Interview with YA fantasy author Christine Potter

Young adult author Christine Potter is chatting with me about her new time travel novel, The After Times.

During her virtual book tour, Christine will be awarding a $50 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly drawn winner. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit her other tour stops and enter there, too!

Bio:
Christine Potter is a writer and poet who lives in a (for-real) haunted house in New York’s Hudson River Valley, not that far from Sleepy Hollow. She is the author of Evernight Teen’s Bean Books, a five-book series that travels through time—and two generations of characters. Christine has also been a teacher, a bell ringer in the towers of old churches, a DJ, and a singer of all kinds of music. Her poetry has appeared in literary magazines like Rattle and Kestrel, featured on ABC Radio News, and sold in gum ball machines. She lives with her organist husband Ken and two indulged kitties.

Welcome, Christine. Please tell us about your current release.
The After Times is the grand conclusion to The Bean Books, Book Five! But it can certainly stand alone. Its main character is Grace Ingraham, a time traveler from 1962 whose parents tried to keep her safe during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the previous book, she got stuck in 2018. At the opening of The After Times, it is spring, 2020, and the world is locking down due to Covid. Grace has finally gotten used to iPhones and the internet, and now she has to contend with a pandemic pod containing her BFF Zoey, her ex-boyfriend Dylan, and her beloved, but nerdy foster parents, Amp and Claire. And that’s before she starts getting pulled back into the past again…The After Times is a book that wonders how love can save the day when you can’t even go into town without a mask. (But trust me, love does save the day!)

What inspired you to write this book?
Well, it’s the close of a long series. I knew the Bean Books—Bean Donohue, now a time traveling guide, is central in all of them—had to end sometime. The question was where. I’d started this book at the beginning of pandemic, and I decided it was important to write it in that period when I heard none other than Stephen King explaining how he’d moved the time period of a book he was working on to avoid writing about Covid. Stephen King may be afraid, but I’m not. I’m a young adult author. Teens were crushed by the pandemic. I felt strongly that there needed to be something written about it, and my big, goofy plots and sweet characters might be just the thing.

Excerpt from The After Times:
Zoey had cropped the sweatshirt short, and cut a V-neck into it that made her look like a dance student, which she isn’t.

She’d been all about science—especially meteorology—in high school, but at the end of her senior year at Stormkill Regional, she got in with the theatre kids. Everyone else is all about the STEM fields for jobs, now, but Zoey follows her heart. She says she’s going to major in Theatre. If anyone could pull off an acting career, it’s her. She doesn’t give up.

“Hey,” she said. “Let’s walk.” She ran up the steps of the front porch, opened the front door, and slid her laptop inside.

Walking’s what we’ve got these days for fun. Absolutely nothing’s open in town—no movies, no coffee shops, no stores at all except the grocery and the CVS. I bunched up my blanket and tossed it onto the front porch.

Amp’s glasses slipped down his nose and the sun glistened on their transparent plastic frames. He shoved them back up and gave us the funny little salute he does sometimes. “Toodle-oo. You two got masks?”

Zoey rolled her eyes, and I felt in the pocket of my denim jacket. Of course we had masks. Our pockets are usually full of them. I don’t hate wearing them. I just don’t love being reminded I have to. Besides, we were outside, and there was no one around but us.

We headed for the cemetery. It’s right next to our house. I’ve lived here for the past couple of years, so it actually seems more like a plain old back yard to me. Except, of course, for the fact that it’s enormous—and my real dad is buried in there, along with plenty of other folks. I don’t know where my real mom is. She’d be in her nineties if she’s even alive. And if I hadn’t time-traveled and skipped a bunch of decades, I’d be well past grandma age myself.

As it is, I’m seventeen.

What exciting story are you working on next?
I’m not sure. I’m also a poet, and it’s time for me to gather another book, I think (I have three full-length collections out, and publish in magazines like Rattle.) I have a few ideas for another YA, too—maybe something with past-life regression, maybe something with attempts at spell-casting.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I can barely remember not writing. Although for years, I mainly wrote poetry. My sister is a journalist and a copywriter, and I considered her to be the “real” writer. I don’t know why I thought poetry didn’t count! I think the publication of the first Bean book made me easily use the term about myself.

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I’m a retired schoolteacher, so I get to write every day. I get up, do Wordle, take a hot bath, and make my way to my study to either create something or promote something. I often write poems about the stuff I’m dealing with in fiction. My cat Bella sits on the desk in the sun from the window. I write on a desktop computer, although I have a laptop I take to retreats when I’m lucky enough to get to go to one. Since pandemic, I haven’t. Later in the day, I get up, stretch, and do some vaguely Pilates-ish stuff in front of the. TV and then cook supper for me and my husband.

I’m just getting my writing practice back now. I stopped writing except for a little poetry during the height of the pandemic because I also used to DJ on the radio and have the tech skills needed to run a soundboard. I was needed to help with my husband’s then-virtual choir.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I love all kinds of music, but I can’t write with it on in my study. I listen far too intensely and get nothing done. I don’t mind the sound of household tasks going on—or even my husband, who is a classical musician, practicing if he closes doors enough to muffle what he’s doing a little bit. I love to write during blizzards!

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be an archeologist for a while, but then I realized I’d have to dig up bones, probably. After that, I thought I’d grab some kind of rent-paying job and write. I didn’t really set out to be an English teacher, but I was one for years and I loved the kids so much that I’m still trying to tell them stories.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Read hard and stay safe!

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