Mundie Moms

Thursday, November 19, 2009

CANDOR Week - Pam Bachorz Answers More Questions


As we continue with CANDOR Week, here are a few more questions Pam graciously answered for our wondering Mundie Mom minds -

Q. We MMs love outtakes (and cookies - i.e. snippets of scenes before a book is released) is there an outtake that you wanted to leave in?
Pam Bachorz. I actually ended up ADDING scenes at my editor's request, and they are among my favorites. One is the scene with the chalked sidewalks, and another is the scene with woods hideaway. Of course I have plenty of ditched scenes from earlier re-writes. And ditched characters--like Crank, an old woman who didn't change because she was hearing-impaired, much to the distress of her family that moved her there in hopes of having a sweet, soft Grandma. I miss Crank. Someday she'll show up in a story and I'll let her stick around.

Q. When you were outlining the story, how did you decide that the POV had to come from the Founder's Son?
Pam Bachorz. That definitely came late in the game. The first few drafts came from Nia's POV, though I found I never could quite FINISH the story. She got very boring as she became brainwashed. Then I went to a Florida SCBWI conference and one of the speakers--I think it was Joyce Sweeney--said that it's very difficult to successfully write a story from multiple POVs, especially if you're at the start of your writing career. Well, I am one of those people who immediately wants to do whatever they are told is impossible, so I set to work on re-writing CANDOR in multiple POVs (Nia and Oscar). Oscar totally took over, and that's when I realized this was entirely his story. Or, I should say, that's when he ORDERED me to make it his story!

Q. Maintenance of dys/utopian societies usually results in their unraveling. Do you think Candor will eventually fall apart and unravel?
Pam Bachorz. Ah, I think I will leave that up to the reader. But I do think Candor will have to answer some hard questions sooner rather than later. What do you do with a pile of brainwashed kids who go to college and get their PhDs and MDs? Leave them in the cold cruel real world or make room for them in CANDOR? What happens if their fearless leader gets sick or disabled--who will run the show and will all agree with their leadership? And if there's an economic downturn, will all those people be able to afford living there, still? Imagine "regular" people buying up foreclosures in Candor. What if they didn't know what was in store for them?

Now don't forget we have a fun contest where you can WIN A FREE COPY of CANDOR going on just for our Forum Members. So hurry and join! Also, Pam's answering questions during CANDOR week which ends Saturday, November 21st. Hop over and ask a question or read through the answers. Her comments are truly insightful and we are thrilled to have her on board for this week!

Below is a promotional video for the Real Candor, FL (i.e. the fictional site Pam created). Check it out!





Tonight is the night... NEW MOON is out!


We're very excited about tonight. Myself and Chairman Meow are over the New Moon Experience/Midnight Premiere for Twilight Moms in Austin, TX. Our months of planning will be paid off tonight. We're so excited. We hosted the Twilight Midnight Premiere last year and will be doing the same for Eclipse and Breaking Dawn at an awesome local chain, The Alamo Draft House.
We sold out back in August and tonight not only are we watching the movie, but we'll be doing raffles to help fight Childhood Cancer with an AWESOME charity called The Alex Lemonade Stand (http://www.alexslemonade.org/about)!! All of our raffled items have been donated to us and we're excited about some of the goodies we've got.
In Mundie Moms fashion we donated a signed Wings book from Aprilynne Pike, signed book marks by Lisa Schroeder and goodies from Bree Despain, that received for being members of her street team.

We are so thrilled to combine both our love of books and helping Children and doing something wonderful about it. We'll be looking for more ways we can help raise money for The Alex Lemonade Stand.


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