Story Mastermind Interview with Rebecca Coffindaffer

A conversation with debut science fiction and fantasy author Rebecca Coffindaffer (CROWNCHASERS, out now from HarperTeen) all about worldbuilding.

I’ve taught thousands of writers, and now I am doing something bigger, more ambitious, and disruptive. I hope you join me. My entire career has been a study in mixing craft and industry knowledge, about helping writers hone their projects, but also providing insight into the biggest question of all: What’s next?

Transcript for Story Mastermind Interview with Rebecca Coffindaffer

Welcome to the Story Mastermind special session on craft and specifically the craft of world-building. With me today, I have Rebecca Coffindaffer who is represented by Andrea Brown and has just had a book debut. And I will have her take it away and tell you a little bit more about herself.

Rebecca: Yes, so I am one of those people who started writing way back when I was kid. So this has been a long journey to get to my debut. I will do the part where I show off, this is it, "Crownchasers" just came out last week. It is a young adult space opera that pulls on a lot of my favorite elements of science fiction, and Star Wars, and Star Trek, and adventure stories. It's very fast-paced, full of humor, and I'm very excited to be here today to talk world-building. It's something that I'm just coming to terms with in terms of being, like... People were like, "No, this is something you actually do well," but you never acknowledge the stuff that you do well. So world-building is something that I've always enjoyed so I'm very excited to talk to everybody about my thoughts on it and ways to approach it.

Mary: That's fantastic. And it's obviously very relevant. Nice holding up the book.

Rebecca: Thank you.

Mary: You are now doing the marketing thing, too, as a new author. World-building is tough to talk about because it is very different from story to story but also it kind of isn't. And what I'm hoping for is a sense of your thoughts for how much to do, when to do it. You know, we have some, I think, world-building needs shift from the pre-writing to the very beginning of a novel to sort of as you roll along.

So I have some questions for you if you wouldn't mind. Let's start with before. Before the rubber even meets the road, what kind of work do you do to develop world-building? How specific do you get and how specific do you think it's worth-getting?

Rebecca: So I am a hardcore plotter. Basically, my messiest draft is an outline. Like, that is my zero draft, and I don't really sit down and get into the meat of the book until I've just scribbled everything out. So I do a lot of brainstorming in a notebook. Before a book ever becomes a book for me, it is a lot of doing that pre-writing and doing a lot of the world-building work.

For me, it either starts with a character first so the main character comes into my head very clearly, or sometimes I actually have an idea for a world-first, and then it's a question of who lives there, what story am I going to tell in this world.

So, in every single aspect of that, it's basically kind of either it's a reverse triangle and you're starting small and working out or you're starting, you know, big and working in. And either one of those are totally valid approaches depending on what you're doing. If you are a hardcore plotter, you're probably like me and then you're going to find as much of that information that you have before you start getting into the draft as possible is going to be helpful to a certain extent because there's the chance that you start, like, keep going down rabbit holes of, "Well, what does this person do and what does that person do?" and then you never write the book, which tends to be a temptation for me where I sit there and I go, "Well, but there's this one guy in a store. What's his story? And why don't we figure out what this person is doing?" and then the book just never gets written.

So I think you need to know for sure, once you figure out the main characters, what story you're telling within this world. Then you need to know the rules and the atmosphere of the world they're going to bump up against. At the very least, you got to know their day to day lives. Like, in their normal world before you start, at the very beginning of the story, what are the rules that they're working within, what do they know about the rules that they're working within, and what is the atmosphere and the people surrounding them.

And if you're a pantser, I think that, as long as you kind of know those basics, like who am I telling the story about, what's kind of the atmosphere around them, I don't know that you need to go do extensively. That could be stuff that you explore while you're writing in your draft.

So those are the two key things that I think you have to know before you do anything else. Who is this person within the world that I'm telling about? And where do they, like, bump up against the shape of society around them?

Mary: I think that's a really good point, and what I really liked about that was what the character knows about the world because sometimes they know everything. Just the rules are, "This is how the magic works, and I've grown up with this all my life." Sometimes they don't know or they think they know everything but they don't and sometimes they don't know anything, like, in a portal fantasy where we're entering a brand new world and you kind of have to learn everything from scratch. So I think that's a really, really good point.

So now we have...and I love that you advocate for outlining by the way. I definitely do. So now we have an idea to go in and we start writing the beginning. Now, the beginning is where a lot of writers fall down in terms of world-building because, on the one hand, there is the issue of not really developing enough to give readers a stronger sense of the world.

I would say the more common issue is you did all this development work and now boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You're just going to put it all on the page, every intricacy, every detail, and then of course, the book doesn't get off the ground because there's a density to the beginning.

So what would you say... How do you approach world-building in the beginning like the first couple of chapters even?

Rebecca: So I think that in the very first chapter especially... This is something that I've worked against my own self, because once I do the work, it tends to be like, "I want to tell you all about it. I want to tell you all about that stuff that I figured out." But I think that, in the first chapter, you have basically two things you need to do. You need to set up the main character. Who are we following? We need to kind of know who they are and we need to know the atmosphere surrounding them. So you've got to set a tone, and you've got to set the character.

So in Crownchasers, there is 1,001 planets in this galactic empire, and she visits a lot of different places. But there is one specific place that you spend the majority of the book and that is on her spaceship. And so in the first chapter that you spend with her, what I'm trying to do there is this is her. She wakes up hungover and kind of a mess and she's cracking jokes. And she's wandering around this ship that she knows so well that she can do it with her eyes closed.

So this tells you everything that you kind of know about her, and she doesn't drop anything really bigger about herself until the very end. So you don't find anything... Until the end of the first chapter, you have no idea that she is the niece of the emperor, that she is connected in a bigger way to the imperial politics. She's just a girl waking up on a spaceship with a hangover after some very enthusiastic but poor life choices the night before.

That's I think all you really need... Like, you want that first chapter to be more like the hook about, man, either the world or the character, one of those things is cool enough that you're like, "Man, I want to hang right here with this person and figure the rest out.

And it's tricky, like, with middle-grade and young adult because you don't have as much space to sort of just hang out. Adult, there's a little bit more patience to be all like, "Oh, I'm just going to wander in this world, and I'll learn the rules that I pick up." You have to be a little bit more on top of it, but at the same time, teens and young readers want the same thing that an adult reader does is they want that first chapter to be all like, "Who is this person? Awesome, this person seems interesting, not necessarily was likeable, and I want to hang out with them and find out more."

So I think that's the only thing you really need to do in the first chapter is, you know, throw some techy words in. This is science fiction. This is the kind of language that you're going to get, this is the kind of space that you're going to be working in and this is the kind of character you're going to be talking to for better or worse.

Mary: I like your style. I like the, you know, "Hey, there are some lumps here. Take it as it comes." I want to throw a curveball question that occurred to me. What about prologues? Do we want to either set up world-building in a prologue where it's, like, you know, the old crone takes a prophecy down out of the sky or flash forward into a moment of great action from the future of the manuscript and then ease into the first chapter. Have you ever used prologues? What do you think?

Rebecca: So, yeah, absolutely. I have a prologue in "Crownchasers" and I think they can be incredibly effective. I usually see them as a tool to hint at the greater... So, not as something that's happening just before the book or it doesn't have to be just before but, like, sometimes it's a few years or sometimes a hundred years, but something that happened before the main story starts that has greater implications for the main conflict later.

That, I feel like, personally is the most effective use of a prologue because it gives you that hint of mystery of going, "Okay, something bigger is happening and this is..." So that when you drop into the character and they're going about their day to day life, you're like, "Oh, I know something you don't know." So there's that hint of dramatic irony that you can kind of work toward.

I know that some people have used the sort of flash forward prologue. I think that it can be challenging to do well and do effectively because nobody knows your character yet so they don't care about them enough to care that they're in peril. And so you just kind of feel like...you feel like you're seeing spoilers on the internet when you didn't look for them, and you're like, "Oh, man, I didn't look for that." So it's not that it can't be done well. I just think it's trickier.

Mary: I also think that there's a risk with prologues. If the prologue is really, really dramatic and then we fall off a cliff in terms of tension with the start of the true chapter one, that can also be something to watch out for.

Rebecca: That's true. I say keep them short. Like, they've got to be a few pages and then move on.

Mary: Yeah. No, I think that's a really good yardstick. So how do you then pace the release of information. So you already gave us kind of a clue. We don't learn something significant about your character until the end of the first chapter, so that sort of speaks to me of pacing not only like reveals but other world-building information that we need to know. Like, we have to know some of these 1,001 planets at some point.

So, as you get rolling past the first chapter and the prologue at the very beginning, how do you personally approach the release of information?

Rebecca: I feel like I do a lot of my, like, background information setting in the next usually two to five chapters. And there's a lot of different ways to do that, but, like, basically what you kind of really need to know to jump into the adventure with this person. So the first chapter you don't find out until the end that she is the niece of the emperor. And in chapters about two to four, you'll find out through various scenes that she ran away from, you know, her uncle's ship, that her uncle is the emperor, and that he's suddenly dying, that there was a great war, and they united things afterwards. And now things are very tenuous because he's passing away way earlier than anybody expected.

And it's only a few chapters. You space stuff out. I space stuff out usually in conversations or little background asides. Personally, I feel like you should have a pretty solid background with YA or even middle-grade by about like five chapters in to kind of have that solid foundation of what this world sort of feels like.

I think that readers should kind of know the rules of this story and what everybody is supposed to be playing by like the 25% mark. Like, by then, people... Now, that doesn't mean you can't change the rules a little bit as you go along, but about 25% you should know, like, this is kind of the boundaries that these characters are playing in, and this is what the world feels like and this is what I should expect. I think especially in kidlit to set those expectations.

If you drag it out much longer than that, I feel like you're starting to lose people where they're just like, "I just don't feel moored like. I don't know where we're at or where anything is going."

Mary: And this is something I see a lot where the world keeps evolving and things keeping added. But I think this idea of feeling grounded... You said moored. You know, once we know the rules of the world, we can of course change them. You know, that's where we get into the later plot that we'll talk about in a minute.

But I really like this kind of, "Let's get it on the page. Let's get readers comfortable with it. Then we can sort of play with it," but the establishing... You know, it's a little bit... It gets a little messy to be establishing for the entire manuscript. At some point, you have to sort of build the foundation and then jump off of it.

Rebecca: I think it depends a little bit too on the character you're writing and the story you're telling. You can't... Well, you can. I hate to say can't because all story rules can be broken at some point if you do it well enough. But, like, I pulled out some books of other people...books recently... so "Legendborn" by Tracy Deonn just came out. And in this one, the world-building was really interesting because she is slowly discovering this whole secret world underneath our contemporary world that she didn't know existed.

So you do feel confused for several chapters in while she is confused. So I think that there are... You have to also understand, like, what does my character know and how much am I going to show beyond what they know. So, like, we kind of know that there's more going on because we've read the synopsis before we bought the book, but it doesn't... Like, she can stretch out the confusion and that sort of unmoored feeling because it lets you feel like the character is feeling.

So there's sort of like a flipside to that so you always... I just thought she did it really well.

Mary: That's a really good point, and this goes back to something that I think you were talking about earlier which is... Even though we're talking about world-building here, you're talking a lot about character and being rooted to character.

And what I think I'm hearing you say is if we're grounded in character, you know, readers are that much more likely to sort of go through the discovery of the world if the character needs to go through the discovery of the world because we care about character. And if we're in good hands, we trust that the world will unfold. So going back to what the character knows, if the character is confused, then there can be a little bit more leeway for that, ugh, discombobulated feeling because it mirrors character experience. So that's definitely a factor in it as well.

Rebecca: Yeah, exactly.

Mary: So this question may be a little tough because this goes very individually to each story but how much world-building information logic and rules do we actually need. I know it depends on world, but I'm really trying to sort of ferret out the minimalist approach versus the kind of maybe overabundant approach and what you think that line might really be at least for you.

Rebecca: I mean I'm somebody who wants to know as much as possible and has to be pulled back from putting too much... Like, I had all these asides about like, "And then there's this planet over here and this happens," and my editor was like, "Nobody knows that. Like, this doesn't serve the greater purpose. It doesn't serve the book." Like, I made notes to make sure I...

Yeah, okay. So, yeah, like the question is: does it serve the plot? And if it serves the plot, then you need those rules. But if it's like... So if you're telling a story about a thief in like 1700 France, then you're going to know about the criminal underworld, and the rules that they'll bump up against there, and who might be on the flipside of their profession.

But as much as you might want to know some more about stuff about what's happening in the castle, you don't need it. You don't necessarily need what's the rules of what's going on in the nobility unless the main character is going up against them.

So, you know, you don't have to expand it until your main character gets there, which is difficult when you have worked very, very hard on random planets throughout the solar system. But if it's not necessary to the main character's journey, you don't necessarily need those rules. You can develop them for funsies on the side, but you won't need them in the story itself in order to further that narrative.

So, yeah, I mean I wrote notes and I'm like, "World-building. Character. Character. Character. Character," because the thing is we will follow great characters and we will go with them in whatever world that they go to for as long as they want. But if you create a great world but the characters in aren't that great... I was just thinking right now about the James Cameron movie "Avatar" and that world is so cool. Like, I will go to Pandora when it's back open, but I don't care if he ever makes another movie about it because I didn't care about the characters at all. Pandora, very cool, great world. Don't care if there's another story set there ever again.

Mary: Yeah. No, I think that's a fantastic point. And I do want your take on something. This is off-the-menu question. So sometimes I find myself a little bit bothered when a writer introduces a detail and fills in that world-building element only right as it's becoming relevant. For example, let's say this world happens to have these little critters called snurfles and suddenly it's like, "And he turned around and there was a snurfle." Oh, a snurfle is... You know, that we get da da da da da.

So I like the idea of reserving some information for later, but it almost seems contrived to only introduce it as it becomes relevant. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that can definitely be tricky because then you just feel like there is just a book full of asides. So that is definitely... Like, the hardest part of world-building is, like, I don't want to info up at the beginning, but I don't want to be spending the entire book going like, "And then there's this thing. And then there's this thing."

If the snurfle is super-duper, like, relevant, cool. Like, if you need to know the background of it, then it's going to attack him and then he has to be like, "And then there was this other time where I was attacked by snurfles and this is how you like get out of it."

But I don't think that you necessarily need to explain absolutely everything in the text. I don't think that there needs to be... I think you need to give readers a lot of credit. Even young readers will just kind of like... And if you're like, "Yeah, this is an aside but I'm not going to explain it. Let's just move on." Most of them are going to be all like, "Cool, let's go on to the next thing that cool thing that we're going to talk about."

So I don't think everything needs an explanation. You can just have a different name for something. If it's not going to be super relevant, like you can have context clues. Like, they can pick up on this stuff. You can be like, "Oh, it's a snurfle. Boy, I remember that time I had a whole bunch of them in my apartment and I sneezed for weeks because they're so fluffy." And that's it. Like, they get that that's an animal and that it's fluffy and that they can, like, infest an apartment and you move on. You don't have to give the history of the snurfle even though it might be scribbled in your notebook.

Mary: Yeah. Well, you have 1,001 planets. I mean, I can't imagine the size of the notebook with all that world-building that you did that ended up on the cutting room floor. Dang, those editors, right?

Rebecca: How dare they make a story better with their editing? Goodness, gracious.

Mary: All right. So how do you handle late in the story kind of information changes, reveals, surprises? I kind of want to go back to this idea of that foundation that we built, because I really do believe that, if we had that strong foundation, readers are understanding everything. The character probably knows what's going on at this point. I think that's the framework from which we can make change and how that change makes sense.

I'm not just saying that so you're like, "Mary, yes, that's very smart. Yes." But that's kind of my position on it; I'd love to hear yours.

Rebecca: I agree. I think that you can make late-in-the-game changes. I think you just have to be careful right around after the 50% mark, and that's like going back to, like, mystery plotting, right? If you're plotting a mystery, when you get to the who-done-it, you have to kind of have... Like, a reader should be able to go back even if they didn't pick up on the clues before. Like, if you've done it right, you seeded it but not in an obvious way so when they get there, they go, "Oh, my gosh," and then they go, "Oh, man, I should have seen it coming."

And I think that you can take that same approach to world-building rules. So you kind of have to Chekhov's gun it. You have to make sure that you've sort of seated it and made a note that this is possible and it's just this undercurrent.

So about halfway through "Crownchasers", this third party enters the situation, and I can't talk a lot about it without a bunch of spoilers, but I haven't seen yet that anybody was surprised about this because there is this undercurrent of there's something more going on. There are political forces beyond this crown chase that she gets involved in at work, that this is not going to be something where everybody plays by the rules. And somebody's going to break bad on these rules in a very dramatic way. So when that happens at 50%, you're ready to go because you're like, "Oh, wait, this was definitely possible. Somebody was going to pull this move."

So I think you just have to make sure...like, go wild in that first draft, but if you break a bunch of rules in the later half of your book, just make sure you're going and sort of like dropping some arrows and some hints that this is how things could break bad for your characters or this is how the rules could be pulled out from under them. It can be very effective. You just have to make sure, you know, that they feel the lead up to it.

Mary: And can you define Chekhov's gun for...?

Rebecca: Oh, yeah. That's a rule that... Chekhov's gun is the rule that, if you see a gun in the first act, it has to go off in the third act so you don't just have the unnecessary details. You're not just, like, look at that gun over the fireplace. Like, if you point to it, it's got to go off and it's got to have an impact.

Mary: Yes, thank you. Thank you. I love the image, but I just wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page. Bad publishing joke. Pa dup pup. Okay, don't encourage me.

So, all right, what are some big world-building missteps that you may have seen other writers making or you've made yourself other than this voluptuous overdevelopment that you sometimes do in your own work?

Rebecca: I think the first one that I thought of when I saw this question and the one that stands out to me the most is the "As You Know, Bob" conversation, which is the one... It is a way to handle trying to get information in but it bothers me because I'm a big dialogue fan and if it doesn't sound like a natural conversation two people would be having.

So just to define, "As You Know, Bob" is... For anybody who doesn't know, the "As You Know, Bob" conversation is like, "Well, what are we going to do about this empty throne?" "Well, as you know, Bob..." Then they proceed to say something that the character that they're talking to would absolutely know. They both know it. There's no reason for them to be explaining it to each other. It's just a very sort of forced information to the reader space, and I think that that's... I think that it pulls a lot of readers out. I know it pulls me out because I'm like, "Ugh, nobody would be talking like this." And they both already know this, and I know that they know this.

So I think dialogue can be an excellent way to transmit information, especially world-building and background information. But you have to make sure that you're always keeping in mind what do these characters know, what do they know that the other one knows. Like, how much information is being freely shared that they would already know about each other? And you're going to have to structure the dialogue to deliver the information with context and trust that you can build context around the dialogue in a way that that information will come through.

So I'm going to not be able to pull any example out, but, like, you just have to... You have to give your reader a lot more trust that they will be able to get that context around dialogue instead of just putting it in their face.

Mary: And characters should ideally act naturally within the framework of their world and speak organically.

Rebecca: Yes, that's a big pet peeve of mine, too. Mine is always like a husband and wife explaining their jobs to one another. That's my "As You Know, Bob" example. Like, "How was your day as middle manager at the power plant?" "Well, as you know..."

Mary: As you know, [inaudible 00:29:37].

Rebecca: "I'm defending this person on death row, and let's talk about the case."

Mary: It's tough though. It's tough because I think a lot of writers... You know, there are all these kind of maxims out there against telling and so writers get petrified, "Oh, I can't tell. I can't just put information on the page," but I think with world-building, that has to be one of the exceptions because sometimes it's a lot more straightforward to just say the information. And so writers kind of twist themselves up into pretzels trying to, "Oh, maybe if I put it in dialog, it won't really count against me."

Rebecca: Yeah. Well, yeah, definitely. Like, they don't want to info dump so that's good but then they fall back on different techniques and those don't always work either. I mean it's tricky. World-building is tough, and it's just a matter of practicing and playing with it.

Mary: Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with you. So this is something tougher that I would love to get your take on is world-building across books. So, is "Crownchasers" a series?

Rebecca: It is the first in a duology, yeah.
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Mary: Okay, so you have two books to work with. So, if you intend to go into a series, how do you go about world-building especially if...you know, there are a lot of writers that I work with that are planning a big change, and obviously, you know, there's something huge that happens at the end of book 1 that changes thing for book 2. So, how do you keep all those extra balls in the area if you're planning ahead?

Rebecca: I mean, the first right step is that you'd be planning ahead. So you have the ability to step back and do that sort of pre-writing work where you go, "Okay, well, these are the things that we're going to look at." I think it's pretty natural to take book 1 and be all like, "This is the scope of book 1 and it's a little more narrow and it's a little more focused."

And just like changing the rules in a contained book, if you're going to change the rules at the very end of the book to launch into a next one, then you just need to make sure that you're planting those little seeds. And if you're doing the pre-work, you can kind of know, "Well, I want to blow the world up bigger." Not, like, literally but you want to, like, blow the perspective of the world bigger, and take these characters to new places, and widen the scope of the conflict usually. And that's usually what happens. Like, we're telling that second or third book because the conflict got bigger than one book could contain.

So I think that you kind of can look at when you're doing the initial world-building for book 1, you can find places. You can be, like, "Well, there's this thief in historical France, and they're doing all of this. And they go through like a heist or something." And then at the end of book 1, they stumble upon this greater conspiracy to overthrow the king.

And maybe they're on the "yes, let's overthrow the king" side or maybe they're on the "no, save the king" side but they stumble upon that, and their world shifts, and you have a very natural place to go, "Now we're going to look bigger." We're going to explore new areas that we didn't have the scope for and all of those pages and pages that we had to leave on the cutting room floor now become relevant because you can go, "All right, well, now I can take them into circles that they don't know the rules, and they're going to have to discover the rules. I can take them into places that they know that this new information has changed."

So I think doing that pre-work, that is a place where all of that...those things that you didn't get to have in book 1, you get to do them in book 2. You get to do them in book 3. And you get to kind of explore new areas and that's how you keep things a little more interesting and fresh without, for example, adding 12 more Avengers to the Avengers movie and just having way too many Avengers.

Mary: And you can also shake a well-meaning fist at your editor and be like, "See, haha."

Rebecca: See? The snurfles actually become a big deal in book 2. Way to go snurfles.

Mary: Thank you for running with my snurfles. So personally was this always concepted as a duology? Did you know from the very beginning that it was going to be more than one book?

Rebecca: I knew from the beginning, yes, and it's sold as a duology. So that was pretty easy peasy on the publishing side. I tend to... Like I said, because I think I do so much world-building and leave so much stuff in the cutting room floor, I am always open to writing a sequel. I usually have somewhere else to go with the character or characters. So, yeah, I tend to think in series.

Mary: Cool. And let's close out this kind of Q&A portion with, if you wouldn't mind sharing, just your experience, your journey so far, and what it's been like to debut very recently. This is kind of a year to be a debut. So, yeah, anything you'd love to share with writers, a lot of whom are still, you know, hoping to have that journey.

Rebecca: So, this was a very long journey for me. I think the first time I sat down and wrote a book and thought, "I'm going to get this published," I was 12 years old. So it's been, like, 25 years in the making.

Now those first couple of books should never see the light of day, but there was a strong intention behind them. So, I wrote for a long time. I wrote fanfiction, I wrote stories and stuff like that, and I had a couple, like, near-misses with getting agented. And for a couple of years, I just stopped. And then in 2011, I thought, you know what? I still have stories to tell. I'm going to sit down and start writing them.

I went out and I got a bunch of great author friends in my local area and kept going. And in 2016, one of them referred me to an agent at Andrea Brown, Lara Perkins. And I signed with her just after my kid's first birthday. And we went out with a book. It was another science fiction book that did not land. It didn't find a home, so that was a little frustrating, like set me back a little bit. But it also gave me the direction to know that I needed to try something a little different, a little closer, first-person, very voicy. And so that's kind of how "Crownchasers" came to be as a very close, first-person, very voice-driven project that still hits all of my sci-fi fantasy nerd stuff.

And that was probably about as smooth of a publishing process as you could ask for. Like, it came together pretty well. You know, so the opposite of the project before that. It has definitely been a challenge, putting a book out in the world, mainly because, you know, the media churn is so overwhelming. And then in the middle of it, you're like, "Do you want to buy a book?" Like, the new headlines come out and you're like, "But 'Crownchasers' though."

So I think that's the weirdest part. The weirdest part is trying to get people to buy a book when you feel like it seems really silly to be selling a book or to try to get people to buy it. But honestly, the book community has been extremely supportive, especially of debuts, especially in the Kidlit community. They have really rallied to try and give a lot of virtual boosting.

And, you know, my debut week went pretty good. All things considered, I think, you know, we're making the best of it, which is all anybody can really do this year.

Mary: No, and that's... Yeah, it's tough to feel like you're doing something frivolous in a world that has suddenly turned very unfrivolous. You know, not to call you or your book frivolous but...

Rebecca: No, but, yeah.

Mary: It's a nice to have, not a need to have, you know? But I think it is a need to have in a lot of ways because everything I'm hearing in the industry is like, "Give me a diversion. Give me a nice distraction I can sink into. I am just done with this year. I want to go to 1,001 other planets because this one kind of...

Rebecca: This one's maybe a little messy.

Mary: And to your point, a lot of your early boosters, a lot of supporters are going to be other writers, other people in the community. You know, book bloggers, people who do it for the love of supporting other writers who are maybe writers themselves. You can't underestimate the power of that demographic when you're launching.

Rebecca: No, you really, really can't. I have it in my acknowledgments actually that, when I was like 15 or 16, I wanted to be a writer. And I really thought that it looked like that last scene in "Wonderboy" where he's sitting in a cabin in the woods with a black turtleneck on and he just writes it. He sends it off and that's how publishing worked.

And it's bananas to think of that now because I wouldn't have gotten anywhere... Not that I would have gotten anywhere on my own, but I wouldn't have, like, just survived... The constant challenge of this industry is to keep going and to keep writing even on those moments where you're like, "Nobody wants to read what I have to write," because I can guarantee you that somebody out there is going to like read your book and love it. And maybe they don't have a million followers on Goodreads but, like, everybody that's debuted has had people reach out to them. Even when they felt like their book was invisible, they had somebody reach out and said, "Your book meant a lot to me." And there's, like, 200 some debuts that I'm with in the kidlit circle. So, like, having that community to get through all those quiet moments where you feel like you aren't being heard and your book is not being talked about is absolutely vital.

Mary: That's amazing. I'm really, really glad that you've had that experience. This has been Rebecca Coffindaffer with "Crownchasers," a duology out now. Thank you so much for coming to speak to us.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for having me.

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