Maria Riegger of Law School Heretic joined me today to talk about the most important legal considerations for new authors, particularly self-published authors. Covered here is copyright - your own, and others - as well as how to protect your personal assets by forming an LLC, and the dangers of defamation.
Kacy Ritter on Texas, Dragons, and writing MG: "The Great Texas Dragon Race"
Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview.
Today’s guest for the WHAT is Kacy Ritter, author of The Great Texas Dragon Race which releases today!
Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?
Failure was the origin point. Seriously.
After trying my hand at a high fantasy YA novel in a medieval setting, I realized I wasn’t writing to my strengths. (In other words, the book was pretty terrible. So, there’s that.) Instead of clumsily writing an uninventive Eurocentric story, I decided to write a uniquely American fantasy in a uniquely American setting. They say, “Write what you know,” and I thought, “Well, I know dragons, and I know Texas, so why not?” To me, it seemed so possible that modern-day Texas could be filled with dragons—and I bet Texans would care for, ride, and train them just like horses. Everything expanded from that concept.
Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?
My protagonist, Cassidy Drake, and her underdog racing dragon became the driving force during the outlining phase. I imagined Cassidy as a bold, stubborn dragon rider and conservationist, desperate to show her grit. The initial plot idea is stolen straight from a classic Western trope, the “Ranch Story,” in which a family-owned ranch—in this case, a penniless dragon sanctuary—is threatened by a larger corporate ranching operation. Then, I merged the plot with a classic competition narrative. (Because, really, shouldn’t there be more dragon racing stories?) From there, I dropped my ideas into a version of Larry Brook’s Story Engineering Beat Sheet and anchored the beats around specific locations across Texas.
Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?
Absofreakinglutely. While the basic plot of The Great Texas Dragon Race was firmly set, the relationships between its cast of characters shifted as I put words on paper. In time, those characters developed arcs which couldn’t be ignored. The entire writing process really is an exercise in how to “kill your darlings.” Originally, I actually wrote (and queried!) this book as a YA novel. But something clicked when my agent, Adriann Ranta Zurhellen, suggested I rewrite it as a middle grade story. Apparently, I was an MG author in disguise! My editor at Clarion/HarperCollins, Emilia Rhodes, also had critical insight into how I could clarify the overall plot and vision. I’m so grateful for everything these fantastic women did to nurture Cassidy’s story.
Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?
My work, at least for now, is very centered around the weird world of Texas. Texas has so much fodder for the imagination because it is so vast and varied. Whenever I’m traveling around the state, I get inspired by everything: from the old, dilapidated BBQ sign in a lonely town to the weird, campy keychain at a gas station. It’s so easy to develop fantastical ideas based on Texas’s strange nuances. Whether or not the idea is a good one… Well, that’s another story.
How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?
I LOVE cooking up plots and characters, but I tend to get pretty obsessive once I get “into” a specific idea. Worldbuilding is my childhood pastime, and while I can multitask if I have to, I prefer to be deeply invested in one “world” at a time. For new stories, I will always gravitate toward whichever idea I just can’t get out of my head.
I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?
As I write this, a very attentive rescue cat named Joe Biden is hovering over my keyboard while my rescue pup, Nandor the Relentless, looks on longingly. My second rescue cat, Dracarys “Cinder” Soot, finds humans mildly interesting as best, but I still have her fur sticking out of my keyboard. Most of the time, I find the trio pretty distracting, but I don’t really have a choice as I am their designated domestic servant. While I wish I had a rescue dragon to complete the crew, I fear that would make writing even more difficult.
Kacy Ritter is a behavioral health professional by day and MG fantasy writer by night. She is also a member of SCBWI Houston. In between writing and meetings, she imagines taking off on a Texas BBQ and taco tour with her rescue dog and cats. Kacy holds degrees from the University of Texas and the University of North Texas.
Jacqueline Vogtman on A Mother’s Magic
In an episode of True Blood, a guilty-pleasure HBO show I watched religiously in my 20s, the vampire Bill Compton says something I always found profound (particularly for TV): “You think that it’s not magic that keeps you alive? Just because you understand the mechanics of how something works, doesn’t make it any less of a miracle…which is just another word for magic. We’re all kept alive by magic, Sookie.”
I’ve been writing magical realist short stories now for about 18 years, since my final year of undergrad, and all throughout my MFA program and beyond I’ve returned to magical realism and its sisters, fabulism and speculative fiction, though I’ve tried out other types of writing. For me, though, magic doesn’t conjure (get it?) wizards and Harry Potter, or witches or Tarot cards or vampires. I find magic in our real world, particularly our natural world, and yes, also in being a mother.
When I was pregnant back in 2013-2014, I marveled at the miraculous changes in my body, that first kick, that first heartbeat, and the sheer fact that we created something—a whole being, soul included—out of nothing. (Well, I know it’s not really out of nothing; I wasn’t absent during sex-ed class.) And even after my daughter was born, the magic didn’t stop, and still hasn’t stopped eight years later.
I was particularly fascinated by breast milk, how a newly-born infant will sometimes squirm its own way up a mother’s body to get at it, how the first drops of colostrum carry protective benefits, how the composition of breast milk will change over time to adapt to the baby’s age and health, how my body would let milk down at the mere thought of my child or her cry in another room. All of this is not to say breastfeeding wasn’t very hard—it was, let me tell you, and I almost didn’t make it through—and I know that some parents are not able to or choose not to breastfeed, and that does not make their nourishment of their children any less magical. But for me, the idea of breast milk was a profound mixture of science and magic, biology and spirituality.
For a long time after my daughter was born, I didn’t write. When I finally did, the first story I wrote featured the magic of breast milk (though this was capitalized on by the patriarchal-capitalist system in a near-future semi-dystopia). The story was titled “Girl Country,” and it became the title story of my first published book, coming out from Dzanc Books in May 2023. Many of the stories in my collection focus on mothers and children because I find magic every day in raising my daughter. From watching her grow taller overnight, to that first tooth that fell out and then miraculously grew back, to creating imaginary worlds with her toys, to exploring the budding plants in our backyard, to watching deer dance in a field, to that first word read and that first story and poem written: all of it is magic, and I hope she grows up knowing this too.
Jacqueline Vogtman won the 2021 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, and her book Girl Country will be published by Dzanc Books in May 2023. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University, and her fiction has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Permafrost, The Literary Review, Third Coast, Smokelong Quarterly, and other journals. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey and resides in a small town surrounded by nature, which she explores with her husband, daughter, and dog. Find her on Instagram @jacquelinevogtman and online at jacquelinevogtman.com.