Teenreads.com -- Author Profile: Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Though she never played high school football or milked cows, Catherine Gilbert Murdock is a big fan of family farms and Wisconsin. She herself grew up on a tiny farm (two goats and honeybees) in Connecticut, and attended Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania. She now lives in suburban Philadelphia with her husband, two children, and Sparky the cat. DAIRY QUEEN is her first novel.

June 2007

D.J. Schwenk --- the protagonist of Catherine Gilbert Murdock's debut novel, DAIRY QUEEN --- tackles a whole new set of challenges on and off the football field in THE OFF SEASON. In this interview, Murdock talks about how she never intended to write a sequel but was curious to explore and continue the stories of her secondary characters. She also describes some of the difficulties she encountered during the writing process, shares a few of the perks of her first book’s unexpected success and offers readers a sneak peak at her next project.

Question: DAIRY QUEEN was very well received, and readers fell in love with D.J. Schwenk and her family. Did this make it more challenging to write another story about her?

Catherine Gilbert Murdock: The challenge, I have to say, came much more from the responsibility of writing a second book at all. I've been told by several people that sophomore books are the hardest, and I completely agree. DAIRY QUEEN I wrote as an exercise, for myself; I never dreamed it would be published and certainly never imagined it would get such a positive reception. The sequel, however, came with all sorts of pressures: my editor's and agent's expectations, the fact that I was being paid (what if I screwed up? I'd have to return the money!), that looming deadline (I had no deadline whatsoever with DQ)…all of those made for a very painful experience. So the responsibility of treating D.J. correctly was incidental in some ways to all this other trauma. I knew that once I got through this agony I would treat her well --- though whether everyone else will agree is another story.

Q: How did the sequel to DAIRY QUEEN emerge? Did you always intend to write a sequel?

CGM: Actually, I had no intention of writing any more about D.J. My mother finished an early draft of the book and said she couldn't wait for the sequel, and my response was "Oh, well." (But in a nice way, because she's my mom.) To my mind, there really wasn't much room for a sequel, certainly not for the dramatic character evolution of DAIRY QUEEN. At the end of that book, D.J. was "launched," to use one of my favorite terms. She developed so much over those thirty-one chapters that I really considered her a full-fledged…well, not an adult because she's only sixteen, but a full-fledged human with an enormous capacity for mature emotional insight.

However, I did have a pang whenever I thought about Curtis, because I cared about him so much and I really wanted to make sure that he was going to be okay. And I felt bad about leaving Amber in the lurch like that --- there she was with a new girlfriend, a pretty cool girlfriend, and that story just ended. And I wanted to know more about D.J.'s older brothers. (This is where my eight-year-old daughter would say, "But Mom, you already know about them! You wrote the book!" She still believes that authors are omniscient. Ha.)

So even though I considered D.J.'s story complete, I recognized that there were other stories left to tell. (And this doesn't even bring in what was going to happen between D.J. and Brian. I've had dozens of e-mails and questions from girls desperate to know the future of their relationship. That story didn't interest me quite so much, but it obviously interests others!) And then my wonderful agent called me in the middle of this publishers' bidding war over DAIRY QUEEN --- well, not a bidding war, really; more of a bidding skirmish --- and asked if I'd ever be interested in writing a sequel because sometimes two books are easier to sell than one. I was skiing at the time, with my daughter between my legs because she's fearless and will shoot down the hill if I don't restrain her, and I'm holding her with one hand and talking on my cell phone on the other, and right when my agent asked if I had any ideas for a sequel, the thought of spinal cord injury popped into my head. And of course I immediately rejected it because it's so huge and tragic and would require so much work, but I said "Sure" to the sequel idea anyway. Over the next few days, that SCI idea (though of course I didn't know the term SCI at that point) kept coming back, taunting me to take it on, to take the sequel to a level far beyond the girl-meets-boy conceit of DAIRY QUEEN.

Anyway, that's how the sequel began.

Q: Are you finished with D.J and her family?

CGM: For the moment, yes. I love D.J., I love her family, I adore Dale and Maryann, but they need to rest for a while, find their own paths. At some point I would like to write a third book exploring college sports recruiting --- if you think spinal cord injuries are challenging and painful, whew --- but not for a few years. This stems in part from my interest in other writing projects, but also because I love the experience of hearing from readers. I finished THE OFF SEASON before DAIRY QUEEN even came out, and I was dumbstruck by the variety of responses I received, and the insights. I'm very much looking forward to the same thing with THE OFF SEASON, and I can't help but think that I'll learn a great deal to apply to a third book.

Q: THE OFF SEASON addresses the financial challenges many contemporary American family farmers face. Is this something you are concerned about?

CGM: Yes, it is, for a number of reasons --- not only because I sympathize with the plight of small farmers but also because I have a lot more faith in small farms than in agribusiness. I'd rather eat a pig raised with two other pigs on table scraps than a pig raised in a warehouse and fed a diet of corn and antibiotics. So I guess you could say that I'm concerned for very selfish reasons. If, after reading THE OFF SEASON, kids and adults think a bit more about what goes into their mouths and recognize that the decisions they make in the grocery store or farmer's market can have a profound impact, well, I wouldn't consider that the worst thing in the world.

Q: D.J. is a very responsible young woman. Do you think this is typical of teenagers today?

CGM: Yes I believe she is more responsible than many kids, but in large part that's because she's forced to be. The entire second half of the book, when D.J. is basically on her own dealing with this tragedy, comes about because her mother is incapacitated. If her mother were present, it would be a very different story. You can't rise to the challenge if a challenge isn't there. She didn't want that responsibility, but she had no choice but to take it. That's an important lesson, I think.

That said, I've heard from several mothers who use D.J. as an example to their own kids. And a few months ago I found my son in the basement washing the floor with a mop (so that he could set up his toy soldiers). "Am I like D.J.?" he asked. Yes.

Q: You used your screenwriting experience when writing DAIRY QUEEN. Did you do the same with THE OFF SEASON?

CGM: Absolutely. For one thing, don't mess with success, and for a second thing, it's the only form of storytelling I know! I'm sure I sound like a broken record, but screenwriting is such a phenomenal way to learn the craft of telling a story well. When I was first studying screenwriting and my kids were little, I'd have these epiphanies as I read aloud to them: Curious George is three-act format! The Three Bears is three-act format! "Three-act format" is screenwriting jargon. It simply means that the first quarter of the story is used to introduce characters, make us care about them, and present their foibles; the middle half of the story entails an escalating series of conflicts in which the main characters have to confront their foibles; and the last third has a glorious resolution (heartily unrealistic, because what in real life ever gets resolved?) in which the main characters become better people. Or monkeys. Or bears. Not that all these details are in fairy tales, mind you, but screenwriting in its purest form is simply a rarefied and highly structured form of storytelling. The dialogue has to be tight --- you don't have five pages to wander through pointless conversation; you have perhaps eight lines total. The descriptions have to be evocative and brief --- one or two lines to make a character compelling and tangible. And of course screenwriting is for that most visual of media; learning how to write visually is critical, especially these days. So, yes, I did use my screenwriting lessons in THE OFF SEASON, and to this day I think of several of the scenes more as film scenes than book scenes.

Q: How do you know so much about spinal cord injury?

CGM: Research, research, research. Thank heavens, once again, for the Internet --- I found several blogs that helped enormously, and through those Web sites two critical books: Travis Roy's autobiography (he broke his neck in a college ice hockey game), and the story of Adam Tagliaferra, a Penn State cornerback with a C4 injury. Originally I'd intended to base THE OFF SEASON at a specific hospital, but those people turned out to be so snotty about it --- not to call a spade a spade or anything --- that I ended up creating a fictitious hospital, which was much better. And then I connected with Magee Rehab in Philadelphia and had the best experience there. When I was writing DAIRY QUEEN, I very much wanted to make sure the football was accurate, and the farming. But spinal cord injury is another level altogether. It mattered intensely that I be correct in every possible way --- I cannot stress this enough. My fear of failure led to months of incapacity (this is why I've never managed to assemble a photo album, by the way), and another complete novel (see below), but in the end I did hunker down and get something written.

Q: Did you always know D.J. and Brian's relationship would end the way it did?

CGM: That was probably the second hardest part of THE OFF SEASON, after the medical research. No, I didn't know how their relationship would play out except for a vague sense that it needed to go beyond "happily ever after." Naïve and optimistic as I am, I do recognize that two people from such different worlds would have a challenging time making a go of it. And frankly, I'm not sure myself what's going to happen in the future, where they'll end up.

Q: The book jackets for THE OFF SEASON and the paperback edition of DAIRY QUEEN feature photographs instead of artwork. Do you like this?

CGM: I love it. When I first began working with Houghton Mifflin on DAIRY QUEEN, I was insistent that the cover not feature a girl, because I didn't want that face to be D.J. I wanted everyone to come up with his own D.J. Now I recognize that the cover model is simply one representation of her. Every reader will still have her own internal portrait.

That said, I am intensely jealous of the eyebrows of the girl on the paperback DAIRY QUEEN. As someone who has always been eyebrow challenged, I find it a bit annoying, the same way I feel about people with naturally curly hair: do you have to show it off like that?

Q: What are you working on now?

CGM: A wonderful, delectable fairy tale featuring a princess locked in a tower, an evil queen, a handsome prince…the whole works. I don't know if anyone else will read it, but I just adore this story. I came up with the idea one Sunday morning last November and wrote the first draft in sixteen days --- it just poured out of me. (Can anyone say procrastination?) It's too bad, actually, how THE OFF SEASON suffers from middle-child syndrome. As I was writing THE OFF SEASON, I was also intensely involved in early promotion efforts for DAIRY QUEEN. Now, when I should be focused on promoting THE OFF SEASON, I'm enraptured with Princess Ben. Not that I don't love THE OFF SEASON as well --- I'm very much looking forward to rereading it; it's been a couple of months --- but it has never had my undivided attention.

Q: What's the biggest surprise to come from DAIRY QUEEN?

CGM: Well, one very big surprise is how seriously I'm taken now. That kind of astounds me, how frequently I hear from neighbors or parents at school that I'm a "writer." I always was a writer --- certainly I was for those nine years of screenwriting --- but somehow having a legitimate book in legitimate bookstores gives me a new level of authority. I personally don't feel that different…although I do relish that I now can put "writer" on that "Occupation" line on forms without guilt. And that I now have an acceptable excuse for getting out of the PTO.

So many people have contacted me about their own farming experiences --- that's something I never would have predicted, the amazing number of Americans who still have some personal connection to the farm, through a childhood friend or a relative, a community… The soil isn't nearly as far away as I had thought. I also get a charge out of hearing all the interpretations that readers come up with --- this is what I mean about writers not being omniscient. For example, I gave a copy of DAIRY QUEEN to my dentist, and on my next visit he told me how great it was that I captured Curtis looking at his hands. (During the ride back from Madison, when he and D.J. are talking about his wanting to be a dentist, Curtis studies his hands.) "Hands are so important to a dentist," my own dentist said. "You really nailed that." I nodded, but actually I'd had no idea --- I was simply trying to convey that Curtis was embarrassed. My dentist also said that he'd collected animal skulls when he was a kid, and agreed that it was very hard to locate intact mandibles. So that made me feel a little better, that just from my imagination I managed to produce a real-life detail. That sort of serendipity keeps me going.

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June 2006

Catherine Gilbert Murdock's debut novel, DAIRY QUEEN, tells the story of a 15-year-old girl who tries out for the high school football team and falls in love with the rival school's quarterback. In this interview, Murdock describes the dream that inspired this book and how her background in screenwriting helped to shape her story and characters. She also discusses the awkwardness and isolation of adolescence, the impact of high school sports on young people, and the effect that a cameo appearance from a famous talk show host has on the protagonist's slightly dysfunctional family.

Question: How did you come up with the idea for this book?

Catherine Gilbert Murdock: It always sounds goofy, but I really did have a dream about a girl playing college football against a boy she loves passionately. When I woke up, my first thought was "What an amazing premise for a story!" Followed by "Babe, you don't know one thing about football." But that kernel stayed with me, just kept growing in me for days, as I thought about it and worked it --- dream or no, the story idea was just a lump, and I had to do a lot of shaping. I immediately tossed the college notion --- that was ridiculous --- and I spent hours trying to figure out where to place the story: Texas was out of the question because football is so important there, D.J. might get killed. I toyed with western Pennsylvania and California and then finally came up with Wisconsin. I say finally because I have family in Wisconsin --- I have cousins who played football there, in schools about the size of D.J.'s. So I was leery at first of writing about Wisconsin self-consciousness combined with obstinacy --- but I'm so pleased now. Then of course I had to develop the characters... The heart of the story, its essential moment, if you will, remains this dream-moment, when D.J. looks across the football scrimmage at Brian. All my work went into building up to that eye contact, which ultimately was only a couple of sentences, but I had to make it as real, as full of emotion, as I could. Hence the first twenty-eight chapters.

Q: The reader learns a lot about life on a dairy farm --- did you have to do much research?

CGM: My mother grew up on a dairy farm, smaller than D.J.'s but with that same feel of family labor (and family tension). When I was a kid we lived up the road from the sweetest, cleanest dairy farm I've ever seen. My sister and I would bike down to buy their amazing ice cream, we'd hunt for kittens in the hayloft and feed the calves, climb a perfect maple tree outside their back door. As I was writing the first draft of DAIRY QUEEN, I kept a long list of dairy-related questions, and then last summer I visited Art Webster --- he's the dairy farmer, retired now --- and quizzed him for several hours. He couldn't have been nicer or more helpful. He's one of the people I dedicated the book to; he's always been a surrogate grandfather to us.

Q: Communication is hard for everyone in the Schwenk family, and the reader sees only D.J.'s thoughts. Is it a challenge to write about characters that don't say much?

CGM: The bigger challenge was explaining the characters from D.J.'s point of view. Her feelings for her father are so complicated that they really obscure his identity. For example, he's a good cook (burnt French toast notwithstanding), but we don't learn that until the end of the book, when D.J. finally figures it out. I had the same trouble with Brian; I had so much trouble getting inside his head because I was too busy seeing him through D.J. Curiously, I've received a lot of criticism from readers about how passive and uncommunicative D.J.'s mother is. Each time I hear this, it surprises me. Has everyone else in the world been raised by articulate, self-aware women? The fact that D.J.'s mother is disappointing is quite different from saying that the character is unrealistic. I like D.J.'s mom a lot --- I like both her parents --- but their lack of communication skills doesn't strike me as unusual. Neither did I find it challenging to develop the characters without their speaking much; that part was really fun, actually.

Q: Did you always intend to include Oprah Winfrey in the story?

CGM: Meaning, did I dream about her on the sidelines, cheering my girl on? No. But she was so easy to integrate --- her role came so naturally, much more smoothly than most of the other characters'. D.J.'s family might be tough farmers, but they can't identify or even give credit to their feelings, and it's destroying them --- the family is collapsing. D.J., by trying in her own inarticulate way to tap in to Oprah, recognizes --- or begins to recognize --- that talking about emotions and pain and resentment, all those hot buttons, isn't self-indulgent or whiny, but essential. Really, I'm using Oprah to epitomize the emotional development of the American psyche. The novel's juxtaposition of old-fashioned self-reliance and heartfelt reflection is to my mind the most important theme of the story. I'd like to take credit for it, but it blossomed of its own accord --- a higher power was at work. Probably Oprah.

Q: Curtis is a very quiet but important part of the book --- how did you come up with his character?

CGM: Ah, Curtis. I'm not going to say he's my favorite character, but to this day every time I think about him, I melt a little. Like many last children, Curtis came into being by accident. I knew from the get-go that D.J. needed at least one older brother who played football --- that would explain her knowledge of and passion for the game. I also knew that she realistically could not perform all the required farm labor by herself --- no one could, not at fifteen. So I "added" a little brother to the family to help her out. But I also had this notion, critical to the story, that D.J. would be increasingly isolated as the summer progressed, in order for her thinking and decision making to evolve, and of course her relationship with Brian. That's why D.J.'s mother works full-time --- if she were home, she'd sniff out the Brian-D.J. thing in a second. And so as I was writing, Curtis played this walk-on role, really, of showing up to help when the workload called for it and then disappearing. Possibly the dullest, most two-dimensional character ever written. He never even spoke. Gradually I realized I had to address this somehow, and so I made his silence part of the story, part of the entire family dysfunction. And then I had the breakthrough that his selective mutism stemmed from some specific reason, a secret explanation. I tossed around a bunch of ideas and came up with, well, my favorite scene in the book.

Q: Why don't you give names to D.J.'s parents?

CGM: It's great --- so many people don't even realize this, and then later they'll ask, "What was D.J.'s mother's name again?" For the record, both parents do have names in my head. But I was quite tickled by the notion that D.J. wouldn't ever provide them. I mean, why would she? She's still at an age where they're �bermom and �berdad. She doesn't see them having identities separate from her own.

Q: You don't skirt around the complicated relationship D.J. has with Amber.

CGM: No, although it's not like I'm breaking new ground. I knew from the beginning that I'd have to address homosexuality at some point. Writing a story about a large, strong, assertive girl playing the hypermasculine sport of football really brings that issue to the fore. But --- given the inspirational dream I'd had --- I very much wanted D.J. to be straight, and I loved the contrast between the "butch jock" stereotype being forced on her and her own passionate feelings for Brian. In a way, she's forced to break just as many boundaries in her yearnings for a handsome, popular boy as Amber is in her yearnings for D.J. That said, I didn't originally intend for Amber to be gay, either. But, again, I really felt D.J. needed to become increasingly isolated over the course of the summer, even from her best friend, and this seemed like such an appropriate way to develop her estrangement.

Q: How do you feel about the huge role football plays in so many towns in America?

CGM: I was a lot more opposed to it before this book. I used to attend football games at the University of Pennsylvania, all the fan rituals and hoopla, but I wasn't impressed --- I was in grad school, after all, and too busy deconstructing the event to enjoy it much. I was pretty far along in DAIRY QUEEN before I even had the courage to read FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, because I knew how disturbed I'd be. In point of fact, I really enjoyed the book, and the movie, which did a phenomenal job of distilling the story.

I don't object to football per se as much as to the pressures being put on young children to compete in all sports, and to the professionalization of high school sports. By professional, I mean being expected to earn one's way through college. I ran cross-country and track in high school, but I also worked on the play and the yearbook and tons of homework, and I fear --- I can see --- that many other worthy activities (including hanging out and sleeping) are getting sucked into this sports vortex.

That said, I loved describing the football scrimmage in DAIRY QUEEN --- my blood still races when I read it --- and I understand what a catalyst these events can be for the entire community. I just feel badly that so much stress is being put on kids --- both the kids who can perform and the kids who can't --- so that a bunch of adults can get excited.

Q: Shouldn't you mention your own athletic endeavors here?

CGM: Endeavor is an awfully high-powered word for what I do. Part of my bias against ball sports, I freely admit, stems from my own ineptitude. Researching DAIRY QUEEN, I realized that not only do I lack skill, coordination, fast-twitch muscles, and resolve, but I also have no ability to mentally visualize other players on the field. (Even biking, I get flustered when someone's behind me.) My problem is cognitive! I finally figured out I have an excuse!

I can, however, swim, bike, and run, and four years ago I began competing in triathlons, without much skill but with great enthusiasm. This experience has really helped to shape my empathy for D.J. and organized sports generally, the rush of training and the glory of competition. I composed DAIRY QUEEN's workout scenes --- her training with Brian, the scrimmage --- while peddling away on my stationary bike. I don't know if I needed the adrenaline to build my enthusiasm or vice versa, but I certainly came off the bike steamy with excitement and thrilled to write.

For the past year, though, I've been struggling with a bad knee, with one surgery already and a second probably on the way. That, too, has given me more respect for the specter of injury that always looms over sport.

Q: Is D.J. the kind of person you would have been friends with when you were fifteen?

CGM: I wish! I would have been extremely impressed with her, particularly the football, and I would have admired her greatly. But I'm not sure we could have gotten to know each other because we'd move in such different circles --- I a fine arts geek and bookworm, and she into team sports, probably vocational agriculture, and not too interested in weird, mouthy, college-bound kids like me.

I've had a number of friends over the years who were phenomenal athletes blessed with coordination and strength and speed, and they had no idea! That is, they knew they were good at sports, but they didn't give themselves any credit for it and were just as full of sniveling insecurities as the rest of us. So many YA heroines are clever, gawky introverts --- probably because so many YA readers, myself included, fit that mold. I relished creating a heroine who diverged from that, and yet who revealed this truth within teens --- within all of us, really: the inability to recognize, let alone to cherish, our own gifts.

Q: You've done a lot of screenwriting. How was writing a novel different? The same?

CGM: Let me clarify that I've done a lot of mediocre screenwriting. I originally set out to make DAIRY QUEEN yet another screenplay, but I'd been burned so many times trying to market scripts that I decided to take the plunge and try a novel instead, though I hadn't written so much as a short story since high school. The experience was amazing! When D.J. had a thought, I could just write it down instead of figuring out how exactly I was going to have to convey that thought via speech or gesture or voiceover. It was enormously liberating.

I love writing screenplays. I love the craft of it, nailing the scene description and the dialogue, streamlining the page. One thing screenwriting teaches you --- it taught me, anyway --- is how to go into every sentence and make it as tight and clear and powerful as possible. That was invaluable. I've also learned so much from writing dialogue, where you get only a half a page to create a critical, moving, believable conversation. That was even more precious. In the end, though, novel or screenplay, the writing experience remains the same. You're telling a story. You have to make it good.

Q: So would you like to see DAIRY QUEEN made into a movie?

CGM: Good question. I wrote the book (to use my one snippet of screenwriting jargon) in classic three-act format, as it was the only framework I knew, and I've been told that many of the scenes are cinemagraphic. That's kind of inevitable, I think, in this culture; we're so used to the medium of film that it's hard not to write visually.

I have to say, though, I have mixed feelings about seeing DAIRY QUEEN made into a movie. How many books do we know that have been mangled en route to the theater? But I would deeply, deeply love to see the trailer. I adore trailers. If movie theaters showed an hour of trailers before the feature, I would show up an hour early every time. I've given so much thought to it --- I think I even wrote it up once --- and I believe, enthusiast that I am, that this book would produce one heck of a two-minute preview.

Q: Has writing DAIRY QUEEN changed you in any way?

CGM: It's made me a more forgiving person. One of my all-time favorite books is A GIRL NAMED ZIPPY. I was so impressed with how empathetically Haven Kimmel treated all her characters, and I tried to apply that empathy and forgiveness in my own writing, to my interpretations of people, and even to my own past. For example, it's easy to be bitchy about cheerleaders, but I decided early on that I wouldn't. For one thing, D.J., by that point in the story, is going through so many traumas with her family that I couldn't pile on any more high school angst. But I also went to school with cheerleaders, I took classes with them, I was friends with a couple, and as far as I could tell they had blood and hearts and feelings just like the rest of us. It meant a lot to me, how supportive the cheerleaders in DAIRY QUEEN were of D.J.

Also, I've become quite the milk drinker, even though I was a big soy fan before this. And I now read the sports section every day. I'm pretty sure I'm never going to paint my face green, but I was as pleased as anyone (well, not anyone --- Philadelphia has some pretty rabid football fans) when the Eagles made it to the Super Bowl.

Q: D.J. is a fresh, funny, unique voice --- different than a lot of teens in current young adult books --- but she's also instantly believable. How did you capture being a teenager so well? Do you read a lot of young adult literature?

CGM: As a teen I was wracked by hyper self-consciousness and self-criticism, acne, parental issues, loneliness, height... Miserable as I was at the time, I can see now that a lot of that pain is universal (except maybe the tall part). It wasn't too much effort to channel it through D.J. Before I started DAIRY QUEEN, I bought an armful of YA books just to get some sense of what I should be aiming for in terms of length, content, acceptable bad words, etc. I also reread a lot of my favorite authors from way back, such as Anne McCaffrey and Susan Cooper (I used to be a fantasy buff). But I'm not a voracious reader. I was pretty squeamish about the all-I-want-is-a-boyfriend books when I was a kid, and I'm afraid I still am, at least as a dietary staple, though they're fun as a condiment sometimes.

Q: Your sister, Elizabeth Gilbert, has a very successful writing career. What's it like writing a book with a well-known author for a sister?

CGM: Completely awesome. Liz could not have been more supportive; she has been for years, encouraging me to write more. On the other hand, I was rabidly paranoid. For example, I was hugely concerned that when writing dialogue I'd end up with a column of said...said...said...said...going down the page. Just a little bit obsessive on that one. At the time I was writing DAIRY QUEEN, Liz was in Europe and Asia researching EAT, PRAY, LOVE, and we were sending long e-mails back and forth every day, and finally late in the summer I mustered my courage and mentioned that I was, you know, writing this little thing, and maybe she could take a look? I'd made this deadline for myself that I'd finish it so she could read it on the plane back to New York, and I really threw myself into getting that accomplished, and then FedExing it to Bali, which is much less difficult than you'd think, and then of course I paced the house, wondering if she'd received it, and what she thought, and on and on... She called me the morning after she landed and said, "It's great, it's perfect, what can I do to help you get it published?" Later, whenever I mentioned that I'd changed a chapter or added a scene, she'd shake her head and say, "It was already perfect." (It wasn't.) Plus, she found me an amazing agent.

Q: What are you working on next?

CGM: The sequel, of course. When I finished DAIRY QUEEN, I thought, "Well, D.J. has her life in order. She's launched now. End of story." I still had ideas about other characters --- I was very disappointed that I couldn't explore Amber more and see Curtis through to happiness --- but there just wasn't room. Then when the manuscript was sent out to publishing houses, my agent asked if I had any ideas for a sequel in case that was an option. Well, I did...in fact, when I thought about it, I had a lot of ideas. I had pretty much an entire book of ideas. As it turned out, many readers wanted to learn more, too. So that's how we ended up with a sequel. The working title is THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD. I also have a couple of other stories I'm kicking around, but they're just sprouts yet, nothing edible.

Copyright � 2006 Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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