CINDY BALDWIN INTERVIEW AND WHERE THE WATERMELONS GROW GIVEAWAY AND IWSG POST

Happy Tuesday Everyone! Hope you are going to have a fantastic holiday. Today I’m excited to have debut author Cindy Baldwin here to share about her MG contemporary WHERE THE WATERMELONS GROW. It sounds like a fantastic story that will pull at your heart.

But I first want to share that Literary Rambles made the Top 50 Writing Blogs by Best Value Schools. I'm honored to be included with the other fabulous blogs listed. You can see the complete list on their website.

IWSG POST

Before I get to my interview, I have my IWSG post, which we're all posting today due to the holiday.

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!

Posting: The first Wednesday (Tuesday this month)of the month is officially Insecure Writer's Support Group Day.

The co-hosts this month are: Nicki Elson, Juneta Key,Tamara Narayan, and Patricia Lynne!

Optional Question: What are your ultimate writing goals and have they changed over time?

This is a great question that I think about a lot. And yes, my goals have changed. When I started writing when my daughter was four (she's now 21), my goal was to get published, and I was super excited about it. My first manuscript got a full request from a publisher at Little Brown and went to acquisitions, where it was not quite strong enough. But I was so happy because I knew it wasn't ready.

Over the years, my writing progress has been slow due to a full-time job as an attorney, care giving to my late husband, and being a dedicated mom. Then this blog took more time. And as I watched other author's careers, I saw how up and down it can be, which tempered my excitement. Since I lost my husband four years ago, many of my dreams slipped away, and I am still trying to find my way.

I am grateful that I have a writing job where I sort of support myself and make at least $2,000 a month. I love the writer's life and writing every day. But as I am now taking care of my mom, my own writing time is limited. Hopefully at some point in the future (it's awhile away), I'll have grandkids to help my daughter take care of. So I don't know if I'll ever have enough time to produce a book on a regular time schedule, which is necessary if you want to be published. Plus I'm worried about the marketing. I'm okay with online promotions, but don't really want to travel much to market a book. 

So, with all this, I'm not sure I have the desire and goal of getting published anymore. I'll just have to see how it goes over the next years and plan to enjoy the process. Plus my writing job will be a great part-time job to pick up money when I retire so I don't plan to quit writing.

What about you? Have your goals changed over time?

Now onto Cindy's interview.

Now here’s a blurb about WHERE THE WATERMELONS GROW from Goodreads:

Twelve-year-old Della Kelly has lived her whole life in Maryville, North Carolina. She knows how to pick the softest butter beans and sweetest watermelons on her daddy’s farm. She knows ways to keep her spitfire baby sister out of trouble (most of the time). She knows everyone in Maryville, from her best friend Arden to kind newcomer Miss Lorena to the mysterious Bee Lady.

And Della knows what to do when the sickness that landed her mama in the hospital four years ago spirals out of control again, and Mama starts hearing people who aren’t there, scrubbing the kitchen floor until her hands are raw, and waking up at night to cut the black seeds from all the watermelons in the house. With Daddy struggling to save the farm from a record-breaking drought, Della decides it’s up to her to heal Mama for good. And she knows just how she’ll do it: with a jar of the Bee Lady’s magic honey, which has mended the wounds and woes of Maryville for generations.

Hi Cindy! Thanks so much for joining us.

1. Tell us about yourself and how you became a writer.

I have honestly been writing for as long as I can remember! I always thought I started in upper elementary school, but a few years ago I found a story that I'd written and illustrated at age seven. It was a very dramatic retelling of Beauty and the Beast, which even had a series title, so I guess at one point I intended to retell and illustrate more fairy tales! I really got serious about writing, though, as a teenager. I participated in NaNoWriMo when I was sixteen and seventeen, and it was a really transformative experience. It taught me that I could write and finish a whole novel, which I think is often the most difficult part of getting started! Later, after college, I started to query a novel in hopes of finding an agent. I ended up querying two books before WATERMELONS, neither of which landed an agent. I was actually about to give up trying to get published for good when I got the offer of representation for WHERE THE WATERMELONS GROW!

2. Where did you get the idea for WHERE THE WATERMELONS GROW?

A few years ago, when my daughter (now five) was about one, I was singing "Down By The Bay" to her when I started wondering what the backstory of that song might be. The idea of this child who's so distressed by their mother's mental illness that they run away from home really stuck with me, and spoke to some of my own deep insecurities and worries as a disabled parent. I knew very early on in the planning process that I wanted this to be a disability-positive book, where a kid comes to recognize that disability in her family doesn't prevent them from having a happy, loving, positive life, and that her mother's disability is a part of who her mother is and not something to be "fixed" or "cured." As a disabled reader and writer, it's really important to me that books capture the complexities and difficulties of disability honestly, but do it in a way that doesn't paint disability either as incompatible with happiness or as "inspiration porn."

3. Awesome how a song inspired your story. And I love that it is disability-positive. My late husband was disabled and a parent. One of the things that people have said about your story is how you have really captured Della’s voice. That’s not easy to do, especially in middle grade. How did you get her voice so well and what tips do you have for the rest of us on strengthening our characters voice?

By nature, I'm an immersive, lyrical, descriptive writer. In fact, I spent so many years studying how to write in a descriptive and poetic way that it took me a lot longer to figure out how to create, um, a plot. (There's a reason those first two novels didn't get an agent!) I am a big fan of studying other authors' works and trying to pinpoint the things you especially love about them, and then incorporating those ideas into your own writing. I also write the book as though a character is narrating it to me as much as I can, trying to really run through each sentence in my head (and later, during revision, aloud) so that I can get a feel for how it flows and whether it feels realistic for that character. With Della, who is from a very rural area of North Carolina, I stuck to a traditional Southern dialect. I'm not a big fan of exaggerated dialects in books (where authors use lots of apostrophes and butchered spellings to convey a character's voice), so instead I paid a lot of attention to the syntax, the way Della formed her sentences, the kinds of words she chose to use.

I also spent some time watching Youtube videos of people in Bertie County, NC, to remind myself of

what the particular accent sounded like! In general, developing a good listening ear is crucial for creating a good writing voice. For middle grade, too, I think it's vital to put yourself as much as possible into the mental space of a preteen. It's such a unique time of life, and preteens have this very specific way of seeing the world; they're caught between childhood and adulthood, and it really influences a lot of how they interact with their surroundings.

4. Ha! Plot comes much easier to me than description. It also sounds like you also did a good job really making your setting feel like a real Southern town. I know you grew up in North Carolina. Did you mostly draw on your memories or did you research when creating your setting?

Both! I did grow up in North Carolina, though it was a few hours southwest of where Della's family lives. I've spent a lot of time driving through the rural Coastal Plains area of NC, and I drew a lot on my memories of those trips when creating Maryville, Della's fictional town. I also modeled it a bit after Hartsville, South Carolina, a small farming community where my great-grandparents owned a family farm not unlike Della's—I spent some time there almost every summer I was growing up. And of course, I did a lot of research, too! I looked at pictures, researched the demographics of Bertie County, watched videos on YouTube, and used Google Street View (my favorite writer tool!!!) to take "drives" up and down the highways by which Maryville would be located. There's no town that is an exact stand-in for Maryville—I wanted to create a very isolated community, so I fudged distances a little bit to make all the nearby towns a bit farther away than would actually be true in real life—but it's definitely heavily inspired by several real towns near the Albemarle Sound.

5. Della’s mother suffers with mental illness, and this plays a big role in Della’s character growth. What were some of the challenges of weaving this into your story in the right way to both portray Della’s mother as someone who suffers with this illness and how it affected Della as she was going through her middle grade year?

Like I mentioned above, I really wanted to show that disability (including mental illness) is a part of life, and something that isn't incompatible with happiness—but I also wanted to explore the stress that illness can place on a family. It was definitely a tough balance. I also sometimes struggled to balance the intensity of Della's struggle throughout the book, trying to cure her mama, with the lighter, more normal moments in her life—playing by Hummingbird Bay with her best friend, taking care of her spitfire of a little sister (who is heavily based on my daughter!), having a crush on a neighbor boy. The story itself is pretty heavy, and so I tried to create scenes that would be a little bit of a breather for the reader, a moment to relax a bit and maybe even laugh.

6. That's important because a kid's life is not all heavy, even if they are dealing with their parent's disabilities. Your agent is Elizabeth Harding. Share how she became your agent and what your road to publication was like.

Like I mentioned, I queried two books without success before WATERMELONS, and was about ready to give up querying at least for awhile by the time I sent WATERMELONS out. I decided that I would send some queries and if I didn't get any interest, I'd stop querying and focus on something else! I started querying in mid-March of 2016, got some initial requests, and then in early April, I entered the first #DVPit Twitter contest, organized by Beth Phelan. I hadn't had much success in Twitter contests with my previous books, so I didn't think I'd get much love in this one, but still felt like as a disabled writer writing about disability, #DVPit was a good fit for my book. To my surprise, my notifications blew up that day, and I ended up with a lot of requests!

Within about four days, I had my first offer from a contest agent, and over the next week and a half the offers kept pouring in. It was absolutely wild—I had gone from being the girl with over 110 rejections to being the girl with 10 agent offers in 10 days. It was so exciting, but also incredibly disorienting and surprisingly stressful! I had to turn down so many amazing agents, many of whom I still think about two years later. Elizabeth was one of the final offers to roll in. She hadn't requested from me during #DVPit, but after I sent a post-offer nudge to agents I'd queried, Elizabeth read my manuscript and offered. There were so many incredible agents I could've chosen, but ultimately I went with Elizabeth because she is an unbelievably kind, humble, and nurturing agent, and I knew I needed some hand-holding! After signing with Elizabeth, WATERMELONS sold fairly quickly to Harper. I officially accepted their offer July 5, 2016, almost exactly two years before the publication day.

(Oh, and I feel compelled to add—I used Literary Rambles EXHAUSTIVELY when querying all three of my books, reading through every kidlit agent's profile and using QueryTracker to make lists of all the ones who repped my genres. I still today recommend to newly querying authors that they take a few nights to sit down with the Literary Rambles agent database to compile a really good list before they get started!)

7. Thanks for the sweet words. What was something that surprised you about being a debut author and why?

I'd sort of gathered this from 2017 debut friends, but I was still surprised by how much anxiety there is around debuting! In many ways, all the worries and insecurities of querying and submission just get worse once you have a book coming out into the world. When I was querying, I dealt with rejection by taking action and sending more queries; while it wasn't fun, it still gave me the chance to be proactive and DO something about it. As a debut, that feeling of ownership over my career is a lot more tenuous. If a reviewer or librarian or bookseller hates my book, there's just not much I can do about it! It's also very easy to compare myself to other debut authors—in terms of publisher promotion, or honors and awards, or simply the fact that they seem to have it all together. I definitely think it's important to cultivate healthy mental health habits during your debut year, something I've been working on a lot! I've taken up hand embroidery, which is a fantastic way to calm down; not only is the action soothing and meditative, but I have total control over the results, which is something very lacking in publishing!

8. That's great to focus on doing things that you can control. I saw on your website that you have a monthly middle grade book club. Tell us how that started and how it is helping you reach middle graders, teachers, and parents.

My dear friend (we call each other "writing twins" because we have the same agent, have mentored together in Pitch Wars, and write very topically similar books) Amanda Rawson Hill is also a 2018 debut; her phenomenal book THE THREE RULES OF EVERYDAY MAGIC comes out in September. Last year, she approached me about starting a joint newsletter, because neither of us was especially enthusiastic about starting traditional author newsletters. She suggested that we could create a newsletter book club, spotlighting a new middle grade read every month. I thought it was a fantastic idea! It's really grown and flourished over the last year; each month, we have an exclusive author interview, discussion questions, an activity, a recipe, and a hand-drawn printable (by amazing author-illustrator Remy Lai, who's a 2019 debut). It's been really exciting to see our Middle Grade @ Heart community grow over the last year! We've connected with some amazing teachers, librarians, and passionate MG authors through it. It has definitely helped both Amanda and I gain more personal visibility in the education community, but it's also just been so fun to get to geek out every month with other lovers of middle grade lit, and shower some love over authors and books that we feel are exceptional examples of the genre.

9. What are you doing to spread the word about your book?

I'm pretty active on social media, and I've definitely been sharing book-related things there—both things about the inspiration and writing process, and honors like starred reviews, the fact that WATERMELONS is an Indies Introduce/Indie Next title, etc. I also have been working for the last few months on some summer publicity and marketing to coincide with my release, like guest blogging, giveaways, a book trailer, and some videos that teachers can use in their classrooms to talk both about my book and about schizophrenia and what it is. (I've realized through this publication process that a LOT of people, including adults, really don't know what it is at all!) I've tried, as well, to cultivate some fun relationships with teachers and librarians, and get ARCs into the hands of as many as possible. Teachers, librarians, and booksellers have been some of the most enthusiastic champions of WATERMELONS, and I can't even describe how much their support means to me!

I've also tried to spend a lot of time boosting other debut authors; I've been lucky enough to be part of many Electric 18s ARC tours, and have really enjoyed reading upcoming books and spotlighting them on my own social media. I am a firm advocate of publishing karma, and the idea that what you put out into the universe in terms of loving on other peoples' books will eventually come back to you!

10. What are you working on now?

Currently, I'm editing my 2019 book, as well as finishing up a draft of my third middle grade, which might just be my favorite yet. Hopefully I can share more about both soon!

Thanks for sharing all your advice Cindy. You can find Cindy at http://cindybaldwinbooks.com/, https://twitter.com/beingcindy, and https://www.instagram.com/cindybaldwinbooks/. You can also find more information on the Middle Grade @ Heart Book Club at https://mgbookvillage.org/mg-at-heart-book-club/

Cindy has generously offered a hardback of WHERE THE WATERMELONS GROW for a giveaway. To enter, all you need to do is be a follower (just click the follow button if you’re not a follower) and leave a comment through July 14th. If your e-mail is not on your Google Profile, you must leave it in the comments to enter the contest.

If you mention this contest on Twitter, Facebook, or your blog, mention this in the comments and I'll give you an extra entry. You must be 13 years old or older to enter. The book giveaway is international  as long as Book Depository ships to you.

Here's what's coming up (FYI I'm on my summer schedule.):

Monday, July 9th I have an interview with debut author Bree Barton and a giveaway of her YA HEART OF THORNS

Saturday, July 14th I'm participating in the Christmas in July Giveaway Hop.

Monday, July 23rd I have an interview with debut author K.A. Reynolds and a giveaway of her MG fantasy THE LAND OF YESTERDAY

Hope to see you on Monday!