Cynsations is celebrating its 20th anniversary by switching to a quarterly publishing schedule, featuring in-depth interviews and articles. Thank you for your ongoing support and enthusiasm!
Author Cynthia DeFelice
Children’s book author Cynthia DeFelice, oft-lauded for her deft storytelling and absorbing themes, died on May 24, in Geneva, N.Y. She was 72, reported Publishers Weekly.
The child of a psychiatrist and an English teacher, DeFelice grew up in a home filled with books. “Lucky for me, my mother read to the four of us children almost every night. She’s the one who made me love books and stories and is, I’m sure, the reason why I am a writer,” DeFelice stated on her website.
DeFelice was working as an elementary school library when she decided to write for children. Her first book, The Strange Night Writing of Jessamine Colter (Atheneum, 1988) was lauded as a Notable Book by NCTE and is still in print.
She followed the young adult novel with a spooky picture book, The Dancing Skeleton, illustrated by Robert Andrew Parker (Atheneum, 1989).
DeFelice continued alternating between picture books and novels, authoring more than 40 books in all and winning many state awards in the process.
Her title, The Ghost of Fossil Glen (FSG, 1998) won children’s choice awards in Texas, Nebraska, Kansas, Florida, Virginia, Maryland and Iowa and led to several sequels. “I loved reading ghost stories when I was a kid… So I thought it might be fun to write one,” DeFelice wrote on her website. She went on to describe weaving together a location near her home in upstate New York with a falling-out with her friends in fourth grade and added in a friend’s golden retriever.
DeFelice included a page on her website titled, “How I Write” with advice to pay attention. “You must always be looking and listening and noticing things, because you never know when something might happen that will give you an idea you can use in a story.” She went on to detail her process of brainstorming, writing and revising, researching and revising, and meeting with her writer’s group for critiquing. In a 2011 Cynsations interview, author Vivian Vande Velde, who was also a member of the group, described their process.
“Once a month we go to the home of Cynthia DeFelice (with her beautiful house on beautiful Seneca Lake; it’s the most central location, a little over an hour’s drive for most of us). We spend a certain amount of time catching up on one another’s news, then we get down to serious business. ….what works for us is to read to each other–a picture book text, a short story, one to several chapters of a novel…. Then we go around (usually, though not always in an orderly fashion) telling the things we liked, the things we didn’t understand, the things that we thought would be stronger if…”
On her How I Write page, DeFelice stated, “After a meeting with my writer’s group, I am always excited about rewriting with their ideas and suggestions in mind.” And she went on to include the next step of sending the manuscript to her agent and editor, “who will undoubtedly want me to do more revisions and rewriting!” DeFelice went through that process many, many times, ultimately publishing more than 40 books.
DeFelice concluded the peek at her process with this: “Seeing the stories that I worked so hard on become beautiful books is the most rewarding thing I can imagine. I love when they are translated into other languages, like Danish, Korean, Italian, German, French, and more! It thrills me to think of children all over the world reading my words.”
Author Francine Pascal
“Author Francine Pascal, whose massively popular Sweet Valley High series broke new ground—and several records—in the YA publishing realm, died July 28; she was 92,” reported Publishers Weekly.
Before writing for teens, Pascal freelanced for magazines including True Confessions and later Cosmopolitan. With her husband, John Pascal, she briefly wrote for a soap opera, The Young Marrieds. In 1974, the couple adapted John’s reporting on the Patty Hearst trial into the book, The Strange Case of Patty Hearst, which Publishers Weekly stated, “they completed under a crash 30-day deadline to be first to the market.”
Pascal’s first book for teens was Hangin’ Out With Cici (Viking, 1977), described by Goodreads as, “An accident, suffered during fourteen-year-old Victoria’s train ride back to the city, allows the trouble-prone adolescent to enter her mother’s childhood in New York City of the 1940’s.”
In a 2019 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Pascal recalled that she’d pitched networks a soap opera centered on teens in the early 1980s, but got only rejections. Then a friend told her an editor was looking for a teen version of the television show Dallas. “I thought about it, and this other soap opera thing was in my head, the one that I couldn’t sell. I sat down and I wrote a [character] bible and the first 12 [SVH] stories. It went quickly because it was such a fertile idea. Bantam Books loved it. They ordered all 12,” Pascal told Entertainment Weekly.
She went on to explain that she had a “heavy hand” in the first Sweet Valley High book, Double Love (Bantam, 1983), but wasn’t interested in writing the series herself. Instead she oversaw a team of ghostwriters who used the character bible and detailed outlines Pascal created for each book.
One of those ghostwriters was author Jennifer Ziegler, who referenced her Sweet Valley High and Fearless work in a 2018 Cynsations interview, and how it prepared her for a career as an author. “Because I had to defer to the mass market editors and follow the series ‘bibles’ – so that the books could maintain a consistent voice – I learned how to get over myself and could better handle editorial feedback with my trade books,” Ziegler said. “In the literary world, work-for-hire writing isn’t valued the same way as trade writing, but I’m proud of my mass market experience. I like to think of that time as my publishing ‘boot camp.’ It helped me conquer fears and showed me what I was capable of.”
According to a CNN/AP article, more than 150 Sweet Valley High books were published, along with many sequels and spinoffs. They sold more than 200 million copies – and counting. The story of twins Jessica and Elizabeth continues in the Sweet Valley Twins graphic novel series.
Book four, The Haunted House, by Francine Pascal, illustrated by Knack Whittle and adapted by Nicole Adelfinger (Random House Graphic, May 2024) released earlier this year, with books five and six due in 2025.
Cynsational Notes
Gayleen Rabakukk holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an undergraduate degree in Journalism from the University of Central Oklahoma. She has published numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and two regional interest books for adults. She is represented by Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management.
She serves as board member for Lago Vista’s Friends of the Library and also leads a book club for young readers at the library. She’s active in Austin SCBWI and has taught creative writing workshops for the Austin Public Library Foundation. She loves inspiring curiosity in young readers through stories of hope and adventure. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.