Book-loving children will be flocking downtown Nov. 17-19 for the Miami Book Fair so they can meet some of their favorite authors. There will be numerous author panels, including panels featuring Shannon Messenger and Peter Lerangis.
Messenger writes the Keeper of the Lost Cities series. She is promoting Book Six – Nightfall. The series has a large cast of beloved characters that centers around Sophie Foster, a telepath in a crumbling Utopia.
“Every time my character sees something strange, they shut her down,” Messenger said.
Lerangis is doing a return engagement to introduce the first book in the Max Tilt trilogy. Titled Fire in the Depths, the book is about Tilt, who is Jules Verne’s great-great-great grandson. Tilt discovers Verne’s unpublished manuscript and finds himself on an adventure similar to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
This will be Messenger’s first visit to the Book Fair. She has received many letters from Florida students asking when she will visit.
“Or they try to tell me what they want in the next book,” she said.
She loves receiving the letters and is impressed with their knowledge about the books.
“I hear so much from my readers; I know what they’re thinking I’m planning and I can fake them out and go the opposite way at the same time,” she says.
When Messenger sold the series to Simon and Schuster, it was a trilogy. Now Book Six is out and there will be a Book Seven, and possibly more.
“I’m taking it one book at a time. I want to make sure there is enough story,” she said. “I know I’m going to need more than seven [books] but we haven’t officially done more than that.”
Messenger rereads the books again and again to make sure she is not dropping any of the story threads. She has a large cast of characters that she loves and a world that she built that is a strong setting for her books.
She has a background in screenwriting and movie producing that convinced her that Hollywood was not for her.
Lerangis has written more than 163 books, but not all of them carried his name. He was a ghostwriter for some of the best-known series, including The Babysitter’s Club, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Sweet Valley High. He learned to write fast.
“I had to turn books around in ridiculous amounts of time,” he said. “I remember having to write an180-page book in two weeks.”
Max Tilt is his seventh series. He said he loves to develop long stories and getting to know his characters. He loves working with familiar characters.
“It’s like starting a conversation with someone you know,” he said. “You don’t have to create a character out of whole cloth. You can dig in the deeper stuff. “They start telling you what to do.”
His first series was called Watchers. He also has written the Seven Wonders series and will have a new series come out as soon as Max Tilt is finished in late 2019.
His advice for kids who want to write: one, keep writing — and read, read, read.
“You cannot be a good writer unless you are a reader,” he said. “The more you do, the better you get.”
The Miami Book Fair International features hundreds of authors, including for Vice President Joe Biden, astronaut Scott Kelly, Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney, and newsman Dan Rather.
For more information, go to www.miamibookfair.com.
