Young adult fiction, written for readers from 12-18 years old, has become increasingly popular in recent years including with adults, who make up about half the readers. But rarely are authors of YA books also teenagers themselves.
Clover Danos, valedictorian at Eureka Springs High School in 2019, recently published a YA fantasy novel Mystery of a Witch she’s been working on since she was 12.
Mystery of a Witch is the story of a blind fox and witch, Sorrell, who struggles to provide healing from pain and sorrow from afar while being misjudged by superstitious neighbors in the forest where she lives.
“It took me about four years to write Mystery of a Witch and two more years to type, edit, and polish it,” said Danos, 19, who is currently a sophomore at Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H. “I started when I was twelve years old, but it didn’t reach what it is today until I was eighteen. I would often wait until an idea hit me, and then write for a few hours until I got it all down on paper.
“Usually, this happened in the evening and I would lose track of time in the process. I also thought about the book constantly and took any chance I had to work on it. I remember writing some small portions of it during school and trying to make them fit the prompts my teachers gave me. Later, I would introduce passages that I wrote in class into the main text.”
Danos never found it hard to be disciplined enough to write frequently. In fact, it was a craving that was fed by the encouragement of various teachers.
“Some English teachers had me keep journals of story ideas and poetry, which I loved,” she said. “I also joined a Writers’ Club that the afterschool program started. I had multiple series of short stories that I wrote in elementary school that never made it past the phase of being jotted down in notebooks or on printer paper stapled into booklets.”
“My mom being a librarian definitely influenced me as a reader, which in turn influenced me as a writer,” Danos said. “I spent a lot of time at the library as a kid. Having access to the library also allowed me to type my books before I had a computer.
“My dad influenced me through his passion for history. He often studies historical documents and talks about his findings with me and my family. I think his interests helped spark my own fascination for book history. Books as objects usually play important roles in fantasy, so the intrigue of book history has helped influence small aspects of my writing.”
Books that inspired her include the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, the Warrior Cats series by Erin Hunter, and Tolkien’s works like the Lord of the Rings series and Roverandom. A more unexpected source of inspiration for her was anime and manga, Japanese cartoons and comic books..
Danos currently has about a dozen projects in the works including several stories, some novel length, and others that are shorter stories she is planning on refining. One of them is longer than Mystery of a Witch.
“It’s a novel that I’ve been working on since I was sixteen, and I’m in the last major piece of the storyline,” Danos said. “It isn’t a sequel to Mystery of a Witch, but it is set in the same world and has small appearances of some of the same characters. It follows the lives of a species of immortal shapeshifters who are made entirely out of magic and the struggles they face through the years. I’m hoping to finish writing it this year.”
Her current book comes with the LGBTQ+ author label because she came out as a lesbian while writing it. She started the book at 12 and came out when she was 13.
“Much of the time I was writing this book, I was struggling to navigate who I was,” she said. “There were a few queer pairings that almost happened in the book because of what I was going through at the time, but ultimately none of them really happened. I decided while writing the book that it wouldn’t have any romance in it, which was probably a good decision since I didn’t know anything about romance at the time that I wrote most of it. I wanted to focus more on the theme of platonic love and friendship.”
However, there are a couple main characters who are it-gender and a scientist who uses the pronouns they/them, so there is a wider variety of gender expression than you find in many fantasy novels. While this novel doesn’t have much representation of LGBTQ+, many of her other stories do, because that’s something she knows and cares about.
“Since it’s the life I live, and the lives of many of my friends, my writing is influenced by the different experiences I encounter, and a lot of my characters just are part of this community,” Danos said. “I also believe that having more stories out there with LGBTQ+ main characters is important.”
It has been rather difficult marketing her book during the pandemic. She is grateful to Timm Hilty at Zarks Gallery for hosting a signing in the winter.
Her book is available at Amazon.com. For more information, see the website cloverdanos.com.