C. Lee McKenzie, author of the new The Princess of Las Purgas, is doing a guest post today to talk about her history and her writing.
After her father's slow death from cancer, Carlie thought things couldn't get worse. But now, she is forced to confront the fact that her family in dire financial straits. To stay afloat, her mom has had to sell their cherished oceanfront home and move Carlie and her younger brother Keith to the other side of the tracks to dreaded Las Pulgas, or "the fleas" in Spanish. They must now attend a tough urban high school instead of their former elite school, and on Carlie's first day of school, she runs afoul of edgy K.T., the Latina tattoo girl who's always ready for a fight, even on crutches. Carlie fends off the attention of Latino and African American teen boys, and one, a handsome seventeen-year-old named Juan, nicknames her Princess when he detects her aloof attitude towards her new classmates. What they don't know is that Carlie isn't really aloof; she's just in mourning for her father and almost everything else that mattered to her. Mr. Smith, the revered English teacher who engages all his students, suggests she'll like her new classmates if she just gives them a chance; he cajoles her into taking over the role of Desdemona in the junior class production of Othello, opposite Juan, after K.T. gets sidelined. Keith, who becomes angrier and more sullen by the day, spray paints insults all over the gym as he acts out his anger over the family's situation and reduced circumstances. Even their cat Quicken goes missing, sending Carlie and Keith on a search into the orchard next to their seedy garden apartment complex. They're met by a cowboy toting a rifle who ejects them at gunpoint from his property. But when Carlie finds him amiably having coffee with their mom the next day -- when he's returned her cat -- she begins to realize that nothing is what it seems in Las Pulgas.
Just click read more to read and enjoy!
People often ask who I am, and I say I’m a California girl who likes to travel and come back to my home state. I’ve lived for short periods in other parts of the world like New York, Hong Kong, San Diego, Vientiane, L.A., San Francisco and Gilroy. Yep! Gilroy, the garlic capital of the world. Hang your steak out the window and it’s seasoned for the barbecue. So you can see I’ve bounced around a bit. I finally settled into a mountain setting near the town of Los Gatos and I think this is my permanent place. It has cats, big tawny lion-types that we sometimes spot just as they disappear among the trees. It has deer and fox and snakes and many forest critters that are willing to share some of their space with me.
I love yoga. I love hiking. I love to grow my own vegetables because they taste like vegetables, and I know exactly how far they’ve traveled to reach my kitchen. I also love to write.
I used to write a lot of nonfiction; then one day I wrote a short story for a contest. This was on a dare by a friend, so when I won the hundred dollar prize we were both blown away. I don’t think that prize motivated me to write, but it did get my interest. I’d just done something for fun and been paid a magnificent sum for doing it. Well, it seemed like a magnificent sum because it was totally unexpected.
Another question I’m often asked is what I most enjoy about being a writer. That’s easy--learning new stuff. Every time I start to write something I find out how much I don’t know about the world I’m trying to create, and I have to go exploring. For my first book, Sliding on the Edge, I had to talk to a lot of horse people and psychologists. Most people love to share what they know, so then I also make new friends, and that’s another wonderful part of being a writer.
When people first asked me why I write edgy young adult novels, I didn’t have an answer. I think that’s because I didn’t set out to write in that category. It just happened. The topics I’m drawn to, the way I craft the language and the stories seem to fit. Now that I’m here, I really enjoy it. I must, because my second YA book is just out and I’m putting the finishing touches on a third.
This second book, The Princess of Las Pulgas, is different from my first one--very. So far I’m not a series writer. I like to create, develop and bring my story to a close in a single book. In Princess I started with the question, “What if this girl, I have in my mind to write about, had everything and then lost it?” Then I went on to find out.
I really struggled to put my poor protagonist, Carlie Edmund, into the situations I felt I needed to build the story. In fact, I saved her from so many bad things that I had to go back and UN-save her or I wouldn’t have had the story I wanted. I hate it when bad things happen to people, but fiction is all about things getting bad before they can become better. While I write, I talk to myself a lot. “Lee, you’ve got to let that plane crash.” “Lee, you know that boy can’t arrive in time to save the barn.” Arrg!
The journey from idea to book is one of the most frustrating, exhilarating, disappointing, rewarding experiences I’ve had. In the end I love it. And as long as I do I’ll keep writing.