Welcome back to Author Spotlight! This week I’ll share part of my conversation with Maria Bostian, the author of several titles including the Fraidy Brady Series.
I wanted to start with the first publication I found, What Should Daisy Do? Is that the first manuscript that you completed or did you complete other ones before you published that one?
I wrote several of them and I did them in picture book form but that was way back probably 10 years before I ever thought about What Should Daisy Do?
I didn’t research, all I did was I went to a bookstore and bought a book on how to write for children. That was really when the internet was just starting to kick off so I was kind of isolated.
I didn’t know any other authors or anything so I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants. I got a binder full of rejection letters which now I understand completely why that happened. So, I just got frustrated and I put writing away for a number of years.
What Should Daisy Do? actually came much later. I worked for a fire department and I needed a story–I needed something to go along with the matches and lighters lesson. So, I wrote a very short–probably four to five paragraph story–and as I went to different schools doing the lessons people started asking about the story.
Where did I get that? Was it something they could have? When I told people that it was something I wrote myself because I saw a need, then they encouraged me to keep writing.
That’s so great to get that kind of encouragement you know when you’re not expecting it, out of the blue.
Yeah there’s that encouragement from people I never ever thought would have ended up being my cheerleaders. It was interesting how that happened.
So, the Fraidy Brady series–I love that name by the way. I love the rhyming names so much! Where did that character come from, because you said you started with that series even before Daisy?
A lot of children’s writing workshops will actually discourage the matchy matchy names like that. They say that it shows you don’t know a whole lot about the business or that you’re a new writer or whatever.
But I kept it anyway. I think I started writing Fraidy Brady in 2004. My husband and I met at a fire department. We got married and he was working shift work so that 24 hours when he would be gone to work, especially on the weekends, that could seem like forever.
So, I started writing Fraidy Brady for whatever reason was inspired and I had time to write, time to query, time to send off manuscripts. Back then it was by mail. I’m telling my age here.
I feel like people were still doing it until very recently. It was still more of an option but the pandemic is when they really went straight virtual for the most part.
So, the Fraidy Brady character started way back then and I really wish I could remember. There was no aha moment. I’ve always loved cats. There’s not been a time in my life when I haven’t had a cat.
And so, the cat character and trying to deal with important safety related topics…children tend to gravitate, you know, a lot of times in my training at the fire department, I know that if you’re trying to talk to a young child about something of a delicate nature if you’ve got like a stuffed animal they’ll tend to talk to the stuffed animal or relate more to the stuffed animal than the actual person.
I was trying to use that anthropomorphic character to try to become a relatable character as opposed to a child doing these things that they weren’t supposed to do or that they were afraid of or having these experiences they were afraid of.
They were super long for picture books. I didn’t follow any of the picture book rules. Now I know why I got all those rejection letters.
When I decided to actually get them back out and reread them and look at them again, I pitched them to the publisher as the early chapter book series. I had never done chapter books but I started reading them. There were some chapter books that I read several in the series and I use those as inspiration as far as word count and page length. Things like that. I think it’s called Appleville Elementary.
I tried to do my research when I pitched them. The publisher that I have been blessed to work with is primarily a Christian publisher but since I think my books are probably some of the few that they do that are considered good clean but have no real Christian background to them. I pitched them and at first we were going to do two a year.
They wanted to do two back to back. Then the pandemic hit and as we all know, that changed up everything. Paper consumption–printing slowed. Everything slowed down.
So, I’ve had two come out and then I have one that’s in the publication process.
When you hit an obstacle, I know you said before you got all those rejection letters. You just put them away and then later you came back to it. What keeps you going when you do hit an obstacle?
That’s a tough one. I think it’s funny how things hit when you get something like that. When something like that happens, you get that rejection letter or you don’t win that contest or whatever, for me, a lot of times other things will happen. Like this past weekend, I met a 12 by 12er and we spent a couple hours in a Barnes and Noble together.
We’re not necessarily writing the same things, but it was just so cool to sit and talk to her. I take that as a little victory.
I don’t think anybody in my family realizes how cool I think that is. What were the chances that I would read the post where she commented that she was from South Carolina and we have a home in South Carolina.
Or I’ll get a picture from a parent and it’ll have a child reading my book and it’ll say, “I just want you to know we have to read this every night before we go to bed.” You get something like that and it’s like, ‘oh, I gotta keep doing this.’
I will say I can wallow with the best of them. When I’m wallowing, some rocky road ice cream or some carrot cake, some really good carrot cake can certainly soothe the soul.
Birthday cake ice cream is my go-to usually. Is there anything else you wanted to add?
The most important thing is not to ever give up. No matter what happens. You just never know. I’ve put my writing away and it’s always resurfaced.
Where can readers find you and your book?
My books are available on Amazon and other booksellers. You can also find me on my Facebook author page or website.
We had a great conversation about momentum, creativity, and writing, I hope you enjoyed this segment of it! Stay tuned next week for my talk with Candelaria Norma Silva, the author of Stacey Became A Frog One Day and other titles.
