Book One Is Done — And Book Two Is Already Taking Shape

I’m so excited to share that The Mirror: Basic Training, Book One in my new middle-grade series, is finished! It’s been a wild, wonderful ride getting Jr and Dakota’s story onto the page, and I can’t wait for readers to meet them.

If you haven’t heard the premise yet: two best friends find an old mirror one night that leads them somewhere it absolutely shouldn’t — a hallway lined with doors that don’t belong anywhere in this world. Behind the first one they open is a kid who’s been trapped there for two years, and once Jr and Dakota realize he’s not the only one, there’s no going back to a normal sleepover ever again.

Writing Book One was personal in ways I didn’t expect going in. Jr and Dakota are named after two real kids I love more than anything, and some of what shows up on the page — the loyalty, the banter, the refusal to leave anyone behind — came straight from watching them grow up together. It’s the kind of thing you don’t plan for when you start writing, and then it just becomes the heart of the whole book.

So what’s next?

I’m already deep into Book Two, and I can tell you a few things without giving too much away:

• This one takes Jr and Dakota through a door unlike anything in Book One — think less “shooting range” and more “floating platforms and a soundtrack you can’t get out of your head.”
• They meet someone who’s been trapped even longer than they’d braced for, and whose situation raises a question that’s going to follow the boys for the rest of the series: can you actually trust your own sense of time once you’re in there?
• There’s a moment early on involving a broken block, a completely pointless number, and more joy than I expected to write into a book about kids trapped in a nightmare hallway. Some of my favorite pages I’ve written so far are in this book, and they’re not even the scary parts.
• And — without spoiling how — Book Two is where the real shape of what’s going on starts to surface. Basic Training asks “what is this place?” Book Two starts answering it, and the answer is bigger than one kid, one door, or one rescue.

I’ll be sharing more as I get closer to finishing the draft, including a look at the cover once it’s ready. Thank you so much for reading along and for being part of this from the very beginning — Jr, Dakota, and I appreciate you more than you know.

More soon!

— Kateryn