Millicent Min, Girl Genius took YEARS to write. Well, okay, maybe not YEARS, as in night and day, day and night, night and day. But it did take a super long time. That's because I would write. Stop. Start. Rewrite. And begin again. And again.
Luckily I had a great editor, Arthur Levine. (He's the man who brought Harry Potter to America.) He encouraged me even before I began writing Millie. And I had another terrific editor, Cheryl Klein, who was very polite about my bad grammar and bad spelling even though I know it drove her nuts.
The first draft of Millie was called Millicent Kwan, Child Psychologist. It was all about Millie after she graduated from college. But Arthur kept asking what Millicent was like when she was in school. So I threw away the first book and wrote another one.
The second book featured Millicent in college. It centered around her cousins, and a snobby child poet who was her nemesis. But it didn't gel. And so, I threw it away and started over. Again.
The third go-around featured Millie and a girl named Emily and a boy named Stanford, and focused on one summer in the life of a child genius. It was all in e-mail format to Millie's pen pal, Juju. Only, it was kind of sloppy. So, I kept the main characters and started over. Again.
But before I did that, Arthur made me write an outline for him to prove that I knew what I was doing. (My previous drafts sort of rambled much like this that you're reading now.) So I wrote a 28-page outline, He approved it and I pretty much followed it, kind of, and somehow it all went smoothly except for a last minute frantic rewrite of the first fifty pages.
Then the title turned out to be bit of a problem. I wanted to call the book Nothing Near Normal, since that's what one of the characters says about MillicentŐs high IQ. But when I took the name to The New School of Orlando to test it, based on the title alone, no one had a clue what the novel was about. One student was convinced it was about aliens.
That's how the novel got to be named Millicent Kwan, Girl Genius. Until it changed again. See, lots of people thought it was about ice skating and the great Olympian Michelle Kwan. So it was decided that the main character's name would be Millicent Wen or Millicent Min. And, for a few days anyway, the novel was named Millicent Wen, Girl Genius. Of course, that didn't stick either. "Millicent Min" just sounded better and that's what our girl got to be named, and how Millicent Min, Girl Genius came to be.
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