Author and Magnolia resident Cameron Dokey's latest novel for young adults, "Winter's Child" is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. Released earlier this month, "Winter's Child" tells the story of two lifelong friends, Kai and Grace, who are separated when the boy Kai is lured away by the Snow Queen. Grace decides to go after him.
"I like the idea that it's about a girl going on a quest," Dokey said. The story is Dokey's latest installment in Simon and Schuster's Once Upon a Time series, featuring modern takes on traditional tales. Dokey has written several books for the series including "Belle," a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast," and "Wild Orchid" based on The Ballad of Mulan. What adds to Dokey's take on Andersen's tale is it is told from three different points of view.
"I wanted to give the Snow Queen a chance to tell her own story," Dokey said. "I made her younger, the same age as the other characters. In traditional folk tales, the stepmother is always the bad guy. It's more interesting to stand some of these things on their head."
Dokey is currently working on another book in the Once Upon a Times series based on Jack and the Bean Stalk. And since she often incorporates a female protagonist into her tales, for this one, Dokey said Jack and the Giant would each have a twin sister.
Dokey also tries to incorporate discipline into her writing schedule so that even when she's not inspired, she forces herself to sit down and get to it.
"You can't sit around waiting for the muse to strike," she said. In the young adult (YA) market, she said books tend to be fairly consistent in length. Dokey's editors provide her with a word or page count and a deadline. Dokey divides the count by the number of days available and then sticks to her daily writing quota.
But getting to it hasn't been an issue with her anyway. At 52, she has written more than 30 novels and that's only having begun in 1993. Moreover, while her father was a writer, writing wasn't her first choice. She began as an actor with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland where she learned a lot about the structure of language. It gave her a great sense of how to put a story together.
Dokey considers her transition from acting to writing to be a matter of connections and timing. "It wasn't a clean break. I was having trouble finding acting jobs. Some of my friends from Shakespeare Festival days were already writing young adult fiction. It was right when the market for YA fiction was taking off and they needed writers."
Dokey's friends connected her with an agent. In 1993, she attended the Pacific Northwest Writers' Conference, where her agent introduced her to an editor. The editor asked her to write a vampire romance. Dokey quit her day job and wrote her first book Love Me, Love Me Not in six to eight weeks. The New York Public Library named it Best Book for Teens. Her follow-ups have primarily been for the YA market and have included fairy tales, historical and contemporary fiction, and titles based on characters from popular films and television series such as Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
She's not sure what's next though.
"I feel like I'm at a crossroads where I need to decide whether to continue what I'm doing or do something else and, if so, what," she said.
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