Interview with Julie Halpern

I could go on for days about the interesting ways in which I have met people (you already know the bizarre way I met April Lurie, for one). Why can’t I simply meet someone by walking up and saying ‘Hello, sir or madam, pleased to make your acquaintance’ like normal humans do?

My connection with Julie Halpern was also unusual, and takes us back seven years. I won’t tell the story because it is very long, but I’ll leave it by saying it involved an overly-precocious 12-year-old me, a telephone call to a top editor at the biggest publishing house for children’s books, somehow ending up talking to a security guard instead, and the realization just a few months ago that Julie’s editor and that editor are the same person. Funny how small this world is. Thus I just had to have an:

Interview with Julie Halpern

1. Quick! Describe yourself in ten words or less (and ‘Hey Ya’ll I Wrote Get Well Soon It’s Real Good’ doesn’t count):

I’m a Harry Potter-Sims-Degrassi-roadtrip-husband-cat-Buffy-lovin’ fool. I’m not quite sure how many words that is, actually.

2. On your website (www.juliehalpern.com), you say you wrote lots of stories when you were younger, especially through high school. Did you ever think of yourself as becoming a writer one day?

No. I never really thought of myself as a “writer,’ I guess because it was just me doing it for myself or my friends. I took some creative writing classes in both high school and college, and even then I just took the classes because I enjoyed writing, not because I thought I wanted to be a writer. Looking back, the fact that I was always writing tells me that it was probably more important to me than I thought.

3. Where did the idea for your book GET WELL SOON come from?

Get Well Soon is a story about a girl in high school who’s hospitalized for depression, and I was hospitalized for depression in high school. Much of it is based on the weird things and people who I met while I was there. So much of it was so bizarre, almost unbelievable, that I always thought it would make a great book. I originally serialized the story as a zine, which made me think that maybe I could write a novel (I had never written anything that long). I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the novel writing process.

4. How did it come about that you decided to take the leap and start looking for a publisher?

My first book, Toby and the Snowflakes, is a picture book, which I originally wrote as a way for my husband, Matt, an illustrator, and I to work together. After we created a proposal using the Children’s Writers and Illustrators Market to find publishers, we sent the proposals out to nineteen different publishers. Then we waited. And waited. Eventually we received eighteen rejections and one maybe. We worked with the maybe on revisions for another six months, then we finally got the good news that it would be published. After that, I began writing Get Well Soon. By the time I was finished, our editor for Toby had left the publisher, so I knew I had to start from scratch in terms of where to send the book. Luckily, Matt had been having a lot of success as an illustrator and had made many contacts. I was particularly interested in editor Liz Szabla, who Matt was working with on a picture book. She always got back to him so quickly (rare in publishing) and seemed super friendly. I just had a feeling. So after a couple of rejections of early, incomplete drafts, I had my complete rough draft ready for Liz, not knowing what she would say. I emailed her and told her who I was, that I had a YA book about a girl in a mental hospital (but it’s funny!), and how I heard she was just moving to a new publisher (Feiwel and Friends). She wrote me back the next day, said the book sounded right up her alley, and I sent it to her immediately. And we just clicked.

5. How did the call go and where were you when you got the good news from an editor?

I was at work (in my middle school library), when I received an email from Liz asking if she could call me. We spoke, and for about ten minutes she told me all of the things she would like to change in Get Well Soon. I assumed she would want me to change those things, and then have me get back to her so she could take another look (another six months, perhaps?). Instead, she said, “We’d like to acquire the book.” After I hung up the phone, I ran out of my office and yelled that my book was going to be published. There were only two seventh grade boys in the library at the time, and they did the whole slow clap thing. It was pretty funny.

6. A lot of writers find that inadvertently, they base their main character’s personality off themselves. Has this happened with you and Anna Bloom, and if so, was it even intentional?

Anna’s a mix of who I was then and who I am now, but in a much more extreme way. I have never been that sarcastic. I think my sarcasm comes out in my writing because I generally think of sarcasm as a sort of negative force, and I try to be a more positive person. But it’s fun to be snarky in writing. Also, I’m such a different person than I was in high school, so it was hard to go back and write Anna completely as what I was then. I was probably too depressed at the time to be as funny as Anna is, although I’d like to believe that I was. Or even that I am now.

7. Do you have any sequels planned?Not yet. Some teens have expressed interest, although most adults say I shouldn’t. I wonder why that is. I think if I did make a sequel, that would be close to 100% fiction. My real life after I got out of the hospital isn’t really bookworthy. Or it would be a completely different series.

8. As a librarian on the side, have you ever had someone check your book out before while you were in the trenches?

Truthfully, I consider myself to be an author on the side of being a librarian, since I’m a librarian five days a week and am only able to write during summers and after school. I give Get Well Soon to my students all of the time! It’s really fun, actually. Particularly when I’m working on a book-I often give my students early drafts, and they say great things, which encourages me to keep writing. I get a lot of instant feedback whenever kids read any of my books, which I wouldn’t get if I didn’t see teens every day. And I think it’s fun for the kids that they have a published author in their library. Hopefully it inspires them to write, too.

9. What type of fiction does it seem teens are checking out from the library these days (I know, an obvious attempt to get insider information, but I can’t help it)?

They are LOVING Twilight, Elsewhere, Cirque du Freak, The Clique, Maximum Ride. I hand sell tons of books, but those are the ones that they automatically pick up.

10. I hear that you have another book coming out soon: anything you can tell about it?

I’m working on revisions right now, actually. It’s a YA novel about a girl named Jessie who’s confused about who her good friends really are. After her old friends decide to dabble in the punk scene, Jessie grows further apart from them and closer to those she shares her classes with- nerds, really. There’s some D&D mixed in there and lots of unique, funny characters. I’m still working on a punchy way to describe it. I’m hoping it will be finished for release in Fall 2009.