About Nova
In a rush? Here are the particulars:
I live in New York City, but I grew up mostly in the Hudson Valley. I’m a graduate of Antioch College in Ohio, where I studied writing and photography, and straight after that I went and got an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. I’ve been awarded fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and I’ll be a resident at the artists colony Yaddo in 2010. Dani Noir is my first original book for tweens and it came out this fall from Simon & Schuster / Aladdin. My next novel is called Imaginary Girls. It’s YA, and it comes out tentatively in Summer 2011 from Dutton. And my favorite femme fatale is Rita Hayworth—obviously.
Maybe that’s all you need to know.
But if you’re curious to hear more about me, like who starred in the first book I ever wrote, how my mom saved my life, what I decided when I found a four-leaf clover, and why I got in big trouble in French class, then read the rest of this page.
You’re still reading. OK, here we go:
Me with my mom and our VW bus
I’m Nova, and I get asked a lot if that’s my real name. So I’ll start off by saying yes, really, that’s the name on my birth certificate. My mom was a hippie—she went to the 1969 Woodstock concert and danced in the mud and slept in the trunk of a car when it was pouring rain—and I was her first kid, so she picked the most creative name she could think of. Nova means “chases butterflies” in Hopi, and my middle name, Ren, means “lotus flower” in Japanese. (My brother after me was named Josh, and my sister was named Laurel, so I guess my mom got the crazy-creative naming out of her system.) I used to hate my name and wish I’d been called something normal like Jennifer, but sometimes a name can help you become who you are. Now, I’m happy with my name and can’t imagine being called anything else. So… thanks, Mom!
Me with our dog Jason
I first decided I wanted to be a writer in the fifth grade. We were doing a unit on creative writing, and I remember writing my first short story and loving it more than anything I’d done before. Better than drawing, and better than ballet. But my mom would tell you that the first book I ever wrote was when I was five or so, and it was about ducks. My second book—made in elementary school for a class assignment—was about aliens from Venus, which I solemnly dedicated to my baby sister. I write about humans now.
We moved around a lot—from small towns in the Catskill Mountains to New Jersey to upstate New York again to Pennsylvania for a short time and then back again to the Hudson Valley. The last place I lived before leaving for college was Woodstock, New York, where I went to high school, and where the real-live Taco Juan’s featured in Dani Noir can be found.
Me and my baby sister
Thanks to all the moving, I was the New Girl at school a few times. I’ll admit that this was very hard, and you know those scenes in movies where the new girl hides away in a bathroom stall during lunch period rather than braving the cafeteria to find somewhere to sit? Yes, that really happens.
I was very shy, and I didn’t talk much in school, but in each place where I lived, I did make some great friends. One girl I met in seventh-grade French class—I remember we got in trouble for passing notes using our best attempts at French curse words—is still my closest friend to this day.
Me in high school
When I was in high school, I was getting a little distracted with boys and hanging out with friends and going to parties, and maybe I was forgetting a little how I wanted to be a writer. My mom swooped in. She knew becoming a writer was my dream and she wanted to make sure my dreams could come true. So she sent me away for a few weeks, to a summer writing workshop for high school students at Simon’s Rock College in Massachusetts. (It still exists! Check it out.) My mom’s best friend helped us by loaning me the money to pay for it, and I worked for months afterward at a daycare center and babysitting weekends to pay her back. I will be forever grateful to both my mom and her BFF, because that summer workshop at Simon’s Rock changed me. When I got home, I broke up with my boyfriend, began writing seriously again, and was determined to go to college to become a writer.
Me in my college dorm
I chose a small liberal arts college in the artsy town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, called Antioch College. (In Yellow Springs you’ll find a place called the Little Art Theatre, which clearly inspired the movie theater Dani loves so much in Dani Noir!) I’d never been to the Midwest before, and it was very different from the Hudson Valley where I was from. But when I visited the campus to try to decide between Antioch and my other top-choice schools—Bard College and Hampshire College, both awesome, too—I was wandering around and found a four-leaf clover. I decided then and there that Antioch was the place for me, even though it was twelve hours from home.
At Antioch, I self-designed my major so I could study both writing and photography. I spent a lot of time in the darkroom and writing short stories. Also at Antioch, I met my first love, Erik, the cute boy who skateboarded around campus. We found each other our first month at school and have been together ever since—we even got married in 2006. I think that four-leaf clover was trying to tell me something.
Me and Erik
When I was about to finish college, I decided to go straight to grad school without taking any time off. I had to choose between creative writing and photography, because in grad school you can only study one thing, and I chose writing. I was very lucky to get into the MFA program in fiction at Columbia University, my “dream school,” the one I thought would never take me. From living upstate for most of my life, I used to visit New York City and wish one day I could live there. It seemed like the greatest place in the whole world. And now I had my chance!
My time at Columbia was incredible. I found my voice as a writer and loved every moment there. During that time, Erik was also in grad school, the MFA in film program at NYU, where he was making short films and we shared our creative dreams and made big plans, and I can say without hesitation that those were the happiest years of my life. So far.
Me during grad school
But life after grad school wasn’t all fantastic the way I thought it would be. First off, you have to face paying off your student loans. And there wasn’t as much time to write as I expected. And you don’t have writing workshops to give you built-in deadlines. You have only yourself to blame if you don’t write. But I kept at it.
My first-ever job was scooping ice cream when I was fifteen. But, since moving to New York City, I worked a lot of jobs, mostly in publishing. I was an assistant at a literary agency that focused on mystery novels. I read short stories on a beanbag chair for a magazine. I worked on textbooks for people wanting to learn English. I was an assistant editor on X-Men comic books. I assisted a cartoonist. I copyedited books based on movies and TV shows and toys. But the whole time what I most wanted was to be a writer. I wanted to publish novels.
Me writing at an artists colony
This didn’t come easy for me, I think because, for years and years, I was writing books for the wrong audience. In my MFA program, I wrote fiction for adults. The first novel I started there and finished for my final project—a 500-page monster you will never, ever see—was for adults, but so much of it was about being twelve and thirteen and fourteen. The second novel I wrote—a smaller monster at 345 pages—was about two teenagers who do crazy things, but again I wrote it (I thought) for adults. Neither of those books got published. So all this time I was writing about teens and tweens and I didn’t realize I should be writing for teens and tweens. Tell me, what was I thinking?
Years passed, and I was pretty frustrated. But at the same time, I started ghostwriting. This was the coolest feeling. I wrote a bunch of books for kids and tweens—middle-grade novels and picture books and chapter books and movie tie-in books and game books, seventeen books at last count—and these books were actually being published. Sure, no one knew I wrote them, because my name wasn’t anywhere on them, but they existed! I saw books I wrote in places like Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart and Urban Outfitters. I fully admit to taking pictures.
Ghostwriting is great: It’s like you have a wonderful secret. But at the same time, have you really published a book if no one knows you wrote it?
Yet it was all thanks to the connections I made as a ghostwriter that opened the door to other things. Soon, I got the chance to write my first original tween novel, a book all my own, based on my characters and my idea and with my name on it. An editor at Aladdin was giving me a shot I’d never had before. And this is how Dani Noir came to be.
Back cover of DANI NOIR
I remember the day when my editor called to tell me they actually wanted to publish the book. I was in complete and total shock. I probably squealed her ear off. Even when I saw the contract I didn’t believe it. When I saw the cover—the incredible art that I love so much by Marcos Calo—I believed it a little more, but still not entirely. I’m writing this page a month before the book is published, so maybe I’ll believe it when I see the actual book in a store. I can’t wait! (And I’ll totally be the one in the bookstore aisle taking pictures.)
What’s next? As we speak, I’m writing a new novel called Imaginary Girls—YA this time—and working on a new tween novel. It may have taken a while, but I feel like I finally found what I was supposed to do. I hope you like Dani Noir as much as I liked writing it!
Me on my rooftop
For even more about me, check out my main website: novaren.com.
And be sure to check out the interviews I’ve done about Dani Noir and so much more.
You can also add me on Facebook or MySpace. And you can also follow me on Twitter.
And, of course, feel free to email me at nova [at] novaren [dot] com with any questions or comments about the book!
