Where did you get the idea for Flight & Anchor? Were you trying to think of other stories in the Firebreak-verse and this is what you came up with, or did you come up with the idea for this book and then realize, “Hey, this could be set in the Firebreak-verse”?

The latter! I’ll explain more about that a bit below, but it was definitely a case of somebody should write this, I want to read it. [pause] … wait a second. And then I sat down in front of a file and this story fell out.

Paul Semel

So when I was little, I had this vintage hardbound copy of The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner from 1943. I still have it.

I must have been five or six years old when I first read it, and I vividly remember the first half of the book being just deliciously intoxicating. Kids running away! Living on their own! Being self-sufficient! Foraging for housewares in the dump! Subsisting in large part on wild blueberries! You might think a book about the minutiae of getting food and water and making a place to bathe in the woods wouldn’t have held the attention of a kid in the late 80s, but I’ve always been a sucker for stories that focus on the day-to-day practicality of living in strange situations, feeling out your survival strategy one step at a time.

The Big Idea

When I was a little kid, for no real reason, I had a fixation on the idea of running away from home. I have no idea if my parents knew about it; if they did, they never seemed concerned, probably because they guessed, correctly, that I wasn’t actually going to do it. And I never really tried. Still, the idea of it hung over me as far back as I can remember.

Not that I had anything to really run away from. My life was fine. It was more that there was something about wherever I was that didn’t feel right. I read a lot of books, hoping I’d come across a world that I could really fall into, but that never worked either. All of these worlds on offer felt like stopgaps, like biding time. I can’t really explain it better than that.

My Favorited Bit