INTERVIEW with an 8-YEAR-OLD MAGAZINE PUBLISHER

Over the summer, a couple months into quarantine, 8-year-old Rin Windshadow had a great idea: a magazine with art and stories inspired by nature. Though she and her friends couldn't get together due to the pandemic, the magazine provided a way for them to share ideas and get creative with one another from a distance. Here is what the founding editor has to say about the publication:

"We have a magazine. It is called My Little Quarantine Magazine. We write stories, and we draw pictures.

"It was started at Sesquicentennial Park. The first issue was about nature. My mom and I worked on it. She drew a mustache and a hat on herself.

"We sent it to some friends. They started to write and draw too. We put it together, edited it, and sent it out virtually. It was published every week until school started. Now it does not have a specific time--just when we want to publish it. There have been twelve issues.

"We publish any stories and any pictures--magic, nature, once a picture for a video game. It is cool because there are pictures and writing and photos. I love seeing the drawings my friends make.

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"My favorite stories to write were the stories where I collaborated with my mom. My favorite one was called The Very Bad Witch & The Devil Pumpkin. It was about saving the night and day cycle in a village inhabited by pumpkins. My favorite thing to draw is anything."

Each issue features the work of 3-5 regular contributors and averages 15-20 pages.

For a sample of the work appearing in MLQM, please enjoy this excerpt from Windshadow's The Very Bad Witch & The Devil Pumpkin:

Once upon a time in the land of Pumpkin Town, the sun stopped shining. Without the sun, the population of pumpkins stopped growing.

Kyla got up and looked out her curtains, and saw darkness. She thought, "Oh no! I HAVE to do something!"

She went to her friend Devil Pumpkin to form a plan. Their plan was to go find a witch that could help them--the only witch in Pumpkin Town. She was greedy and sometimes mean, but she was very helpful with things like this.

They found her hut on the swamp at the edge of town. It sat up on stilts. Fog drifted all around. Kyla and Devil Pumpkin had to bounce from lily pad to lily pad to get to the hut. Kyla knocked on the door.

The witch answered. She was bald, with a hat. She had purple eyes, and smelly breath, and a green strap around the hat with a buckle. She wore a black robe and was holding a potion when she opened the door.

"Hunh. What do you want?" the witch snarled.

Devil Pumpkin, who knew the witch better than Kyla, said, "We need a potion to restore the night and day cycle."

The witch said, "First you must find the Soul Slime, and collect five droplets of slime. Bring them to me, and I will give you your potion. . ."

An Interview with Kalayna Price

By Vikki Perry



Tell us about your book, Once Bitten.

Once Bitten is my first book and the beginning of a series following Kita Nekai, a calico cat shifter stranded in a city full of hunters--hunters who are after her. A rogue shapeshifter has been littering the city, Haven, with bodies, and Kita has a serious case of wrong place, wrong time. Accused of creating the rogue, her life is forfeited if she doesn’t find and stop him in two days. Helping her in her search is a vampire with a little too much curiosity, particularly about her, a mage who thinks she is guilty, and her ex-lover who is determined to drag her back home.

I know you write urban fantasy. What is urban fantasy?

My favorite genre. Oh, you want a technical answer. Urban fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy because it deals with fantastical elements (like elves, werewolves, vampires, magic, etc.) but unlike, say, high fantasy, UF places these fantasy elements in a contemporary (typically city) setting. Usually UF is told from first person and includes a healthy dose of mystery and a helping of romance. Some of the superstars of the genre include Kim Harrison, Charlaine Harris, and Karen Chance.

You're being published by Bellebridge Books in Atlanta, how did that happen and what do they publish?

Bellebridge Books is the new fantasy imprint of Belle Books. The parent line specializes in Southern fiction, but the new line, which launched this past August at Dragon*Con, is focusing primarily on Urban Fantasy and YA. I’m biased, but I think the line has a lot of attitude, and I can’t wait to see the spring line up. If you’d like to check out BelleBridge Books, you can find out more information at www.bellebooks.com.

Your book was a product of Nanowrimo 2005. How did Nanowrimo help you finish your book? Does the book resemble that first draft?

I’ll answer the last half of that first. No, the first draft and the published draft look nothing alike. I think at this point, my scrap file of what has been cut out of the book or completely rewritten is longer than the actual book, and the book is 100k words. That said, if I hadn’t written that (awful) first draft during NaNo, I would probably still be sitting around with another story that puttered out after a couple thousand words. After all, that is what I did for years. I wrote for over ten years without finishing anything. Mostly because I suffered from two problems: I only wrote when ‘struck by the muse’ (which was typically only once or twice a month), and I always edited and fretted over every word, every sentence. So, I never finished. NaNo forced me to sit down every day and write. I put the internal editor in her box and dragged myself to the computer day after day even if I didn’t have a clue what to say, and lo and behold, at the end of thirty days, I had a first draft completed. “Butt in Chair, Write” is now my writing philosophy whenever I am working on a new draft, and I really do owe that to NaNoWriMo.

What do you have planned next?

Well, the next book in the Haven series will probably be out in late 2009 or early 2010, but I don’t have a firm date on that yet. I also have another series I am just starting to shop around. I’ve received a couple requests so far, so we will see. Hopefully I’ll have good news to report on that front soon.

Visit Kalayna at www.kalayna.com.