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
So that was a wild book to write. I'm actually
a social studies teacher. I don't have a strong science background.
But then I dreamed up this idea of genetically engineered
kids who have to go live in the ocean because
climate change is out of control. And this book is
definitely set two hundred and fifty years in our future
what I was trying to do, and this is written,
(41:49):
you know, fifteen years ago, so it's an older series.
I really always cared about climate change. I had a
science teacher in sixth grade who was marrying my sure
where are the fact that climate was changing? And very
much an environmentalist and that really stucked. And so I
just kept reading all this stuff about how the planet.
Speaker 5 (42:07):
Was heating up and what a big problem this would be.
Speaker 3 (42:09):
So I thought, I really want to put this into
a book so kids can picture how different the world
may be if we don't get off of falseful fuels
and start making some better choices.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
So Neptin came out.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
As I'm concerned about climate change and genetic engineering. I
don't think a lot of people realize the degree to
which we have started mixing human DNA with animal DNA. Right,
And here's the weird connection. In science. If you put
human and animal DNA together, it's called a chimera because
a camera is three different creatures stuffed into the same
(42:42):
body in the myth.
Speaker 4 (42:44):
And so when you're mixing animals and humans, and the reason.
Speaker 5 (42:46):
We would do this, the good reason.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
Is something like pigs. We're trying to get organs that
we could put into human beings and have our bodies
not reject them. So if you can make grow a
pig kidney or a pig heart that has some human
DNA in it, it's left out to be rejected by
our bodies.
Speaker 5 (43:05):
So that's the good use for this.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
But the idea of putting animal and human DNA together
is really pretty shocking and scary in some ways. So
I wanted to talk about that a little bit. And
then also I just really need to make money. And
I've always been fascinated by the oceans because I live
I grew up in Colorado. We don't have a lot
of oceans in the middle part of the country. So
all those they came together in the Neptune project, and
(43:28):
the basic idea is the heroin. These kids don't know
they're part of the secret Neptune Project. Genetic engineering has
become totally illegal in this future, and so when the
scientists realize the land is getting so hot and so dangerous,
they decide maybe are species' only chance is if some
of us go into the ocean. So they actually change
(43:50):
their own kids before they're ever born, and that has
to happen that way if you want the traits to
be heritable, meaning if you want them to be another
generation of Neptin kids and make Neptune babies, you have
to change them. So this happens before they were.
Speaker 5 (44:03):
Born, and it's part of their structure, their DNA structure.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
So the kids have this modification when they turn twelve
or thirteen, they start as land kids.
Speaker 4 (44:11):
They think they're land kids.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
They get a shot when they turn thirteen or fourteen
and they're old enough to survive in the sea, and
then they have to go into the ocean coming back
because their lungs have been changed. So it's a pretty
shocking transformation for these kids, especially the ones that have
no idea that it's going to happen. To them. Imagine
if somebody said to you tomorrow, you've got to go
live in the san and you're not coming back. So
(44:33):
that leads to some good conflict between the kids and
their parents, certainly between my heroin They're and her mother
when she finds out that she's sort of been a
science experiment, bred by her mother to do this, but
her mother really loves her and so anyway, so the
kid goes into the sea, and she's another very shy,
quiet kind of a character, not really comfortable with the
kids in town. And I like to show shy kids
(44:57):
coming to the fore and becoming leaders. I also seem
to like to choose girls as my.
Speaker 5 (45:02):
Heroines and show them leading by consensus.
Speaker 4 (45:05):
The girl girl powers well.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
The girls who listen to other people, and usually the
boys in my story sort of don't listen very well,
but the girls listen to the other people in their group.
Speaker 5 (45:16):
There are always lots of boys in my stories.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
It makes me sad when they just put a girl
on the cover because the boys don't buy the book.
They are very strong boys in the stories, and they're
very heroic and they make great things happen too, But
usually it's the girl that gets everybody to work together
to save the day.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Okay, introduce us to there. I'm saying her name right,
Introduce us to there. And she does she what age
is she? When she has to go live in the.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Water, So she's more like late thirteen into fourteen. I
never exactly say her age because I didn't want that
story to appeal to older writed readers.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Okay, that's something.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
Called older middle grade in publishing. They kind of even
know where to put your book in a bookstore.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
So there's middle grade.
Speaker 3 (46:00):
There's chapter books, and then there's young adults. But a
lot of us who write for this thirteen and fourteen
year old age group really feel like there should be
an older middle grade category because someth and eighth graders
want books with heroes and heroines their age, so she
has more of that.
Speaker 4 (46:15):
Age once again.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
She comes from a damaged family. The dad has disappeared,
the mom is pretty distracted because she's a brilliant scientist
and she's very much a part.
Speaker 5 (46:24):
Of this very dangerous secret Neptune project.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
And the brother just ran away or disappeared a couple
of years earlier, and so it's just her and her mom,
and she and her mom don't get along terribly well
and her dolphins and so who the sort of her
best friends and the creature she relies on for her
emotional support are the dolphins. And she's able to do
(46:47):
that in part because she has a very strong telepath,
meaning she can hear thoughts. And guess what it turns
out of the dolphins and telepathic who dow and I
had come up with this because I just got to
think it, Okay, these tysnical in the ocean, how are
they going to be able to communicate with each other
and trans Our vocal cords need oxygen, they need air
passing over them for me to be speaking right now
(47:09):
into my little cell phone air. I couldn't do this underwater,
and so it was like, how are these kids going
to be able to talk in the ocean. So that's
when I decided part of the genetic engineering that was
going to go on with them is it would wake
up our ability to speak mind to mind. Only she's
got it before she ever gets the shot. And then
the dolphins actually in her little pod, the mother a
(47:31):
dolphin can actually understand English. And that is not because
we learned dolphin, It's because she was orphaned as a
calf and raised with strong telepathic humans, and she learned
human speech. And so it's amazing to have one dolphin
who can really understand human beings really well. And by
the end of it you start understanding that a couple
more of them has picked it up from their mom
(47:52):
then with sort of language and animals and animal intelligence.
When I was writing that that, seriously.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
I love your stories. Can you tell us why make
an appearance in the Neptune Challenge? What is happening at
the start of the Neptune Challenge?
Speaker 3 (48:11):
So the whole first book is really the kids getting
used to the ocean and going through this terrible transformation
of you know, turning from a land kid into a
sea kid. And then their journey in the first book
is to get themselves from southern California. They have to
travel all the way up the coast to a colony
that has been created for them around Vancouver, north of
(48:32):
Vancouver in.
Speaker 5 (48:35):
BroadOn Archipelago. You know, the ocean.
Speaker 3 (48:37):
We're not at the top of the food chain when
we're in the sea. So it's a very dangerous trip,
in part because they have to do with sharks and
giant squid and jellyfish. It's also a dangerous trip because
the marine Guard turns out that there's a terrible you know,
the government of California's kind of gone off the rails
and become very a dictatorship essentially, and so the marine
Guard want to catch wants to catch these kids because
(49:00):
plastic pretty handy creatures to have around in terms of
telling if people are telling the truth, and they just
want to control this project.
Speaker 5 (49:07):
They don't like the idea that there's a whole.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
Other civilization that could get started in the sea, so
they're chased by brain guards.
Speaker 5 (49:14):
So anyway, that's kind of the first book.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
Then the second book, we find out that there's a
boy who was traveling with them, and I won't say
his name. Turns out he's kind of a spy for
an evil doctor Frankenstein of the Ocean. So when the
project was founded, they had a whole group of scientists
working on us, and they were trying to create kids
that were as human as possible, with human values and
(49:38):
human not not too far out in terms of whatever
DNA they got spliced into them. But this one scientist
was really looking to make an incredibly strong humanoid that
could survive in the sea, and he was not nearly
as principal about caring whether these kids would be happy
or not. So he goes off and he creates sharp
kids and octopus kids and kids with electric eel powers.
(50:03):
And it was really fun to do this because as
you start reading about all these wonderful creatures in the ocean,
you think, oh, would it be cool to have a
kid who could shock people.
Speaker 4 (50:11):
Excuse me?
Speaker 3 (50:12):
Or a kid with extra arms, And so this is
what this terrible scientist has done. He's created a sort
of a mutant group of kids. They're still human beings right,
and still young teens, but they have all these extra abilities.
And the shark kids in particular are not very happy
because they're very restless. They're always hungry, they always need
(50:33):
to keep moving.
Speaker 5 (50:35):
And his son is.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
Kind of a spy who was in the first In
the first book, and these kids get captured basically by
this evil scientist. So the second book is a lot
about finding out about these other kids that he's created,
some who want to be good human beings and aren't killers,
and then some other kids that are just too much
(50:56):
too much shark in them to become sort of s
and our hero or anti hero boy is really trying
to fight as violent impulses and he's kind of the
dark hero. He's kind of the big crush.
Speaker 4 (51:10):
I still have kids.
Speaker 5 (51:11):
Excuse going to stop for a second.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
Oh oh, go right ahead. And then your books sound
they do sound so interesting. I love your imagination, as
I'm sure your young readers enjoy your imagination and each
of your stories. Even though even part of the series,
they sound like they could be a standalone book as well,
which is which is good. So I also wanted to
(51:34):
ask you what have what have readers of the books
been saying about the stories?
Speaker 4 (51:40):
I just love this. I think I have to go
get a cough drop. Can we stop for a second.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Absolutely, absolutely, you go. We are We have the pleasure
this morning of of interviewing and hearing from author Prolly Hollyoake.
And she she is the author of the Neptune Trilogy,
which is what we're talking about now. Is you the
uh just a outdoors woman. She loves the outdoors and
(52:08):
that you can see that appreciation for the outdoors make
appearances in her in her book series, the Neptune Trilogy,
in the Skywriter series, which we started off discussing and
I encourage you to visit Polly online at p O
l l y h O l y oke dot com. Again,
(52:30):
that's p O l l y h o l y
okae dot com. She got her start. She's writing for kids,
oddly enough, uh, and I just thought of this. She's
writing for readers who that around the age she was
when she and her friend first wrote their first book
Two Days at Eagle Pass Ranch, where she wrote with
(52:51):
her friend in the fifth grade. So now here she
is back writing for uh a similar age group. UH. Today,
So if if, if Polly is back, and we thank
her for being here with us today. If you are back,
could you tell us what readers have been saying about
the books? Okay, so we're gonna wait for for Polly
(53:15):
to join us. Uh. So just one couple of things
he did say. You know, she talked about I love
the characters and that there has to be a good
enough conflict, uh, something that happens with your characters. That
it is not everything's not smooth and easy. You do
(53:35):
need a lot of conflict in the story to maintain
that interest. And you can hear it with key she
who She said, I believe it's dyslexic, and she's very,
very shy, and that's from the sky Writers book series,
and her father lives so far away she she's under
the care of her uncle Dougs, and then he's passing
and her mother has has left. That's that's the Skywriters.
(53:58):
But she grows on to become U Here Wrong and
then you see me, who's another shy kid in the
Neptune the Neptune series.
Speaker 3 (54:06):
And all that, and the conflict in the Neptune project
really is between shy shine Air and then these boys
were used to leading it and sometimes don't want to
listen to her, but eventually realizes that Mayor knows a
lot more about the ocean than the rest of them,
(54:29):
and so they vote and they vote for her to
become the leader, which is a really nice moment. But
there's definitely a lot of conflict between. Yes, you just
have to set up conflict to your characters, and I
think in the Neptune also, these kids are from very
different backgrounds. That also leads to their conflict. Hapening to me,
(54:50):
I just had COVID a week ago, and so oh.
Speaker 2 (54:54):
Bless you, bless you, Oh my god, bless you. No, no, no, no,
don't don't too worry about We are coming down to
like the last four to five minutes in the show,
and I'm not going to be able to get to
all the questions I was going to ask you anyway,
but can you tell us what readers have been saying
about the books?
Speaker 5 (55:12):
So this is just so much fun for me.
Speaker 3 (55:15):
I still and even though The Neptune Project is a
series that's really ten years old at this point, I
get emails all the time from my fans for that series.
I'm just starting to get more emails with guy writers,
but in the Neptune Project, I get emails like I
decided to become a marine biologist because I and I
(55:37):
literally about three months ago, got one from a girl
who loved The Neptune Project. So she came to one
of my writing workshops. She was only nine years old,
and I guess I told her that I thought her
writing sample was remarkable for her age and that she
should consider her suing writing well. She she sent me
(55:58):
a podcast she had made or a blog she had
made from her journalism class. So she kept going with
her writing and she said, you are one of the
reasons I'm becoming a journalist and was like, wow, I
have to admit I don't remember, but I see so
many you know, kids because I go. I get to
go to hundreds of schools. I'm up around on closing
in on five hundred schools now because of my teaching background.
(56:20):
And I just I love I love talking to kids
and saying, you know, think about writing if you're a
daydreaming kind of kid. We will always need people to
write the stories, to write TV, to write the movies.
I also get I just read one on Goodreads last
night from a girl that is twenty two now, and
she was just saying that Neptune Project was the first
(56:41):
big book she ever read.
Speaker 5 (56:43):
In the first book that.
Speaker 4 (56:44):
Made her reading. She had some learning differences.
Speaker 3 (56:47):
And reading was really a chore for her, but the
Neptune Project was just so.
Speaker 5 (56:52):
Exciting that she sat down and she read it, and.
Speaker 3 (56:56):
Then she pestered her dad into helping her buy the
second book. And there's got a third book in the
series that I had to self published when Disney didn't
buy that one, and that one's still so really well.
So they're kids that are still discovering the Nettun series.
It has a little romance in there.
Speaker 5 (57:12):
Which I think is what the thirteen and fourteen year goals.
Speaker 4 (57:14):
Really like about it?
Speaker 3 (57:16):
And then all this near death. You know, they almost
die every other chapter. I purposely do write books that
are very exciting because I'm aware of the fact that
books today have to compete with video games and skateboarding
and all these other things. And so I'm never going
to win the Newberry. But I do write books that
gets kids, that get kids turning pages. And I think
(57:37):
that's so important today because the competition for books is
pretty tough.
Speaker 2 (57:42):
Out there, and I'm going to say you are going
to win a new Berry one day. I don't say that.
We have about a little under three minutes. We two minutes. Now,
can you quickly share three or four steps, or let
me say two or three steps? Then you found to
be effective at getting the word out about your books.
Speaker 3 (58:02):
Well, children's fiction is a little bit different from adult fiction.
In kids fiction, what's terribly important. Our librarians are the
gamekeepers gatekeepers, I'm sorry, are the gamekeepers. And so you
need to reach school librarians. Your publisher will do this
through sending your book out for reviews from places like
School Library Journal and book List, and that's kind of
(58:24):
beyond your reach is the author.
Speaker 5 (58:26):
There's not much you can do about that.
Speaker 3 (58:27):
What you can do is make yourself available to state librarians.
If you make a state list, then a lot of
schools in that state will buy your book. And librarians
are really the ones who tell kids.
Speaker 5 (58:40):
What are cool books and get the wood of mouth going.
Speaker 3 (58:43):
So I think it's very important to be in touch
with your state librarians and try to go to their
state conferences and be available if you are comfortable working
with kids, be available to go on school visits. And
so that's worked really well for me.
Speaker 2 (58:58):
Okay, thank you for sharing. Where can off the shelf
listeners get a copy of your books?
Speaker 3 (59:05):
So they are all available. If you call ahead, every
indie bookstore and Burne the Noble can can get you
these books. If you call ahead, they will probably not
be on the shelf, but you can order them through
your local indie or you can order them through Burns
the Noble. Don't order them through Amazon because Jeff Bezels
(59:26):
has enough money already.
Speaker 2 (59:30):
Okay, so we have Oh what a Delight with a
delight Polly Hollyolk author Polly Holio. She started writing her
first book you guys. She was in Any Ladies when
she was in the fifth grade. She is the author
of the Neptune trilogy and the sky Writers series. Please
visit Polly online at p O L L y h
(59:50):
O L y oke dot com. Thank you so much,
Polly for taking time out of your day to be
here with us and our listeners here on all the
Shelf Books this Saturday morning. And to our listeners, thank you,
thank you, thank you. As I always tell you, you
are just absolutely fabulous. You are amazing, You're awesome, and
(01:00:11):
I encourage you to go out and create a wonderful
day for yourself. Probably I'll shoot you a link to
the show when it finishes streaming. Please set your calendar
Saturday mornings eleven am. You're gonna catch author Shelf Books
to enjoy another fabulous author. Thank you all so very much,
(01:00:33):
Bye for now.
You're listening to the winning literary show Off the Shelf
Books Talk Radio Live with host Denise Journey, author of
the books Long Walk Up, Porsha, Love for Over Me, Spirals,
Love Has Many Faces, and Rosetta's Great Hope. Turn up
your dials and get ready for a blast of feature
author interviews four one one on book festivals, writing conferences,
(00:22):
and so much more. Ready, Let's go, Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Sometimes later becomes never. Do it now. My grandfather told
me that he was in his oh my gosh, he
was in his eighties, and I told him there was
something I wanted to do and I was working on
it as my writing, my novel writing. That's what I
want to do full time, and he's like, do it now.
He said that when you get older, your energy everything
(00:48):
can change, and your mind is still sharp, but maybe
your body's like, well wait a minute. So sometimes later
becomes never for maybe different reasons. Something changes in your
life and you can't see it coming, and it's something
you wanna do, so do it now. And that quote
is anonymous, but I'm sure that many people who have
given people that advice. We are waiting for our guests
(01:12):
to join us this morning. And so I'm gonna kick
it off anyway. One thing I've learned. If you are
one of our loyal listeners, thank you, thank you, thank you.
If it's your first time turning into the show, thank you,
thank you, thank you. But if you've listened to Off
the Shelfs, We've been on for seventeen years. If you've
been listening to Off the Shelfs, you know, I always say,
(01:35):
you gotta be flexible. You gotta know how to pivot,
and no matter what happens, you gotta be ready to
keep it moving forward. Cause things happen in all of
our lives. If you do a TV show, a radio
show like TV, they probably have other stand by guests.
Cause you getting ready to go on the air. What
is somebody who supposed to be there in an accident,
(01:55):
they fell sick, they had an emergency in their family.
That second guests is coming on and the audience never
even knows they want to first on deck. You gotta
always be prepared in life just to keep moving with
a real smooth flow. So I want to ask you,
if I often ask you were coming up on a
(02:17):
holiday season, it is December the seventh, you guys in
less than twenty days for those who celebrate Christmas Quansa.
And I'm trying to remember when Hanaka is. All these
winter holidays we write in it, we're write in it.
(02:37):
There's not like a lot of more time to prepare
for it. So if you're looking for gifts for yourself,
and I think there's no better gifts than a book,
you're looking for a gift for yourself, or you're looking
for a gift for someone else. If you love mystery
and suspense, but not just mystery and suspense, you also
(03:01):
value relationships. There is an an amazing this is a
real love story and these this couple meets in college
in Pennsylvania and they are really supposed to be together,
but one of them grew up he's raised by his
father separate from alcoholism, and it's it impacts Raymond. Raymond
(03:28):
is a track and field We just had the Olympics.
Raymond with a gold medal at the Olympics in middle distance,
no doubt about it. And he's an academ's academic it
very talented, so in both and he gives a full scholarship.
And that's where he meets his soul mate Brenda, and
her background is different from here. She's grown up with
(03:48):
more with some people might call privilege. But she's grown
up in the South, and Raymond grows up in Ohio,
in the in the in the mid in Midwest, and
oh my goodness, they do belong together. But now you
gotta deal with all the baggage that you've from your
childhood programming. But there are these five friends. Women have
four friends. These guys are friends for life, these dudes
(04:11):
or and it's read that I find a story about
like even women or men who are like these tight
type friends. And in there is a murder of mystery
kept in the story. So if you like suspense and
you romance and love and the a a a real
depth to a relationship, I encourage you to get Love
for Over Me. It's an ebook and print and I'm
(04:35):
trying to think if it's in hard back as well.
You can get it any retailer online. You can also
get it offline. You get at the library. If you
don't see it at the store, uh uh, you know,
the the local independent book stores as well where you live.
Just as the store clerk to order a copy for you,
they can get a copy because it's carried by the
(04:55):
largest book distributors. Well and again as love poor ol
for me? Who doesn't want that? Love pull over me?
Don't you want love to pull over you? Love pull
Over Me? By Denise Ternity. And now we're going to
c introduce you to today's special Office shelf guest. And
(05:17):
today's guest is Polly Holly Oak. And if I pronounce
her last name r Uh incorrectly, I hope she corrects me.
She is a former social studies teacher and she has
loved reading books since she was a child. She wrote
her first book Two Days at Eagle Pass Ranch with
her friend when she was in the fifth grade. That's
(05:38):
the same ten when I started writing. In addition to
reading and writing, Polly grew up hiking, skiing, and camping
in the Codlorado Mountains. She also loves scuba diving. She's
a outdoors person, y'all. She loves scuba diving, a water
activity her husband introduced her to. And she's, like I said,
she's a true outdoor enthusiast. She has climed forty eight
(06:00):
of the fifty three fourteen thousand foot beaks and cadd
o'roddal Wow. Polly is also the award winning Neptune trilogy
and the acclaimed Skywriters series Arthur And please check Polly
hollyoakad online and it is Pollyhollyold dot com, p O
L L y h O L y oke dot com,
(06:24):
p O L L y h O l y oke
dot com. We are just so excited and honored to
have Holly with us here on Off the Shelf Books
this morning. Welcome to Off the Shelf, Polly.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
I'm very happy to be.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Here and we're so excited to have you here with
us this morning. I enjoyed, as I do with all
of our guests. I really enjoyed researching and preparing for
your interview today. I learned so much about the authors
when I'm getting ready for the shows. But the first
three questions, the first three questions I'm going to ask you.
I asked every guest just to give our listeners a
(07:05):
little backstory on the office before I start talking about
their stories. So the kick off this morning show, Probaly,
can you tell off the Sholf listeners where you grew
up and what life was like for you growing up?
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Well, I grew up in Colorado, so I am definitely
came by my outdoorsiness spuder naturally and organically, so to speak.
My father was a mountain climber. He was a doctor,
but he was also a mountain climber, and so hiking
was just part of our weekend deals.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
And then my parents.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Very sadly split when I was in seventh grade, and
then you have that typical divorce agreement where the kid
goes back and forth on weekends, and so the every
other weekend I had with my father, we started climbing
mountains and doing camping, and so I saw even more
of the great outdoors and I really enjoyed my dad.
So those are some of my favorite memories. Also, Colorado's
(08:05):
took place with an outdoor lifestyle. I have lived in Texas,
which was very good for my career, and people were
lovely there, but it's much more of an indoor lifestyle,
and I'm very happy I moved back to Colorado three
years ago, so I'm back to skiing and camping and
hiking and doing all those things.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
What city Denver was city in Colorado? Did you say Denver?
When I did? I did?
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Actually, after the parents split, my mother moved to Aspen
before it was a really fancy place, so I remember
Aspen when there were cute little Victorian houses that people
were still fixing up. Unfortunately, Aspen has really become the
billionaires have pushed out the millionaires, and so it's a
it's almost a ghost town now because a lot of
(08:51):
those houses are third.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
Homes or fourth homes for folks.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
It's still a very really beautiful place with a great
ski mountain, but I lived in Steamboat Springs, which is
much more of a real town with real people and
real schools, and I really really love it here.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Can you know what's interesting when you said that about Aspen,
I saw it show I forget what it's It wasn't
about Aspen. It was something that had happened decades ago,
but they were seeing just what you said. It was
a people don't realize it, like people say Austin, Texas.
You go way way way back, these are They said
it was nothing like what it is now, but it was.
(09:29):
It was like a small town. I'm thinking a new
town Pennsylvania. It probably was like that, with these quaint
shops and these towns. And then they said it just
took over. The wealthy just came in and it just
took over this this area there are different parts that
you see that. Harlem is another area. Some people say
it's changing where you see people with money coming in
(09:50):
and it just changes as a dynamic of the area. So, now,
when you were a young girl, what did you dream
of being? Polly? When I grew up, what did you
want to become when you grew up?
Speaker 3 (10:03):
Well, I have always always loved animals. So my great
three when I was a kiddo was I wanted to
be a veterinarian, and that was what I was really
thinking I would be. And then I was fortunate enough
the high school that I went to had a work
program and on Wednesdays we actually went out into the
community and had a chance to experience different jobs.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
And so I might have was in Washington, D C.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Area. So I on junior year, I worked on Capitol
Hill and realized I really wanted nothing to do with politics.
And then either year I got to work and a
vet's office, and I loved being with the animals. But
veterinarians have to spend a lot of their afternoons during surgery,
and a lot of that surgery is making sure that
animals can't make babies, and so there's a lot of
(10:47):
sterilization that goes goes on, and there's a lot of sewing,
and you know, I don't really like sewing that much.
So at the end of my internship that senior year,
I realized that being a vet was not for me.
So I decided to be a teacher and study and
that was a wonderful fit and something that I still
get to do on and off now as an author.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
But I do think it's very useful for young people.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
To figure out what they don't want to do along
with what they do want to do, and that school
is hard enough and so expensive. Now I am so
fortunate that I figured out early on there I really
probably did not want to be a veterinarian.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
You make a great point, and this is where you
have to take advantage of an internship. We spend so
much of our lives at work, and I feel like
I'm thinking back to my grandparents and my parents. Back then,
my parents, a woman really rarely worked outside the home.
But I think back to those times and I remember
(11:47):
my elders telling me, do something you love, because you're
going to spend so much time at work. And I
tell you, that was before the internet, and when they
worked we spent even more time at work. It's this
constant connections you could have from your cell phone to
your laptop. You can be attached to work almost twenty
(12:08):
four to haven. Now, where before you went in the
office and when you came home you were home. It
was pretty much it. It's really case. So it is
even more important to find out what you like and
don't like. You said you love the animals, and then
you go in and you learn about whats veterinarians really
do and you're like, no, that's not for me. And
(12:29):
I've had other people say the same thing. That is
so so so important. Who or what experience inspired your
love for not just reading but writing books.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
I think that it probably started with a grandmother I
had who used to come see us again growing up
in Colorado, so she would come from Nebraska. And I
was almost the youngest of all the cousins, so I
was the youngest grandchild, and so she's gotten quite frail
by the time I came along, but she still was
just such a fun, pepy lady. And she would sit
(13:05):
on the couch because she, you know, had off the
softer process. My dad hugged her at the airport and
broke two of her ribs once, so she couldn't move
around a whole lot. But she loved to read, and
so she would read great, big, thick books to me.
I read that she read The Jungle Book to me.
She read Black Beauty to me, and looking back, those
are those are really big books. And then you know,
(13:26):
I would act out all the parts.
Speaker 4 (13:28):
Running her out on the floor, but.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
I just couldn't wait for her to finish a meal
and put on her reading glasses, and then she would
transport me into this other world. And I think she
must have been very good at reading, too, because those
stories are still so real and edited to me, they're
not particularly easy reads.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
So that was part of it.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
And then writing. I had this wonderful experience with my
best friend Laurie, who was actually still one of my
best friends.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
And she had her family had a ranch near Kremlin, Colorado,
And the.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
First time we went to this ranch for us sleepover,
I was in fifth grade and it was all cold
and snowy at the ranch. It was actually in January,
and it was just this magical experience they led us her.
The parents said go play in the hay barn. So
there was this hay barn where there were stacks of
hay bills with little trails between them and ladders and
trap doors. We thought it was there to play hide
(14:20):
and go seek. I think it was probably there to
store hey, but that was wonderful. They let us ride snowmobiles,
and again marn Fith grades were about ten eleven years old.
Snowmobiles are fast and they're powerful, and we kept getting
them stocks but it was still very fun.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
And then another thing they us do was.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
Right the horses bare back in the snow.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
That's kind of fun because if you pull off the horse,
you land in a snow.
Speaker 5 (14:41):
Drift and it doesn't hurt.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
The one thing they said to be careful about were
the breeding bowls.
Speaker 5 (14:46):
Those are the big male dad cows.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
They had them in special pens and they can be
kind of grumpy.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
We snuck up to the hay up to those corrals
a couple.
Speaker 5 (14:55):
Of times and waved at them and tried to get
us to charge.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Us, which they never did, but we thought was really so.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
It was really cool and really dangerous.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
So we got to school.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Our little private school in Denver had study hall in
the middle of the day, and that is waste that
is a total waste for fifth and sixth graders. Nobody
I know what that age really gets the homework done.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
But for two weeks, I think.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
We used study hall pretty well, he said, Lory, but
trying to book about your ranch because it had just
been such an incredible.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
Experience for me, and so we wrote. We sat down
him every day.
Speaker 5 (15:24):
At study hall.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
We wrote another three or four pages.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
We wrote until we got to about fifty.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Seven pages, all handwritten, and so we took a lot
of our adventures and we turned it into a story
about two girls out smarting bad guys who'd come to
the family ranch.
Speaker 5 (15:39):
To steal the prize quarter horses.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
And the funny thing is, again all the stuff we've
done on our weekend showed up. So one of the
bad guys in the story, one of the bad guys,
they got him on the back of a snowmobile out
in the hayfields. We handed over an irrigation ditch, so
he fell off the back.
Speaker 5 (15:52):
And got a concussion.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
And another bad guy they kind of lost them in
the hay barn where the girls knew all the ladders
and the secret exits, and they locked him in there,
and the very nasty bad guy. The leader they tempted
him is they loaded him into the bullpen and got
him trampled by the breeding bulls.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
So what we really did.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Was write Home Alone, because that's really a story of
a little boy, you know, beating up on the burglars
and beating the burglars.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
We wrote Home Alone Goes to the Ranch, and we
had so much fun we couldn't wait to get to
study Hall.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
And that's when I realized that when you write stories,
if you have a visitive imagination, as I seem to
and as I think a lot of writers do and
a lot of kids do, it's like you get to
live the adventures yourself. And so now I've figured out
a way to turn my daydreaming into a job that
to get paid for.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
So that's that's.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Really wonderful for me.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Yes, have you ever thought about revisiting this story two
days at Eagle Pass Ranch? And actually, whether you do
it solo, get your friends permission to incorporate her part
of the story and do it write it as a
solo author, or revisit it with your friend. Have you
ever thought about revisiting it as an adult now and
(17:05):
publishing it? Maybe you publish it for middle schoolers. As
the idea ever come to you, I think.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
It really it's on my list. There are just so
many books that are kind of knocking on the door,
but I think that's the second to next book that
I might try to write, because every time, you know,
I start to explain it, I use this story when
I go to schools. One of the great joys in
my life is again I was a teacher, and now
I get to go back into schools for a day.
And I think it's just this kind of God given
(17:33):
opportunity to share my message. And my message is really,
kids need to read, they need to write, They need
to unplug from their gadgets, to leave time to daydream
whether they want to be a scientist or a mathematician
or a writer. We need more creative time. And I'm
afraid all the cell phones and the iPads.
Speaker 5 (17:50):
Are stealing that from kids.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
But another part of my author assembly is I do
talk about writing this story with my best friend, and
it's just wonderful see kids light up, and I hear
from teachers from months after I visit a school that
they've got all these kids that are trying to write stories,
to write and that's just the most wonderful thing that
I get to do that. You know, I'm at a
(18:11):
stage in my life where it's like, how can I
give back? And it makes me so sad that the
kids are, you know, so dialed into their into their games,
and into their iPads and into their TV. I have
a friend who keeps arguing that video gaming actually can
be creative, and I understand that there are some games
where you get to kind of invent your adventures. Certainly
D and D Dungeons and Dragons can be quite creative.
(18:34):
I think some of those kids who write their own
fantasy stories based on the D and D worlds that
they build. But a lot of this stuff is not
so creative, and I think it's very distracting from what
you and I probably did when we were younger. If
you had spare time, you sat there and you've made
up adventures in your head. And usually I or I
took a book that I loved, and then I imagine
myself into the story, and somehow I usually ended up
(18:56):
being the hero and the star.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Oh yes, you know, y. Even with artificial intelligence, there's
a lot of good. It can reduce errors, particularly for
things at the at the been the more ma uh
manufacturing corporate environments. But it's it's a a are people
going to continue to really use their brains as much? Uh?
(19:21):
There will always be inventors, there will always be scientists,
There'll always be people who'll be researchers and be curious
and creative. But will that expand across the masses? And
if it doesn't, what will we see in another fifty
seventy years? It be? It will be interesting. And I
do encourage you know, exploring and be in creativity. It's
(19:42):
a great way to express what's going on inside that
you do. So now we're gonna start getting to these books.
What drew you to horses? Was it the time at
the ranch, PA, but particularly the pegasus. When I think
about the pegasus myth, would you two horses? So I
(20:04):
relate the myth?
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Yes, Okay, so we've established I definitely was an outdoorsy
and a horsey kind of kid.
Speaker 5 (20:12):
I think that there's just a special relationship between girls
and horses, you know, with perspective, I see, I was
so privileged.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
To be able to have that, But I think that
there are a lot of kids from world backgrounds that
get to have you know, through four age programs and
so forth, that get to have very strong relationships with animals.
I think that friendship between kids and animals, that's a whole,
really important theme in a lot of kids books. I
think kids need that feeling that there's something, there's a
(20:40):
creature or a person who loves them, understands them, and
accepts them unconditionally.
Speaker 5 (20:46):
So we're always going to have horse and dog books.
That's part of it.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
But what you're really asking is.
Speaker 5 (20:51):
About the Pegasus myth.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
So when I was a little kid, I had my
parents gave me this beautiful, beautiful version of the Pegasus
myth with these more for watercolor illustrations, and I read
and re read that picture book a bazillion times, as
actually retold by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who actually told the myth,
and it was it was just this beautiful book. But
(21:13):
I kept thinking how lovely it would be to have
a flying horse, and I think I probably daydreamed flying
around on.
Speaker 5 (21:18):
A flying horse.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
So during COVID, I needed to come up with another
story idea. It had a pretty successful series with Disney
about genetically engineered kids who have to go live in
the ocean because climate change is out of control. That
was very science y and very science fiction orator that
series was called the first book was called The Neptune Project.
Speaker 5 (21:37):
Was actually quite successful.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
In terms of getting on state lists and being well received.
So I needed to come up with something else, and
I knew that I also really loved fantasy. And for
your listeners who are writers, I think it's terribly important
to write the kind of book you want to read
when you were a kid you wanted to read, or
that you still like to read. You can't go chase
(22:00):
a market trend and write something in the genena that
you don't enjoy, because it's not going to be authentic
and organic and it's not going to work. So I
love fantasy novels. I'd really wanted to try my hand
at one. And I also used to teach Colorado history,
and so in that I became very aware of something
called a pony Express, which is very sad to me
when I tell kids about this, how many kids have
(22:21):
not heard about the American pony Express.
Speaker 5 (22:23):
But of course we had this.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
Time period when around eighteen sixty we didn't have a
train across the Noble country, and we didn't have a
telegraph yet, and so it took three months to get
the mail from Washington, d C. To San Francisco because
the ships had to go all the way around South
America and we didn't have a Panama Canal yet. So
these businesses businessmen decided to hire a bunch of young
(22:45):
writers to ride day and night eighty miles shifts on
four different courses, each handing off the mail like a
relay baton. And they thought, maybe they get to cut
down the time to get letters to San Francisco, and
indeed they did. They did do it in about eleven
days from Missouri from Saint Louis to San Francisco, which
(23:06):
is kind of amazing, and itways, it's just this very
colorful little period in and we lasted eighteen months, and
then they strung the telegraph lines across and then the
Pony Express became redundant. And so I said, always been
interested in that. And I love the Pegasus myth which
Pegasus and Blerophon fight this terrible three headed monster called
a chimera. And somehow I think sometimes creative ideas when
(23:27):
you mash two totally different ideas together. So I thought, oh,
what about a pony Express.
Speaker 5 (23:32):
With flying horses.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
What if you had young riders delivering the mail across
the vast empires so big they have to use flying
horses that fly really fast. And so that was kind
of the original premise of the story. Is two totally
different things, the record Pony Express and the vegasust. Myth
put them together and that's what I came up with
sky Riders, which is a story of brave young couriers
on a flying horses delivering the mail. And my heroin Ki,
(23:56):
loves her jobs, she loves her sky steep, she loves
her Uncle Dougs, even though he's always pestering her to
practice sky fighting. Well, everybody knows that's a waste of
time because the chimera, which is the creature you would
fight in skyfighting, that once ravaged their world are long gone. Well,
in the course of the story we discover that Kimera
are not long gone. Uncle Dougs is terribly hurt fighting
(24:17):
the first wave of chimeras they attack Pricault, and he
makes Kai promise, with what we think might be as
dying breath, that she will take his manual on ancient
sky fighting tactics to the Capitol and convince people there
to read this manual before it's too late, because in
the hundreds of years since there have been chimera problems
and call people have forgotten how to.
Speaker 5 (24:39):
Fight these monsters.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
And that's a pretty tall order for a shy girl
with dyslexia from the borders of the empire and the
fringes of it of the Empire. So that's kind of
a quest. In the first book, it was just a
ton of thing to write, you know, shy girl making
a difference, being brave and aerial battles was just a
great book to write.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Oh my goodness, I was getting ready to ask you
to give us the synopsis of Skyriders and thank you,
thank you for introducing us to the story. Can you
tell us a little bit more about Keissandra? You call
her key? Oh, you say she's shy, but what more
you mentioned her uncle? What are her parents, her if
(25:20):
she had any siblings, good friends? And exactly what are
her superpowers? Not a horse flies? So I'm now interested
in are these regular humans with these animals with superpowers?
So give us a little bit more about her personality,
her family backgrounds, and just what are her superpowers?
Speaker 5 (25:41):
Okay, so I did see that she really had a
lot of superpowers.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
I suppose the one thing that makes her different from
other young writers or young sky fighters and skyriders. She
discovers that she can link and speak to all the
sky steats, any sky steaeds that she touches.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
And by the way, I call the pegason, so the
when good horses or called sky.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Steps in my story, she's very shy and doesn't trust easily,
and that's kind of a sad thing that it came
out of the fact that she had to board during
the weeks the weekdays at the school in the village
because her her dad had an orchard out in the
foothills so long a distance she couldn't go back and
(26:22):
forth every day to go to school, so she had
to stay in town, and the kids.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
In town were really mean to her because you don't.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Often see because she has dyslexia, you don't often see
that in fantasy novels. I think the big series that
does it well is of course with Percy Jackson books,
and that are Perscy Jackson actually is very has definitely
has dyslexia, but otherwise you don't usually see those kind
of learning differences. And my daughter had dysgrapha when she
(26:50):
was younger, and it really made school hard for her.
So I think fantasy can be can take some of
these realistic, everyday problems and let kids sort of see
them being used or dealt.
Speaker 5 (27:02):
With in a fantasy world.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
And I really wanted to do that and try and
do that well. So Kai doesn't trust well because she
was teased at school because reading was so hard for her.
She doesn't have a lot of friends. She really really.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
Loves her sky steeds. And I guess the magical power
or the thing that's special is in this world.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
If a sky steed accepts you as you're as their writer,
then you can communicate with your sky steed telepathically. That
would be the scientific term in a magic word. A
lot of times it's mind speech. They can just understand
each other. So usually one writer can understand just their
sky steeds. So the one thing that is very unusual
(27:41):
about Kai, when she goes to the Capitol and she
starts working with other sky Steeds, she starts to realize
that she can understand every sky Steed that she touches,
and that becomes more and more important as the story
goes on, because by the end we're in this terrible
battle between the sky Steeds and the writers and the camera.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
The ways of.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
Camera that are coming in and the fact that she
can communicate with all these sky steage really helps. She's
kind of the communications center and she ties everybody together
and makes it much more.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Oh my gosh, you took like the little kind of
outcast girl and now she's like the hero hero. She's
the one that the town needs to lean on, the
hated tie and almost narrob meat. What's their relationship like?
Speaker 3 (28:30):
So I think I love these questions. You did a
good job on your homework.
Speaker 4 (28:35):
Here they met.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
She really wanted a sky steam. So in this world,
the rich folks have been breathing over the years, they've
made the horses bigger and bigger, so they're almost like
chargers that would carry armored knights, and those big domesticated
sky Steas are very valuable and they fight with their
noble riders on.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
Them in tournaments.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Well, as the horses get bigger the skysty get bigger,
they actually get less agile in the air, and that
becomes a real problem with that Timilar return. Whereas Kai
because she doesn't have any money, but she desperately wants
a sky steed when she was only eleven years old.
She goes up into the mountains and she tries to
find a wild sky steed. The wild sky steeds are
(29:18):
based on our present day mustangs, and their mustangs tend
to be a little bit smaller than domesticated horses because
they don't have as much food out on the range.
So as a species, the mustangs are a little bit
usually smaller than our mainstream horses or domesticated horses. So
she spends a whole summer camping up on the mountains
and get trying to get close to wild skysteats, and
(29:40):
finally Nia sees her and he's very curious about her.
And you find out more in the second.
Speaker 5 (29:45):
Book, by the way, which is called The Sky Kingman
is Out.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
Now you find out more about these wild sky steeds
and you find out more about his story. But in
terms of his personality, I really had fun making a
lot of these sky steeds that are partnered with skyriders,
different from their studies, from their howls, from their writer.
And so Naurah is incredibly outgoing. He's comfortable where he goes.
(30:08):
He loves talking to the big domesticated sky steeds. He
loves meeting new sky steeds and new people, and that's
sort of the opposite of Kai.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
And so.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
At the beginning of the book, you hear him saying,
you know, she's you need a bigger herd of your own.
I wish you'd build a herd of your own, because
horses are very herd animals, and they're very comfortable in
the group. They're very lonely. If you just have one horse,
you should feel sorry anytime you see one horse to
beget a feel because that's not a horse.
Speaker 5 (30:34):
In its natural environment.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
They really love to be around other and so that's
I had a lot of fun with sort of the opposites.
And you know that he's always trying to get her
to be more outgoing, and I think that's important anytime
somebody is writing a story, you need to think about
what your character wants and what your character needs. And
what she thinks she wants is just to become promoted.
(30:56):
She wants to make more money as a skyrider. She
wants to be a sky courier, she wants to be
a senior sky scorier, and that's what she thinks would
make her happy. But the underlying context is that she
would definitely be happier and more content if she had
more friends. Ay, interesting, and that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
I love how yes, Oh my god, Now did Uncle
Doug's did he raise Kai? I know he's passing away
and he'd make her make this promise, but did he
raise her? Not? How did? How did he support her?
In the story Skyriders?
Speaker 3 (31:31):
So at the at the beginning, he actually doesn't have
a huge role in the story. He's just there at
the beginning. And so what you find out is that
her her dad died two years earlier from a fever,
and he really raised Kai. Turns out thats a mom
did not like this hard scrabble life in the foothills
(31:52):
in an orchard, and so she actually leaves Kai when
Kay is, you know, young enough to remember her and
be hurt broken when her mother just writes off with
a peddler, the mom just and so now you'll find
in kids books a lot of times there's a tough background,
even going back into fairy tales. If there's a happy
mom and a dad and if everybody is getting along beautifully,
(32:15):
there's not nearly as much scope for a story. So
it's a very sad thing. But I often tell kids
when I'm tell you know, I help them coach them
to write stories. You probably have to be really mean
to your character if you're going to be an author,
because if you're not mean, there's not any story so
far that's true.
Speaker 5 (32:33):
So Uncle Beso, you look at all the Disney things,
you know, there's always a dead parent.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
It's a Disney story or the or the parent's gonna die.
Speaker 4 (32:40):
Because again, that's one of the most terrifying things for.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
A kid is is to lose a parent. So anyway, yes,
so she is almost taking care of uncle Doug's as
much as he's taking care of her. At the start
of this book, she has got a load, you know,
she's taking care of an orchard, she's taking care of
her uncle. She's got a lot on her plate. A
very capable young person.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Now, would you please give us an overview of the
sky King.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Well, so part of Kai. It turns out that Kai
discovers that she is the Nexsara, she is the Connector,
and this is the sort of a legendary job and
everybody'd sort of forgotten about it because again, the last
big battle of the Chimera happened three hundred years earlier,
so people forgot there was such a thing as a nisara.
But when the camera come again, part of the magic
(33:30):
that links sky Steeds and humans, that magic was forged
three hundred years earlier, so the sky seats would help
humans fight back the camera that we're going to just
destroy this whole continent and take all the most of
the life form, the larger life forms off of it.
So this is a very important alliance that.
Speaker 4 (33:50):
Was forged, but it has changed over time and people.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Human beings have almost made the sky steeds almost into
their caves or they're certainly not their equals anymore. And
originally the alliance between the when the sky seeds agree
to join the human beings and bind with them, it
was supposed to be an equal partnership. So by the
second book, Kay is starting to realize that that sky
(34:15):
seeds are not treated fairly anymore. They are owned by
human beings. That was never the plan, No, and in
the second book she goes a lot of sky Stets
and writers get killed at the end of the first
book in a terrible battle. They need the Empire needs
more sky steeds, and so her job becomes to go
to the wild sky steed herds and the head of
(34:35):
all of them, which is the sky King, and try
and convince him to let more of the wild smaller
sky seats bind with young writers so they have a
chance of fighting the Chimera when they come again. And
that sky King himself is very bitter about how the
relationship between humans and sky skieds is gone astray, and
(34:56):
he does not want to for the first of most
of the book, he does not want to that his
wild wild herds fight with humans against the Chimera because
the relationship has deteriorated. So she becomes really an advocate
for the sky steeds, and by the end, I don't
want to give too much away, but by the end
she has found the original meeting place where sky steeds
(35:18):
met as equals with human beings, and she makes sure
that they get some more of their rights back.
Speaker 5 (35:24):
Another thing about dealing with grief.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
It sounds like a funny thing in a fantasy novel,
but I do think that fantasy, when it's done well,
kind of dress just as many problems as contemporary fiction
for kids. And so one of the things that's always bothered
me about old fantasy novels like the Lion, the wooch,
and the wardrobe. These kids go off and fight these
terrible battles and there's no.
Speaker 5 (35:44):
Cost, there's no trauma.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
I have two daughters that are there a social workers,
so I hear a lot about trauma and how it
impacts people. I wanted to make sure in the second
book that Kai has got some weight on her from
the losses in the first book, and this King helps
her learn to face that grief and to share that grief.
Speaker 4 (36:04):
Because she's spoke into the loner, you know.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
She thinks it's a weakness to show her grief, and
the sky King shows her that she needs to be
with other people, with her herd and share her grief.
So that was a lot of fun. I sometimes I
just say that the Sky King is like the origin
story of the sky Steech. You find out a lot
about the wild herds and a lot about sort of
the origin of this beautiful relationship between human beings and
(36:29):
sky streets.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Okay, now the tamera you've got, I'm saying it right.
As you've mentioned these monsters, can you describe what they
look like and what are their powers? They sound like
they're like real formidable foes. Are they huge, like fifty
feet cold? They look like dragons? What are they like
(36:53):
and what are their powers?
Speaker 3 (36:56):
I'm so the original kimera that Billerrathon fought in the
Greek myth. So, going back to the Greek myth, Blerethon
was a Greek hero who wanted to make a name
and a reputation the way you did that ancient Greece
if you went and found yourself a terrible monster to kill.
And so when Bleophon was looking to make a rep
for himself, the monster of the day was something called
(37:16):
a chimera, and it was laying waste to Lycia. And
that chimera had three heads, the head of a serpent,
the head of a goat, and the head of a lion,
and it was about the sides of dragon. It had
leathery wings so it could fly, and that chimera could
breathe fire. I've always had sort of an issue with
how woods, something that has feathers and wings cite something
(37:38):
that breathes fire the wind. I think the thing that
brings fire, the monster with the fire, is going to win.
And so when I went to the plot the Skywriter series,
I decided that my chimera would have three heads, the
head of a goat called a blood goat in my book,
and a sand dragon. These are all deget creatures, and
a lion, but they would not rereads fire, so I
(38:01):
didn't want them to. My skywriters have to say a
spell or something it would save them.
Speaker 5 (38:05):
From the fire.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
But I did make the serpent had incredibly poisonous, and
part of that was I was bitten by a rattlesnake
when I about fifteen years ago, when I was hiking
in the Utah Desert, so I know what it feels
like to have a very strong neurotoxin in your body.
Writers are always taking their adventures and then putting them
into their books in one form or another. So this
terrible chimera that I've created doesn't breathe fire, but it
(38:28):
is incredibly fast, and it's always hungry. It was created
to always be hungry, so it's always trying to kill
things and always trying to eat things. And then again,
this one head is very poisonous. The size wise, it's twice,
if not three times the size of.
Speaker 5 (38:45):
The largest sky states.
Speaker 3 (38:47):
So they're big, but I didn't want them to be
too huge. They just there fast, and I wanted to
make it possible for two or three sky states to
take one down one camera. But it's like the book
one camera. So the sink there is a chimera and
then a peor olds chmeira. I get tripped up and
everybody else gets tripped up doing that, right, And so
they have these battles. As the books proceed, we find
(39:10):
out that the evil mage that is making the chimera
has made a couple of them that are really big,
and that those are harder to fight. But your garden
variety Hymier in this story is twice the size of
the sky steed, with three heads and very hard to kill.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Wow, it sounds like it. Oh my gosh, can you
before we start talking about the Nettube project, what time period?
This is fantasy? But if in the in a person's
mind it looks at, you know, today's time to what
what time period I'm fall in advance? Is the story
set in compared to the day's time.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
So the way to kind of tell that a lot
of times it's just a look at the technology. So
we would call this more of a medieval fantasy. There's
not power yet, there's not gunpowder, okay, so it would
be it's definitely not Earth. It's just another reality. But
it's in a pretty low tech world and so horses
(40:13):
flying horses, but yeah, not no electricity yet, no no
steam power, so a pretty basic technology in this in.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
This world, I was thinking in my mind, total opposite.
I'm going way far in the future. So I'm going
to ask you that what age, what age group are
the books written for?
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Okay, so this series is definitely a fantasy series for
ages eight.
Speaker 4 (40:41):
To twelve is what the publisher says. But I am finding.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
That even Junior high, which goes up into seventh and
eighth grade, which would be more like eight to fourteen,
I have some thirteen and fourteen year olds that seem
to be really liking it. And I think it's because
there's so much action and excitement, and you know, she's
an older for this type of book. She's thirteen, so
that's an older protected kids like to read about kids.
Speaker 5 (41:06):
That are older than themselves.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
They really don't like reading about kids that are younger
than themselves, and so that's why, you know, there's been
thirteen and fourteen year olds that are actually enjoying the series.
But I would say it's definitely a little bit younger
in its field than my Nepkin books.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Okay, now can you please give us a brief synopsis
of the Neptune Project.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
So that was a wild book to write. I'm actually
a social studies teacher. I don't have a strong science background.
But then I dreamed up this idea of genetically engineered
kids who have to go live in the ocean because
climate change is out of control. And this book is
definitely set two hundred and fifty years in our future
what I was trying to do, and this is written,
(41:49):
you know, fifteen years ago, so it's an older series.
I really always cared about climate change. I had a
science teacher in sixth grade who was marrying my sure
where are the fact that climate was changing? And very
much an environmentalist and that really stucked. And so I
just kept reading all this stuff about how the planet.
Speaker 5 (42:07):
Was heating up and what a big problem this would be.
Speaker 3 (42:09):
So I thought, I really want to put this into
a book so kids can picture how different the world
may be if we don't get off of falseful fuels
and start making some better choices.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
So Neptin came out.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
As I'm concerned about climate change and genetic engineering. I
don't think a lot of people realize the degree to
which we have started mixing human DNA with animal DNA. Right,
And here's the weird connection. In science. If you put
human and animal DNA together, it's called a chimera because
a camera is three different creatures stuffed into the same
(42:42):
body in the myth.
Speaker 4 (42:44):
And so when you're mixing animals and humans, and the reason.
Speaker 5 (42:46):
We would do this, the good reason.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
Is something like pigs. We're trying to get organs that
we could put into human beings and have our bodies
not reject them. So if you can make grow a
pig kidney or a pig heart that has some human
DNA in it, it's left out to be rejected by
our bodies.
Speaker 5 (43:05):
So that's the good use for this.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
But the idea of putting animal and human DNA together
is really pretty shocking and scary in some ways. So
I wanted to talk about that a little bit. And
then also I just really need to make money. And
I've always been fascinated by the oceans because I live
I grew up in Colorado. We don't have a lot
of oceans in the middle part of the country. So
all those they came together in the Neptune project, and
(43:28):
the basic idea is the heroin. These kids don't know
they're part of the secret Neptune Project. Genetic engineering has
become totally illegal in this future, and so when the
scientists realize the land is getting so hot and so dangerous,
they decide maybe are species' only chance is if some
of us go into the ocean. So they actually change
(43:50):
their own kids before they're ever born, and that has
to happen that way if you want the traits to
be heritable, meaning if you want them to be another
generation of Neptin kids and make Neptune babies, you have
to change them. So this happens before they were.
Speaker 5 (44:03):
Born, and it's part of their structure, their DNA structure.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
So the kids have this modification when they turn twelve
or thirteen, they start as land kids.
Speaker 4 (44:11):
They think they're land kids.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
They get a shot when they turn thirteen or fourteen
and they're old enough to survive in the sea, and
then they have to go into the ocean coming back
because their lungs have been changed. So it's a pretty
shocking transformation for these kids, especially the ones that have
no idea that it's going to happen. To them. Imagine
if somebody said to you tomorrow, you've got to go
live in the san and you're not coming back. So
(44:33):
that leads to some good conflict between the kids and
their parents, certainly between my heroin They're and her mother
when she finds out that she's sort of been a
science experiment, bred by her mother to do this, but
her mother really loves her and so anyway, so the
kid goes into the sea, and she's another very shy,
quiet kind of a character, not really comfortable with the
kids in town. And I like to show shy kids
(44:57):
coming to the fore and becoming leaders. I also seem
to like to choose girls as my.
Speaker 5 (45:02):
Heroines and show them leading by consensus.
Speaker 4 (45:05):
The girl girl powers well.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
The girls who listen to other people, and usually the
boys in my story sort of don't listen very well,
but the girls listen to the other people in their group.
Speaker 5 (45:16):
There are always lots of boys in my stories.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
It makes me sad when they just put a girl
on the cover because the boys don't buy the book.
They are very strong boys in the stories, and they're
very heroic and they make great things happen too, But
usually it's the girl that gets everybody to work together
to save the day.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Okay, introduce us to there. I'm saying her name right,
Introduce us to there. And she does she what age
is she? When she has to go live in the.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Water, So she's more like late thirteen into fourteen. I
never exactly say her age because I didn't want that
story to appeal to older writed readers.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Okay, that's something.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
Called older middle grade in publishing. They kind of even
know where to put your book in a bookstore.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
So there's middle grade.
Speaker 3 (46:00):
There's chapter books, and then there's young adults. But a
lot of us who write for this thirteen and fourteen
year old age group really feel like there should be
an older middle grade category because someth and eighth graders
want books with heroes and heroines their age, so she
has more of that.
Speaker 4 (46:15):
Age once again.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
She comes from a damaged family. The dad has disappeared,
the mom is pretty distracted because she's a brilliant scientist
and she's very much a part.
Speaker 5 (46:24):
Of this very dangerous secret Neptune project.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
And the brother just ran away or disappeared a couple
of years earlier, and so it's just her and her mom,
and she and her mom don't get along terribly well
and her dolphins and so who the sort of her
best friends and the creature she relies on for her
emotional support are the dolphins. And she's able to do
(46:47):
that in part because she has a very strong telepath,
meaning she can hear thoughts. And guess what it turns
out of the dolphins and telepathic who dow and I
had come up with this because I just got to
think it, Okay, these tysnical in the ocean, how are
they going to be able to communicate with each other
and trans Our vocal cords need oxygen, they need air
passing over them for me to be speaking right now
(47:09):
into my little cell phone air. I couldn't do this underwater,
and so it was like, how are these kids going
to be able to talk in the ocean. So that's
when I decided part of the genetic engineering that was
going to go on with them is it would wake
up our ability to speak mind to mind. Only she's
got it before she ever gets the shot. And then
the dolphins actually in her little pod, the mother a
(47:31):
dolphin can actually understand English. And that is not because
we learned dolphin, It's because she was orphaned as a
calf and raised with strong telepathic humans, and she learned
human speech. And so it's amazing to have one dolphin
who can really understand human beings really well. And by
the end of it you start understanding that a couple
more of them has picked it up from their mom
(47:52):
then with sort of language and animals and animal intelligence.
When I was writing that that, seriously.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
I love your stories. Can you tell us why make
an appearance in the Neptune Challenge? What is happening at
the start of the Neptune Challenge?
Speaker 3 (48:11):
So the whole first book is really the kids getting
used to the ocean and going through this terrible transformation
of you know, turning from a land kid into a
sea kid. And then their journey in the first book
is to get themselves from southern California. They have to
travel all the way up the coast to a colony
that has been created for them around Vancouver, north of
(48:32):
Vancouver in.
Speaker 5 (48:35):
BroadOn Archipelago. You know, the ocean.
Speaker 3 (48:37):
We're not at the top of the food chain when
we're in the sea. So it's a very dangerous trip,
in part because they have to do with sharks and
giant squid and jellyfish. It's also a dangerous trip because
the marine Guard turns out that there's a terrible you know,
the government of California's kind of gone off the rails
and become very a dictatorship essentially, and so the marine
Guard want to catch wants to catch these kids because
(49:00):
plastic pretty handy creatures to have around in terms of
telling if people are telling the truth, and they just
want to control this project.
Speaker 5 (49:07):
They don't like the idea that there's a whole.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
Other civilization that could get started in the sea, so
they're chased by brain guards.
Speaker 5 (49:14):
So anyway, that's kind of the first book.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
Then the second book, we find out that there's a
boy who was traveling with them, and I won't say
his name. Turns out he's kind of a spy for
an evil doctor Frankenstein of the Ocean. So when the
project was founded, they had a whole group of scientists
working on us, and they were trying to create kids
that were as human as possible, with human values and
(49:38):
human not not too far out in terms of whatever
DNA they got spliced into them. But this one scientist
was really looking to make an incredibly strong humanoid that
could survive in the sea, and he was not nearly
as principal about caring whether these kids would be happy
or not. So he goes off and he creates sharp
kids and octopus kids and kids with electric eel powers.
(50:03):
And it was really fun to do this because as
you start reading about all these wonderful creatures in the ocean,
you think, oh, would it be cool to have a
kid who could shock people.
Speaker 4 (50:11):
Excuse me?
Speaker 3 (50:12):
Or a kid with extra arms, And so this is
what this terrible scientist has done. He's created a sort
of a mutant group of kids. They're still human beings right,
and still young teens, but they have all these extra abilities.
And the shark kids in particular are not very happy
because they're very restless. They're always hungry, they always need
(50:33):
to keep moving.
Speaker 5 (50:35):
And his son is.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
Kind of a spy who was in the first In
the first book, and these kids get captured basically by
this evil scientist. So the second book is a lot
about finding out about these other kids that he's created,
some who want to be good human beings and aren't killers,
and then some other kids that are just too much
(50:56):
too much shark in them to become sort of s
and our hero or anti hero boy is really trying
to fight as violent impulses and he's kind of the
dark hero. He's kind of the big crush.
Speaker 4 (51:10):
I still have kids.
Speaker 5 (51:11):
Excuse going to stop for a second.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
Oh oh, go right ahead. And then your books sound
they do sound so interesting. I love your imagination, as
I'm sure your young readers enjoy your imagination and each
of your stories. Even though even part of the series,
they sound like they could be a standalone book as well,
which is which is good. So I also wanted to
(51:34):
ask you what have what have readers of the books
been saying about the stories?
Speaker 4 (51:40):
I just love this. I think I have to go
get a cough drop. Can we stop for a second.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Absolutely, absolutely, you go. We are We have the pleasure
this morning of of interviewing and hearing from author Prolly Hollyoake.
And she she is the author of the Neptune Trilogy,
which is what we're talking about now. Is you the
uh just a outdoors woman. She loves the outdoors and
(52:08):
that you can see that appreciation for the outdoors make
appearances in her in her book series, the Neptune Trilogy,
in the Skywriter series, which we started off discussing and
I encourage you to visit Polly online at p O
l l y h O l y oke dot com. Again,
(52:30):
that's p O l l y h o l y
okae dot com. She got her start. She's writing for kids,
oddly enough, uh, and I just thought of this. She's
writing for readers who that around the age she was
when she and her friend first wrote their first book
Two Days at Eagle Pass Ranch, where she wrote with
(52:51):
her friend in the fifth grade. So now here she
is back writing for uh a similar age group. UH. Today,
So if if, if Polly is back, and we thank
her for being here with us today. If you are back,
could you tell us what readers have been saying about
the books? Okay, so we're gonna wait for for Polly
(53:15):
to join us. Uh. So just one couple of things
he did say. You know, she talked about I love
the characters and that there has to be a good
enough conflict, uh, something that happens with your characters. That
it is not everything's not smooth and easy. You do
(53:35):
need a lot of conflict in the story to maintain
that interest. And you can hear it with key she
who She said, I believe it's dyslexic, and she's very,
very shy, and that's from the sky Writers book series,
and her father lives so far away she she's under
the care of her uncle Dougs, and then he's passing
and her mother has has left. That's that's the Skywriters.
(53:58):
But she grows on to become U Here Wrong and
then you see me, who's another shy kid in the
Neptune the Neptune series.
Speaker 3 (54:06):
And all that, and the conflict in the Neptune project
really is between shy shine Air and then these boys
were used to leading it and sometimes don't want to
listen to her, but eventually realizes that Mayor knows a
lot more about the ocean than the rest of them,
(54:29):
and so they vote and they vote for her to
become the leader, which is a really nice moment. But
there's definitely a lot of conflict between. Yes, you just
have to set up conflict to your characters, and I
think in the Neptune also, these kids are from very
different backgrounds. That also leads to their conflict. Hapening to me,
(54:50):
I just had COVID a week ago, and so oh.
Speaker 2 (54:54):
Bless you, bless you, Oh my god, bless you. No, no, no, no,
don't don't too worry about We are coming down to
like the last four to five minutes in the show,
and I'm not going to be able to get to
all the questions I was going to ask you anyway,
but can you tell us what readers have been saying
about the books?
Speaker 5 (55:12):
So this is just so much fun for me.
Speaker 3 (55:15):
I still and even though The Neptune Project is a
series that's really ten years old at this point, I
get emails all the time from my fans for that series.
I'm just starting to get more emails with guy writers,
but in the Neptune Project, I get emails like I
decided to become a marine biologist because I and I
(55:37):
literally about three months ago, got one from a girl
who loved The Neptune Project. So she came to one
of my writing workshops. She was only nine years old,
and I guess I told her that I thought her
writing sample was remarkable for her age and that she
should consider her suing writing well. She she sent me
(55:58):
a podcast she had made or a blog she had
made from her journalism class. So she kept going with
her writing and she said, you are one of the
reasons I'm becoming a journalist and was like, wow, I
have to admit I don't remember, but I see so
many you know, kids because I go. I get to
go to hundreds of schools. I'm up around on closing
in on five hundred schools now because of my teaching background.
(56:20):
And I just I love I love talking to kids
and saying, you know, think about writing if you're a
daydreaming kind of kid. We will always need people to
write the stories, to write TV, to write the movies.
I also get I just read one on Goodreads last
night from a girl that is twenty two now, and
she was just saying that Neptune Project was the first
(56:41):
big book she ever read.
Speaker 5 (56:43):
In the first book that.
Speaker 4 (56:44):
Made her reading. She had some learning differences.
Speaker 3 (56:47):
And reading was really a chore for her, but the
Neptune Project was just so.
Speaker 5 (56:52):
Exciting that she sat down and she read it, and.
Speaker 3 (56:56):
Then she pestered her dad into helping her buy the
second book. And there's got a third book in the
series that I had to self published when Disney didn't
buy that one, and that one's still so really well.
So they're kids that are still discovering the Nettun series.
It has a little romance in there.
Speaker 5 (57:12):
Which I think is what the thirteen and fourteen year goals.
Speaker 4 (57:14):
Really like about it?
Speaker 3 (57:16):
And then all this near death. You know, they almost
die every other chapter. I purposely do write books that
are very exciting because I'm aware of the fact that
books today have to compete with video games and skateboarding
and all these other things. And so I'm never going
to win the Newberry. But I do write books that
gets kids, that get kids turning pages. And I think
(57:37):
that's so important today because the competition for books is
pretty tough.
Speaker 2 (57:42):
Out there, and I'm going to say you are going
to win a new Berry one day. I don't say that.
We have about a little under three minutes. We two minutes. Now,
can you quickly share three or four steps, or let
me say two or three steps? Then you found to
be effective at getting the word out about your books.
Speaker 3 (58:02):
Well, children's fiction is a little bit different from adult fiction.
In kids fiction, what's terribly important. Our librarians are the
gamekeepers gatekeepers, I'm sorry, are the gamekeepers. And so you
need to reach school librarians. Your publisher will do this
through sending your book out for reviews from places like
School Library Journal and book List, and that's kind of
(58:24):
beyond your reach is the author.
Speaker 5 (58:26):
There's not much you can do about that.
Speaker 3 (58:27):
What you can do is make yourself available to state librarians.
If you make a state list, then a lot of
schools in that state will buy your book. And librarians
are really the ones who tell kids.
Speaker 5 (58:40):
What are cool books and get the wood of mouth going.
Speaker 3 (58:43):
So I think it's very important to be in touch
with your state librarians and try to go to their
state conferences and be available if you are comfortable working
with kids, be available to go on school visits. And
so that's worked really well for me.
Speaker 2 (58:58):
Okay, thank you for sharing. Where can off the shelf
listeners get a copy of your books?
Speaker 3 (59:05):
So they are all available. If you call ahead, every
indie bookstore and Burne the Noble can can get you
these books. If you call ahead, they will probably not
be on the shelf, but you can order them through
your local indie or you can order them through Burns
the Noble. Don't order them through Amazon because Jeff Bezels
(59:26):
has enough money already.
Speaker 2 (59:30):
Okay, so we have Oh what a Delight with a
delight Polly Hollyolk author Polly Holio. She started writing her
first book you guys. She was in Any Ladies when
she was in the fifth grade. She is the author
of the Neptune trilogy and the sky Writers series. Please
visit Polly online at p O L L y h
(59:50):
O L y oke dot com. Thank you so much,
Polly for taking time out of your day to be
here with us and our listeners here on all the
Shelf Books this Saturday morning. And to our listeners, thank you,
thank you, thank you. As I always tell you, you
are just absolutely fabulous. You are amazing, You're awesome, and
(01:00:11):
I encourage you to go out and create a wonderful
day for yourself. Probably I'll shoot you a link to
the show when it finishes streaming. Please set your calendar
Saturday mornings eleven am. You're gonna catch author Shelf Books
to enjoy another fabulous author. Thank you all so very much,
(01:00:33):
Bye for now.
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