Devon Monk: Magic to the Bone

Title: Magic to the Bone
Author: Devon Monk
Publisher: Roc
Paperback: 368 pages
ISBN: 978-0451462404

1. First off, congratulations on the big novel sale! Give us the elevator pitch. What’s your book about?

Forget the fairytale hocus-pocus, wave a wand and bling-o, sparkles and pixie dust crap.  Magic, like booze, sex, and drugs, gave as good as it got. Using magic means it uses you back, and every spell exacts a price from its user. Usually the price is pain, but sometimes when Allison Beckstrom uses magic it does more than make her hurt.  It takes her memories. Some people get out of paying the price by Offloading the cost of magic onto an innocent. Then it’s Allie’s job to identify the spell-caster. Allie would rather live a hand-to-mouth existence than accept the family fortune—and the strings that come with it. But when she finds a boy dying from a magical Offload that has her father’s signature all over it, Allie is thrown back into his world of black magic. And the forces she calls on in her quest for the truth will make her capable of things that some will do anything to control…

2. Most new novelists have an interesting story to tell about their journey to publication. What’s yours? Did you use an agent? Make sure to tell us about the day you found out you’d sold a book.

MAGIC TO THE BONE started out as a short story.  The anthology editor liked it, but did not buy it.  I was kind of relieved when he rejected it, actually, because I was pretty sure it wasn’t really a short story.  It was the first chapter of a novel.  I sent the short story (now a revised first chapter) to my agent, telling her I thought it would make a good novel.  And after reading it, she emailed asking how quickly I could get it done.  Unfortunately, I never got her email.  By the time I checked back in with her, the holidays had rolled around. I promised her I would have the finished book in her hands by the end of January. 

I handed the book in on time.  My agent read it, and loved it.  Then she got married.  She took some much deserved time off for the wedding and honeymoon and pretty soon, it was summer.  Sometime in late June, I got the call.  My agent told me we had an offer on the table.  She also told me that the book was going to auction.  A couple weeks later (after a holiday and people had returned from vacation) we accepted a three book deal from my wonderful editor at Ace/Roc.

During those weeks, my family and friends checked in with me to ask how things with the book were going.  The afternoon I got the final call from my agent, and accepted the contract with Ace/Roc, my sister, best friend, and brother all stopped by to see if I had any news.  I broke out a bottle of sparkling apple cider, and the four of us, barefoot in my kitchen, toasted to the amazing good luck that had come my way.  It was such an exciting and surreal moment, something I’d been dreaming about and working hard toward for years.  I didn’t know if I should be terrified or exited.  And I have to say that right now, with my first book finally out there in bookstores, I feel exactly the same way–terrified and excited.    

3. Do you have another book in the pipeline? What are you working on now?

Book two in the series, MAGIC IN THE BLOOD will be out May 2009 with book three (as yet untitled) to appear in November 2009.  I’m currently finishing book three.  As soon as that’s done, I’ll spend the winter months writing a different sort of fantasy novel I’ve been dying to dig into that is not a part of the MAGIC series.  

4. What’s your process like? Morning writer, night writer, or something in between?

I guess I’m an all-the-time, anytime-I-get-a-chance writer.  I feel most alert in the morning, so it makes sense I should write then, and I do.  But when my kids were younger, I always wrote after midnight.   So I do that too.  Does that make me “something in between” or “something all over the place?”

5. There seems to be an unusually high percentage of writers who own cats. Here at The First Book, we’re doing a study to find out if there’s a direct relationship between writing success and cat ownership. Do you own a cat? If so, tell us about him or her. If not, tell us what you have against cats.

I love cats, but they make me sneeze.  We do have a sweet Australian Shepard mutt we brought home from the Human Society a few years ago.  I have also been known to keep lizards as pets.  The upside to a scaly friend? No sneezy fur.  But while a lizard can out-aloof a cat, they are a little trickier to cuddle and just don’t have the same kind of purring power.