Dear Scuttlebutt readers,

This is the second in a series of occasional essays about the making of The Tinkerers, my upcoming novel for young readers. In the first installment, I told you about my brainstorming process and how it took me almost twenty years to pull together all the ideas that eventually found their way into the book. (If you missed that essay, you can read it here.) This is a longer read than my usual newsletters, so if you’re interested in seeing a few behind-the-scenes details of how a book gets written and published, maybe make yourself a cup of tea and settle in for a few minutes.

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Back in 2021, my literary agent and I were extremely fortunate to sell Wicked Marigold to Candlewick Press as part of a two-book deal with an unspecified second book. This meant that Candlewick had agreed to publish both Wicked Marigold and… something else. What was that something else? We didn’t know! Nobody did!

This is a wonderful kind of deal for an author to get. When you sell a book before you write it—or even before you know what it’s going to be—you can work on your new project in relative comfort and security. You may feel safe enough to take big creative risks, knowing that if all goes as planned, your book won’t disappear into a forgotten pile of drafts. In other words, your publisher is giving you the gift of creative freedom. It’s not a gift that artists receive all that often these days, but I have a hunch that when they do receive it, they’re able to produce some of their best work.

Still, there are some challenges when it comes to selling a book that doesn’t exist. I don’t want to work on a book that my publishing team doesn’t also love. If my editor doesn’t love my book, she won’t be able to put her best work into it; if the publishing team isn’t excited to publish it, it’ll have a harder time finding its way into the world and connecting with readers. I knew that I was excited to write The Tinkerers, but I didn’t know if it would be a book that the rest of the team would be excited to publish. To find out, I had a Zoom meeting with my brilliant editor, Miriam, and my brilliant agent, Alli. I told them about my idea for The Tinkerers: A kid who lives at a cozy inn in a remote mountain town finds a magical device that can turn back time, but only by a few minutes. I pitched another idea I’d been playing around with, too, but Miriam said she could tell that The Tinkerers was the project I really wanted to work on.

She also said it sounded awfully similar to another upcoming book on her list.

Of course it did! Because in addition to being my brilliant editor, Miriam is the brilliant editor of novelist A.R. Capetta, and when A.R. and I were in graduate school together once upon a time, we often ended up writing really similar things completely by chance! I should have known that A.R. would also be writing a time travel story set in a cozy magical valley! (That novel, Costumes for Time Travelers, is available now, and I hope you’ll check it out—it looks splendid.)

When I heard that news, I was a little heartbroken. Surely Miriam couldn’t publish two cozy-valley-time-travel fantasies in one year. But she told me that it would be okay, that even two very similar-sounding pitches will almost always end up as two very different stories, and that I should write the story I was most excited to tell—another real gift.

After that meeting, I felt ready to start drafting The Tinkerers. I knew from page one that I wanted to tell this story in documents, in part because I’d really enjoyed writing the documents in my Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates books, and also because The Tinkerers had so many different story threads that I needed a few different tools to handle them all. I would have to write my own folktales. I would have to try my hand at writing something like a movie script, a form I hadn’t attempted since my 10^th grade creative writing class. It all sounded like a huge amount of fun—but once I sat down to write, I realized that it was also going to be a huge challenge. I knew the story I wanted to tell, but I wasn’t convinced I had the talent required to tell it. It could easily turn into a mess.

Maybe it wouldn’t be a mess?

I began at the beginning. This may sound like a silly thing to say, but some people like to jump around their books backward and forward from scene to scene when they write, and I don’t usually work that way. I prefer to encounter my stories in the same way a reader eventually will, from beginning to end, with no jumping around—at least not in the first draft. I wrote the first 40 pages, sent them to Miriam and Alli, and asked them to warn me right away if those pages were awful. They said the pages were not awful, and more importantly, they said to keep going.

I kept going. I consulted my twenty-six single-spaced pages of notes, but I didn’t write an outline; while I still consider myself to be a plotter, I haven’t formally outlined a book since The World’s Greatest Detective. For this book, I knew the general shape of each of the different plot lines, and I knew that I wanted all of them to come together at one crucial moment near the end of the book. Whenever I reached a natural stopping point with one plot line, I’d pause that part of the story and jump to another plot line to move it along. That strategy worked well enough to keep me writing until very close to the end of the draft, when I did finally make a list of all the scenes I wanted to include in the climax and resolution.

I took a lot of writing breaks to look things up, because even books set in magical lands require real-world research. I searched for photos of the Aoraki Mackenzie Dark Sky Reserve in New Zealand and took virtual tours of astronomical observatories. I watched videos of people shearing sheep, spinning wool, and setting up looms for weaving. I read about bouldering techniques and considered trying them out myself, and then reconsidered. I learned more than you might think about the nesting habits of falcons and the hibernation habits of newts. I aged up my youngest character from 2 years old to 3 because my youngest child was getting older and I wanted to mimic the rhythms of his language.

I kept waiting for the book to become a mess. It kept not quite becoming one.

Although it had taken me twenty years to brainstorm The Tinkerers, it took me only nine months to write the first draft. When I reached the end of the story, I wasn’t entirely sure it all made sense… but it seemed like the sort of book that could make sense one day. And in a first draft, that’s really all you need.

Until next time,

Caroline

THE TINKERERS comes out on October 7, 2025 from Candlewick Press! Preorders really make a difference to authors—you can order your copy from your local indie or anywhere else you love to buy books. Thank you for supporting my work and sharing it with the young readers in your life!