Aleks Mickelsen

Thank you everyone who came out last Saturday for my book reading at the Suntree Viera Library! It was so nice to run into new and longtime fans. Some fun things I got to try out this time was my new table display for my book business cards, my new banner, and my Seriously Fierce scale necklaces. What do you think? Aren’t they fabulous?

If you missed the event, here’s a recap and rewind. You can watch my reading of chapter two from the book here:

Highlights from the Q&A + Transcript:

Audience: Do you work with Eoghan Kerrigan, as if he was like a police artist, so that this is actually what you’re imagining when you’re writing?

Me: I wouldn’t say he works like he’s a police artist. He doesn’t pick my brain to quite that extent. He gets documents (and the book itself) that have all the characters pulled out so that he has their descriptions. For the especially important characters, we do a series of mock-ups, and I pick the ones that feel more like my character. In that way we do what you’re talking about.

So if it’s a hooked nose, or a sharp pointed nose… he knows the details of how they’re described. He’ll take the information and interpret it. It’s as fun for me to see how what I’m saying from my mind and how I’m picturing it to how he interprets it. Some of them are really close, and some are so much better than how I pictured. They’re fabulous and I love working with him.

Audience: Good, good, because when you’re reading you’re always picturing in your mind, and if you got the illustrations as a visual clue for what they look like, instead of us going off on a tangent. It’s nice to know what they look like.

Me: What’s also fun that gives you another dimension of how the characters look is if you hear the audio book and how Michele’s does it, because she interprets how the voices are going to sound. In this book, there’s a bunch of trolls, and she has to go back and remember how the returning trolls sound. They were described as having voices, deep, and guttural, and grumbling, and so she has a variety of voices.

Now we have teenage trolls this time, who are all about the same age as the kids. There’s older trolls, conniving trolls, silly trolls, so they all have a variety of sounds and when she whips them out one right after the other, “I’m like how do you do that?” because it’s hard enough for me to do even Nori’s voice, and she’s not a troll, but a high pitched female.

Audience: So you have to remember which voice you’re doing?

Me: Yes, but she does a fabulous job with them and I feel it gives you a different dimension to how you picture the characters too. If a troll talks like this (deep) you’re going to picture him very (muscular) versus talking like this “Hello” (higher pitched). She also does the brownie voices and they get very squeaky, so you kind of get an idea of height and breadth simply based on how she does the voices. It’s really cool actually.

Audience: Who is Svein?

Me: He’s… well, I don’t want to say a throwaway character, because you never know when someone comes back, but he’s a character who’s just hanging around by the airport, when the kids go up and fly, and he knew Geirr. So he’s kind of like a copilot and tour guide. He’s like the older representative to convey to the inspectors and everybody at the scene after the crash that Geirr is an excellent pilot and knows what he’s doing. He’s there to be a witness to say that the plane didn’t crash because Geirr is a bad pilot, but to say the plane crashed because of something else, which is important because otherwise poor Geirr might never fly again.

I’ll wrap up by saying thank you again to everyone for making it out to see me. I had a blast!