Carrie Cross performs a Live Reading of Skylar Robbins

Live Reading by Carrie Cross at the Waterford Public Library

It was wonderful meeting everyone at the Waterford Public Library in Waterford, Wisconsin Friday August 7th during my live reading of Skylar Robbins: The Mystery of Shadow Hills. The librarian, Tricia Cox, planned some fun crafts for the kids, including drawing with invisible ink pens, and using a fingerprinting kit with different colored ink and stamp pads.

After reading chapter one from The Mystery of Shadow Hills (Author Carrie Cross, Teen Mystery Press 2013), I signed books and took pictures with all of the Skylar Robbins fans. Then we had a drawing for prizes! Five kids won free toy binoculars to start their own detective kits, and one girl won a signed copy of The Mystery of Shadow Hills. Thanks to everyone who attended, and to Marjorie Stark Suto photography for recording the event. It was a lot of fun and I hope to come back again next year after publishing, Skylar Robbins: The Mystery of the Missing Heiress (Teen Mystery Press, 2016).

Skylar replies to her readers

In a recent interview, 5 Skylar readers who became her secret agents (to participate interactively in the next book, THE MYSTERY OF THE HIDDEN JEWELS) answered several questions. One was, “If you could ask Skylar a personal question, what would it be?”
3 of her fans answered:
Does she ever wear dresses?
How many adventures in total have you solved?
Will she be my friend?

Here is how Skylar replied:
Does she ever wear dresses?
Yes! When I go to a party, a dance, or out to dinner I almost always wear a dress, or a skirt and a cute matching top. But when hunting for clues, I usually wear jeans. You can get pretty dirty searching a dusty attic or a forgotten garden for evidence. Black fingerprinting powder gets all over your hands and can really mess up your clothes. So casual is best when you’re working a case.

How many adventures in total have you solved?
I’ve been working on cases since I was a little kid, helping my Grampa. He was a cop before he went undercover, and he taught me everything I know about solving crimes. So my adventures are really too many to count. But stay tuned. After the Mystery of the Hidden Jewels, I get tangled up in the Mystery of the Missing Heiress, which–believe it or not–is even more dangerous! After that, it’s the Curse of Koma Island. I almost don’t get off of the island alive.

Will she be my friend?
Of course I will. Anyone who enjoys mysteries, adventure, hunting for clues, and solving crimes is a definite friend of mine. And if you filled out the S.A.A.F. (Secret Agent Application Form) and have a code name, you have already proven that you have mad detective skills and have my back. Get ready for our next case. It’s going to be a wild ride!
Love, Skylar

MYSTERY OF SHADOW HILLS: Fun for the Whole Family! Who Knew?

Amulet and earrings inspired by Skylar Robbins

Amulet and earrings inspired by Skylar Robbins

Another Skylar Robbins reader makes an amulet for protection.

Another Skylar Robbins reader makes an amulet for protection.

Samuel also makes a protective amulet like Kat's and Skylar's from The Mystery of Shadow Hills

Samuel also makes a protective amulet like Kat’s and Skylar’s from The Mystery of Shadow Hills.

After reading the following passage from SKYLAR ROBBINS: THE MYSTERY OF SHADOW HILLS, one family was inspired to copy the creative projects suggested to 13-year-old Skylar by her new BFF, Kat, the Malibu middle school witch:

“I don’t have any ideas yet,” I admitted to Kat. “How about you?”

“I have a bunch of them,” she said, leaning toward me. “We can decorate a special box for our amulets. We can go down to the beach and collect stones with different powers and weave a basket for them. We can embroider spirit pouches and fill them with herbs, feathers, incense, and seashells. We can use our leftover liquid lead and glass stain and decorate a candle holder with Wiccan symbols.”

My new friend was amazing. “What’s Wiccan?” I mouthed.

She looked around. No one was listening. “Witchcraft.”

Interview with Bookingly Yours

Bookingly Yours recently asked me to write a 500-800 word guest post about my inspiration for the Skylar Robbins mystery series:

book cover

book cover

I’ve devoured books since discovering Goodnight Moon as a young child, and when I was four years old I decided I wanted to write. My first “book,” Blackie the Little Black Dog and the Flying Washing Machine (composed in crayon), was surprisingly never published. But I’ve written ever since, inspired by a variety of disparate authors. Many of my favorite books were those I read as a ‘tween. All-time #1 fave? Judy Blume’s, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. Others include Harriet the Spy, Happy Hollisters mysteries, The Secret Garden, and Zipha Keatley Snyder’s, The Changeling and The Velvet Room. My current influences are Lee Child, Deb Caletti, Sarah Dessen, and Ayn Rand. The series I’m writing features an intelligent thirteen-year-old sleuth named Skylar Robbins, similar to Nancy Drew, but more modern, quirky, and fun. Skylar is rational, independent, and smart, like Ayn Rand’s heroes and heroines. As in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, Skylar Robbins is the brave, strong-willed protagonist in each book, although every mystery is it’s own separate entity that picks up where the prior novel leaves off.

The initial seedling of inspiration for Skylar Robbins: The Mystery of Shadow Hills–the first book in the series–occurred when I was six. My parents decided we needed to move into a bigger house, and we looked at an ancient fixer-upper in Santa Monica canyon. While playing hide-and-seek with the little girl who lived there, I discovered secret passageways and hid inside little closets that opened into other rooms. I never forgot that house and later wondered, “What if there were clues or coded messages hidden in those secret passageways?” And the idea for the Skylar Robbins mystery series blossomed.

I’m an only child, and when I was a young girl I spent a lot of time creating scenarios to act out by myself or with a friend. In middle school we liked to experiment with witchcraft. My friends and I would cook up love potions out of witchy ingredients like peaches, candle wax, and 7-Up, and mutter spells while we flushed burning scraps of paper down the toilet. Truthfully, we weren’t surprised when our spells didn’t have any effect on the cute boys in our class.

But what if they had?

This thought was another nugget of inspiration for the Skylar Robbins series. What if a rational teenage sleuth grudgingly agreed to cast spells with an odd classmate in an abandoned garden–and the witchcraft actually started to work? What if their incantations gave the school bully a serious illness? Or enabled them to grow something unbelievable from seeds they found in a dank cave on the beach at midnight? Imagine the look of horror on that brainy detective’s face when the unimaginable happened. What would that do to a smart 13-year-old who was brought up to believe that there is always a logical explanation for everything? I decided to start fireworks by pairing up this practical sleuth with a feisty teen witch who started to convince her that magic could actually work. And then I lit the fuse.

The Mystery of Shadow Hills inspired several of its beta readers to buy detective tools, and a group of sixth-graders in Oregon even started their own detective agency. Ten of them use the secret codes and detective skills they learned from Skylar to solve mysteries and crack cases at their school. I hope the Skylar Robbins series will continue to inspire readers to use their brains to look for clues, solve problems, and have fun in creative ways. Please stay tuned. Skylar Robbins: The Mystery of the Hidden Jewels comes out next June.

Looking for Secret Agents

Anyone interested in being written into THE MYSTERY OF THE HIDDEN JEWELS as a Skylar Robbins Secret Agent can fill out the S.A.A.F. (Secret Agent Application Form) on my website: www.skylarrobbins.com. Kelsey, Hannah, Kalyn, and Ella are already written into the book. There is room for three more Secret Agents! But you must have mad detective skills. Tip: to decipher the secret code on the application, read The Mystery of Shadow Hills.

SHADOW HILLS FRONT COVER

Carrie Cross signing at Mystic Journey Bookstore 10/27 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.

MYSTIC JOURNEY SIGNINGHello Skylar Robbins fans! I will be appearing live and reading from SKYLAR ROBBINS: THE MYSTERY OF SHADOW HILLS on October 27 in Venice, California!

Please come on down to the Mystic Journey Bookstore at 1624 Abbot Kinney Blvd. between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. tomorrow. Several well-known authors will read excerpts from their books, which will be available for sale after the reading. The event is FREE, and delicious snacks will be served.

So stop by and support a local bookstore, buy an autographed copy of a new book, or just snack and socialize with authors and fellow book lovers. Hope to see you there!