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Amber J Keyser is one of the Mixed Up Files  newest member and she’s got the first book birthday of the year. New Year’s Day saw the publication of her MG series Quartz Creek Ranch. It’s published by Darby Creek and all four books came out together. Here’s the description of the series:

Every summer, the gates of Quartz Creek Ranch swing open for kids in trouble. Under the watchful eyes of lifelong ranchers Willard and Etty Bridle, these ten to twelve-year-olds put their hands—and hearts—to good use, herding cattle, tending the garden, harvesting hay, and caring for animals. Aided by two teenage horse trainers, the kids must forge a bond with their therapy horses, grow beyond the mistakes that brought them to the ranch, and face unique challenges in the rugged Colorado rangeland.

I loved to ride horses when I was a kid, although it was a rare treat when I got the chance, usually in connection with Girl Scout camp. Do you have a childhood memory of horses that you drew on for these stories? 

Many, actually! Hurtling through the filbert orchards bareback and dodging low hanging branches. Leading two horses, getting stuck in deep muck and losing my rubber boot. Cantering through summer meadows in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. A lot of specific pieces of my childhood made it into the pages of these books, but the emotional power that suffuses all of them comes from a lonely, socially-misfit kid (me, obviously) who connected on a deep level with horses. The connection that can form between a small human and a huge animal is magical.

That’s Amber on her childhood horse Jeannie.

One of my favorite venues for a book event was a thing I did with Suzanne Morgan Williams, the author of BULL RIDER at the Reno Rodeo. We sold a ton of books and I met a fabulous woman who did respite care for teens in foster care at her stable. She did not have trained therapy horses, but in the challenging experience of being a foster child, those horses where an anchor and source of great comfort to a generation of foster kids in Nevada. What drew you to write about therapy horses specifically?

I have these radiant memories of being with horses and feeling like those animals understood me better than anyone. I could be my whole, true self with them. In fact, if I wasn’t my true self, the horse wouldn’t respond well. Riding forces you to be open, to listen, and to focus. And those were “regular” horses. (As if anything as amazing as a horse could be regular!) Therapy horses take that one step further—these are animals that have been trained to be particularly responsive to a wide variety of needs. I reaped such intense benefit from my casual interactions with horses. For these books I wanted to imagine how much more could come from a relationship between a girl and her horse when the entire point of the interaction is to provide space for healing.

So about that… Why do you suppose that horse books are almost always exclusively marketed at girls?

Sigh… I am making a sad face right now. In the proposal we wrote for the series, Kiersi and I had one book with a male main character, but our European publisher requested that all of the main characters be girls. I get really frustrated with the gendering of books—as if a story should only appeal to one kind of kid. Rosanne, you wrote an amazing book about a boy and his horse. (Go read HEART OF A SHEPHERD, y’all. It’s one of my favs!) Lots of the classics, like KING OF THE WIND and WARHORSE, are about boys. I don’t know why it’s this way. Maybe because our society is hung up on boys actually having feelings like the kind I had as a young rider.

Kiersi and I did not want to write a series with stereotypical “mean girls” set in a fancy-pants barn. Neither of us grew up that way, and we wanted to write much more authentic relationships. Each book has an ensemble cast with four to five kids, both girls and boys, plus pivotal adult characters like ranch owners Mr. Bridle and Ma Etty, ranch manager Paul, and of course, the trainers Madison and Fletch, who are college-aged.

I absolutely loved writing the scenes with all the kids together. When I put all these unique characters together, the scenes became noisy and full of life. Often surprises would emerge. Things I didn’t expect would happen. Characters would say things I never could have planned. That richness came from putting all this diversity together.

It can be such a struggle even with a very supportive publisher to get them to move beyond the tried and true sales formula. Thanks for sticking to your convictions and keeping your larger cast of characters gender diverse. And speaking of diversity, how did you go about choosing which race or ethnicity or economic background for a character?

First, let me say having a diverse cast of characters was really important to me and Kiersi. By diverse, I mean in all ways: ethnically, economically, and personally. This was the most challenging part of our work on the series. For the series, we created nineteen kid characters and six primary adult characters plus assorted parents, neighbors, camel-owners, etc!

Each one had to have a distinct personality and unique issues that brought him or her to the ranch. In some ways it was a giant chess game to figure out the right combination of characteristics for all of them. We would have conversations like, “We already have a girl with anger issues,” or “This set of kids is all too quiet.” It was a head-spinner, but honestly, the ethnicity of the characters—and about half are kids of color—came pretty organically. It just made sense for them to be from around the country and from all kinds of backgrounds.

The upside of this crowd of characters is that there is LOTS of opportunity for conflict!

What a minute! Camel owners? Really! You’re just going to toss that out there and not say which book they’re in? Sorry guys, I guess you’re just going to have to read the whole series.

A ranch for troubled kids sounds like the sort of story that could have gone in a YA direction and you’ve written YA before. Why MG for this series?

In my mind, the key distinction between MG and YA is this: MG characters are trying to find their place within the milieu of their family while YA characters are trying to find their place in the broader world.

I read a parenting book when my kids were young that said a parent needed to be a fixed point of stability, and at different developmental stages, kids needed to pull away and make forays into the broader world, but they always needed a home base to return to. For the kids in our books, the summer they spend at Quartz Creek Ranch is that adventure outside the family, and in the end, each character brings new insights and new strength back to their family of origin.

It’s hard for me to imagine these books as YA. I mean, I can imagine writing a YA novel about a girl and horse. Certainly she’d have bigger, edgier problems than the characters in these books. No doubt she would also connect deeply with the animal. But the difference, I think, is that she wouldn’t take those lessons home. She would take them and leave home. And that’s a different story.

I always think of MG as a more circular story with a character venturing forth and then returning home, rather then the more linear path of the YA story. Which scene (or scenes) was all joy to write? 

 There are two scenes in THE LONG TRAIL HOME that I loved writing. In the first one, the vet, Carla, comes to check on a pregnant horse and does a manual inspection of the foal. It involves a glove that goes up to the armpit. (This still makes me laugh.) The other scene that was great to write was the birth of the foal. It is very messy!

Oh! I wrote a calf birthing scene in Heart of a Shepherd. That was a blast. So deliciously earthy! One last thing. Do you have a horse in your life now?

I do! I’m riding at a barn called Harmony with Horses. Almost all the horses there were rescues. Mostly I ride Tucker. He was in bad shape when he arrived, but now he is a total love!

 

My problem this month was having three topical ideas and only time and space for one blog post. So I did the 2017 thing and held a Twitter poll. Just like I’ve always wanted to.

Given a choice between my New Year’s resolution to write a non-fiction book proposal, or my take on authorship responsibilities in the Age of Donald Trump, Twitter users overwhelmingly voted for something about the Netflix series, “Stranger Things.”

There will be spoilers. If you haven’t watched the series yet, it’s well worth your while to get the initial free-month subscription to Netflix and binge these eight episodes, with no financial obligation to keep Netflix for as many future seasons as this series is going to run. Although you will want to, because that’s how they lure you in.

The strangest thing about “Stranger Things” is that everyone comes away from it with some number of questions. Rolling Stone had eight. Business Insider had nine. Time magazine had ten. But weirdly, nobody had eleven questions, because wouldn’t eleven be the most obvious number of anything associated with this show?

I have eleven questions and my first is:

1. What happened to all those missing questions?

My theory is that they were taken by Teen Vogue, which has lately been flexing some serious journalistic muscle under the leadership of Elaine Welteroth. TV‘s list has 35 questions about “Stranger Things,” which is enough to cover their own set of eleven plus the lost questions from about a dozen of those slacker publications. You go, Teen Vogue!

Luckily, Teen Vogue isn’t asking their questions from the all-important middle grade author’s point of view, so there’s still room left over for me to ask things like…

2. What middle grade novel is most like “Stranger Things?”

There is no one right answer, but I’ll give you my suggestion at the end of this post. In the meantime you can start mulling over your own choices to discuss in the comments section.

3. What does a middle grade author think about the use of 80’s nostalgia in “Stranger Things?”

I’m so glad you asked!

In 1983, I was about the same age as Mike and his friends. I played Dungeons & Dragons like Mike and his friends. And I mean just like Mike and his friends–really badly, with dice often ending up on the floor. I even had pewter figurines of monsters and wizards like Mike and his friends, until my mother read somewhere that they had a high lead content and banished them from the house.

The opening scene was highly nostalgic for me personally, but probably just reminded everyone else of the D&D scene from E.T.

What impressed me most about D&D in Stranger Things was that it doesn’t just serve as pop-culture window dressing. D&D actually moves the plot forward and makes the story more plausible.

A campaign of 10-hour D&D sessions has linked these four players with a bond of friendship, mutual understanding, and respect. They know how to work together toward a common goal and they have an enviable knowledge of monsters, psionics, and the possibility of travel between planes of existence. When adventure comes calling, these kids are fully prepared!

Just as my friends and I were also ready to spring from our D&D table at a moment’s notice to combat real-world forces of evil. Or to go on a snack run. Whichever seemed more urgent. Oh, the nostalgia!

4. What can middle grade authors learn from “Stranger Things?”

World-building and foreshadowing! And as an added bonus, we get both of these lessons through Stranger Things by way of Dungeons & Dragons.

Every good Dungeon Master has to be a master of world-building, because monsters can only exist within an ecosystem of monsters, constantly fed by a stream of unlucky adventurers. The failed adventurers of past D&D campaigns also create the game’s economy, by stocking treasure chests with their pocket change and belongings. And finally there’s the dungeon itself, which must follow logical rules of construction allowing it to fit snugly on a single sheet of graph paper.

Having mastered these skills, is it any wonder why so many D&D players go on to write novels, screenplays, or Netflix original series?

I’m hopeful that the story world of the Upside Down will establish and maintain its own inner logic over time. Is it an alternate Earth that was once identical to ours or has it always been such a mess? Has it been conquered by aliens or did the monsters evolve there in a shadow ecosystem? Were there people who built the alternate structures we see or do the demogorgons mimic human architecture in some kind of cargo cult?

I expect the monsters will make sense and come in a variety of species. The glowing egg that Hopper and Joyce run past on their way to the demogorgon’s lair may or may not hatch into another demogorgon, but it definitely will hatch into something.

And just as the demogorgon from Episode One’s gaming session foreshadowed the first season’s monster, I’m betting that the campaign boss from the last episode’s gaming session was also meant as foreshadowing.

My Monster Manual is packed away somewhere, but I suspect the thessalhydra is like the creature from Greek mythology that grew back lost heads and limbs, becoming more powerful even as Hercules hacked it into bits. You wouldn’t want to, say, chop off its foot in a bear trap, because it would then likely just grow extra limbs that make it run faster than before. And you certainly wouldn’t want to, say, blow it apart into a million tiny pieces, because each piece would have the ability to regenerate into an entirely new creature.

[Edit: I just found my Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual II! It seems the thessalhydra has one big nasty mouth surrounded by a bunch of snake heads. If you cut off a snake head, it takes a whole twelve days to grow back, so pff. But once per day, the big mouth can shoot out a wad of acidic saliva, so that’s pretty cool. Hey, is anyone else up for a D&D campaign?]

Of course it’s possible the next season of “Stranger Things” will move beyond D&D into another form of 80’s nostalgia. I’ll note that Will and Dustin both seem to be receiving Atari 2600 game consoles for Christmas, so I fully expect Pac-Man, Missile Command, Space Invaders, and Asteroids to have an outsized impact on future plotlines.

5. What’s your favorite 80’s movie reference in “Stranger Things?”

“Stranger Things” evokes several movies of the 80’s including the bike chase from E.T. (1982), the child-swallowing wall-portals from Poltergeist (1982), and the floating ash from The Day After (1983). But for me, the most important is Firestarter (1984) as the source of Eleven’s nosebleeds and so much more.

Firestarter is the film adaptation of a 1980 Stephen King novel by the same name, in which a shady government agency uses an experimental drug on study participants, resulting in two of them having a daughter with psychic powers. Which might sound familiar…

“Stranger Things” telegraphs this story through Eleven’s flashbacks and Hopper’s leg-work to find Eleven’s mother. But when Hopper and Joyce visit the mother, they’re in for a letdown as it turns out she’s permanently checked out of reality and is entirely irrelevant to the plot.

Or so we’re very intentionally led to believe.

With so much groundwork laid, my bet is that the rest of the Firestarter plot is being held back for a future season. In both stories, a parent has a super-powered child taken away by the Cold War-obsessed government agency that created her, and that parent goes catatonic for a while afterward. But in Firestarter at least, the father’s apparent catatonia is a ruse to trick the government agents into letting down their guard for a rescue attempt. Similarly, Eleven’s mom may also be a whole lot more with-it than she’s letting on.

If so, is she going to drop her carefully-honed facade for two random strangers who come knocking on her door? I don’t think so!

Most interestingly, in Firestarter, the mother and father also developed lower-level powers from the pharmaceuticals they were given. So could Eleven’s mother also have as-yet-undisclosed abilities? If so, what might they be?

6. Is Eleven still alive?

I have no doubt that we’ll see Eleven again.

In the last episode, Hopper leaves a bundle of holiday food in a metal box in Mirkwood. With the inclusion of Eleven’s favorite kind of waffles, that food can have only one intended recipient.

This can’t be the first time Hopper is filling this cache with food because the box has been there at least long enough to develop that layer of snow on top. And it can’t just be blind hope that Eleven will find this box, because the cache is clearly empty when Hopper arrives. Someone or something has taken whatever food he’s left before, and Hopper doesn’t seem surprised. He leaves food, he comes back, the original food is gone, and he leaves more–that’s his routine because he an Eleven have a standing arrangement.

So the real questions are, why is Eleven hiding in the woods, why is Hopper helping her, and who else knows that she’s there?

7. What other theories do you have about Eleven?

On a symbolic level, with a shaved head and numbered arm-tattoo, Eleven has the general appearance of a Holocaust survivor. Which makes me wonder whether gray-haired 1980’s-era Dr. Bannon might have once been a 1940’s-era Nazi scientist. One who specialized in ESP research that would be helpful in Cold War espionage, but with experimental methods too unethical to be carried out in the open. He’s not old enough to be a Dr. Mengele, but about the right age to have been apprentice to a Dr. Mengele.

Flashbacks make it seem like Eleven was born and bred to be a psychic spy, but if so, why are her language skills so underdeveloped? If she’s meant to listen in on intercontinental conversations, she should have been drilled on Russian and Mandarin at least. Her room should be littered with flashcards from a dozen languages, but instead she’s barely mastered English, and her lack of language doesn’t seem to be due to a learning disability. Her speech is consistent with someone who’s grown up in isolation without an adequate vocabulary, not even for such important concepts as friendship. We can see how smart she is and the struggle she has putting complex thoughts into her limited selection of words.

Is she meant to be a weapon? We don’t see any evidence that the Electric Company is providing the training and disciple to hone her skills and keep them under control.

It seems more like Dr. Bannon and Company want to understand Eleven’s powers, possibly to replicate them, but that she as a person is expendable. They don’t just fail to give her a name, they deliberately take away the name her mother intended for her.

In exploring Eleven’s powers, they probably didn’t expect her to be both telekinetic and clairvoyant, and they certainly wouldn’t have expected her to be able to access parallel worlds. When that happened, they just went with it, with disastrous results.

So it’s possible that Dr. Bannon and his cohort are more incompetent than they are sinister but they also believe their original core mission, whatever it is, enough to justify kidnapping infants, burying mock corpses, installing mass warrantless wiretaps on US citizens, and conducting unauthorized human drug trials.

8. But why is she called Eleven?

Perhaps Eleven was given a number in order to dehumanize her. She’s a tool being used by a U.S. government agency during the Cold War era, so it makes sense that the staff of the Electric Company would be encouraged to not see her as a person or get too attached to her. Except that Dr. Bannon does get attached, either because Eleven refers to him as Papa and draws him pictures, or because he really is her biological father.

He’s just not winning any Parent of the Year awards.

But why Eleven unless at some point there were at least ten more just like her? And why the tattoo? When you have eleven students in a class, regardless of whether they have names or numbers, you don’t need tattoos to tell them apart. Not unless they are literally identical. Which makes me wonder about the state of the art in cloning technology, circa 1971.

Another possibility is that the initial study had ten participants including Eleven’s mom, and that they were all given numbers to preserve their anonymity. Under serious dosage of experimental drugs, they might have been unable to interact with the staff or to properly identify themselves, so tattooed numbers were used instead. When an eleventh test subject was somehow…conceived, she was given the next number up and a matching tattoo so the experiment could continue for another generation.

9. Is Barb still alive?

She’s gone. Eleven said so. Move on.

10. Are Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler the most oblivious parents ever, or what?

Their son has a psychic friend living in the basement. Their daughter has multiple boys going in and out of her bedroom window. The children have dinner-table conversations that whoosh over both parents’ heads. Nobody questions why so many Eggo waffles have gone missing. The parents have no idea their son is wandering the woods at night, or that their daughter is popping through dimensional portals, or that she has a gun.

Even as federal agents are surrounding the house, Mrs. Wheeler is just gabbing away on the phone, so yeah, I’d say they’re kind of oblivious.

11. What Are You Looking Forward to in Season Two?

Secrets.

Hopper has at least two: his knowledge that Eleven is alive; and the details of his deal with the Electric Company. Will also has two: one is that he’s coughing out Upside Down slugs; and the other is that he’s uncontrollably flipping between worlds.

My theory on that, in the metaphor of the acrobat and the flea, is that Will has become a flea. And that he’s possibly been infected with Upside Down parasites or baby demogorgons. Remember, the official cover story is that Will dove into the quarry, nearly drowned, suffered a coma that was misdiagnosed as death, and was buried and then exhumed in time to save his life when the “mistake” was detected. He would have been checked out by medical professionals, but maybe Upside Down organisms don’t show up in the standard tests.

The Electric Company still has secrets, and if my Firestarter theory pans out, Eleven’s mother will also have at least one big secret as well so I expect a season of major reveals, one after another.

2 (revisited). What middle grade novel is most like Stranger Things?

For me, it’s The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (1978). There are no monsters or telekinetic powers but there is a mystery approached by independent teams using different methods and following different clues. That’s the structural framework on which Stranger Things is also built.

In Stranger Things, Joyce investigates the blinking lights and strange phone calls related to her son’s disappearance in a scientific manner, hanging more lights and trying to communicate, remaining completely rational while outwardly seeming to suffer an emotional breakdown.

Hopper does his own style of hardboiled investigative work, including library research, following leads, getting inside the Electric Company, and keeping an open ear and remarkably open mind.

Jonathan and Nancy equip themselves with weapons and explosives like they’re going to war.

And Mike, Dustin, and Lucas use their knowledge of D&D lore, walkie-talkies, biking skills, and one special psychic friend to have a ridiculously grand adventure.

For most of the season, these teams don’t even realize how they’re overlapping their efforts and chasing down each other’s leads. It’s a whole lot of fun to watch.

What middle grade novel most reminds you of Stranger Things? Leave your thoughts in the comments, and thanks for watching!

Be sure to enter the one below! Meanwhile…

The winners of our SASHA giveaway are

Heather S. and Stacey Hicklin