Oh my gosh, I've hit the jackpot.
Shh!
Sorry, sorry.
Excuse me, how many books am I allowed to check out?
Four at a time.
But what if I want to check out 12?
Could you make an exception?
No, no exceptions.
Yo, Cap!
Let's get our read on, baby!
Shh!
Ryan, respect the library.
Keep your voice down.
My bad, I'm just so hyped.
There's so many cool books here.
I know, me too.
What'd you find?
I found a cool graphic novel called Whistle by E. Lockhart.
It's about a 16-year-old girl in Gotham City who also happens to be the first Jewish superhero.
No way.
I love Whistle.
You know we had E. Lockhart on the 10 News, right?
E. Lockhart was on the 10 News?
Shh.
Sir, if you don't control yourself, I will put you in time out.
Sorry.
Wait.
They do time out in the library?
I told you.
Respect the library.
And yes, E. Lockhart was on the show.
Do you want to hear the interview?
Of course I do.
I'm Ryan Willard.
That's Tracy Leeds Kaplan.
And this is a 10 News Road Trip Remix.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
We're so happy that you're here with us.
We are so excited.
I'm excited to learn about a new comic book.
Tell us about it.
Whistle is about a teenager living in Gotham City.
And if you don't know this already, Gotham City is where Batman lives.
And, along with Batman, all of the villains that Batman fights, including the Riddler and Poison, Ivy and Killer Croc, who show up in my book.
She lives in Gotham City.
Her name is Willow Zimmerman and she is a Jewish teenage activist struggling while working nights to help support her family.
Her mom is really sick and they don't have any health insurance.
And long story short, she gets superpowers and has to figure out whether she can do anything with these powers to save her neighborhood, which is under attack by various supervillains.
Yeah.
How does she use her powers to protect Gotham City?
Well, they are dog-related superpowers.
And when I got the chance to invent a superhero, the first thing I thought was I would like to have a dog sidekick that I could talk to if I was going to be a superhero.
So I invented this character, who is a Great Dane, a beautiful big black and white Great Dane, and her name is Leibovitz.
And she becomes Willow's dog.
And the two of them get superpowers together.
They have like a mind meld and they can talk to each other.
And Willow also develops superpowered hearing and superpowered smell like a dog, as well as a lot of dog impulses that are kind of funny.
Like she has the urge to chase things and fetch and roll over and things like that every now and then.
And she also develops a super-powered whistle that can call all the dogs in the area to come to her aid.
So those are her powers.
And together with Leibovitz, she becomes this superhero whistle.
I love it.
That's the name of the book, Whistle.
Absolutely love that.
And I love the sidekick.
That's such a classic pairing in comic books.
I love that you're bringing that back.
It is classic, but Leibowitz is the first ever female superhero dog.
There you go.
Love the first.
Thank you for it.
Is this why it was important to you that Willow be Jewish?
And how does her being Jewish influence the story, if at all?
So my hero, Whistle, is living in a neighborhood that has a long Jewish history.
And she cares about the institutions of that neighborhood, which are not all Jewish, because a whole bunch of different kinds of people live there.
But she's very connected to the community centers and the synagogues and the delicatessens and the bagel stores which have Jewish history.
And so she's a local superhero, right?
And she's connected to her city.
And I feel very connected to my city of New York City and to its Jewish history.
Willow did have to make a difficult choice.
She had to make this tough choice between getting to be part of this world that she just got to be part of, or choosing the right path.
It was a real tough choice, but she made the choice to do the right thing.
Would you make the same choice?
Well, one thing I was really interested in is what is it like to be a teenager in Gotham City, right?
Gotham City is full of really, really corrupt, terrible people doing terrible things, but very interesting things.
And so what happens to Willow is because she needs money and because she needs a job that is better than the all night job that doesn't pay that well, that she's working currently.
She gets a job working for the Gotham city underworld and gets pulled into kind of the wealth and glamor of of uh of that that criminal element.
And then, when she really realizes what those people are up to and what they, what they do and what it means to be in that, in that world, she um has to make the choice to betray some of those people in order to become a hero and operate on the side of right.
And you know I was interested in the moral complications of, you know, trying to be a hero or having relationships with people who are maybe not great people.
This is something lots of kids have in their lives, right?
One way or another.
And you have to think, you know, nobody is always a perfect person, right?
The question is just how do you make your decisions and can you live with them?
And you know when do you compromise your principles and when do you not compromise your principles.
And I think superhero stories are actually a really cool and fun way to get at some of those really important questions.
Okay, E. Lockhart is awesome.
I'm definitely checking out Whistle today.
Any other good recommendations?
Have you ever read the Skyfall trilogy or the Keeper of the Lost Cities books?
No, I haven't.
Are they any good?
Are you kidding me?
Shh.
Oops, sorry.
They're amazing.
Shannon Messenger is a best-selling author, and they're as cool as it gets.
My daughter Naomi and I interviewed her on the show, too.
How are you getting all these amazing authors?
Sir, you have been warned.
It's time-out time.
Oh, come on!
Ryan, I'm going to send you the Shannon Messenger interview to listen to in your time-out.
Okay.
Shannon.
It's so great to have you with us here today on the 10 News.
We are big fans.
I will say that we are even super fans and we're really excited to talk to you.
Well, I'm so excited to be here.
This is so much fun, especially since we don't get to go out in person as much.
It's so nice to get to meet with readers and fans and, you know, have a nice morning together.
Wonderful.
And I'm joined today by my daughter, Naomi Kaplan, who's going to help me out with some of our questions and questions that we were sent in from our tenors.
We have a good audience that loves your work.
And I think where we want to start off is hearing from you.
How did you come up with the world for Keeper of the Lost Cities?
What inspired you to create this epic adventure?
You know, I mean, it it really came from all different places.
It was not one of those instances of just you know.
I sort of woke up and went.
I know this entire story in this entire world.
It kind of happened very gradually.
I knew that I wanted to write about elves.
And I had from, you know, starting a short story that was actually with Fitz's character.
Oh, right.
I knew that.
Starting out as a short story.
Yeah.
I had created Fitz for a different book that I was working on and created the elves story just very loosely for a different book that I was working on and I got stuck.
And so I was kind of just trying to, you know, unstuck that story by writing from one of the side characters POVs, and out came Sophie into that story.
I don't really know why she just sort of popped in.
Somehow I decided that that story was going to be about Fitz meeting a girl and realizing that she was like him and she was an elf, and him having to tell her that.
And in proof that maybe short stories aren't always my best form, you know, the dramatic ending of that story was just him basically saying Hey, so you're an elf, and her being like cool.
Yeah.
Like the short story ended with when she found out that she was an elf, and then Not the greatest ending.
I mean, I know I'm known for my cliffhangers, but I feel like that's an even worse cliffhanger than like, what I do in the series.
It just, it wasn't satisfying at all.
And it, but it got me to realize that that's what the story was.
I just kept thinking.
So what is going to happen to this girl now, now that she knows she's an elf?
What does she have to leave?
Does she have to go live in the lost cities and why was she hidden away?
And that's when I realized there's a story there and I need to kind of figure those questions out.
So can you tell us how do you put your characters together?
You know, that is the one part of my writing process that is kind of a mystery even to me, which is a bummer because it's the question I get asked the most often, because my readers always want to know how did you come up with these characters?
And they kind of form themselves.
They really do.
My brain has a very vivid imagination.
And so I tend to start to see the character kind of fully formed.
The one question that I do ask always ask a character before I start writing them is I ask what is this character hiding from me?
Because I feel like we all have secrets.
And once I know that character's secrets, I kind of get them, I kind of own them in a way, and it doesn't always mean bad secrets.
I mean the secrets can be a crush, or they can be, you know, a secret dream that they want to have that they haven't shared, or it can be things that they're afraid of or things that they're embarrassed of or anything like that.
Usually it's a mix, but I feel like once I know those things, that really tells me everything that I need to know about the character, and the rest is just kind of discovery.
As I write, I try to really think of them as real people.
And I try to really, when I'm writing the scene, sit down and think okay so, given what I know about this character and given what I know about the situation that they're in, what would they do?
It makes my life as an author a lot harder, because sometimes the answer to that question is like well, but that doesn't go along with what I need them to do.
So what am I gonna do now?
But it means that I have to follow some curve balls, but I think that ends up making the story feel more authentic, because I really am kind of letting the characters run the show.
And I know that my mom is always like, you know they're not real, right?
And I'm like I know, but I have to treat them like they're real in order to write them in a way that makes them feel real on the page.
And so, yes, they're not real, but they're also real all at the same time.
We are gonna jump to some of the tenors, questions from our tenors.
This is a question from Hazel.
Hi, Hazel.
How did you get the idea for the characters' names?
I, for a person who only recently had a child, I own an abundance of baby name books.
That was one thing that is kind of a character building exercise for me.
I do like the names to have a meaning that says something to me about the characters.
Some, it's very on the nose, like Keith means handsome.
So, you know, that name is very spot on.
Some are a little bit more, you know, an impression of a character or like Sophie, it means wisdom.
And I feel like that's something that Sophie brings to The Lost Cities, that she has this very unique worldview because she was raised with humans, always feeling like an outsider, but was still believed that she was one of them.
This question is from Nia.
How did you write Tam so perfectly?
Oh, well, thank you.
You know.
Again, it just really comes down to putting thought into what I know about him.
You know and I knew a lot about his backstory.
You know everything all the conflict with his parents, all of his time with Lin on their own, their time in Exilium.
You know what it's like to be a shade in a world that kind of values light above everything else and your ability controls darkness.
You know just really kind of putting thought into all of those things.
And you know he kind of came together as this slightly surly but also very funny and, you know, super emo kind of guy who speaks his mind and you know, but is also kind of quiet.
And, you know, he's he's a study in contrast.
He's a very cool character.
And then Nia had a follow up question about his sister.
Oh, right.
Does Lin ever get a significant partner?
Well, sadly, I'm not allowed to give spoilers.
I would get in very big trouble.
We tried, Tenors.
We tried.
Yeah, I can't answer that question without getting myself in a tremendous amount of trouble.
So all I can say is I guess we'll find out as the story unfolds.
I will also say I never plan relationship stuff.
Anything, even the Sophie stuff.
I let that unfold by asking myself what the characters would do, because I feel like I control the plot as far as what the villains are going to do, how many times they're almost going to die, all of that.
That's all me throwing stuff at them.
But then how they feel about it, that's on the characters.
And so something like a relationship, that's all to do with feelings.
And so again, that's all something that I just kind of let unfold.
So this came in from quite a few tenors, looking for an update of what you can share for the next book.
Okay, so book nine, because of the whole, you know, I had a baby.
Just that.
Book nine has been a little delayed.
I actually found out I was pregnant the day I finished Unlocked.
Wow.
Yeah, I took a test and found out, oh, man.
And I realized, I remember being like, it's I've got nine months.
I'll totally be able to write those entire nine months.
So that's coming out November and we should be able to start sharing things like title and cover and things like that a little bit earlier than we normally do.
I think usually those things drop around like April or May.
So stay tuned to my social media for anything else on that front.
But it does have a title and I actually have seen the cover and it's amazing and everyone is going to go nuts.
There's lots of excitement ahead and I can also say that book nine is not the end.
It has been announced that there will be a book 10 and book 10 is going to be the end.
So right now book 10 is slated to come out the following November, so November of 2023.
Hopefully I'm able to stick to that deadline schedule.
We'll just kind of see how cooperative my child is.
So, yeah, stay tuned on that.
All right.
Well, this was great, Shannon.
It was so wonderful to have you here today.
And we look forward to news about book nine.
Yeah.
All right.
I started Keeper of the Lost Cities while in timeout, and I love Sophie.
I'm going to preorder her next book.
Are you ready to check out, Cap?
Yeah, just one sec.
Excuse me.
What if I have nine books?
Can I check out nine?
Ma'am.
How many times do I have to tell you?
It's a four-book limit.
Got it.
But what if I put one back and wanted to check eight books out?
Can you bend the rules a little?
Do you need to time out too, ma'am, so you can think about the rules and why we follow them?
Fine.
I'll just take seven, and I'll bring one back tomorrow.
It's time out for you too, ma'am.
Please come with me.
Ryan, I gotta go.
Can you please close out the show?
I'm on it.
But first, here's a quick note for the grown-ups.
This has been a 10 News road trip remix.
Technically we're off for the summer, but look out for our road trip remixes and re-airing of some of our favorite episodes all summer long.
I'm Ryan Willard, and thanks for listening to the 10 News.
Hope you're having a great summer and staying cool, kind, and informed.
