K.D. Hays and Meg Weidman are a mother-daughter team who aspire to be professional roller-coaster riders and who can tell you exactly what not to put in your pockets when you ride El Toro at Six Flags. Meg is studying art in a middle-school magnet program. For fun, she jumps on a precision jump rope team and reads anything not associated with schoolwork. K.D. Hays, who writes historical fiction under the name Kate Dolan, has been writing professionally since 1992. She holds a law degree from the University of Richmond and consequently hopes that her children will pursue studies in more prestigious fields, such as plumbing or waste management. They live in a suburb of Baltimore where the weather is ideally suited for the four major seasons: riding roller coasters in the spring and fall, waterslides in the summer, and snow tubes in the winter. Although Meg resents the fact that her mother has dragged her to every historical site within a 200-mile radius, she will consent to dress in colonial garb and participate in living history demonstrations if she is allowed to be a laundry thief.
Their latest collaboration is a wonderful book titled Toto’s Tale.
You can visit their website at Totostale.com.
Kate and Meg will be on virtual book tour in November and December 2010 to promote their latest middle-grade fiction book, Toto's Tale. We interviewed them to find out more about their wonderful new book.
Q. Thank you for this interview, Kate and Meg. Can we begin by having you tell us why you chose middle-grade fiction to write?
Kate: We picked the story first. Meg was a middle-grade reader when we started, so it seemed natural to make it a middle-grade-level book. We were working from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which is a children’s story but written in a style more appropriate for older readers.
Q. Who was your favorite character in Toto's Tale and why?
Kate: My favorite character is Happy, one of the witch’s wolves who come to attack Dorothy and Toto but later end up helping them get home. He has a lot in common with Shaggy from Scooby Do.
Meg: I can’t decide whether my favorite character is Happy or Lomen the lickloe, who is one of the witch’s servants. A lickloe is a creature with a penguin’s head and a lion’s mane, the body of leopard, tiger stripes, and human hands.
Q. Who was your least favorite character?
Meg: The witch is not too likeable because she’s well, a witch. But she was fun to write about so it’s hard to call her our least favorite.
Q. Can you tell us about the setting and why you chose it?
Kate: Since we started with an established story, a lot of our settings were already chosen for us. But we got to elaborate on them. As a dog, Toto is focused on smells, so we learn about the scents of Oz. For instance, instead of noticing that everyone looks green, he notices that they smell like plants.
Q. What was the hardest part to write?
Kate: The most difficult thing was to determine how much human language Toto could understand. Obviously Dorothy can’t understand dog speech, so initially we wrote it so that Toto couldn’t comprehend her words at all either. But our editor wisely pointed out that not only does this make the story less interesting to read, it is also inaccurate, since scientists now believe that dogs understand human language at about the same level as a human two-year-old. So then we rewrote. And rewrote. And rewrote some more. Eventually it worked out so that he could understand most of what the others say (and all speech of other animals and insects) but he hears some words incorrectly.
Meg: For instance, he thinks they’re following the brick road to see a great lizard.
