“Do you think that’s what happened?” Nancy’s voice was shaking.
For the first time since she had met him, she looked at Thomas Duncan. Past the colorless hair, the glasses, the thin, unhandsome face, she looked into the man himself. He wasn’t her father and never would be or could be, but still, oddly, now he was a part of her life—and Kirby’s—and Brendon’s. And, most of all, Elizabeth’s.
Slowly, deliberately, inch by careful inch, she let the bars down and let the feel of the man come into her. The strength. The warmth. The kindness.
“Do you really think that’s what happened?” she asked.
“I don’t just think it, I know it,” Tom said. “Kirby told me herself on the way to the hospital.”
Epilogue
…and so they lived happily ever after, or at least, for good, long lifetimes. Kirby became a famous dancer and went to live in London.
Nancy married a grad student she met at a parapsychology lab where they both were involved in research. They had five children, three girls and two boys. Nancy always knew where all of them were and exactly what they were doing.
Brendon tried his hand at a number of things and finally became a helicopter pilot. He never did anything with his music other than occasionally filling in playing piano at jazz clubs.
After Thomas Duncan and Elizabeth Garrett were married, they had one more child, a daughter. Her name was Lois, and she was born with the gift of storytelling.
Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR
Young adult authors Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks
sat down with Lois Duncan to ask her all about
Lois: This is Lois Duncan. I’m the author of a number of books, one of which we are going to discuss today: A GIFT OF MAGIC.
Heather: And I am Heather Cocks…
Jessica: … and I am Jessica Morgan. And we are the young adult authors of SPOILED and the forthcoming sequel MESSY.
Lois: I was told by my editor that I was going to be interviewed by spoiled, messy writers!
Heather: It’s true on many levels! Lois, A GIFT OF MAGIC was one of the many books I read and reread as a kid because I had serious ESP envy. I really thought the ability to read minds was, like, the ultimate. In fact, in our next book, MESSY, our main character makes a reference to wishing she had ESP so that she could understand high school boys better. It’s funny, though—now that I’m an adult, I think I would actually want Brendon’s gift of music instead. We wondered which of the gifts in this book you would prefer to have?
Lois: I would most definitely want the gift of storytelling!
Heather: That’s true! And you got it! Other than the gift you already have, would any of the three in the book be one that you crave more?
Lois: Oh, the ESP, definitely. I can’t see myself leaping around like a ballerina, and the gift of music went straight past me. Both my grandmothers were concert pianists, and then it jumped a generation and turned up in my children. I have never particularly yearned for that one; I was happy with the one I was given.
Jessica: That actually reminds me of a question we were talking about. We love that at the end of the book Tom Duncan and Elizabeth Garrett have a daughter named Lois. Were those names homages to your parents? Or were they just a fun thing that you did?
Lois: That was pure vanity on my part. I was just finishing up the book and had reached the epilogue—where I was talking about what happened to each of them when the story was over—and suddenly I thought, “I love this book. I want to be in this story, too! Well, I’m the author, why can’t I? I have the power to put myself in….” So I decided that they would have a fourth child and it would be Lois Duncan. And of course I had to go back and change Tom’s name all the way through so that it would be Duncan and would make sense. Back then, we didn’t have computers, so I had to retype the whole manuscript.
Heather: That is a labor of love right there. In general, do you pull names from people you know in life, or is it just whatever name comes out on the keys and sounds right for that person? Is there a process?
Lois: Some names just jump into my mind because they feel right. That can backfire, because sometimes they jump into your mind because they are buried in the subconscious and they are the names of people you actually know, and you can get in trouble if that happens, especially if you make them the bad guys. I’m afraid that’s something we all face. For the minor characters, I sometimes leaf through my personal address book and look for names I haven’t used in other books and put them in a different order so I don’t have the first and last names identical to those of my friends. I think the main thing is to avoid having your characters’ names start with the same letter. People tend to skim when they read, and if you have Sandra and Sharon and Susan and Sherry in the same story, they won’t be able to tell them apart.
Heather: Yes. We ran into that problem a little. We realized we tend to favor M names and names that end in Y.
Jessica: We did a Molly and a Shelby, but we also did a Max and a Mavis. We have a lot of Ms. We changed some of them after the fact, but there was a point where we realized the person already had that name in our head and it was too late to change it.
Heather: That actually reminds me of one of the changes in A GIFT OF MAGIC that I’m curious about. In the original draft, the competing ballerina was named Arlene White, and in the update she becomes Arlene Wright. I was wondering if there was any anecdote as to why that changed.
Lois: Well, when I reread the book as I was doing the updating, I realized there was a teacher whose name was Ms. Green, and that fact had escaped me before, but I caught it this time. I didn’t want more than one character to have the name of a color.
Jessica: It’s funny, all these years later as you are rereading the books, the things that jump out at you.
Lois: I reread the books now and it’s as if somebody else wrote them, and you can always catch other people’s mistakes more easily than you can catch your own.
Heather: It’s like you get to be your own editor. It’s kind of a gift I think a lot of authors would really like—the chance to take another pass at the book, that one book.
Lois: I have really enjoyed the process of doing these updates. It’s been like a game. Also, I’ve gone back and discovered I have a new favorite author, Lois Duncan! I really like her work.
Jessica: Actually, speaking of updating, something that Heather and I talked about was the fact that you had to update a lot of your slang. Did you find that to be challenging?
Lois: That was very challenging. I am no longer surrounded by kids, and I am at an age now where it’s just my husband and me, and I have not kept up with the current slang. I would have to call or e-mail my teenage grandchildren and my young editors. Also, you don’t want to use slang any more than you have to, because it will outdate your book. Today’s slang will be outdated in another three years, so I try to steer as clear from that as I as I possibly can, unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Heather: It was definitely interesting to read that book and see how the speech patterns and vernacular have changed. The need to avoid slang is a very good point, because nowadays everything is OMG and LOL. I often think that in twenty years, someone will read that and think we are talking in code.
Jessica: We reread both this book and THE THIRD EYE, and it felt like there were a few more tweaks in this one than in THE THIRD EYE. For example, I think in the original version of A GIFT OF MAGIC, Nancy was in seventh grade, and she skipped ahead into eighth grade to be in Kirby’s class, but in the update, not only are Nancy and Kirby ninth-graders, but they are actually twins. Could you talk a bit about how you made those decisions?
Lois: A GIFT OF MAGIC was originally written for eight-to twelve-year-olds, so I made my main character, Nancy, twelve years old. When Little, Brown brought out the new editions, they wanted to make this book fit better with my other young adult novels, which were all geared toward slightly older readers. They wanted me to increase their ages because teenagers don??
?t really want to read about twelve-year-olds, which they were very right about. The first suggestion was to make Nancy fourteen and Kirby sixteen, which just wasn’t possible because no professional ballerina begins extensive formal training at age sixteen. It usually starts much earlier, so it was a stretch even for Madame to accept Kirby as a student at fourteen, but I knew she wouldn’t accept her any older than that. So we compromised with keeping her at fourteen and shoving Nancy up to become her twin.
Jessica: That’s an intriguing fix. I like that. I think it’s good to have them as twins.
Lois: In a way it works better than the original version, because you get the feeling of competitiveness between the twins when one is so much more physically mature than the other one. That was an element that was missing the first time around, and I really think it makes this updated edition more interesting.
Jessica: It does. And especially Nancy’s desperation to hang on to Kirby—she doesn’t want her to go. It made sense before, but it kind of makes double sense when you think of them having that twin kinship, which is an extra level of bonding.
Heather: I think another thing we enjoyed was how subjective Nancy’s form of ESP can be. For instance, she can tell you who is on the end of the phone and be right, but she also thinks Tom Duncan might be dangerous—and it turns out he is only dangerous in her mind because he is a threat to her idea of what her family should be. She thinks her father is in trouble, when in fact it’s just that he was going to get engaged to a woman who is not Nancy’s mother. So it seems like sometimes her visions are factually true, and sometimes they are colored by her perceptions of the world. Was that a nuance that you learned about in your own research on ESP? Or was that more of a character choice for Nancy?
Lois: I had not learned about it at the time I wrote the original book, but I now know that I was right on target. The right brain hemisphere is our main connection to ESP, and that is also the side of the brain that processes memory and imagination and emotions. One problem that most psychics have is that they get those things all scrambled together, and even the psychic herself can’t tell the differences. For instance, if there were a psychic who had been traumatized by a tall, dark-haired, clean-shaven man when she was a child, and she was assigned to work with police on a child abduction case, she might very well dip into that right brain hemisphere and come up with the image of a tall, dark-haired, clean-shaven man, when in fact the abductor was a short, blond man with a beard. She doesn’t know what she is pulling out of the subconscious, and that can send the police out on a wild goose chase. That’s one reason most police departments don’t use psychics. In this case, Nancy’s personal emotions were affecting her responses to the feelings that something important was going to happen. ESP is a very inexact science for that very reason. Nancy was pulling up her emotions rather than the real thing.
Heather: You’re making me wish that one day we would have a sequel to A GIFT OF MAGIC where we would follow Nancy as she learns to develop her gift through trial and error.
Lois: In fact, you get another view of that in THE THIRD EYE, because that, too, is about a girl with ESP. There are different kinds of ESP. Nancy’s seems to be more highly developed at an earlier age than Karen’s is in THE THIRD EYE, yet Karen is experiencing precognition, which is the ability to look into the future, when she sees visions of the daughter she will have one day. Nancy doesn’t seem to have developed that yet. Maybe she never will. There are many kinds of ESP, like psychometry, clairvoyance, precognition, and telepathy. Most psychic detectives I’ve met tend to primarily have psychometry, and that’s the energy in inanimate objects. In THE THIRD EYE, Karen tries to use that when she goes into the missing child’s bedroom and hugs the teddy bear. From the touch of the bear she is trying to get the emotions of the child from when she last held the bear. I don’t think I gave that to Nancy in A GIFT OF MAGIC.
Jessica: It was really fun to read these books back-to-back and to see those subtle differences between Karen’s gift and Nancy’s gift and the way they can use them. Karen seems to be able to close her eyes and just see when she needs to, but when Nancy needs to reach out to people, sometimes the visions she gets back are tainted by her own emotions. It was really interesting to see how you presented those two very different executions of a similar gift.
Lois: It’s a fascinating subject, isn’t it? It can go in all different directions. My family’s own work with psychic detectives since the murder of our youngest daughter has, of course, made us very aware of the different types of ESP the various detectives had. We worked with one who had psychometry. She touched the earrings that our daughter was wearing when she was shot and immediately had a vision of what she was thinking and what was happening at the time she last had those earrings on. Other psychics got information in other ways—going into a trance, for instance. It was a horrible way to get an education, but certainly one that made the whole subject very real to us.
Heather: Nancy has a lot of stuff going on in her life—she’s moving, she’s starting a new school, and there’s her parents’ divorce—and those things seem to be universally relatable to young adult readers, including the way she deals with them: denial, which I think resonates with both kids and adults. And Kirby struggles with her body image and how it pertains to being a ballerina. That is even more of a hot-button issue today than it ever has been before. As you were rereading the book, did any themes like that take you by surprise by how evergreen they are, or by how much more powerful they are today than they were when you wrote it?
Lois: No. I’m trying to think how that happened. I was basing those three children very much upon my three oldest children, who, at the time when I originally wrote A GIFT OF MAGIC, were my only children; I had two more later. Well, one of my daughters at the time wanted to be a ballerina, and she started studying very young—she actually entered a contest and won some free ballet lessons. Then we continued to send her for more lessons, and that was her dream. Then she reached puberty and she began to develop, and it was obvious she was not going to have the build of a ballerina. She was beautiful and she was a marvelous dancer, but she had to give up at that point because she realized she’d never become a professional. She did not develop anorexia or anything like that, but she did have to switch dreams. I realized then that when it comes to dance, the build of the dancer is very important. So that led to my writing about Kirby.
Heather: I was quite captivated by the way that you wrote Brendon. As a writer who is a woman, I am always very nervous about assuming the inner voice of a guy. But Brendon’s sections, to me, feel right on. I just feel like everything you wrote about the way he likes to pick fights with his sisters, and the way he talks to girls, and the way he gets so excited about having a real fight at school…. I just thought, “Oh yeah, I’m not a boy, but I would bet money that that is exactly how they think.” Was it a challenge to you to tap into the mind of a young member of the opposite sex and really get it right? How did you do that?
Lois: Well, I fashioned the character of Brendon after the personality of my older son—who at that point was my only son—Brett. Brett was born with the gift of music and could play any instrument by ear. He refused to learn to read music, and he would be in the band at school playing an instrument, and he would be so good that they would work him up till they made him first chair, and then he would quit band because he wouldn’t read music and the first chair had to be leading the rest of them along. So he quit band, and then he took up a new instrument, and would then work his way up to first chair on that one and then quit. So Brendon was based upon Brett. Brett would also torment his teachers and his sisters relentlessly, but he was so charming that nobody could resist him. And now Brett has a son named Brandon. Go figure.
Heather: Everyone either has this boy, or grew up sitting next to this boy in math class, or knew him somehow. He just felt so real to me, so it’s fascinating to know that he in fact was real to you.
Lois: Well, he was! Believe me, he was
a handful.
Jessica: Lois, we really enjoyed being able to read the different stories of these kinds of gifts—and hearing how they are personal to you in ways you couldn’t have predicted when you wrote them. Thank you!
Lois: And I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the both of you. I feel like I know more about today’s generation of young writers who are moving up to take the place of the old guard, now that I’ve come to know the writers interviewing me for this series. So I would also like to thank you very much for doing this.
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan skewer celebrity fashion crimes on their popular blog, Go Fug Yourself, which draws millions of monthly readers. Spoiled and Messy are their first novels for young adults. Both ladies live in Los Angeles, California, and watch almost everything on the CW.
About the Author
Lois Duncan is the author of over fifty books, ranging from children’s picture books to poetry to adult nonfiction, but is best known for her young adult suspense novels, which have received Young Readers Awards in sixteen states and three foreign countries. In 1992, Lois was presented the Margaret A. Edwards Award by the School Library Journal and the ALA Young Adult Library Services Association for “a distinguished body of adolescent literature.” In 2009, she received the St. Katharine Drexel Award, given by the Catholic Library Association “to recognize an outstanding contribution by an individual to the growth of high school and young adult librarianship and literature.”
Lois was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Sarasota, Florida. She knew from early childhood that she wanted to be a writer. She submitted her first story to a magazine at age ten and became published at thirteen. Throughout her high school years she wrote regularly for young people’s publications, particularly Seventeen.