Ten Fun Facts About COMING UP SHORT!
Ten Fun Facts About COMING UP SHORT!
Behind-the-scenes tidbits about my about-to-release book + updates on virtual and in-person events
My new middle grade novel, Coming Up Short, comes out next Tuesday, June 21st, on the first official day of summer! I’ve been busy working on a couple of guest essays that will run on other sites next week, so I don’t have any more essays in me. But I do have lots of behind-the-scenes tidbits I’m eager to share. So for this month’s newsletter, I thought I’d share a list of ten fun facts about the book.
1.) The original working title was Hang the Moon. That phrase comes up throughout the novel because the main character Bea’s grandmother says Bea’s parents think she hung the moon. It’s thematically important, but it doesn’t offer a clear sense of what the story is about. Coming Up Short is a much better title for this book and lends itself to that amazing softball-as-the-O cover design, so I’m happy we switched it. Plus, I didn’t know it yet, but Kate Albus already had dibs on moon-hanging titles; her A Place to Hang the Moon came out last year and is an absolute gem.
2.) Coming Up Short has two settings that are both fictionalized versions of real places. Butler, the New Jersey town where Bea lives, is very loosely inspired by Morristown, NJ, where I grew up. Gray Island, the Massachusetts island where Bea travels, is also the setting of Up for Air, and it’s very loosely inspired by Nantucket, where we used to go on vacation when I was a kid.
3.) I can’t seem to stop writing about ice cream. There are important scenes in which characters are eating ice cream in both Up for Air and Saint Ivy, and an ice cream shop called the Creamery features prominently in Coming Up Short. The Creamery is inspired by two real ice cream places—the Juice Bar in Nantucket and the South Street Creamery in Morristown.
4.) Re-using a setting meant I got to include fun cameos but also had to fact-check myself. Annabelle from Up for Air gets a brief cameo in Coming Up Short, and attentive readers will notice references to a couple of other Up for Air characters as well. Annabelle’s stepdad Mitch also used to briefly appear, but I cut his scene. (Sorry if you’re a Mitch fan!) In the last stages of editing Coming Up Short, I had to go back through Up for Air to make sure I’d used the right name for the bagel shop and given Creamery employees the right color T-shirts and other details like that.
5.) I stole the whole summer escape plot. From myself. Several years ago, I wrote a young adult novel about a girl from New Jersey who escapes to Gray Island to stay with her estranged dad for the summer after her world gets shaken up at home. That book didn’t sell to a publisher, but I used the Gray Island setting and a few key characters in Up for Air, and now here I am with a new novel about a girl from New Jersey who escapes to Gray Island to stay with her estranged aunt for part of the summer after her world gets shaken up at home. Everything about the book except that basic setup is completely different, but I was happy to make good use of it.
6.) During revisions, I made cuts to speed up pacing and decrease word count because I wanted to get the book under 300 pages…but I didn’t really understand how page counts work. I know some teachers and librarians find it challenging to get kids to pick up books that are more than 300 pages, and I wanted this book to be similar in length to Up for Air, which is 288. I made a lot of strategic cuts, but I couldn’t get the word cut down quite as low as Up for Air’s. When I first saw the book beautifully laid out as a PDF, there was a comment from one of the people working on the design saying they needed to find a way to open up spacing and stretch the book to 304 pages. Turns out page counts have to be multiples of 16, so if the book couldn’t fit in 288 pages, it had to be 304. The cuts made the book tighter and I love the interior design exactly as it is, so I have no regrets! I just had to laugh seeing a comment about stretching the page count to 304 when I’d been so set on getting it under 300.
7.) I did another revision pass looking for ways I could make the book funnier. My friend and critique partner Cordelia Jensen read the novel between revisions, and she pointed out that I could find opportunities to increase the humor and playful moments. If the book makes you laugh, that’s probably thanks to Cordelia.
8.) The art storyline was a late addition. I needed more Bea and Aunt Mary content, and I needed Bea to explore other parts of herself outside of softball. I’d tried to do some directed drawings with my daughter last year (she was not a fan, but I was), and on a whim I tried having Bea and Aunt Mary do some of those together. Those scenes seemed to do the trick!
9.) It was a joy to write about a sport I actually know. When I wrote Up for Air, the main character, Annabelle, insisted on being a swimmer, which was quite inconvenient since I’ve never been on a swim team. I had fun learning more about swimming, but I promised myself that next time I wrote about sports, I’d choose a one I knew well. I still had one of my former students (who played softball more seriously—and recently!—than I did) do an expert read to make sure I didn’t mess anything up, but it was a joy to incorporate many of the things that stressed me out about softball as well as all the things I loved about the game—including making up silly cheers with my teammates.
10.) Writing Coming Up Short was basically the opposite experience of writing Saint Ivy. This book poured out of me and the general plot stayed the same from my initial outline through the final draft, BUT I had to do a lot of work in revisions to figure out Bea’s emotional arc, and I completely rewrote all the most important scenes at the end. On the other hand, Saint Ivy felt impossible to finish drafting and I had to change the plot significantly in revisions, BUT the emotional arc and key scenes at the end barely changed from first draft to last. Go figure!
News & Events
Obviously the big news this month is: this book is about to release! If you’ve enjoyed my fun facts (and/or if you’ve enjoyed my other newsletters or my other books), please consider pre-ordering a signed and personalized copy for yourself or a 10-14 year-old reader in your life from Children’s Book World. The store will ship out books after my launch party. Or if you’d like to check out the book from the library or buy a copy elsewhere, that would be awesome, too!
I’m excited to have some virtual and in-person events scheduled and hope you can join me for one of them! The launch party will be streamed on Children’s Book World Haverford’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. Please note that all times are EST, and I’m waiting for confirmation on the exact time at H&H Books in Philadelphia on July 10th, but it should be late morning.
Recommendations
Two middle grade books I’ve recently loved (which happen to pair beautifully because both are told from the perspective of a kid who’s trying to track down a classmate who has run away) are Tae Keller’s Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone and Lin Thompson’s The Best Liars in Riverview. Both also deal with bullying and identity, and have captivating first-person voices. I also loved Lupe Wong Won’t Dance by Donna Barba Higuera, which was great as an audiobook and made me laugh and think (while also teaching me about square dancing). Finally, Diane Magras’s Secret of the Shadow Beasts is a fast-paced, emotional, and character driven fantasy; her storytelling swept me away and I think kids will love this one at least as much as I did.
Thanks, as always, for reading!
Love, Laurie