morrow ford
In which Michael Thomas Ford answers some burning questions
Michael Thomas Ford writes matured-oriented short stories and that's it, set? Suicide Notes was his first YA novel, redress?
That's what I thought for years. Turns out I was truly incredibly wrong. Then, via the wonder of email, I found out that Mike is not only a fruitful writer of books for children, junior adults, and adults, he is funny, discerning to answer emails, and a devoted watcher of sci-fi goggle-box. How could I resist asking for an interview? Understand on and learn the fascinating life stories behind the most prominent author you've only just heard of.
Carlie Webber: A lot of people imagine that this is your first YA novel, but it isn't. Can you talk a little bit about your curriculum vitae in writing children's and YA books?
Michael Thomas Ford: There's a extensive scene in Norton Juster's THE Vision TOLLBOOTH where Milo, after rescuing the princesses Wisdom and Reason and restoring peace to the feuding kingdoms, is told by Monarch Azaz that he has been withholding a secret from Milo, which is that the reprimand Milo has just accomplished was illogical. Milo, astonished, asks the sovereign why he hadn't warned him, to which the king replies, "So many things are practicable just as long as you don't know they're outrageous." That pretty much sums up how I managed to coin a writing career.
My final semester in college a elegance I was signed up for was canceled and the department unswerving to offer a class on writing for children in lieu of. The instructor was Isabelle Holland, who is best bib known for the novel THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE. Because I was the only one with a car I was drafted to pick Isabelle up every week at her apartment in New York (the college was in Westchester) and then tour her home again after class. We got to be quite proficient friends during these drives.
As the semester neared its tight Isabelle asked me what I intended to do with my entity. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I had applied to Episcopal Divinity Denomination and to the graduate school at Duke University, but wasn't definitely thrilled about the idea of being either a seminarian or an English professor. Isabelle suggested the publishing trade, about which I knew nothing. She called a friend of hers at Macmillan Publishing (the recently Elizabeth Cater, who at that time was the maestro of educational publishing at Macmillan Work Clubs), who passed along my name to someone in the children's branch. It just happened that a new editor (Plain-spoken Sloan, who I believe is now editor-in-chief of Rourke Publishing) had recently started and needed an assistant. He called me in and hired me because -- he told me later -- I wore Hush Puppy shoes and corduroy pants to the conversation and he thought that was sort of sweet and mournful. It was all very Ugly Betty.
So I went to effort at an imprint of Macmillan Children's Books. We specialized in nonfiction books for the kind and library market. Because there were only the two of us working on these books I got to do a lot more than an leading article assistant normally does. Within a year I was editing books, and presently after than we acquired another imprint and launched a third. I was editing a ton of books and more or less having fun, but I knew I wanted to do something else. It was marvy to work on other people's books, but I wanted to put in writing my own. I just didn't know what I wanted to disregard about.
Then one night I turned on the news and Spell Johnson was announcing that he was HIV-positive. The next morning I went in and told Unrestricted that we needed to do a book on HIV/AIDS for na people. Long story low on -- I ended up writing it. That order was 100 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS ABOUT AIDS. It was enormously well-heeled. But it wasn't until a couple of years later -- after our imprints were acquired by another comrades and I chose not to go with them -- that I had to decide whether or not script was something I could do full time. Against all logic, I decided I could.
Because 100 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS ABOUT AIDS had been so well-received I did more books in that manner. An imprint of Morrow had optioned the paperback rights to the first tome, and I did a follow up with them called THE VOICES OF AIDS, which was a accumulation of interviews with people whose lives had been afflicted by HIV. I then did a similar book of interviews with gay and lesbian people called Open, which was a companion book of sorts to a laws I'd done with The New Press a few years before called THE Humanity OUT THERE: BECOMING PART OF THE LESBIAN AND GAY COMMUNITY.
At that point I was the "sexually transmitted issues guy." The books won a bunch of awards and got on a classify of best-of lists, and that's what editors wanted me to keep doing. But I wanted to try something else, and so I convinced an redactor friend at Avon to give me a shot at theme middle grade fiction. She assigned me two books in the SPINETINGLERS series (published under the series prime mover name of M.T. Coffin), which was one of the eighteen million dread series that were around at that time. I had a blast doing those, but the series ended and then my reviser friend left the company. I was irksome to decide what to do next when another editor at Avon called. She was new, and she had exactly been assigned the job of creating a series of books based on a
boob tube show called EERIE, INDIANA, which had run for one occasion a few years before and which was about to be re-launched by Avon's parent flock. The editor had never heard of the show, let alone seen it, and she was looking for writers for the series.
As it happened, Strange had been one of my favorite shows. I think more out of comfort than any trust in my writing abilities, the redactor assigned me the first book in the series. I ended up scribble literary works nine of the seventeen books in the series (as Mike Ford), and that was enormously fun. Those are still some of my favorites of my books, and I was sad when the re-launched telly series bombed and the book series was canceled along with it.
By then I had started review the first of what would become the TRIALS OF MY QUEER LIFE series of tackle collections for adults. Ironically, as I was becoming well-known as a gay author I published for young adults a post called PATHS OF FAITH, which was a hoard of interviews with leaders from various precise traditions. There was a little bit of the "is that the same guy who wrote THAT'S MR FAGGOT TO YOU?" quirk with that book, and although the book was named to many choicest-of lists by YA review sources it sold poorly. Of positively I can't be certain that my adult writing had anything to with that, but it made me a petty wary.
After the EERIE books ended I arranged my editor a series of books about girls studying Wicca. At the mores she said that they absolutely could not do a series like that because the text was too controversial. So I put the idea away and concentrated on my books for adults, which had become very all the rage. Then, just as I was again wondering what I was going to do next, the phone rang and it was an columnist at HarperCollins (which had recently acquired Avon) asking if I had any ideas for a series about girls who were witches. The d
of that phone call was CIRCLE OF THREE, a series I wrote under the name Isobel Bird (in honor of Isabelle Holland) about three girls fatigued together by their interest in Wicca. It was a wonderful experience, but also fatiguing. I wrote 15 books in the patch of about 18 months, which didn't give me much interval to actually enjoy writing them.
After COT I started to focus mostly on my books for adult readers, and I didn't belittle delete anything for young readers until 2007, when I did a fun central grade romance novel (PUPPY Friendship, written as Jenny Collins) as a irregularity between two heavy adult books. And now SUICIDE NOTES is coming out, which will be the first YA with my honest name on it. I'm really excited to be getting back to YA books, as the smash they can have on people's lives is really singular.
One interesting thing to note is that when I first started expos for young adults I had an editor (a lesbian, by the way) discriminate me that she could never publish fiction with my real name on it because people would be put off by the low-down that I was openly gay. I assumed that as my gay-themed chirography for adult audiences became more popular I was making it even more outrageous for me to publish YA fiction under my real name. When I was asked to do SUICIDE NOTES I in truth offered to do it under a pseudonym. To my delight they insisted that
I use my name just because of my popularity with adult readers. It's marvellous how things have changed in the last 15 years.
CW: What inspired you to decry SUICIDE NOTES?
MTF: Abby McAden, my editor-in-chief on the CIRCLE OF THREE SERIES, wanted me to do
a wood-alone novel that featured some of the humor of my books for adults. Eight or nine years earlier I had in a word worked on a novel idea about a boy who wakes up in a psychiatric minor after a suicide attempt. It was written in the compose of letters between the boy and his best friend, who is a filly. I asked another writer friend to occupation on it with me, and for about a year we actually exchanged letters as the characters. But then we both moved on to other projects and I put the doctrine away. Abby (who, by the way, is the editor who signed Meg
Cabot for THE PRINCESS DIARIES and who is a total virtuoso) wanted me to do something gay-themed, and I immediately reasoning of this project. I jettisoned everything except the first couple of paragraphs and started over, and that's what became SUICIDE NOTES.
CW: More and more, GLBTQ YA novels are positive. Where gay characters used to be killed offstage in car accidents, now we're seeing many books where gay characters complete the same lives as straight
characters. Being gay and denying his sexuality, however, is what drives...
Blackboard Jungle - "First Day"
morrow ford: New professor Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) meets the two "big men" in his high school homeroom order, Artie (Vic Morrow) and Greg (Sidney Poitier). Shot in 1955 by big cheese Richard Brooks, from a screenplay he wrote from Evan Hunter's novel. Nominated for 4 Oscars, Blackboard Jungle was one of Sidney Poitier's earliest films and without doubt shows the camera presence and depth of his acting ability. The screen was Vic Morrow's first film in one of Hollywood's most prolific and difficult careers. Excluding the 152 episodes (1962-67) of the famous television series Combat, Morrow is credited with over 100 film and television appearances in a...
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