Last Wednesday I was tagged for "The Next Big Thing" by Jenni Moody. Here are my answers:

1) What is the working title of your next book?

I think of it as “The Little Dancing Girl,” but I’m positive the title will change as I continue writing and revising.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

Two things sparked the idea:

When I was pregnant, someone asked me what was the most important thing I would want my child to understand about the world. I decided I wanted my daughter to know that there is no God, but that that isn’t a bad thing, that in fact, the real world—the world as we understand it based on science, not faith—is far more complex, interesting, and even magical than the over-simplified belief that someone created the world and we’re all beholden to that creator.

Also while I was pregnant, I was having trouble writing. I was incredibly distracted with thoughts of motherhood and planning for my daughter’s arrival. A few people suggested that I keep a sort of pregnancy log, possibly with the intention of showing it to my daughter down the road. I started writing her letters, which started to become a sort of memoir of the important things about me and the important incidents from my life that I wanted my daughter to know.

I wrote over a hundred pages of letters, and I started trying to shape the letters into a cohesive story about how I came to turn my back on religion (having grown up the daughter of a preacher), and how I found that my life seems to actually have more meaning this way. The problem was, as a fiction writer, I kept wanting to embellish the stories, or in some cases, make up entirely new, more interesting stories. Now that my daughter is one and the letters have been sitting, untouched on my computer, for some time, it recently hit me that this mish-mash of letters could be the impetus for a novel, in which I can explore those same basic themes, but do it in my own way, shaping the story how I want to shape it.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

I’m not really sure yet, but probably YA. The main character will be a young adult throughout the majority of the story.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Hmmm. If I could choose actors at any stage in their careers, I would cast Claire Danes from her My So-Called-Life days as the main character. I think I’d like to see Kevin Kline as the father and maybe Frances McDormand as the mother.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

This is a difficult question to answer at this stage of the writing process, but here’s a try:

A mother turns her life story into a fairy tale for her daughter: the tale of the little dancing girl, who grew up in a valley obscured by the shadow of a vast mountain on which everybody believed lived a fearsome king.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

If the book comes together in a way that I’m satisfied with, I’ll do an agent hunt. If I can’t secure an agent, I’ll look at small presses.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

It’s still in progress. The plan is to have a complete draft finished by this summer.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I don’t really know. I think it’s too early to say because I don’t really know, yet, where the story will go.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I was inspired by my daughter and my desire to ease her way in life. I wanted to share with her the struggles I had growing up, never really feeling like I belonged and always searching for some meaning to my existence. On top of that, I’m a staunch atheist and feel very frustrated by the pervasiveness of Christianity in my culture. I wanted to give my daughter a clear idea of what atheism is and why her dad and I are atheists, as well as describe to her the sorts of struggles I remember dealing with from my own childhood in the hopes that the story might ease her struggles a bit.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

The story is told in the style of a fairy tale, but all the magic in the story is not real—it’s just things the townspeople believe but that the main character eventually discovers to be false. In style, it’s very similar to a story from my collection, “This Is Not a Fairy Tale,” in which a very mundane, non-magical story is told through the lens of a fairy tale. In my novel, it’s very clear that the narrator is fairy-tale-izing her own life to turn it into a bedtime story for her daughter, but you don’t know exactly what parts of the story are real and what is embellishment.

Next Wednesday, visit the following writer’s blog. I’ve passed the Next Big Thing buck to Jayme Russell.