About James Edmonds

Where this started

James Edmonds grew up on stories that had already been told a thousand times — the ones passed down at kitchen tables, slightly different each time, depending on who was doing the telling. There was always a version where the facts bent a little, and a version where somebody swore it had really happened to their grandmother.

The Ruby Road came out of that same impulse: not a retelling so much as a continuation, a question about what happens when an old family story stops being a story and starts being Tuesday. James wanted to write a girl who inherits a legend the way most of us inherit old furniture — without being asked, and without much choice about where to put it.

"I didn't want to write the storm. I wanted to write the girl standing in the kitchen the morning before it, not knowing yet that it's coming."

How James writes

Mornings, mostly, with coffee that's gone cold by the second page and a playlist that hasn't changed in three books. James drafts in longhand first — a habit picked up from a grandmother who insisted that stories "ought to cost you something to write down" — and then types it up in the evening, which is usually when the dialogue finally starts sounding like people instead of a script.

Research for The Ruby Road involved an embarrassing number of hours reading about Kansas weather patterns, pre-war farmhouses, and what, exactly, a Winkie Knight's boots might sound like on gravel. None of that made it into the final draft in any way you'd notice. All of it is in there anyway.

A short, mostly true timeline

• EARLY YEARSGrew up telling stories before being able to spell most of the words in them.
• FIRST DRAFTSSpent a decade writing manuscripts that live, respectfully, in a drawer.
• THE IDEAThe Ruby Road began as a single scene: a girl, a wagon, and a box she wasn't supposed to open.
• TODAYWriting full time, one cold coffee at a time, with Book Two already underway.

When not writing

James can usually be found several chapters behind on a to-be-read pile, pestering friends for opinions on fictional dog names, and keeping half an ear out for thunder — purely for research purposes, of course.

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