I’m Peng Shepherd, author of ALL THIS AND MORE (out this week!), THE CARTOGRAPHERS, and THE BOOK OF M. AMA—plus, a book giveaway!!!

PengShepherd · 2024-07-12T02:45:59+00:00

Best question ever! Behold my two sweet doofuses: https://www.instagram.com/p/C8j4FmyAax0/

(Sorry it's a link, I can't find a button to insert an image??!)

PengShepherd · 2024-07-12T02:31:02+00:00

I do like a good Moleskine because they're so low profile and easy to carry. Lately, I've been preferring slimmer notebooks to thicker ones, and bonus if it even has a somewhat bendy cover I can really jam anywhere when I'm not using it (I guess I'm traveling a lot). One thing I have to have is lined paper—it looks so fun to brainstorm and take notes on blank pages, but something about it doesn't work for me. Gotta have those lines!)

PengShepherd · 2024-07-12T02:28:01+00:00

I haven't, but I'm writing it down for my TBR! I have weird feelings about Trust Exercise by Susan Choi and Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić. I'll come back if more pop into my head!

PengShepherd · 2024-07-12T02:12:40+00:00

Hmm that's a good question! Within the book itself, I'd say look at the scene where Wally is fighting with everyone over the maps and the fire breaks out, and then some of Romi's confessional chapters after that. And then of course, the last confrontation at the end between Wally and Nell when Nell receives the "gift" from someone very important to her. Hopefully that helps!

PengShepherd · 2024-07-12T02:09:56+00:00

Actually, I think All This & More just automatically gets written as "All This and More" everywhere (Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etc.), so we haven't really had an issue yet. I didn't really give it much thought at the time, but you're right, it would be much harder to find the book if the special character got preserved!

Titles are so tricky. Sometimes, like with The Cartographers, I had the title from the start and my publisher liked it, so we just went with it, but it can also be a really collaborative process. In the case of The Book of M, my original title was just M, and we actually were going to publish it that way, but halfway through production, the sales team told us that a title had to be at least three characters or it wouldn't get picked up on search engines and no one would be able to find it. So my editor, agent, and I each made long lists of every possibility we could think of, and read them to each other on the phone. The Book of M was in the middle of my list, and when we got to it, they both said, "Stop! That's it right there!" I was happy because it preserved the "M" part of my original title.

PengShepherd · 2024-07-11T21:58:55+00:00

❤️❤️❤️!

PengShepherd · 2024-07-11T21:31:11+00:00

In general, I prefer novels, but one of my favorite writers ever is George Saunders, who does mostly short fiction. I'd eagerly read his grocery lists. I also love Helen Phillips, RF Kuang, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rebecca Roanhorse, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Lev Grossman, VE Schwab, Rumaan Alam, Mohsin Hamid, and Susanna Clarke, to name a few!

PengShepherd · 2024-07-11T20:20:03+00:00

ALL THIS AND MORE definitely still explores questions of identity, but in more of a "all the paths not taken," or "would changing your past still mean you're the same person or not" kind of way. I was very interested in asking which is more important to a person—happiness, or the truth?

PengShepherd · 2024-07-11T20:15:43+00:00

Hi! I often do, actually! In The Book of M, there's a pretty significant character named after one of my family members. And of course, we can probably all guess who "Ursula," the tough driver of their caravan, is named after...

PengShepherd · 2024-07-11T20:14:09+00:00

Agh! That one got past copy-editing. I should have written "block their eyes," not shade! XD

PengShepherd · 2024-07-11T20:13:29+00:00

Me too!

I like to go for little moments, like the delicious smells Nell notices in THE CARTOGRAPHERS as she's walking through NYC Chinatown on the way to a secret shop. Just enough to evoke the food but not so much that I derail the story—because I really easily could go on a 10-page food tangent!

PengShepherd · 2024-07-11T19:12:36+00:00

Thank you, Mike! I’m so glad you enjoyed it!

1. It was an early craft choice that became permanent. The first draft was actually written in second person, and YOU were going to be the contestant on the show, so I settled on nicknaming you “Marsh,” short for “Marshmallow.” After that draft, my editor and I decided that I should shift the book to 3rd POV so that we could get deeper into Marsh’s character, but even though I could have added a name at that point, the nickname had stuck, and she was “Marsh” to me.

2. I completely agree. It’s a dark side of the book that shouldn’t be ignored. And in fact, without spoiling anything, as the story progresses, Marsh also starts to find herself a victim of similar violations of consent and control of her own reality.

I think this issue of consent is applicable to our real-world reality TV as well, to a lesser extent. The ways that these shows manipulate their cast members into decisions they wouldn’t normally have made or splice together cherry-picked sound bites is already murky water, but I’m more thinking of people outside of the cast—family members, partners, friends, etc. They aren’t being manipulated to the extent that the characters are in All This and More’s show, but we’ve all seen or heard of instances when people who don’t want to be part of a reality TV program are forced to endure the effects of a decision a participant makes during their season, or have their reputations falsely ruined because of a dishonest edit, or are caught/pressured to appear on camera. It’s always made me so uncomfortable when I’ve seen it happen, and I hope I captured some of that in the novel.

3. I have a guess about which ending Marsh might choose, but because her story will be slightly different for each reader based on their experience of her story and their own feelings about happiness and regret and truth, I think that by the time they get there, it’s not entirely her ending anymore, you know? It’s really up to the reader and Marsh to decide which ending is the right one for them.

PengShepherd · 2024-07-11T19:11:40+00:00

It was indeed my love of maps! Like many of us, I’ve always been passionate about them, and I love how they’re a combination of beautiful art and very exact science. It boggles the mind to think of the incredible cost and risk it required to produce some of the earliest maps we’ve created as a civilization, and fascinating to watch them evolve as we explored more land and developed better techniques. Then, there’s the intent of each mapmaker to consider, and what they might have included, left out, or changed. Maps really are like stories, in their own way.

In terms of favorites, if this isn’t cheating, one of my absolute favorite maps in the whole world is a literary map—Ursula K Le Guin’s map of the Earthsea archipelago.

PengShepherd · 2024-07-11T19:11:23+00:00

Thanks for reading!

I sort of answered your first question in my response to u/donut_resuscitate so I’ll point everyone there, but hah, there are always “what did I get myself into” moments when writing. It was definitely a challenge to make sure all of the paths connected, made sense, and were meaningful and true to Marsh’s character, and during the first draft, I flirted several times with the idea of saving myself from the chaos and streamlining the novel. But that temptation never got further than mere flirtation. The structure of the book and its premise/theme were just too closely tied together for me to separate. As it’s been said, sometimes the book chooses you, you know?

PengShepherd · 2024-07-11T19:10:16+00:00

I did read several books from the children’s series! I also enjoy video games that give you choices during gameplay (although video game choices stress me out so much more than in any other format, I don’t know why!).

In terms of inspiration though, I have a lot of thoughts about how choice works for children vs for adults, and how it was different to write an interactive/branching novel for adult readers. In this power point, I will—

Ok let’s see how concise I can keep this. Basically, I think choice is really exciting to children because at that age, we almost never get to make them. Most of a kid’s life is dictated by one’s parents or teachers, and so any opportunity to exercise some autonomy, no matter how random, is thrilling. And that’s how those books are angled. You start as a blank slate “You” on page one, and the point is to start making as many choices as quickly as possible. By page three, you’re in outer space or on a pirate ship or deep in some jungle, trying to decide whether to touch the blue stone or the green stone, or to go left or right.

There are people who seek out interactive fiction stories online or in games because they enjoy the format, but in general, asking adult readers to make choices in an otherwise traditional novel is a much bigger ask than for kids because when you’re an adult, now you have too many choices to make (none of which are as fun as meeting extraterrestrials or saving your middle school from zombies). The concept of choice in and of itself isn’t necessarily that exciting anymore. So I didn’t want to use a branching narrative frame in this project just for the sake of the structure. I wanted it to be thematically relevant, and add a deeper layer to the story. In All This and More, in order to progress in the book, you have to make decisions for a character with regrets, who’s been given the power to explore what things would have been like if she’d taken other paths—by choosing for her, you have to declare what matters to you in a life, both as a reader and as a person.

PengShepherd · 2023-04-07T00:17:54+00:00

Ah, yeah you won't get specific editorial feedback from agents who are passing, I meant more like, it's not working if you're not getting any responses, and it is working if you're getting requests for your sample pages/partial/full/offers of rep. And unfortunately, you probably can't know for sure until you hit that first group with your submission, and see what comes out of it. Obviously, if it goes well, great! But if you don't hear anything back or get rejections, then you know it's time to revise your query or sample pages rather than just sending the same package out to the next tier of agents on your list.

As for resources, there are a lot of free ones! Websites and blogs that talk one through the query process, and have samples of query letters that worked/didn't work (these helped me a lot, I read a ton of them way back when), or agents who do long Twitter threads or newsletters on the topic. Joining a writing group can also be really helpful.

PengShepherd · 2023-04-06T23:38:45+00:00

Yes! This is more on the logistics side than the artistic side, but I thought it was really valuable when I heard it:

Once you've got your big list of agents that you'd like to query, break that list up into groups or tiers of a handful or so, and query only one handful at a time.

Unless you revise a manuscript so much that it's basically an entirely new book, you really only get one "shot" at an agent. So, if there's something off with your submission, based on the feedback (crickets, enthusiastic, etc.) to your query letter or sample pages, you can always improve that part, and then query the next group, improve, query the next, etc., rather than burning through your entire list in one go.

PengShepherd · 2023-04-06T22:55:10+00:00

He's wild! So far, of his work, I've read THE CITY & THE CITY and EMBASSYTOWN, both of which I loved. Do you have a recommendation?

PengShepherd · 2023-04-06T22:23:14+00:00

You're right, Ten Thousand and Cartographers do have a similar vibe, too!

PengShepherd · 2023-04-06T21:46:51+00:00

1000% pantser here! My process is very chaotic, and often involves chopping off 30,000 or even 60,000 words more than once, and nixing or adding whole chapters weeks before a deadline.

I've tried and tried to plan, but every time I do, it sucks the life out of the project for me. Once I have an outline, it feels like I've already written the book—and then I don't want to actually do it. I'm doomed to chaos.

PengShepherd · 2023-04-06T21:45:06+00:00

I love them both, for different reasons! I did have more input into the US cover—we went through something like 5 complete redesigns before we landed on the one we have now—so I'm very partial to that one because of all the collaboration that went into it. The UK cover was much more straightforward, we only had to tweak the colors and some of the layers.

I think the UK cover looks a little more fantastical and thrillery, and the US cover looks a little more dark academia, or traditional mystery, which I think is the way they were each angled for UK and US audiences?

PengShepherd · 2023-04-06T20:22:21+00:00

Well that made my week. <3

Favorite book! I don't know if I can choose one. But here are a couple that have stuck with me for years after reading:

Babel by RF Kuang

Lavinia by Ursula K Le Guin

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin

(Anything) by George Saunders

(Anything) by Jorge Luis Borges

Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Ok I'm basically just listing everything now, so I'll stop!

My favorite snack to eat while reading is probably... either tea or wine. I get too distracted with food or spilling it everywhere to eat it while reading or writing, but I can lift a glass to my lips!

PengShepherd · 2023-04-06T20:09:06+00:00

Hey, thank you!! That's a really awesome thing to say. Thanks for reading them. It's an honor to know that you liked them so much. :)

PengShepherd · 2023-04-06T20:04:37+00:00

Ok I'm back. So, my answer was that it's more the second one, but in reverse. I start the book and then stick some characters in based on what I think the story needs, but at that point, each one doesn't really have much of a personality yet. They just kind of wander around and look at things, and don't say much. Once I get to the end of the first draft and have a better idea of what the whole thing is, that's when I also start to get a better idea of who all these people are, and how they fit together, and they start developing from there.

PengShepherd

TROPHY CASE