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Interview with Film Nerds author Sofia Warren

By on October 8, 2026   /   Articles, Author Interviews   /   Leave a comment

I’m excited to interview Sofia Warren, the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Film Nerds, which just came out September 29. She is also a cartoonist for The New Yorker. Welcome, Sofia!

About the Book

To start, can you give us a short summary of Film Nerds?

Film Nerds is about two best friends who make movies together. There’s nothing Ami and Ivy love more than getting together and making their epic sci-fi. . . that is, until the stressors of middle school start creeping into their project. Ami is having a hard time at school, but is trying to hide this fact from Ivy: what if Ivy sees her differently, and doesn’t want to be friends anymore? Ami’s convinced that if she can just show the movie to her classmates, things will get better, but Ivy doesn’t agree. What will Ami do? Will their collaboration survive? And more importantly: will their friendship?

Who would especially enjoy this book?

Film Nerds is for creative kids— which is to say, all kids! It deals with themes of friendship, belonging, creativity, and overcoming hardship. Fans of Raina Telgemeier, Terri Libenson, and Kayla Miller will enjoy spending time with Ami and Ivy.

 

About the Author

What was your connection to cartoons and graphic novels growing up? What were some of your favorites?

I loved comics! I mostly read comic strips and syndicated cartoons, like Calvin and Hobbes, Zits, The Far Side, and For Better or For Worse. I also loved Asterix and Tintin. I didn’t really read graphic novels until after college, but once I discovered them in the library, I totally devoured them.

How did you become a cartoonist for The New Yorker? (To see some of her cartoons, check out her Instagram page).

New Yorker cartoonists (myself included) just pitch our work to the editor, and she either takes it or she doesn’t. I started submitting cartoons almost a decade ago after a friend explained the process to me, and I’ve been sending work in regularly ever since.

Tell us about the film you created as a tween: As the Moon Orbits.

I loved making movies! My two major projects were Mary-Kate and Ashley and the Sorcerer’s Scone, (a feature-length satire of Harry Potter) and As The Moon Orbits, a soap opera in which every character was played by either my friend Christen or myself. They may not be Oscar-worthy, but I learned so much and as a shy, awkward kid, I’m so grateful for the experience: making movies made me feel confident and energized. I wish I could show you a clip of these masterpieces, but sadly the soap was on a hard drive that got damaged, and I don’t want to share clips of the others without the consent of the other players.

Do you make films anymore? Have you dived into the world of animation?

I miss making movies, but I haven’t done so in a while— my main creative outlet is comics now. I did go to film school for college, and spent my first few years as an adult working on film sets (both professionally and with friends). I also worked in animation for a number of years, and still animate on occasion!

What was most relatable to me was the uncontrollable blushing—and it getting worse the more you try to stop it. Is this from personal experience? What else did you draw on to write Film Nerds?

Definitely! I was a big blusher. This book is certainly fiction, but much of it is pulled from my own experience: like Ami, making movies with my friends was my favorite thing to do, and like Ami, I was worried that I’d lose my best friend if she discovered my low standing in the popularity hierarchy. The events in the book aren’t real, but the feelings very much are.

What is something from your childhood that you snuck into the book?

I love the movie Waterworld, because it’s one of the few movies we had on VHS when I was a kid. I managed to sneak a reference to it into a fantasy sequence, and I’m very happy about that.

 

Graphic Novels

With graphic novels, it can be difficult to get the page turns to work. How did you plan the storyline with panels? What challenges did you face?

I wrote all of Film Nerds as a script first, which was broken down by panel and page. Because I’ve been making comics for a while, I had a pretty good sense of how much I could visually fit on each page before it started to feel rushed or dense. That said, I left room in the process to draw out a rough draft, and I did move things around at that stage: for instance, sometimes a particular story beat needed more space for emphasis. I drew things out in spreads, rather than pages, because I find that gives me a better overall picture of the pacing of the book.

Was it difficult to go from creating single-panel cartoons to writing a middle-grade graphic novel?

A lot of what I learned by making single-panel cartoons translates into longer-form work: drawing in a simplified style, and composing panels with an emphasis on clarity, humor, and efficient storytelling, for instance. That said, they’re very different processes. I wouldn’t say it was difficult to go from one to the other, because I’ve always worked in longer-form work alongside the cartoons, but it does require a different kind of approach with a lot more planning and less spontaneity.

I liked the use of the film strip Rovers of Time and Space and how it parallels what’s happening in the story. You ended up having to write a story within a story! Was this hard to do?

Thank you! I had a lot of fun writing the girls’ movie within the story. I wanted the stories to feel related without mapping exactly one-to-one, so I did make a chart with the big story beats to make sure they were lining up the way I wanted. Once I settled on the overall conceit of their sci-fi, I found it pretty organic to write the story for it.

 

For Teachers

Are you doing school visits related to this book?

I have a few visits planned, and would love to do more! I have different presentations and workshops planned for different age groups, which show art from the book talk about the process of making it. I’ll also be doing some comics workshops oriented for middle schoolers.

How can we learn more about you?

Thanks for asking! I’m online at sofiawarren.com and @sofiawarrenart on Instagram.

Thanks for your time, Sofia!

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Interview with The Creeps Author Tehlor Mejia

By on October 7, 2026   /   Articles, Author Interviews   /   Leave a comment

Do you know a middle schooler who loves scary books? This one is pretty scary! The Creeps by Tehlor Mejia just came out October 6. It was hard to put down. I’m thrilled to interview Tehlor to learn more about how the book came to be.

 

About the Book

Hi Tehlor! Give us a short summary of The Creeps.

Hi! The Creeps is a book about a middle school boy named Dylan who has to move into a motel for a while when his mom gets sick. Only this isn’t a normal motel. It’s a motel with a lot of rules to follow, and when people don’t follow them, those people tend to disappear…

Who did you have in mind when you wrote it?
First and foremost I wanted to write this book for kids who have experienced housing insecurity—which is a lot more kids than we sometimes realize. Stable housing is such a given in most books for this age group, but that doesn’t reflect the lived experience of a lot of readers, especially as our economy continues to recess.

What came first, the rules or the storyline?

The rules were first! I was thinking about how folks who need to access housing support often have to jump through a lot of hoops to access it, and how sometimes people use their desperation as a way to push a particular agenda. I wondered how a slightly rebellious middle schooler would react to all those extra rules and Dylan’s story grew from there.

You address some serious topics in the book, including a child coping with a chronically sick parent as well as money issues. Unfortunately, there will be many children who relate to both of these. May I ask why you chose to tackle these issues?

Sure. As people in book publishing we’re always talking about the importance of kids seeing themselves in the stories they read. A lot of times being represented by the books you love can be the spark that makes a kid a lifelong reader. But for some kids, representation is pretty sparse. We seem to be pretty scared as a society of talking about poverty and illness. Maybe we’re so afraid of these things happening to us that we want to pretend they don’t exist. But this is reality for a lot of kids, and I believe those kids deserve to see themselves and their experiences in the books they read too.

 

About the Author

What horror films or books did you grow up liking? (Is “like” the right word for our relationship with horror?)

I’ll be honest, I’m a total scaredy-cat. I was barely able to watch any horror as a kid without getting terrified (this is pretty much still the case). But I did love Are You Afraid of the Dark, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and some of the less visceral kids horror. You’ll never catch me writing something scary enough for adults, that’s for sure.

What parts of Dylan can you relate to?
I shared Dylan’s experience of housing insecurity for periods of my own childhood. I never lived in a creepy motel run by [REDACTED], but my family had times where we stayed with friends or had to move to new places due to money issues. It was an experience that wasn’t shared by many of my friends, so it sometimes felt shameful and isolating to be dealing with stuff like that as a kid.

Writing Horror for Middle Grade

I’d imagine writing horror for middle graders is tough as there’s a fine line between not-enough-scare and too much. What rules do you have for yourself on this?
Honestly this one is pretty easy for me since I have about the same scare-tolerance as a ten-year-old. If it’s too scary for me, it’s probably too scary for them.

You’ve written adult, young adult (YA), and middle grade novels. Tell us a little about what you do differently for middle grade versus YA.
Yeah, there are so many cool things about writing for all age groups, but I’ll always have a soft spot for middle grade. I think in YA we’re often dealing with a character’s first time experiencing the world on their own, and having to navigate new situations without parents or guardians guiding them every step of the way. Middle grade is a little different because middle schoolers are really feeling the urge to separate from the adults in their lives and prove that they can handle things, but they’re still a long way from adulthood. So for YA I try to focus on the moment of separation and stepping into your own authority, while in middle grade I like to explore what happens when you feellike you want that freedom and independence but you might not quite be ready to separate entirely from the adults in your life.

I see you have a new book coming out: According to Vero. Can you give a brief description? It sounds really scary—evil AI is scarier than Freddy Krueger, for sure!
Thank you, yeah! According to Vero is about a boy who struggles to make new friends in school until he finds a mysterious device that seems to give him all the answers. It works great at first, until he starts to realize the device has an agenda of its own, and that the price for its corrupted advice might be higher than he was willing to pay.

 

For Teachers

Are you doing school visits related to this book?
I’m always happy to consider school visits for elementary and middle school. I can do book talks, talk about horror for kids, talk about the craft of writing scary stories, etc. Anyone interested can reach out through the contact form on my website.

How can we learn more about you?

I’m on Instagram at @tehlormejia and my website is tehlormejia.com

 

Thanks for your time, Tehlor!
Thank you so much! This was fun 😀

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The Leap to Indie: One Author’s Story

By on October 5, 2026   /   Articles   /   2 Comments

Not all authors are lucky enough to get a book published. Some try for years, even decades, without success and eventually give up. Others keep at it, hoping for a book deal, even if the chances are slim. And the others? They do the one thing they swear they’d never do. They publish their own books.

Life After Kat Greene

After my debut novel, Kat Greene Comes Clean, came out in 2017, I was on cloud nine. Becoming a published author had been a long-held dream, and I felt like I’d won the lottery. Until my sales numbers came in. Understandably, my publisher turned down my second book, and my agent tried to find a new home for it. Things didn’t pan out, and eventually we parted ways. I found a new agent, and wrote a third book.

Disappointment and Despair

Despite my new agent’s enthusiasm, editors weren’t feeling the love. “The voice feels too young,” some would say. “The voice feels too old,” said others. Sometimes, editors wouldn’t respond at all. Hopefulness gave way to hopelessness, and it got harder and harder to stay optimistic. I knew I wasn’t a failure, but I definitely felt like one.

My daughter, Chloe, saw me struggling and gave me a book called Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. I appreciated the gesture, but I felt too deflated to read it. At the same time, I  knew that if I didn’t make some serious changes, I’d be stuck in a never-ending loop of disappointment and despair.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

The first step was breaking up with my agent. We had formed a strong professional bond over the years, filled with trust and mutual respect, and I worried that pulling the plug would feel like a personal betrayal. Thankfully, my agent didn’t see it that way. They admired my courage to forge my own path, and promised to remain friends. It felt like a burden had lifted, perhaps for both of us.

But after I terminated my contract, reality hit. I had no agent, and no clear way forward. Although I knew indie publishing was an option, I doubted it was right for me. Sure, many authors were doing it, but as someone who’s worked in publishing for more than thirty years, it still carried a stigma I couldn’t shake. Plus, all that hard work! All the uncertainty! And all the decisions I’d have to make, from hiring a cover designer to securing an ISBN number, and everything in between. For a risk-averse person with fair to middling decision-making skills, this was my worst nightmare.

Snowy Wings Publishing

And then I discovered Snowy Wings, a group of MG and YA authors who banded together to form their own publishing house. It’s a cooperative model, which means the authors in the collective share resources and advice, and help to cross-promote each other’s books. What could be better than that? So, I contacted the founder, Lyssa Chiavari, and bombarded her with questions. Lyssa patiently answered them, and then invited me to join the group.

My first novel with Snowy Wings, Camp, Crushes, and Other Catastrophes—an epistolary novel that focuses on two thirteen-year-old BFFs, Maddie, who’s getting bullied at sleepaway camp, and Kenzi, who’s back home in NYC, babysitting her bratty little brother—will be published on May 4, 2027.

I’d be lying if I said I’m not freaked out by going indie, and the learning curve is steep. But the thought of having more control over the publishing process is worth the price of admission. And then some. Watch this space! 🙂

Author Melissa Roske smiling and signing a book at a bookstore event. She is seated at a wooden table in front of bookshelves, wearing a sleeveless purple dress.

Melissa Roske is a writer of middle-grade fiction. Before spending her days with imaginary people, she interviewed real ones as a journalist in Europe. In London she landed a job as an advice columnist for Just Seventeen magazine. Upon returning to her native New York, Melissa contributed to several books and magazines, selected jokes for Reader’s Digest, and received certification as a life coach. In addition to her debut novel Kat Greene Comes Clean, Melissa’s short story “Grandma Merle’s Last Wish” appears in the Jewish MG anthology, Coming of Age: 13 B’Nai Mitzvah Stories. Learn more about Melissa on her Website and follow her on  Facebook and Instagram.

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