iUniverse Rising Star author Rebecca Linam on Alex the Great

In her first blog article iUniverse author Rebecca Linam gave us huge insights into writing children’s books, now she gets specific by giving us the writing inspiration for her iUniverse Editor’s Choice book, Alex the Great.

Writing iUniverse Alex the Great

“I originally started writing Alex the Great when I was in the ninth grade. We had just moved up to the high school, and I was completely enthralled by Friday pep rallies. Never in my life had we been allowed to be as loud as we wanted to be and throw paper around, i.e. confetti, without getting in trouble. The kids in the older grades were even wilder than we ninth-graders, throwing their classmates up in the air. I remember coming home from school one Friday, grabbing a fresh notebook, and putting down the whole experience on paper so that everyone else could experience the same exhilaration.

The result was one third of a novel about a fifth grader who refuses to conform to the unwritten rules of middle school. Instead, she keeps playing with her toys and doesn’t care one lick that the other students won’t have a thing to do with her. She would rather play with her cat and dog. I wrote eight chapters, much of which contains details of my own middle school experience and one chapter that includes the above-mentioned pep rally. I planned out twice as many chapters, but somehow I moved on to other writing projects and left Alex alone for seventeen or so years.”