Ask the Author: Bill Elenbark
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Bill Elenbark
A monster story. Or more specifically a YA monster story. Inspired by my love of horror stories I've integrated my normal YA LGBT love story themes with a monster attacking people in southern Vermont. Also takes place in my hometown of this past decade, Hoboken, NJ. And features a great new cast of characters. Almost complete and ready to go out to editors :)
Bill Elenbark
During the summer before my final year in my MA writing program, I knew I needed both a short story for my fiction class and a novel idea for my thesis. I was reading a book at the time that was very stream of consciousness style and mentioned a character named "Stickboy" (they all had odd nicknames in the story) and as an experiment I wrote out a paragraph in stream of consciousness that started with "Stick. Not because he was good with a bat..." That morphed into a whole page and a short story followed and eventually served as the basis for a longer novel that was my thesis ... but that novel never went anywhere. Many years later, I got the idea to re-write the basic "Stick" story but base my narrator's family on my best friend's family and the Stick character on my boyfriend's family and turn it more into a family story. Almost nothing was left from my original thesis but that first line from the first short story made it into the final published draft of I WILL BE OKAY. That line was written longhand in a notebook way back in 2009. So... it's been a long time coming, this story.
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