When a Middle Schooler Saw Aliens in his Phone Photos We discuss the challenges and rewards of YA writing with J.A. Dauber Dan Friedman 0 Comments Middle school is hard enough without alien invasions. But in J.A. Dauber’s new middle-grade sci-fi adventure Press 1 for Invasion that’s exactly what 10-year-old protagonist Matt faces when he finds a mysterious cell phone that seems to show him a terrifying truth: the aliens are already among us! Dauber, a longtime storyteller with a history of horror and a sharp sense of humor, turns an everyday object into the portal for a fast, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt story about friendship, courage, and cosmic chaos. Book and Film Globe spoke with Dauber — whose day job is being a professor of American Studies — about how to maintain empathy for the weirdness of adolescence, and how a single eerie image — an alien face glimpsed through a phone screen — sparked the book. He explained why writing for kids demands ruthless honesty and restraint, and how he balances laugh-out-loud moments with genuine tension. BFG: Your protagonist, Matt, finds a cell phone that seems totally normal — until it connects him to an alien invasion. What first sparked the idea of using a phone as the key to such a wild adventure? J.A. DAUBER: Different writers, I think, get their ideas for books in different ways: with me, it’s usually an image. In this case, it was a moment where a kid looked through the camera on a phone and saw his school crossing guard with a goggle-eyed, tentacled alien head where a human head should be; but clearly (in the way that your mind can clearly know things that aren’t obvious from the picture it makes up) only through the phone. So then I had to write the book to figure out what was going on with the picture! How do you balance real middle school life and crazy sci-fi, so readers laugh but still feel the tension when the stakes get high? I think that at heart there’s two kinds of fantastic fiction (and SF is, at heart, a branch of fantasy): the intrusion of the fantastic into the real, and the intrusion of the real into the fantastic. This book is firmly in the first category, and so it was important to me to have a real, grounded, kid protagonist, who would act the way that someone in, say, my kids’ school would if they were faced with these consequences that were much, much too big for a kid to handle — the fate of the world! – but without any choice but to handle them. The tension that they would feel comes out on the page, I think. But, as you say, the plot is broad enough — ray guns! space ships! smooching alien monsters! — that readers can have a bit of a giggle break from it, too…. How do you balance the didactic with the entertaining? I’m a big fan of that dictum — usually attributed to movie mogul Sam Goldwyn, but the Internet tells me that if may have been writer Moss Hart — that if you want to send a message, use Western Union. (A reference that would not mean very much to my audience, it should be said). This is a book to just read for fun, to sneak under the covers and read past bedtime, and (hopefully) to enjoy the twists and turns and laughs. That said, I think that, despite my best efforts, there’s something that emerged from the story itself — I don’t think I did it consciously — that passes for a theme, about the importance of treasuring every individual. But I think if it didn’t come out of the story and have real narrative purpose, it wouldn’t work. J.A. Dauber You have kids in the demographic, and the book is dedicated to Ezra who, presumably, was your main focus group — did he actually read it and give you notes? The truth is that my two older kids, Eli and Ezra, didn’t read it until it was finished. But it was the first book of mine that they’d ever read, and they gave me the best reviews I’ll ever get in my life. Kids, it’s fair to say, are not natural diplomats, even and perhaps especially to their fathers, and so when Ezra said, “Dad, I think a lot of kids are going to like this” — and even stayed up late to read it! — well, take that, New York Times! They also gave me plenty of notes for a sequel, so stay tuned! What do you find most rewarding (and most difficult) about writing for the younger age group? The trickiest thing, I think, is to jettison the perfect word — a word like, for example, “jettison” — when you know that your characters wouldn’t say it or your readers would balk at it. I read out loud to all my kids, and kids — who don’t always have great poker faces — react at times, almost viscerally, to a part of a sentence that they don’t quite understand. So I try, very hard, to avoid those bumpy moments! The story includes a few sweet, awkward moments of young crushes and even a kiss or two. How did you decide what level of romance felt right for middle-grade readers? Trying to remember what you were like as a 10 year old is like trying to look at the past while having a very bad head cold: very blurry and hard to concentrate on. But I do remember having crushes during that period, kind of like the one Matt has on Marcela, and I tried to recapture that sentiment, as best I could. You May Also Like Source: https://bookandfilmglobe.com/books/when-a-middle-schooler-saw-aliens-in-his-phone-photos/