00:00:00 Molly Rauh
Hello and welcome back to this CCIA Literacy Conversations podcast. I'm your host Molly Rauh with my co-host...

00:00:08 Jessica Rickert
...Jessica Rickert. Today's podcast features, Melanie Conklin, Melanie's work centers around writing middle grade novels. Melanie shares about her writing process, inspiration for her stories, and how Nicholas Sparks helped her get started in the publishing world. We are here with Melanie Conklin. Thank you, Melanie, for joining us on our our podcast. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about your background?

00:00:36 Melanie Conklin
Sure thing. Hi, I'm Melanie. I'm very excited to come and visit Denver in the beginning of 2022. Let's all take a moment to acknowledge how ridiculous it is that it's almost 2022. But my background was in not writing at all. I actually went to design school and studied to be a product designer. Most people don't know what that is. But basically, if you've ever been in Target or Walmart, all that stuff on the shelves that's what a product designer works on. We decide what something looks like and how it works; these kind of consumer products that you have in your home. So if you've ever seen like a giant cupcake birthday cake, it's like a giant cake, and it comes out of a pan. I designed that pan. So you probably have stuff in your house that I designed and worked on. That's a fun talking point. But so I was I was a designer for about 10 years. I quit to stay home with my kids while they were little, and I still liked them. And and I got bored during that time, started writing. And, and five years later, I was an author. So that's how I got here.

00:01:41 Molly Rauh
So I feel like they're have to be more steps from going from writer to authors. Or are there some stories or some pieces there of how you went from? Like I'm writing with my time to I have something published?

00:01:55 Melanie Conklin
Sure. You know, it's interesting because I've been in publishing for a few years now, and I've met a lot of writers, and a lot of them have very circuitous unexpected paths to becoming authors. For me, I just think I have always had a love of the creative process. So when I had this like energy, one day, I woke up and thought, Oh, I have this idea for the story. Well, if I was writing that, I'd started this way. And so at nap time, I was like, well, why don't I just write that down? Like I have Microsoft Word like I can do that for free and product design. You have to bet I have about a million dollars to like, make a product. But for a book, all you have to have is somewhere to write, you know, even on paper. So I started writing, and I told my husband, you know, I think I'm writing a book, and he was like, of course, you are. So just let me know when it's done. And then I then I tried to read the whole internet, you know, to learn how to be a writer. I finished that first draft, and it was really bad. It did all the things that you're not supposed to do. So the protagonist was like 14 which is the dead space in between middle grade and YA. And she woke up from a dream on the first page and looked in the mirror immediately, which all three of those things are bad. Like none of that is good. And so once I started learning what I needed to do, I explored more, discovered that my voice for middle grade was something that really resonated with me. And "Counting Thyme" was my first book that was published was the third book that I wrote. And when I wrote that one in my critique, partners are reading it. They were like, you know, this is something like this. This reads like a real book. What's funny is it really didn't. There was still a lot of work that needed to be done. But at that point, I entered into the arena of trying to find an agent. And, you know, most people are always like. So how did you get your book published? Like, did you just send it to the publisher, or whatever? What happens is, an author works with an agent who's like your representative, who then takes your book to a publisher and convinces an editor at that publisher to buy it. And then you get paid, and the agent gets a chunk of what you get paid. So it's the first big decision you have to make when you're entering publishing is what agent are you going to work with? And so I had a few different agents that were interested in me, which was great, very fortunate. And my agent that I ended up working with at that time, he was didn't have a ton of experience yet with his own clients. But he said, you know, one of our I want to have one of our agency clients call. You can answer questions. And I was like, okay, that sounds good. So he told me what time I was going to get a call, but he didn't tell me who was calling. So my phone rings and I pick it up. And on the other end of the line, the guy says, "Hi. This is Nicholas Sparks, isn't that wild?" And I went, "What?" and he goes, "This is Nicholas Sparks, you know, the author, you know, I you, you're looking to work with one of my agents." And I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." So I was totally my brain emptied of all thoughts. Like, what am I supposed to say to Nicholas Sparks? Right? Well, he turned out to be super helpful. You know, has a ton of experience could answer any question I had. And of course, had some real verbal gems that I was just like, wow, I can't believe I just heard him say that to me on the phone. So I did end up signing with that agent. We don't work together anymore now, for totally other reasons. But we had a great time working together for a few years. And I will never forget having Nicholas Sparks call me from from the road to talk to me about publishing.

00:05:40 Jessica Rickert
That is an amazing story. I would have probably freaked out too, and not been able to talk about anything, coherently. So with your first book, it centers around cancer, right?

00:05:54 Melanie Conklin
Yeah.

00:05:55 Jessica Rickert
So, tell us about how did that play? Like, was there a personal experience that you felt the need to write this book around that?

00:06:07 Melanie Conklin
Sure. So my my debut novel was for middle grade readers, and it's called "Counting Thyme." But time is spelled with an "H"- "Y" like the herb. And it's about a girl named Thyme who moves across the country for her little brother's cancer treatment. And it's sort of about that conflict that you have if you're a sibling where you often want things for yourself. But you have to compromise a lot, because there are other children who need things in your family as well. Which I have a little sister. So there's a lot of fodder for me about that topic. I was gravitated towards writing about pediatric cancer and specifically, neuroblastoma, because a few years prior to writing this, when I lived in Brooklyn, one of our neighbors' children was diagnosed with neuroblastoma. And this was when blogs had just started. And so everybody was like, wow, you can read it. You can read about each other's like daily lives like, and they can just post updates. And everyone in our neighborhood followed their blog and organized meal train and raised funds when they needed it for different things. And I became pretty intimately familiar with how difficult the treatment is for a lot of pediatric cancers, specifically this one. And I felt like it was just a really, really tough position for parents to be in that you're pursuing a treatment that you know is painful and difficult for your child. But it's the best chance they have. It's the best chance science can give them to outlive the disease. That's what I wanted to write about in that book. And I think it was the first middle grade that was had neuroblastoma knit, pretty sure, but I was personally familiar with it. Then I started working with a group called Cookies for Kids Cancer that raises funds to support research in that arena and part of what I, my proceeds from "Counting Thyme," went to supporting their research.

00:08:02 Jessica Rickert
And you have some crazy statistics about childhood cancer on your website, which, like, shocked me. I didn't know that it would - isn't it the greatest killer of kids? Like that's how kids die the most deaths are attributed to cancer.

00:08:23 Melanie Conklin
Yeah, you would. You would think it might be something else. But actually, pediatric cancer is the leading cause of death in childre. A lot of times, because it's not discovered until it's quite late. A lot of times you don't have the signs that you have with adult bodies. And so, and things are progressing quickly, because they have rapidly dividing cells, you know, because they are growing. So that's what neuroblastoma in particular is cancer of the nervous system. So it can appear anywhere that you have nerves, which means it can be all over your whole body, not only in your brain and your spine. So that can make it really hard to treat. And and that's what was kind of astonishing to me when I got to know the statistics through cookies for kids cancer was that there was so little money being spent on on cures for for children or even treatment, and that it's very difficult to even develop treatments ethically, because you don't want to do a study where you're giving placebo to children, you know, in order -so most of these treatments, including the one that's depicted in "Counting Thyme," which is an antibody treatment. They remain in clinical trial status permanently, because in order to get approval, they have to do a blind study, and they would have to knowingly let children suffer without getting the treatment. And that's just a real conflict of ethics. So it's very complicated trying to develop new treatments for pediatric cancer. And that's why supporting it is really important because they don't have the same kind of funding draw that say breast ca