BLOG TOUR: Daughter of the Centaurs

Hi there readers!

Welcome back to Satisfaction for Insatiable Readers...the place to be when you're in need of a delicious, perfectly seasoned, book du jour...and trust me when I say that today's post fits the bill.

Today, we play guest to a blog tour courtesy of Random House Children's Books featuring an author with a creative start to a Young Adult series and a unique backgound.  How so?  Ah, it's all in the details.  An interesting tidbit of information came to my attention when first approached by Lauren (~waves~) about this tour...the author, Kate Klimo, is an Executive Editor with Random House, the very same house that is publishing her YA debut.  Curious....very curious.  This of course led me to ponder a few things, namely..

...what was the path like to her current role...

...why make the jump to penning her own title...

...and of course...

...what inspired her journey in the first place?

Thankfully, my questions were not met with a raised eyebrow and hand held high to prevent further investigation, but rather a remarkabley insightful response that I couldn't be happier to share with you, my fellow readers.  So, please...join me in welcoming (and congratulating!) author Kate Klimo as she travels the blogosphere in celebration of her recent release, Centuriad, Book 1:  Daughter of the Centaurs...

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GUEST POST:  Author Kate Klimo

I think I’ve always thought of myself as being a writer. From the age of ten, when my best friend and I wrote a fantasy epic, writing was just something that I always did. I went to college to study writing with writers. My ambition at the time was to write adult books. At Sarah Lawrence, I studied with E.L. Doctorow, Grace Paley, Hortense Calisher, Curtis Harnack, and other working writers. Interestingly, all of them agreed that my approach to adult stories was somewhat phantasmagorical which, at the time (unlike today) wasn’t selling on the adult market. (Maybe they knew then what it took me years—and two adult novels—to discover, which is that all along I was meant to write for children.)

I took a job in publishing after graduating, choosing children’s editorial, because I figured it would be too much, given that I wanted to write adult novels, to be working on them on a day-to-day basis. I got married and had three sons and during their early years, I wrote four novels for adults, two of which got published but--what can I say?--the earth didn’t exactly move. But something else happened during those years: I spent hours and hours and hours reading aloud to my kids all the fantasy books I had read and loved as a kid (C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Edward Eager, Tolkien) and the new ones that had been published since I was a kid (Lloyd Alexander, Tamora Pierce, Susan Cooper, Robin McKinley). I saw what I hadn’t seen as clearly as an editor and publisher, which was what a love of fantasy did for my kids. It was transformative. It was the spice in the stew of their lives. It was the magical spark that animated their imaginations. I decided that maybe my lot in life was to write books like this for kids.

As soon as my kids left home, I started revving up to write. The first piece I worked on was about some kids who try to crack open a geode only to discover that it’s an egg with a dragon inside. It was based on my own kids, who had failed to crack open this geode they had found. I consoled them with the idea that the geode was really a dragon egg but that it wasn’t ready to be born. My middle son placed the egg in his sock drawer, which he thought would make a good nest for it. And, as often happens, he and his brothers forgot about it. It wasn’t until years later, when I was converting the bedroom to a study and emptying the bureau drawers, that I came upon the geode, and—bam!—there was my story. The idea for The Centauriad occurred over years of taking riding vacations with my husband to different spots around the world: the Canaries, Africa, France. I started with the idea of an adventure involving horses, I added centaurs, and before I knew it, I had this world in the far-distant future populated by hybrids of human and animal—with one lone surviving human, a horsewoman, making her way.

My friends think that because I work for a publisher (and am, in fact, myself a publisher) that it was easy for me to get published. And it was, in a way, in the sense that I could submit a manuscript and not have to wonder if it got lost in the mailroom. But it still took months for anyone to get back to me. And the first editor who read it felt really awkward even responding, considering that I was her boss’s boss. The editor I finally wound up with was the woman I hired as an assistant almost twenty years ago who had since become the Associate Publisher of Random House Books for Young Readers: Mallory Loehr. Mallory had the guts to respond to me, to edit me, to give me hard notes without fear of offending me or violating the hierarchy. And trust me: Mallory doesn’t cut me much slack. She didn’t acquire my first book until I had revised it about five times. Nor did she overpay me (on the contrary!) She’s a tough editor and I don’t believe for a moment that she gives me special treatment because I’m the publisher. In fact, I sometimes think she goes out of her way to prove otherwise.

The same goes for the marketing and sales folks. In many ways, being on the inside of the same house that is publishing me puts me at something of a disadvantage. To begin with, I know lots more than I need to know, certainly more than your average author knows and yet, as the author, I am powerless to exercise my publisher’s authority to do much of anything with that knowledge. I constantly have to switch hats; to bow out of discussions that involve my book. When I retire from being a publisher in April and begin to be a more traditional full-time writer, I look forward to being liberated from the wearing of those multiple hats. Rather than being a hyphenate, a publisher-editor-author, I will go to being just this: an author. It’s a little scary, because as a publisher, I have spent the last thirty years clad in corporate armor. As an author, I no longer have that armor. I feel considerably more defenseless. So be kind, readers! Thanks for inviting me into your blog!

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Wow...what a journey!
So you see, fair readers....inside information isn't always what it's cracked up to be. Sometimes it can merely heighten your awareness of all that is happening around you as opposed to the short lived bliss of ignorance.  Still, I can't help but think that all that experience, whether worry inducing or insight creating, helped to mold Ms. Klimo into the writer she is today...and really, don't you just love where she got her inspiration from?  Come to think of it, I had a geode as a child....I wonder....

Be sure to check out the rest of the tour as it makes its way through the blogosphere...

2/20 Tynga’s Reviews



2/21:  HERE!


2/22 Taking it One Book at a Time


2/23 Literary Escapism


2/24 Total Bookaholic


2/25 Livin’ Life Through Books


2/27 The Children’s Book Review

2/27 LitFest Magazine

2/28 Bibliophile Support Group


2/29 The Compulsive Reader


3/1 Sea of Pages

...you never know just what you'll uncover next!

For more information on the author, be sure to visit her official website or follow along on Twitter.  This book is now available on a bookstore shelf near you so be sure to be on the look out!

Until next time...happy reading!