Pep Talkers

For the 2007 Young Writers Program, we secured some help with the email pep talks that went out to our participants in November. The wonderful novelists below all stepped up to the plate, and agreed to send a little love and/or advice our way during the Great Challenge.

Chris Baty

Read Chris' pep talk here

A resident of Oakland, California, Chris has been heading up NaNoWriMo since founding the escapade in 1999. With his startlingly mediocre prose style and complete inability to write credible dialogue, Chris has set a reassuringly low bar for budding novelists everywhere. Chris is a freelance writer by trade; his work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Believer, and Lonely Planet guidebooks. When not bossing strangers around, Chris spends debilitating amounts of time in coffee shops.

Neil Gaiman

Read Neil's pep talk here

Neil Gaiman is the author of the New York Times bestselling children's book Coraline and of the picture books The Wolves in the Walls and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. He is also the author of critically acclaimed and award-winning novels and short stories for adults. Among his many awards are the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Bram Stoker Award. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States. For more info on him, visit neilgaiman.com. (photo credit: Sigrid Estrada)

Garth Nix

Read Garth's pep talk here

Garth Nix grew up in Canberra, Australia. Besides being a full-time writer, he has worked as a sales rep, publicist, editor, marketing communications consultant, literary agent, and part-time soldier. He is the author of Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen, the books in the internationally bestselling Abhorsen Trilogy, as well as Shade's Children and The Ragwitch. He now lives in Sydney, a five-minute walk from Coogee Beach, with his wife, Anna, his sons, Thomas and Edward, and lots of books. For more info on him, visit garthnix.co.uk. (photo credit: Robert McFarlane)

Wendy Mass

Read Wendy's pep talk here

Wendy Mass is the author of six novels for young people, including A Mango Shaped Space (which was awarded the Schneider Family Book Award by the American Library Association), Leap Day, the Twice Upon a Time fairy tale series, and Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, which is a lead title in this year's Scholastic Book Fair. Her most recent book is Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall. Wendy also wrote the storyline for an episode of the television show Monk, entitled "Mr. Monk Goes to the Theatre." She tells people her hobbies are hiking and photography, but really they're collecting candy bar wrappers and searching for buried treasure with her metal detector. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and their twins. For more info on her, visit wendymass.com.

Amber Royer

Read Amber's pep talk here

Amber hosts our popular Stump the Librarian contest on the front page of the site. She's an actual, honest-to-goodness (as opposed to an alien robotic) Teen Librarian in the state of Texas. Amber decided she wanted to be a writer in the fourth grade because her English teacher really inspired her. She's almost thirty, married (both she and her husband won NaNoWriMo last year), and has two cats, one of which is lactose intolerant and eats plastic when she's careless enough to leave it around. The other cat looks sweet, right up until somebody pets her, then Amber winds up handing out the Band-Aids.