Welcome to Fast Forward Friday, Megan. Your debut book, ALONE, comes out on January 12, 2021. I recently had a chance to read it, and it’s such a unique story that adventure lovers are really going to enjoy. Can you tell our readers a bit about it, please?

Thanks so much for having me, Kathie. I’m delighted to be here.

Perfect for fans of Hatchet and the I Survived series, ALONE is a novel-in-verse that tells the story of a young girl who wakes up one day to find herself utterly alone in her small Colorado town.



When twelve-year-old Maddie hatches a scheme for a secret sleepover with her two best friends, she ends up waking up to a nightmare. She’s alone—left behind in a town that has been mysteriously evacuated and abandoned.



With no one to rely on, no power, and no working phone lines or internet access, Maddie slowly learns to survive on her own. Her only companions are a Rottweiler named George and all the books she can read. After a rough start, Maddie learns to trust her own ingenuity and invents clever ways to survive in a place that has been deserted and forgotten.



As months pass, she escapes natural disasters, looters, and wild animals. But Maddie’s most formidable enemy is the crushing loneliness she faces every day.

One of the things I loved about this story is that it’s written as a novel in verse, and moves very quickly. Why did you decide to write it in this format?

The earliest drafts of the book were actually written in prose, in third person voice, and in past tense. After many rounds of revisions and feedback, I decided to tap into my experience as a poet and I rewrote the entire story in verse, using first person voice and present tense. This allowed me to get inside Maddie’s head and explore the solitary and sensory nature of her experience. The poetry freed the story and I felt much freer as a writer.

One thing I noticed is how little dialogue there is since Maddie spends so much time alone. Did that make it easier or harder to write?

The lack of additional characters and dialogue initially made the writing very challenging, but once I introduced George, the rottweiler who stays with Maddie throughout the story, it got easier. George became someone she could interact with and talk to, and that eased the burden of the story being all inside Maddie’s head. The problem was also made easier by writing in verse. The poetry leant itself to expressing her various moods and states of being—things that might otherwise be revealed through dialogue and interaction with other characters—and it offered me a way in to Maddie’s inner experience.

If you’d been in a similar situation to Maddie, what’s one thing you think you would have done differently?

Wow, that’s a tough question, and one I’ve asked students before but no one has ever asked me. When I was twelve I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to drive, so I might have taken the car and tried driving out of town to see if I could find other people. I don’t know if I would have had Maddie’s foresight to consider the possibility of running out of gas and being stuck in the middle of nowhere.

I can also be pretty extroverted, so I might have decided to reveal myself to the looters immediately instead of waiting and watching to see if they were safe the way Maddie does. I guess it would just depend if my fear of them was greater than my eagerness to be with people again. But would interacting with them be a smart choice in the long run? Hard to say. There are real risks with every decision and the stakes are very high.

What would you like young readers to take away from your story?

I’ll quote James Patterson here and say I hope young readers love it so much that it makes them want to go right out and read another book. The more kids love reading the more books they read, and I want my book to be part of the cycle that creates enthusiastic lifelong readers.

I also hope they will be intrigued by the what ifs of the story. What if they were left behind like Maddie is? What might be challenging and what might be exciting? What kind of animal would they want as their companion? How might they solve some of the problems Maddie faces? What problems might they encounter that she doesn’t have? The question what if opens the doorway to imagination and it’s really fun to walk through. I hope my book is an invitation to imagination.

Can you tell us where to find out more about you and your writing, please?

At MeganEFreeman.com, readers can find more information about me, as well as information about author events and how to find ALONE in bookstores. It also has links to my social media, where I love interacting with readers directly.

Thank you so much for joining us today, and I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me.

I loved it, and I really appreciate everything Middle Grade Book Village does for readers, teachers, writers, and families. Thank you so much!

Megan E. Freeman attended an elementary school where poets came into the classrooms every week to teach poetry, and she has been a writer ever since. She writes middle-grade and young adult fiction as well as poetry for adults. Also an award-winning teacher, Megan has decades of experience teaching in the arts and humanities and is nationally recognized for presenting workshops and speaking to audiences across the country. Megan used to live in northeast Los Angeles, central Ohio, northern Norway, and on Caribbean cruise ships. Now she lives near Boulder, Colorado.

Hi Basil! I’m so glad you could join me today on Fast Forward Friday. Your middle grade debut, THE FABULOUS ZED WATSON!, is co-authored with your dad, Kevin Sylvester, and comes out on January 26, 2021 with HarperCollins. I was delighted to have a chance to read an ARC, and I absolutely loved this story. It’s funny, uplifting, original, and who can resist a road trip to search for a long lost book? Can you give us a bit of a synopsis of it, please?

Hi Kathie! Thanks for having me! I definitely can; the book is about an energetic kid named Zed who is obsessed with finding a long-lost manuscript called The Monster’s Castle. They have to go on a road trip to gather all the clues to find it, except they don’t have a car—so they have to go along with their neighbour, Gabe, and his sister Sam. It’s a book filled with road-side stops, bad puns, ice cream, clues, new friends, and lots of fictional monsters!

Zed is such an entertaining character. I especially liked when they did something we weren’t expecting, such as thinking like a corpse, or dancing in the Potato Dance Off. Yet I also learned a lot from Zed about what it means to be nonbinary while they explained it to their friend, Gabe, and the challenges they’ve faced. How did you find that balance between educating and entertaining as you wrote them?

I’m really glad you liked their weirdness—the corpse moment was one that Kevin wrote separately, and I laughed out loud when he showed it to me! I think it’s important to have conversations in the book that sound like people would actually talk—if we just went for a straight lecture or information session, it wouldn’t be realistic anyway. So that’s kind of where some of the Own Voices element comes in, because when people ask me about gender or lgbtq+ stuff, I tend to address it with humour/levity. I also think that if trans and/or nonbinary kids read this book, they would get bored if it was just an info session for the uninitiated, so addressing stuff like this with humour means it’s more engaging for everyone and just a better read.

What was it like to co-author a book with your dad, and how did the collaboration work in terms of the writing process? Did you also have input on his illustrations?

It was so fun, honestly! We wrote an outline super quickly—we just seemed to be on the same page so to speak. Then we split it up in parts—Kevin would write a certain part if he was excited about it, I would write the gender stuff and a lot of the character-driven conversations, and so on. Then we got together and read everything out loud, and edited as we wrote. While I was reading, he would illustrate—I had a lot of input, he was very generous about that. He originally drew a couple character designs for Zed and I remember I mainly directed him on that—I said I wanted Zed to be short and wearing lots of oversized stuff, and to be a bit chubby, like me.

I’m always drawn to a story where there’s a hunt for missing items, but I could never solve a single clue. Do you enjoy scavenger hunts, and how did you come up with such creative clues?

As a kid I absolutely loved them! in fact, my dad and my mom used to make scavenger hunts for us and hand-write notes from different fictional characters that would lead us around the house and backyard. There’s something so incredibly special about solving a clue yourself and getting a reward for it! I’m a bit self conscious about the clues in Zed because I worry they’re a bit opaque, but sometimes the fun is just watching Zed and Gabe run around and doing zany things. The clues were all about places, and initially it was all going to be stuff just from The Monster’s Castle, but we realized that wouldn’t be as fun since the reader wouldn’t know it. So we added the plant/flower clues to make it a bit more complex and also so that you could learn things while watching them solve it!

What’s one thing that’s surprised you about the publishing process?

I would say for our book the thing that surprised me the most was the trust they put in me with a lot of the aspects of the design, even though I’m an unknown to them! For instance, they sent a cover mock-up and I suggested a different style of font—which they then allowed me to do! Me! I’m really proud of the cover we did—it was based on my original idea and then I, who is in no way a professional artist or any kind of artistic talent, got to do the cover lettering and the lettering on the spine! It was very exciting to work with our editor and the art department on that, and I feel really great about how it turned out!

What would you like to hear a young reader say after they’ve read your book?

I just hope they enjoy it, and like Zed. I hope some LGBTQ+ kids will see themselves and have fun reading a book where the main character is like them and gets to do all kinds of cool things. I hope they say that it inspired them to learn something else—like, I don’t know, gardening or the history of pulp horror novels, or maybe that it inspired them to write. I think I’d like that a lot.

Do you have another book on which you’re working right now?

Basil: Not exactly—I’m trying to finish my bachelor’s degree (sigh). But I am toying with writing an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, possibly for YA readers. I’m not sure yet, and I don’t want to jinx it! But I can tell you there will be a queer element to it, most definitely.

Where can our readers go to find out more about you and your writing?

To be honest, I am not all that active on social media, but I am trying to update my writing Instagram account more, @basiltheowrites (Theodore is my middle name).

Thank you so much for talking with me today, Basil, and I wish you all the best with your book’s launch in January.

Thanks so much Kathie! What an honour, and I’m so glad you enjoyed the book! The published version is going to be even better—we caught a few mistakes in the ARC—so look out for that on January 26! Have a great weekend everyone, and happy reading!

BASIL SYLVESTER is a nonbinary bookseller. Their favourite monsters are vampires. They live in Toronto. The Fabulous Zed Watson! is their first book.