Magical realism naturally goes hand-in-hand with YA lit. Today you can check out an excerpt from Imaginary Friends by Chad Musick and then read about his journey to becoming a writer. Follow the tour for more and be sure to enter the great giveaway!
If the delivery had been a demonic bowling alley or a mermaid’s grotto, Ivy would have sent it away. She has standards, after all. But she can’t refuse a magical Library, especially when they’ve gone to the trouble of including a wheelchair ramp. They say that on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog, but somebody knows fourteen-year-old Ivy is an orphan, that she sells her paper-writing services to lazy college students, and that her imaginary friends are unhappy being stuck in the mural on the wall of her Alaskan home.
Himitsu refuses the Library, becoming angry enough to attack the delivery people with his bamboo sword. They won’t tempt him with books, any more than his mother has been able to tempt him into leaving their apartment during the past two years. He has all he needs: video games, online forums, and his virtual girlfriend Moe. Well, almost all. His dad’s death has left a hole in him, which is why when he receives text messages saying the Library can bring back the dead, he changes his mind. Moe tries to warn him about the danger, but what does she know, anyway?
Now, having been lured into the Library and having foolishly brought their imaginary friends with them, Ivy and Himitsu find those friends are trapped. The teens have a choice: fulfill the Librarian’s odd and painful demands in hopes of rescuing their friends or go back alone to their small, boring lives, knowing they’ve failed the only ones who really believe in them.
Read an excerpt:
All giraffes are named Janice, excepting a few heretics. The old guard, being traditionalists, are the most militant in asserting that this is the necessary state of affairs.
The Janice of our story, however, is not one of the old guard. He’s too young to be a veteran of the Nehming War, and to him the consequent Sophie massacre is something that happened to distant French relatives. Because of this, he is sometimes known to intimate that his name might, in fact, be Chanda. Despite this obvious breach in social graces, he doesn’t consider himself to be a deviant. In fact, he thinks of himself as quite normal. Janice is anything but normal. For one thing, he’s a giraffe. We mustn’t neglect this observation. Giraffes are not normal. But let us leave that aside for a moment and pretend they are. Humans, not being monstrosities except in aggregate, naturally regard involuntary baldness among the males as an unsightly defect. Bald men are likely to be regarded as degenerates. Some of them even become history teachers. Among boy giraffes, however, baldness of the ossicles—those little sticky-uppy bits on their heads—is a mark of honor gained by battering at other giraffes.
To his enduring shame, the tops of Janice’s ossicles are covered in thick, feathery hair. Not because he is cowardly (though he is) but because Janice has never met another giraffe. In fact, he’s never encountered a third dimension at all, being stuck in perpetual twilight in the paper jungle pasted to the wall of Ivy’s otherwise crappy little house.
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Your journey to becoming a writer
My journey to becoming a writer is steeped in pain. I began to write at the urging of my favorite teacher when I was 14 just after the death of my mother. My mother was ill for the majority of my life. I have very few memories of her healthy. She had a long battle with cancer, and her death was not unexpected. With that said, it was still really hard. When I started to write, I had what felt like a lifetime of trauma to work through. I am the middle child of five, autistic, and epileptic. My parents were ill-equipped when it came to managing my needs. My English teacher was the closest thing I had to an appropriate adult in my life. When she suggested I write, I was doubtful that it would help. I didn’t feel comfortable journaling or writing anything autobiographical, so I wrote short stories. When I was in high school, I won a few awards for my writing, but when I got to college, I put writing aside to focus on my first love: math. This led to about a five-year hiatus from writing anything that wasn’t required for school. I pretty much stopped writing fiction and began to focus on technical writing until my wife found a stash of my old work from high school and became passionate about my writing.
At my wife’s encouragement, I tried to pick it back up and just couldn’t seem to finish any of the stories I was writing. After graduating school, we moved to Japan and my focus shifted to my PhD, work, and securing permanent residency. This took 10 years, and I really didn’t write during this time. After securing permanent residency, I took a gap year and wrote two books. The first book I wrote doesn’t have a title and was too much of a deep cut of the cult I was raised in. My second book Not My Ruckus was published in 2021 and is a dark coming of age story. After completing Not My Ruckus, I was able to write my third book From the Lighthouse that is a Fisher King story with a very deep first-person point of view which explores identity. While working on these two books, I was also writing Imaginary Friends in which two teenagers enter into a magical library and complete tasks for the librarian to earn rewards. It is an adventure novel written in a very whimsical voice. Writing more than one novel at a time seems to be the only way I will complete a novel because I need to write about 2/3 of the book and then work on something else before I can come back to it and compete it. Without my sabbatical after securing permanent residency, I don’t know if I’d ever have finished a book. Having that year to do whatever I wanted gave me the space to write.
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Despite a tendency for electronic devices to burst into flame after Chad handles them, he persists in working in various technical and technology-related roles.
Chad makes no secret of being epileptic, autistic, and arthritic, facts that inform how he approaches both science and the arts.
Chad Musick will be awarding a $10 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
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Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteI like the cover. Sounds like a good book.
ReplyDeleteI like the cover and think the excerpt sounds really good.
ReplyDelete