Return to Return to Sender

words about words.

Hooray for today! A project I’ve had in the hopper longer than pretty much anything is finally out in the world. My very first novel-novel, a middle-grade story called Return to Sender.

You can scoop up a copy at your favorite local bookstore, always my favorite option, buy it online, or request it from your library. It also comes in audiobook flavor, which is BEYOND COOL. I’ll also be doing a few events where you can get one and have it signed:

This book is something new for me - lots of illustrations, but still, mostly words. It’s also something really old - a story idea I’ve had since high school.

I was a weird art kid, in a school that was lacking in them. There was no anime club, no comics club, not even an art club. I passed for a normie as best I could, but it wasn’t til I got on the internet that I found my people.

On an animation forum I met a handful of artists my age, who were into the same things I was into. We talked on livejournal and ICQ, geeked out about anime, and most importantly, drew our own comics. We put them online, formed a little collective called Pants Press, and made minicomics that we sold at San Diego Comic-Con back in 2003. Erika Moen, Jen Wang, and Dylan Meconis are all published authors too, and we’re still buds.

My comic was called Return to Sender, about a man who moved into an apartment that had a mysterious mail slot on the wall. It would spit out letters with instructions, and if he didn’t do what they said he would get a terrible nosebleed. His friend Colette joined in. I never finished it because I was sixteen and that’s just how things go with sixteen year olds. If you look around on internet archives I bet you could find it, but I’m not gonna help you out. It’s not good. But I will be vulnerable and let you see a page:

I wound up studying animation and working as a story artist for ten years (a real job, unlike making books), but I always liked the conceit of a mysterious mail slot that led to chain reactions. I filed it away in one of my little story pockets - all authors have these I think, like fishing vests where we keep our bits and pieces in case they wind up proving useful later. We will probably go to our graves wearing these vests, except for maybe Stephen King, who is really amazing at emptying his out of whatever lint accumulates in there.

I picked up Return to Sender a few more times over the years. I was now working in a space of stories with younger audiences, so it made sense to age the characters down. I was a better writer by then so I moved some story parts around and gave it a heart. It changed a lot, but the title and the mail slot survived.

It became a story about wishes, and class inequality. As a kid I was convinced that one day I would find a genie lamp and wish all my problems away. Wishes are such a classic trope, and make about as much sense as anything else in childhood. How cool would it be to have a wish dispenser in your very own home? How interesting would it be if those wishes led to Rube Goldberg chain reactions that you got to watch? How complicated would it feel if every wish had consequences?

I got all the way to the point of having a contract to do it as a graphic novel. It was now about a girl named Olive, living in New York City with her mom and baby brother.

She was a poor kid at a rich school, picked on for her shabby clothes and tiny apartment. She was able to make wishes using the mail slot to make her terrible classmates jealous.

I even drew a few sample pages…

…and designed the apartment building where Olive would live.

This is where it fell apart. Because guess what I absolutely hate drawing.

And guess what New York is absolutely FULL of.

There is no way around it with graphic novels - you have to draw everything. And I was going to make myself absolutely miserable for years drawing this book. There’s a reason my graphic novels are set in forests or wells or underwater. No cars or fire escapes down there.

I’m serious, I’ve always hated drawing cars. How little car can I get away with where it still registers as a car? This much.

So I didn’t sign the contract, crammed everything back in the fishing vest, and made Be Prepared instead. Bullet dodged.

Fast forward many years and I’d left animation. I was now a full-time author, which it turns out is a real job after all. Now I was friends with all kinds of artists - poets, novelists, filmmakers, cartoonists, picture book writers and illustrators. There are so many ways to tell a story, and I was curious about ones I hadn’t tried. I rooted around in the vest for ideas, and out came Return to Sender again.

How could I tell this story without having to draw forty thousand parked cars?

Genius.

Writing prose felt easier in a lot of ways - you write it and you’re basically done, unlike a graphic novel where you finish writing and still have three more passes at the damn thing. But it was also harder, since I didn’t have the artwork to carry the story. I’m very used to showing how a character is feeling with facial expressions and body language, and it took some practice to learn that that wasn’t going to happen here. It felt like magic - I tell the reader what the character is feeling and they just believe me? Shut the door.

The story was now about Oliver, a ten year-old-boy living alone with his widowed mother. He has a sinister neighbor named Eliza who has machinations on the mail slot, and an intense, bitey friend at his new fancy private school named Colette.

This story is still very much about class inequality. Oliver attends an exclusive private school where his mom works as a janitor, surrounded by cartoonish Manhattan wealth everywhere he goes. Visiting New York always feels like for me - billionaires and normal people just scraping by, skimming within feet of each other. It’s an unfair place, a perfect setting to make wishes to try to even the odds.

There’s fun chain reactions…

…a smorgasbord of wishes…

…gratuitous violence…

…and finally solving the mystery of what is on the other side of the mail slot. It’s pretty weird.

It’s also sincere and personal, as all my books have to be. It’s been compared to Roald Dahl a few times, which makes me extremely happy. I think I would’ve dug this as a kid.

And I drew a few cars and fire escapes. Grudgingly.

It means a lot that my editors at Macmillan trusted me to do this thing I’d never done before. I really loved getting to try something so spicy and new, and to finally tell this story the way it was always meant to be told. No more vest purgatory! It’s a beautiful object as well, nice to hold and read and flip through. It is my fondest wish (HA) that you have as much fun with it as I did.