Author Visit – Lisa Mangum
On Saturday, July 25 author Lisa Mangum visited our store. The young adult book club read her first book The Hourglass Door, so she kindly agreed to come and discuss her book with them. Mrs. Mangum was very open and had a great sense of humor. She answered questions about her career, how she came up with the idea for The Hourglass Door and subsequent novels in the series.
Mangum works as an editor for Deseret Book Publishing. She edits books and stories, fixing anything from grammar and punctuation to general feel and tone.
She related how she came up with the idea for her book. She said she was driving to Thanksgiving Point and got stuck in construction traffic. She had been working on an adult fantasy novel and started thinking about what kind of a young adult novel she would write. And while she was stuck in that construction traffic, the idea for a trilogy of young adult time travel romance novels was born.
Mrs. Mangum shared how she gets over writer’s block, for those aspiring novelists in the book. She said that she would jump from scene to scene, and that she rarely writes chronologically. When she gets really stuck, she said, she would write anyway, even if what she wrote was dumb.
Mrs. Mangum also revealed that she knows how the series will end, if not how the characters will get to that ending. The sequel, The Golden Spiral, will be released in May of 2010.
She is helping direct her school’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, when a mysterious Italian exchange student arrives. She instantly is drawn toward him. Abby and Dante make an instant connection. But the more she gets to know him, the more she begins to notice strange things. Where is Dante from? Why does the strange band in town ‘Zero Hour’ have a strange hold over everyone who hears their music? And why is her best friend Valerie acting so strangely now that she is dating one of the band members?
