Guest Post - Gina Linko ( Author of Flutter)
Today's Guest Post Author is "Gina Linko" author of the Teen Fiction book "Flutter". Click here to check out "The Phantom Paragrapher's" thoughts on her book :
Guest Post - Gina Linko :
Way back when the Internet was just learning to sit up on its own and I was still wearing my 90s leopard-print Doc Martens, I taught seventh grade language arts. I was good friends with the fabulous librarian (seriously, folks, aren't librarians just the best!) and that was when I spent a lot of time reading young-adult literature. My students gobbled up books by Joan Lowery Nixon and Christopher Pike, and lots of other talented authors. They loved books with a little mystery, horror, suspense.
And in my grown-up life, I LOVED to read Stephen King and Dean Koontz. My favorite, favorite stories were the ones that involved normal, everyday people -- contemporary -- but then something just a tad beyond the normal enters in. Then the reader, along with the characters, has to struggle with this newly ascertained slice of science fiction, and the good writers make you believe in it, make you feel like it is possible. They make you think that maybe that could happen. Maybe science and the laws of our natural world could stretch and bend and leave a little loophole for something extraordinary ... and maybe even a little creepy. I mean, we've all been there, right? Reading at two in the morning, with the lights off, starting to hear all the noises in the house, seeing shadows around every corner, wishing we would've just went to sleep already! But, no, we're up reading and we're freaked out. (And loving it!) Those are the best books EVER.
One of my favorite Stephen King books is The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I think it could easily be YA, with a young protagonist, who gets lost in the woods. It is such a thrill-ride, with just a dash of the speculative. I love this book because it is exactly my favorite kind of story. Believable and normal in all its details, with just a little twist, written is such a way that you are able to suspend belief, because it's woven into the story in such a way, that it actually makes sense.
Another of my absolute faves when I was a teen was Watchers by Dean Koontz. I mean, who couldn't believe that a golden retriever might possibly have enough intelligence to spell things out with scrabble tiles and actually communicate with you? We want to believe that.
Because isn't that what is really exciting and sometimes scary about this world? That we don't have it all figured out yet? That there are still some mysteries out there? That maybe, maybe, ... the next big scientific discovery will be something right out of a YA speculative novel?
In that little pocket of uncertainty, where things seem implausible but not impossible, that is where I like to write. And, yes, I do believe it is science fiction to a degree, but I like the term speculative better, because as my agent once told me, "the best thing about your stories is that they seem like they could really happen." (And there is no better compliment than that!)
So, in Flutter, I hope that I've woven together sci-fi elements, romance, and a mystery, because these are the things that my students -- and really I -- love to read about.
SCI- FI
In Flutter, Emery Land is a normal seventeen-year-old girl, with a totally abnormal secret. She has seizures, but they're not seizures; she is time-travelling, yet no one believes her. She calls it looping, but all of a sudden, her loops start to evolve and intertwine with her real life--her home loop. That is when things start to get interesting, setting her out on an adventure to save herself and to solve the mystery of her loops.
In Flutter, Emery Land is a normal seventeen-year-old girl, with a totally abnormal secret. She has seizures, but they're not seizures; she is time-travelling, yet no one believes her. She calls it looping, but all of a sudden, her loops start to evolve and intertwine with her real life--her home loop. That is when things start to get interesting, setting her out on an adventure to save herself and to solve the mystery of her loops.
ROMANCE
Of course, Emery meets a boy. A boy that has secrets all his own. Because along with the creepy what-if, sci-fi factors in stories, I love falling in love. Reading about falling in love. Falling in love with my characters. It's the best part. And I wanted to really explore what it means to fall in love, and why we are attracted to other people. What is the origin of that pull? Why do we feel so connected to others? But this love-story is star-crossed, time-crossed, and complicated from the get-go. (But aren't the best ones always?)
MYSTERY
When I first had the initial BAM! moment of the idea for FLUTTER, it was all about the ending. It's a didn't-see-that-coming, knock-your-socks-off shocker, I hope. Because I know that teen readers are SMART, and they want to have a mystery within a mystery within another mystery to try and figure out. They don't want to be able to figure it all out on page 15 or even 115.
I hope you will love reading Flutter, as much as I loved writing it. It is, to me, the exact kind of book I love to read.
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