Here’s some details about the book: “Tyler and Lucinda have to spend summer vacation with their ancient uncle Gideon, a farmer. They think they’re in for six weeks of cows, sheep, horses, and pigs. But when they arrive in deserted Standard Valley, California, they discover that Ordinary Farm is, well, no ordinary farm.

The bellowing in the barn comes not from a cow but from a dragon. The thundering herd in the valley? Unicorns. Uncle Gideon’s sprawling farmhouse never looks the same twice. Plus, there’s a flying monkey, a demon squirrel, and a barnload of unlikely farmhands with strange accents and even stranger powers.

At first, the whole place seems like a crazy adventure. But when darker secrets begin to surface and Uncle Gideon and his fabulous creatures are threatened, Lucinda and Tyler have to pull together to take action. Will two ordinary kids be able to save the dragons, the farm — and themselves?”

And here’s some background on Williams:
“Tad Williams has held more jobs than any sane person should admit to—singing in a band, selling shoes, managing a financial institution, throwing newspapers, and designing military manuals, to name just a few. He also hosted a syndicated radio show for ten years, worked in theater and television production, taught both grade-school and college classes, and worked in multimedia for a major computer firm. He is cofounder of an interactive television company, and is currently writing comic books and film and television scripts as well as novels.”

Finally, some background on Beale:
“Deborah Beale is a mother, businesswoman and writer. She collaborates with Tad Williams as well as managing the business arising from his books and their joint enterprise. For many years before this, Deborah was a book publisher in the UK, publishing across all fields of fiction and non-fiction, and specializing in SF and fantasy. Deborah was a founder member of the Orion Publishing Group.”

Did I mention you can read the first eight chapters here for free? My thanks to Williams and Beale for the interview.

Tim O’Shea: Am I correct in thinking the key to your collaboration is flexibility and revision. Deborah you write the first draft and then turn it over to Tad a turn–correct?

Deborah Beale: Yes, although the entire process is evolving and one of the fun things is playing with what comes along.

O’Shea: In this collaboration, what do you view are the assets that you believe the other brings to Ordinary Farm?

Tad Williams: An outsider’s fascinated eye for California and a certain gothic darkness.

Beale: All the experience of a world-class writer and a certain steadying calm.

O’Shea: This first book in the Ordinary Farm series is set in the summer –in young adult literature would you say summers are an archetype of sorts? In setting the story in summer (while admittedly you dodge the “why aren’t they in school” question), but do you also appeal to the children’s perception of a summer break being rife with unlimited potential?

Beale: An archetype? – ooh, yeah. There’s a lot in what drives me that comes from a younger age, and yearning for what were basically big American ideas. The summer, for instance – that’s a big American idea, or at least it was to me when I was 8 or 9.

Williams: All of those things are true. Plus summer is a traditional time of remaking oneself, of learning and changing.

Beale: It’s a bridge from a younger self to another self.

O’Shea: Was Ordinary Farm always conceived as a series of books, or did it initially grow out of an idea for a standalone novel?

Williams & Beale: It was always meant to be a series, but how many, we didn’t quite know. We offered two to Klett Cotta, Tad’s German publishers, first of all, because they’d loved the idea from the start. They came back and said, No, not two, but we’d like to commission five. We smiled a lot that day.

O’Shea: Deborah, as a veteran editor of many books (as well as a founder member of the Orion Publishing Group), what is the key to hooking a reader with your story?

Beale: A list:
Suspense, withholding of information, good characterization, good balance of spookiness and fear. Living vicariously in the story – making it fun, so you wish it was happening to you. But also, a good shot of oo-err reality – you might wish it was you, but if it was, you might not be that happy!

O’Shea: I was struck by your use of italics in your writing–for emphasis. How hard is it to pace something like using italics–if used too often in a page or in a chapter it dilutes the device of emphasis. Do you debate on aspects of the novel like that, or is just one of you in charge of what gets italicized?

Williams: All of that stuff goes with word usage, grammar, syntax. That’s final assessment at polished draft stage. But you have to see it in proofs so you can get things and catch all mistakes — like the last person in the room looks around, checks under the bed and turns the light off.

Beale: That’s like the material handling of the language. Ideally when you’re paying attention to the surface of the text, it’s late in the process.

O’Shea: Deborah, on your Twitter account, you wrote: “The man is asleep and totally wiped: he’s working so hard at the moment that his brain won’t shut off at night.” When you see Tad working this hard are you worried for him on some level, or do you know he’s ultimately happy when he’s working this hard.

Beale: It’s really about doing whatever you need to do as a writer to make a business for yourself. So it comes with the territory – the up and down nature of things.

O’Shea: Tad–when you’re juggling multiple books and drafts like this, does it ever stop being enjoyable for you?

Williams: The only thing that’s ever not enjoyable is if I feel like I’m in too much of a hurry to do my best work – and when I feel like that, it’s a warning sign that something’s not working properly. But I don’t mind juggling lots of things if I can give them all the proper attention.

Beale: You thrive on that…

Williams: I do have multiple things going on all the time.

O’Shea: Greg Swearingen provided illustrations for the book–can you talk about how he was selected to contribute to the book? How do his illustrations serve to compliment the story?
Beale: Our former editor at Harper Collins, Brenda Bowen, is responsible for the production. I think it’s gorgeous, we were just so thrilled with illos after we’d seen them in rough form.

O’Shea: What’s the appeal to writing dragons?

Williams: It’s one of the great archetypes. It’s been done a great deal in the last 20 or 30 years so that makes it even more of a challenge to carve out new territory.

Beale: I wanted to create a ride on a dragon. And I saw it as something terrifying and transformative. So that became the seed of one of the book’s storylines.

O’Shea: Back in 2001, Deborah, you wrote “It is in fact a great problem for any writer, and it doesn’t lessen if a writer is blessed enough that it becomes his or her full-time work. You really need solitude, and there is never enough solitude.” You both are active parents, clearly involved in your children’s lives, compare 2001 to now–do you two both have a harder time finding the solitude to write, or is it easier now? What’s the trick to finding the time to write?

Williams: It’s definitely easier because the children don’t need the same day to day, hour to hour work of keeping their little bottoms clean.

Beale: But when they come home from school it’s like this total drama moves through the house, slamming doors and spreading whatever kind of day they’ve had, over as many people as possible. So it’s a new age, with a whole new set of demands!

The trick – well, the trick is to figure out what you want to do, work supremely hard, put it at the center of your life and pay the price for it all. Then you’ll have found the time to write, and by then you will be writing. It’s really best done earliest in life because it can be destructive.

O’Shea: You are aggressively marketing the book (surprisingly not something every successful author like you two are bothers to do)–on May 20 you released a sneak peak of the first eight chapters–what other marketing efforts are you doing to bring attention to the book?

Beale: There are videos on YouTube – there’s a set called “Being Creative” which we made for Harper Collins’ library & educational market, and then there’s another 4 or 5 which are interview bits, us on the sofa. We’re probably going to start adding to these on a regular basis. There’s a whole bunch of stuff due to go up on Harper Collins’ website. Our special Ordinary Farm webpage is here. Tad’s on Facebook – he’s killingly funny and gets to act out his comic alter-ago. I’m on facebook.com/boudicca, and on Twitter as MrsTad. Twitter’s closer-in to my daily consciousness, as it were.

O’Shea: In the course of writing the book, which characters became increasingly more enjoyable to write as the novel evolved?

Beale: Well, Tad’s not very connected to Ordinary Farm at this exact moment, because he’s heavily involved with finishing Shadowrise. But I’m deep into the first draft of A Witch At Ordinary Farm and I have to say, I’m loving writing Tyler now he’s a year older and I get to think about how he evolves. Basically I suspect he’s bi-polar, but we haven’t discussed that really, so we’ll see. Also, writing Colin in this book is very enjoyable. I get to deepen him, and work with his complexity, and he’s really opening up to me as a character.

O’Shea: Is there anything about Dragons of Ordinary Farm you’d like to discuss that I neglected to ask you about?

Williams: One of the fun things is you can read it as a straightforward adventure, but some of the ideas are going to be quite big. Like, what is the long-term meaning of the fault line… Because it isn’t going to stay static. There’s an idea about evolution at work, and an idea about parallel universes. There will be time-travel paradoxes too.

Beale: I just think it’s a gorgeous great jewel chest stuffed with ideas. Ideas are like jewels I think: they thrill me and sometimes they’re beautiful.

O’Shea: The Dragons of Ordinary Farm will be released later this year in Germany. How much are you two consulted when your work is translated into other languages?

Williams & Beale: It depends on the individual relationships concerned, but we’re good friends with our German translator, Hans Ulrich Mohring. HUM’s great. We have to answer his questions, and get it right for HUM. We think he’s got an astonishing feel for his work.

Tim O’Shea: Beige is partially inspired by your initial move to Los Angeles. While the novel is not your story, of course, I’m wondering if when writing a novel like this do you find you learn a little about yourself in the process?

Cecil Castellucci: While no novel is biography, there are always elements of myself and where I’m at or where I’ve been. Sometimes it’s a look back, sometimes it’s a reflection of now, sometimes an imagined path not taken. So, I think that I learn a little bit about myself from every novel I write. For Beige, I was inspired by moving to my particular neighborhood in Los Angeles, Silverlake, and dealing with all the punk in Los Angeles. Everything was so punk rock here and I felt like an outsider looking in, even though I had moved here to put out my first CD on No Life Records. I was working at Epitaph Records and I was this little indie rock girl who sang Twee music. I suppose in this case I learned about the essential roots of punk, which are pretty much the essential roots of being an artist in the world. Ask questions. Pay attention. Think for yourself. When you do that, it’s all good.

O’Shea: One of the main characters in Beige, Katy’s dad (The Rat) is a recovering addict. In writing a young adult novel, how hard is it to touch upon subjects like that (addiction/recovery/impact on the family) without either getting too adult with the topic or talking down to the audience?

Castellucci: I don’t think it’s too hard to talk about anything in Young Adult literature. That’s the great thing about it. There’s room for all kinds of stories, all kinds of conversations. I think you can touch on anything, any subject, as long as you do it with empathy, heart and honesty. In this book, it was important to me to talk about recovery and redemption, rather than the more typical way that drugs and addiction are presented in YA. A lot of times there are very grave consequences, characters end up dead, lives ruined and don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning drug use or abuse, I am just saying that once you’ve made that mistake, there is life after that. The Rat and Sam Suck all paid dearly for their choices. It ruined their lives and the lives of Katy and Lake’s moms and greatly affected how Katy and Lake are brought up. In the end, they got through it. Well, most of them. In my life, along the way, I have met many people, who are in recovery for drug or alcohol abuse and they were (are) amazing people. Talented, brilliant, kind, generous, human. I feel privileged to have met the ones that I call friends and acquaintances at that time in their life, while in recovery, after they had gone through all of that dark stuff and come out the other side. I got the best of them. With The Rat and Sam Suck and Katy’s Mom, I wanted to write a book that reflected those people who got sober and gave themselves a second chance.

O’Shea: Who was your editor on Beige? After writing a novel, how painful (or painless) is it to endure the editorial process?

Castellucci: I’m so glad you asked! Kara LaReau was my editor. She had edited my two previous novels Boy Proof and The Queen of Cool so we already had a shorthand. I would say that the editorial process with her is a fantastic experience. Not that I don’t get frustrated and beaten down by the process of making a novel. I weep sometimes. I curse my clumsy sentences. I eat bon bons in despair and beat my chest dramatically. But she makes it a lot easier. She’s a big cheerleader and a great sounding board. She also sometimes says one thing about the story, one sentence that just blows my mind and clicks everything together in the story for me. Basically, in our process together, we have long talks about the heart of the book. This book was a bit more layered than my other books, there were more words! So there was a plot chart that was made so we could quickly look at the beats of the narrative broken down chapter by chapter. I love when I give my book to Kara and then we talk. She pulls the best stuff out of me, she has this magical way of just tweaking things just so and then I’m off and running. I love when I get her notes and then I revise. Revising is fun. First drafts are hard.

O’Shea: Who was your favorite character to write in Beige? Now that it’s been a few years since you wrote the book, have you gained a greater affection for other characters in the book?

Castellucci: Oh, picking favorites is always difficult! But in writing the book I loved writing The Rat! He is so fragile and great. He’s trying so hard! He’s really making a go at his second chance. These few years later, I now have a super soft spot for Garth Skater, who wears his helmet all the time because he’s so beautiful, who makes Katy the punk primer cd mix that make up the chapter headings. And of course Katy and Lake, well, their hard blossoming friendship was a treat to write.

O’Shea: When you do a book like Beige, with a certain set of characters–do you ever have the temptation to revisit the characters in another novel?

Castellucci: Beige is the only book where I knew what would happen if I ever got to write a sequel. I knew where I wanted it to go. As a matter of fact, the first draft took place over the summer with the rat and then continued through the whole next school year. Kara LaReau, my editor and I had a long talk and decided to cut out the second half of that draft and just concentrate on the summer. Other than that, except for the Plain Janes, I haven’t really had the temptation to revisit characters. My books are usually pretty stand alone.

O’Shea: Back in 2007, when Beige first came out, you started a blog discussing favorite punk songs in honor of the book’s release. At the blog you run a photo of yourself giving the one-finger salute. The book finds its roots in punk music and the punk attitude, so the picture (in the right sidebar under “This is Cecil”) makes sense to me (and is funny). But do you ever worry that as a contemporary YA writer some potential consumers might be turned off by the photo?

Castellucci: Oh, the one finger salute! I try not worry about stuff like that. I think that as long as you are an excellent adult, honest, true to yourself, full of heart and good deeds, then it’s all good. That is the most important thing to show kids. How to be an excellent person. I try to be an excellent person. It’s a process. I would say that a better way to think of people being turned off by the photo or other things that make consumers (I’m going to venture that would be parents) uncomfortable, whether it be my smiling punk picture or the content of a book, any book, is that those are great opportunities to engage in an open conversation with kids. My feeling is that any entry into dialogue with kids is great. I bet if they sat down and talked with their kids about that picture, Why am I giving the finger? What is punk? then they would likely come to the same conclusion that you do, that in context, the book Beige finds its roots in punk music and the punk attitude. That’s a good dinner table conversation. I’m all about good dinner conversations. So I’m not going to worry about being shown with the finger as a YA author because I know that pretty much every single person has given the finger at some point. And I’ll probably give the finger at some point in the future about something. It happens.

O’Shea: With the Beige is Punk blog, what’s been some of your favorite songs that you’ve been introduced to through the blog?

Castellucci: Well, I finally watched the movie Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. Which is FANTASTIC! Also, I rediscovered a bunch of songs. I was actually surprised at how many songs I had known already and adored. But pretty much everything Douglas Wolk picked! He’s got such great eclectic, underground, wonderful taste and I hardly knew any of them.

O’Shea: Did anyone punk veterans happen to read the book (albeit not your target audience) and give you feedback on the book?

Castellucci: I wish!

O’Shea: When your career expanded into the world of graphic novels, did you find that coverage helped to expand consumer interest in your YA novels?

Castellucci: I think so! I think everybody finds out about you and your work different ways. I mean, I have some people who read a book of mine because they used to like my band. Or some people read their first graphic novel because they liked my YA novels and vice versa. I’m sure it all goes around. I think some people will like all of what I do with my different ways of telling stories, and some will only like one part. That’s cool. I’m going to keep telling my stories in all kinds of different ways and I’m sure people will come and go.

O’Shea: 2009 is the year of short stories for you. How did this creative decision come about? And while it’s only March, how is 2009 going so far–any pleasant or unpleasant creative surprises?

Castellucci: The fact that I only have short stories coming out in 2009 is a weird fluke! First, I co-edited an anthology about Geeks and the Geek Observed called Geektastic with Holly Black. Then I was asked to be in a Vampire anthology, The Eternal Kiss and that was so fun to write. The story is called Wet Teeth and it’s totally creepy and wretched! Yeah! Then I have a story called The Long and Short of Long Term Memory coming out on the Interstital Arts Foundation anthology Interfictions II. That story is special to me because it’s my first story that is not a young adult story, although it’s perfectly suitable for teens. The most interesting thing is that I feel like these short stories have given me a chance to explore a new literary voice. The stories have informed the new work in progress that I’m working on, which is a novel, which is going to be something very, very different for me. So it’s been enormously wonderful and completely surprising to write these short stories. I feel very lucky that these new pieces in this new voice have been so warmly received and that my efforts to grow as a writer are going to be published. It’s encouraging me to be braver in my work. I love that!

O’Shea: Given that The Long and Short of Long Term Memory (A quite engaging title, I must say) is allowing you to explore “a new literary voice”–I’m curious to hear in what ways has the new voice allowed you to venture into new territory–and how soon into the writing process did you discover you’d tapped into this new voice? Was it in the midst of writing it, or later–when you were revising it?

Castellucci: The new voice question is tricky. I think I had been starting to toy with a new voice, but it wasn’t really fully present yet. Previously I had written a novel (unpublished) (and totally secret cause it was so different from anything else I’d done) called The Cherry Tree, which I am going to finish now that the new voice has sort of settled in my body and I feel stronger about what I’m doing. My editor, Kara read it and remarked at how different it was for me. She encouraged me and even said that she thought that this was the voice I was meant to write in. But I was so nervous, so unconfident and I didn’t know what it was. It seemed that maybe because I had written more contemporary YA that people would think my new ideas would be too weird or something. Then, through a stroke of luck, my new editor at Candlewick, Deborah Noyes was editing an anthology of weird stories called Sideshow. When I found out, I was bummed that I wasn’t the kind of author that would be asked to be in weird anthologies like that. I mentioned to her that I would like to try to write something like that one day. A week later, one of the authors in the anthology had dropped out and Deb asked if I wanted to take a stab at a story. I wrote this story called The Bread Box and she was surprised at what I had done. That gave me a little boost, but I was still feeling too nervous to really try something like a novel or something for adults. The Long and Short of Long Term Memory came from watching my dad, a neurobiologist give a lecture on memory while I was in Montreal recovering from a psychological trauma. I came home that afternoon and wanted to write a story about someone who was trying to remove a specific memory from their mind. That day the new voice really took hold of me. I’m really proud of the story and now, hopefully, it’s more like I’ve just added some kind of je ne sais quoi to my work. I suppose it’s opened me up to even more kinds of story telling, and more possibilities for myself as an artist, which is a bonus. I am working on a novel now that is combining what I hope will be the best of my old voice and elements of the new, so fingers crossed that it blends beautifully.

O’Shea: Are your days of playing in band in your rearview mirror–or do you see yourself doing some musical projects at some point down the road?

Castellucci: Like Cher. There is always room for a musical comeback.

Enjoy this interview? Please subscribe to my RSS feed.