As New York Times Bestselling author Ally Carter took a cruise through Southeast Alaska in 2014, she had the initial idea for her new young adult thriller \u201cNot If I Save You First.\u201d Standing by the rail at night as the ship sailed through expanses of wilderness, Carter noted she couldn\u2019t see a single light.<\/p>\n
The Oklahoma-based writer always has to ask herself a central question when she plots her books: why do the teenaged protagonists not go to the adults for help in resolving the story\u2019s conflict? Carter has handled this problem in numerous ways in her other works, like the Embassy Row books and the Gallagher Girl series, and knew that Alaska\u2019s wilderness provided a unique answer to explore. If somebody gets into an emergency situation out in the wilderness, 911 won\u2019t be a simple call away. When Carter arrived in Skagway, a tour guide told her about his experience living off the grid in a cabin, which made her wonder what that life would be like for a teen girl. And so, Carter\u2019s idea for her latest novel was born.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot If I Save You First\u201d follows 10-year-old Maddie, the daughter of a Secret Service agent and best friend of the president\u2019s son and other main protagonist, Logan. She thinks she and Logan will always be inseparable, but after a kidnapping attempt is made on the president\u2019s wife, Maddie and her father leave D.C. to live in a remote cabin in Southeast Alaska. Maddie\u2019s one connection to her past life, Logan, dwindles along with his letters. Yet circumstances push the pair together six years later, and when someone kidnaps Logan, Maddie must use all her survival skills as she tracks rescues him in the Alaskan wilderness.<\/p>\n
The tone and characters in the story fell into place when Carter got a solid grasp of Maddie\u2019s character.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things I\u2019ve always really liked playing with is in the other books that I\u2019ve written is the subject of confidence and femininity and how they\u2019re not mutually exclusive. A girl can love fingernail polish and sparkly dresses and doing her hair and her makeup and giving herself a facial but that doesn\u2019t mean she isn\u2019t super smart and really tough and really strong and really amazing,\u201d she said, giving the example of how Maddie carries several tools wherever she goes, one of them being a sparkly hatchet. She\u2019ll fish for her dinner and chop wood for the fire, but she also likes lip gloss and teen magazines.<\/p>\n
Carter said since this is one of her most realistic books, she spent quite a bit of time researching Alaska and survival skills.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m probably more nervous about the release of this book, and especially about going to Juneau, then I have for anything in a long time. For the most part my books are pretty farfetched. Nobody is every going to come up to me and say \u2018I went to a boarding school for spies and you got it wrong\u2019 because that probably doesn\u2019t exist and if it does, they certainly aren\u2019t going to admit it to me. But people really do live in (Alaska),\u201d Carter said.<\/p>\n
She read books about Alaska recommended to her by Alaskan librarians, and spent time gathering information on Park Service websites about plant and wildlife, learning what berries are poisonous and how far away a bear can smell blood. She learned from survivalists what kinds of tools a person would never leave home without and how to start a fire. She even called upon research she did for past books for her portrayal of the Secret Service.<\/p>\n
Despite all the attention to detail, Carter tried to keep some details in the story fairly general. She doesn\u2019t even mention in the text that the main body of the story takes place in the Tongass National Forest, though it can be inferred.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve learned to more encompass the spirit of the place and the bigger picture things and not necessarily worry about the micro-level detail. Hopefully I did okay. Hopefully Alaskans will enjoy and appreciate the book. I wanted to treat the people and the environment and the natural resources there with as much respect as possible,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
While in Juneau, Carter will visit local schools, discussing how she began writing, what writing a book is like, how books get published, and her visit to Alaska. Carter grew up in a rural town and didn\u2019t initially realize being a writer was a career path she could pursue. She wants young people to be aware of the possibilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think a lot of people think that writing is for people with degrees in English literature from New York and they already have a friend who is a literary agent. Writing is not always like it is in the movie where there\u2019s some kind of montage of a person sitting by a roaring fire and they\u2019re typing out on an old fashioned typewriter and they have to finish their book by the weekend because they want to get it out by Christmas which is three weeks from now. It\u2019s really, really, not like that. The truth is that anyone can write and publish a novel. I firmly mean that. You could be on the Moon and working on your novel. That would not hinder anything. As long as you\u2019ve got internet access you can be involved in the publishing industry,\u201d Carter said.<\/p>\n
The hard part is writing a book that is publishable, she said. The first book Carter published she wrote at night while working a fulltime job. That wasn\u2019t her first attempt at writing a book though. Her first try was when she was around 12 or 13 years old. It didn\u2019t go how she envisioned, but she learned a valuable lesson from the experience. Her mother, an English teacher, gave her some advice Carter wishes to pass on to other writers: rough drafts and finished drafts are quite different.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very down on myself because what I had written was not very good,\u201d Carter said on her first book attempt. \u201cI think my exact words were \u2018It\u2019s not as good as the opening paragraph of \u201cTo Kill a Mockingbird\u201d and she said \u2018Well that\u2019s the greatest novel ever written so maybe we lower our standards. Also, you should never compare your first draft to somebody else\u2019s finished draft.\u2019 That is something I have to remind myself almost on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carter will launch \u201cNot If I Save You First\u201d at Juneau\u2019s Nugget Mall Hearthside Books location on Sunday, March 25 from 3-5 p.m. There will be a Q&A and book signing.<\/p>\n
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\u2022 Clara Miller is the editor of the Capital City Weekly. She can be reached at cmiller@capweek.com.<\/b><\/p>\n
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