Young adult author Patrick Jones is chatting with me today about his new YA, Things Changed.
During his virtual book tour, Patrick will be giving away a $25 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 his other tour stops and enter there, too!
Bio:
From Flint, MI but now residing in Minneapolis, MN, Patrick is the author of over fifty novels for teens. His working with teens in correctional facilities and alternative schools has informed his works such as the Unbarred and The Alternative series. While he published his book in 1992 and this first novel in 2004, his initial publication was for a professional wrestling magazine when he was only eight years old.
Welcome, Patrick. Please tell us about your current release.
Two years ago, shy high school junior Johanna was entangled in a passionate and volatile relationship with high school senior Paul. Despite all of the good times, the bad times filled with verbal, emotional and physical abuse, coupled with Paul’s lying and drinking, led Johanna to end it by saying, “Paul, you are part of my past but not part of my future.”
Two years ago, Bret, a high school theater standout and social oddball, became involved in a heavily sexual relationship with Kylee, one year his senior. What once seemed a dream for outsider Bret becomes a nightmare when Kylee cheats on him with one of his friends. A fateful and inevitable confrontation with a bully at his high school prom leaves Bret injured, but it is his heart broken by Kylee that leaves lasting scars.
Both broken by betrayal, Bret and Johanna, who have recently completed their first year at different colleges, meet by chance in the hallway of a county courthouse. There is instant chemistry between them even though they are very different people. Despite their attraction to each other in the present, their relationship is hampered by memories of their failed first loves.
The novel follows the passionate romance between Bret and Johanna over the course of one summer. It takes place under the cloud of Paul’s reemergence into Johanna’s life, Bret’s distraction of dealing with his feelings about his father who is in jail for a DUI, and the looming calendar of when Johanna will return to college. With time, odds, and circumstances stacked against them, Bret and Johanna struggle to have a successful healthy relationship in this intense YA novel.
What inspired you to write this book?
I used to tell high school students in my writing workshops that the idea for most every novel begins with one question: what if? Things Changed is the perfect example of that. Johanna is the main female character from my first novel Things Change, while Bret is the main male character from my second novel Nailed. So, what if they met? What if those two characters, both burned from failed first loves, fall in love? The book is the answer to the “what if” question. A side plot of the story is Bret’s father is in jail. A few years ago, I published a series of books called Locked Out about teens with incarcerated parents, a subject that is of great interest to me. Even though Locked Out was a five-book series, I still had more of that theme I wanted to explore as Bret balances gaining a new relationship with the difficulty of the ambiguous loss of his father to jail. Finally, I was inspired just to write again to keep myself sane during COVID.I had taken a break from writing for personal and professional reasons, but I knew as soon as I asked that “what if” question that I had to answer it and had the time to do so.
Excerpt from Things Changed:
I honk even though my hearing is blocked by the blaring music from the car in front of me spilling out into the night. In a second, my eyesight is clear as I see the black Firebird parked in front of me.
It happens fast. The man—which has to be Paul since Johanna told me often about the black Firebird and I saw it in her driveway once—comes toward me. I quickly lock all the doors and get my phone ready to dial 911 although this far out in the burbs, and with all crime in the city, I doubt they can help me. Paul bangs on the driver’s side window. I’m just about to put the car in reverse while I hear louder sounds coming from the window. It is Paul kicking at it with his right foot. In seconds, the glass explodes, sending shards all over the front seats. I feel some of it cut the skin on my arms and face. I reach up and wipe away the blood. Paul reaches in his hand and hits the switch so the doors open, then he punches me hard in the jaw. Stunned by this blitz attack, I can’t fight back. He pulls open the driver’s side door, and in one swift motion, undoes my seat belt, then grabs me by the shirt. I try to fight back, but I am defenseless against his enraged onslaught. He’s all fury, and I’m all fear. Fury wins.
What exciting story are you working on next?
I have two books finished. I also used to tell creative writing students that if you thought writing a book was hard, wait until you try getting one published. So, these are both books that need to find a home.
Hurricane Misty, like Things Changed, is told from the viewpoint of two young people: Misty and her cousin Rachel. Rachel is the AP student and obedient daughter; Misty is the troubled student in an alternative school. She has been diagnosed of Borderline Personality Disorder causing her to act impulsively and make bad choices. Although these two girls have very different lives, the find in each other something they need to make them better people.
The other book is Cassandra’s Fate, a supernatural thriller. It is my 3rd book about a high school student named Cassandra Grey, who is a tear collector. Just as vampires live off human blood, tear collectors live off human tears. In order for Cassandra to survive, others around her have to suffer and express that sorrow by crying. Tears are always plentiful in high school, but they have increased at Cassandra’s high school as students are being murdered. While Cassandra reaps the benefits of the grief these murders cause, she is also scared that she might be the next victim.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
While I vague memories of writing as a young child, I knew I was a writer when I got rewarded for my work starting at age eight. That was when I became the Michigan correspondent for a New York based professional wrestling magazine. I would type up – on an old manual typewriter – a summary of the matches, then send it in. While I continued to write for enjoyment, it wasn’t until my twenties that I started publishing focusing on non-fiction, including a book called What So Scary about R. L Stine? I still didn’t consider myself a “real” writer until my third novel Chasing Tail Lights was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards. Even though I didn’t win – I think because I had a downer, albeit realistic, ending – something about that recognition stuck with me. I’ve published a whole lot of books since Chasing Tail Lights, but that honor made a huge difference in my self-esteem and identity that good reviews and royalty checks had not.
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 wish I could write full time but the market for what I mostly like to write – realistic fiction about high school kids, many living in poverty, facing hard times – is not best seller material. So, I’ve always had a day job, mostly managing libraries, although years ago I was a librarian working with teenagers so I had great research materials in my library every day and plenty of books to read to learn what to do, and not do, in a teen novel.
I write whenever I can, but my most productive times are early in the morning. I will walk the dog and during the walk, I will think about the next part of the book. That is, I need to come up with the answer to the questions that the last thing I wrote asked. Every sentence in a novel is really a question: what happens next?
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
That I can write anywhere and anytime. While I mentioned mornings are best, I have found myself writing at all hours in all sorts of places. While promoting my books, I did school visits, which meant lots of time in hotels and airplanes. Some guy in a suit in the seat next to me on the plane would be finishing up his PowerPoint for a sales conference, while I’d be pounding out another chapter of a book about some teen, often living in poverty, getting through a crisis. I write every day during my lunch at work for fifteen minutes with the document stored on Google Drive. Where I once wrote on a manual typewriter, now I often use my phone. Times changed; things changed.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Anything but a factory worker which is what my dad and everyone else in my family did. That happens when you grow up in Flint, MI which had one time had a dozen large auto factories working three shifts, but I knew I didn’t want any part of that. I probably wanted to be a professional wrestler, but one of year getting destroyed in high school wrestling moved me off of that idea. But from the first publishing gig at age eight, I knew I wanted writing to be part of my life somehow.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
While the characters in Things Changed are a few years older than you find in most YA fiction, this is very much a teen novel concerned with the hard road a person takes from being a dependent teenager to an independent adult. Both Johanna and Bret find their romance of the present hampered by failed relationships in the past. Both of them are still trying to successfully break away from their parents, from Johanna’s parents who dominate her life, to Bret’s father who once loomed so large but now is a shadow of himself as he sits in a jail cell.
With each of them telling the story, the reader gets the perspectives of both characters as they try to form a relationship with those of the past haunting them like ghosts.
Links:
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Thanks for hosting me today running the interview. I’m here all day to today to answer more questions,
Thanks for hosting!
This looks like a great read.
Sherry – thanks for stopping by and the kind words
This is a great interview, thank you for sharing more about yourself
The book sounds very interesting. Great cover.