Creator Spotlight: Sarah Beth Durst

This week we talked with Sarah Beth Durst about Even and Odd and her inspiration behind the book:

"But once I began writing the story, I knew I wanted to fill this book with absolutely as much magic as I possibly could."

Even and Odd grew from a sentence I scrawled in my “ideas” notebook: “One sister has magic on even days, and one has magic on odd days.” I didn’t know why they shared magic or how they felt about it when I first jotted that down. But once I began writing the story, I knew I wanted to fill this book with absolutely as much magic as I possibly could. Shrieking mermaids! Unfortunate transformations! Obnoxious elves! A unicorn named Jeremy! There’s a myth that stories come as lightning strikes—boom! crack!—and you suddenly know everything about your characters and what happens to them. But one of the great joys of writing is that it doesn’t actually work that way. You get to discover the story as you write it. And what I discovered while writing Even and Odd is that this story is about becoming a hero. Twelve-year-old Even desperately wants to be a hero, but she thinks she’s not old enough, not trained enough, and just not ready. She learns, though, that you don’t have to wait until you’re grown up, or even until you feel ready, to make a difference. You can change the world right now.

You can find Sarah Beth Durst on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.