Student-Author Interview 11: Jen Malone

It’s time for another student-author interview, and I’m very excited to feature the tireless and talented Jen Malone! Jen’s debut novel, At Your Service, came out in 2014, and she is one busy author. She has several books for tweens and teens on the way, and you can find out more about them at jenmalonewrites.com (and in her interview below)!

In At Your Service, thirteen-year-old Chloe Turner already knows exactly what she wants to do with her life: she wants to follow in her dad’s footsteps as the concierge at a fabulous New York City hotel. After Chloe manages to entertain Marie, the extremely difficult daughter of one of her dad’s important guests, she earns the job of Junior Concierge. It’s up to Chloe to show a prince and two princesses around the city. But cute Prince Alex, unimpressed Princess Sophie, and mischievous Princess Ingrid might be more than Chloe can handle…especially since Ingrid has an uncanny talent for disappearing and goes missing on Chloe’s watch.

This is a fun, humorous, fast-paced story that takes readers on an exciting tour around New York City. Abby, Juliana, and Lucy read the book and had some great questions for Jen!

First, here’s what the girls liked best about AT YOUR SERVICE with Jen’s response:

Juliana: I like that Chloe works at a hotel as the Junior Concierge and gets to help with the kids who stay there. She has a really unique job.

Abby: I liked how Ingrid, the littlest princess that Chloe was in charge of, wants to get all of the souvenir pennies in the city!

Lucy: I liked the point of view that the book is written in and the way the characters are described.

Thank you, girls!! I love reading these so much- you’ve made my day!

Now for some questions about the book and about writing in general:

Lucy: What inspired you to write this book?

Two things were my big inspiration for this book, and both were jobs I once had. One was managing a youth hostel in Baltimore not long after I graduated college. It was nowhere near as fancy as the Hotel St. Michèle (guest slept in bunk beds and shared one big bathroom!) but I did get to put together fun itineraries of my hometown for visitors from all over the world and I loved sending them places where I knew they’d have fun. I also used to work as a publicist for the movie studio 20^th Century Fox and part of my job was acting as a personal assistant of sorts for any visiting movie stars. I would set up all their media interviews and walk down the red carpet with them at movie screenings, but I also had to do really silly things, like make sure they had their favorite kind of bottled water, which was only available in France and had to be shipped in special. Writing the scenes with Marie were really fun because I have dealt with movie stars who were only slightly more reasonable in their demands!

Juliana: Did you grow up in New York City? How did you decide to set the book there? Did you do any research about the city to write the book?

I grew up in horse country, about 40 minutes outside Baltimore. But I visited NYC several times as a kid and now I go three or four times a year from Boston, where I currently live. I think it helped that I don’t live in NYC because I still see the magic of the city every time I go and could write about it with that sense of awe. If I lived there, I might be more ho-hum about it and that could have snuck into the story. I did have to do a lot of research for the book- I interviewed a Rockette to find out what a rehearsal was like, I spent a day “shadowing” a concierge at his hotel, and used Google maps streetview to trace all the steps my characters took. My husband was in NYC on a business trip when I was writing this, so I had him visit every penny machine in the city and take lots of photos of their surroundings so I could write the part where the characters go to the penny machines realistically. He got extra hugs for that! And then my editor and one of my close friends who read my first draft both live in New York City, so I relied on them to fact-check for me.

Abby: How did you get the idea for Ingrid wanting to collect the souvenir pennies?

Directly from my three kids, who all have collections of them! We have fun seeking out those machines on vacations. I was really stuck on how to give Chloe clues about where Ingrid might be when she disappeared and I just couldn’t figure out how to write the next part of the story once Ingrid made her getaway. One day I was driving and the idea of the pennies just came to me! It ended up working perfectly because it let Chloe and the others have a roadmap of sorts for where to look and also allowed me to write about all the great tourist spots in the city.

Juliana: Is the Hotel St. Michèle a real place? If so, how did you choose to write about that hotel, and if not how did you come up with it?

It’s not a real place and it was actually named by my editor, but when I worked for 20^th Century Fox I spent a LOT of time in fancy hotels throughout Boston because a lot of the visiting actors’ interviews were done in hotel meeting rooms (or sometimes in the actors’ suites). Also, part of my job was to check into the hotel ahead of the actors and make sure all the room’s lamps worked and that the toilet flushed- all so the movie stars wouldn’t encounter any hassles when they arrived. Silly, right? The good part was that sometimes they would finish their interviews early and hop a flight back to LA and I would get to stay in their fancy suites since the room had already been paid for. I once spent the night in the Presidential Suite at the Four Seasons in Oprah Winfrey’s bed when she left early- she even left all her yummy food in the fridge! So I had lots of good fancy hotel experiences to draw from when coming up with the Hotel St. Michèle.

Lucy: How did you choose to make Chloe the age she is?

Her age actually changed from what it was in the first draft. She started out as thirteen going on fourteen, but my editor wanted to leave room open if there were ever to be a sequel and thirteen is sort of the top age a character would be before it would cross into YA and be in a different section of the bookstore. But we couldn’t make her too young because then it wouldn’t be believable that she’d be allowed to roam the city by herself and/or with her guests. So we settled on making her twelve at the start of the story and then having her turn thirteen just before the royal family arrives.

Abby: Is there going to be a sequel to this book? If not, what else are you writing?

No sequel yet, though I do have some ideas for one, if the publisher decides to go forward with it! It really comes down to how many copies of the first book sell. But in the meantime, I have six more books coming out. The next one is a series called You’re Invited, which I’m co-writing with one of my good friends. The first book in that series comes out in May and it follows four girls who live in a tiny beach town in North Carolina and decide to entertain themselves over the summer by forming a party planning “business” in their abandoned-sailboat clubhouse. They throw some rather, er, unique parties and everything that can go wrong does, but their friendship is really what the story is about! It’s perfect for kids who might have liked The Babysitters Club and not yet be ready for Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants– it falls right between those two series. Book 2 comes out next year and I also have three Young Adult books coming out with HarperCollins, one per summer starting this July.

Juliana: What inspired you to become a writer?

I skipped kindergarten because my mom had taught me to read already and I think that made me latch on very early to the idea that my reading skills (and soon after, my writing ability) was what made me special- it was “my thing” and the part of me that I had the most confidence in, even when I was a disaster at other things (gym class- I’m looking at you!). In 3^rd grade I won a school-wide award for Best Halloween Story and that cemented it. After that though, I stopped writing fiction because I thought I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I was an editor on my school paper in high school and college, then switched to advertising (writing the copy for ads) and then public relations (where I wrote press releases). So I was always writing, just not fiction. It wasn’t until my youngest daughter showed a huge interest in reading as a kindergartener herself that I even thought about writing fiction again. I had an idea to write her a short story that she could read to me at bedtime and I set aside a few hours to work on it. A month later I had written an entire book (oops!) That was in 2012 and I haven’t looked back—it quickly took over my life! Part of me wishes I hadn’t taken such a long break between 3^rd grade and now, but when I realize how much of my other life experiences make it into my stories, I don’t regret the zig-zag path to get back to writing one little bit!

And finally, some questions about when Jen was in middle school:

Juliana: Did you know you wanted to be a writer when you were in middle school?

Yes, but I thought I would be a journalist. Most of what appealed to me about journalism was that I loved getting to know a lot about one specific subject and then moving on to the next interesting thing for the next article (I’m really curious and I love to learn new things, but I also get bored sort of easily). However, I’m finding that to be completely possible with fiction writing too. Right now I’m writing a book that takes place during Hurricane Katrina. I’ve read probably twenty books on the storm and New Orleans and I love that part of the process. I’m even booking a trip there this winter so I can better describe the places I’m setting scenes. That kind of “formal excuse” to explore any subject that piques my curiosity is definitely something that would have appealed to my middle school self as much as it does my adult self.

Abby: Where did you live and what school did you go to?

I lived in Jacksonville, Maryland, in a really normal subdivision that happened to be surrounded by horse farms (I took riding lessons, but I never did get my wish of owning a pony!) and had to take the bus thirty minutes to the closest middle school. We sarcastically called our town “Actionville” instead of “Jacksonville” because nothing much happened there! We did get a McDonalds when I was in middle school, though. That was a big day.

Lucy: Is Chloe like you when you were in middle school at all, and if so how? Or are any of the other characters like you when you were in middle school?

Chloe is like me in middle school in that I sought approval from adults a lot and I always wanted to be seen as capable and mature, even when I didn’t always act that way. She has a good sense of adventure and I did too, but she’s much more confident in herself than I was. I wasn’t popular and I wasn’t unpopular- I was fairly “average,” if there even is such a thing. But I was so intrigued by the popular girls and I could never stop watching them (I think this trait is what makes me a good writer today- I people watch A LOT, but now I get to put those observations to use in developing characters) and I don’t think Chloe would care that much about popularity. For example, I definitely would have been much more intimidated by Princess Sophie than Chloe ever was. The times that I did hang out with the really popular kids were fine and no one was making fun of me or anything, but I just never had as much fun as I did around my other friends because I was never relaxed and being myself around those kids. I don’t think Chloe would have wasted five minutes trying to be popular—she was already looking to the future in a way I wasn’t at that age. However, I was totally boy crazy so, just like Chloe, I would have had a thing for Prince Alex and I also would have been so, so nervous and thinking things like, “Did I remember to turn off my curling iron” when he leaned in to kiss me!

Thank you, Jen, for visiting with us! We loved finding out about how you became a writer and how AT YOUR SERVICE became a book, and we’re looking forward to your upcoming releases!