276: A Stitch in Time: Pacing, World Building, and Time Travel - Interview with Nicole Valentine

Hey there word nerds! 

Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Nicole Valentine.

Nicole Valentine earned her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches the Brain Trust Workshop at the Highlights Foundation in Honesdale, PA.

Before shifting to writing, she used to work at CNN.com in NYC where she helped build the first web publishing tool for a newsroom, so science and innovation have been a huge prat of her career from the get-go. She is also the former chief technology officer at Figment.com (now called GetUnderlined.com) and Space.com.

But her talents don’t stop there. A fellow crafter, when she was placed on bedrest pregnant with her daughter, she designed a line of literary needlework samplers that got picked up by a national distributor and became very popular for a number of years.

Nicole loves science and as a writer enjoys pondering the times when science falls short of explanation and magic has room to sneak in. She’s the founder of steaMG.org, The Middle-Grade Sci-fi Authors Alliance. A Time Traveler’s Theory of Relativity is her debut novel.

When not engaged in fictional world-building, Nicole can often be found with a hawk on her arm. She lives in Pennsylvania with her human family, two giant dogs named Merlin and Arthur, and two small cats named Tink and Pickwick.

In this episode Nicole and I discuss: The origins of A Time Traveler’s Theory of Relativity  Using “real life anchors” to create a realistic magical worlds Using adults in middle grade fiction Time travel as a metaphor for grief Carving a place for upper middle grade Bringing real science to time travel Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

For more info and shownotes: www.diymfa.com/276