Will Taylor on trapdoors, treasure maps, magic keys and writing for kids.

Will Taylor’s new book out in August 2019.

Beth Bacon: Welcome to Pen & Story, Will Taylor. Tell us about your most recent release.

Will Taylor: Maggie & Abby and the Shipwreck Treehouse (which is coming out Aug 20th, 2019), is the very, very silly sequel to my debut, Maggie & Abby’s Neverending Pillow Fort (which released in April 2018). It follows our heroes, Maggie and Abby, as they return to Camp Cantaloupe and attempt to use the key they really shouldn’t have in the locked trapdoor of the mysterious Shipwreck Treehouse. Unfortunately they’re forbidden from going anywhere near it. Not that that stops them. Tons of things go wrong, of course, and we meet a whole new crew of odd characters, including a house-bound pirate, a mechanical dolphin named Florence, and a very conniving chicken. 

Beth Bacon: What do you hope your audience will get from this book?

Will Taylor: A few good laughs! And an appreciation of how useful a homemade space helmet can be. Also how hard it is to draw decent treasure maps on a table covered in flour.

Beth Bacon: Do you have a writing group? How do you get feedback on your work-in-progress?

Will Taylor: I don’t have a writing group at the moment. It’s been a few years. I’m a messy drafter and tend to need at least three full rounds of edits to get my work anywhere near sharable, and by that point I’m usually looking for feedback from my agent or editor to steer me in the right direction. I have nothing but admiration for authors who are brave enough to share their works in progress, but I’ve found the solo route is the one that works best for me. At least for now.

Beth Bacon: What’s the hardest thing about being a writer?

Will Taylor: Wishing I had more time to write! Like most other writers I have an unrelated full time day job, and trying to fit enough writing and editing in around it is a real challenge. But I love every aspect of this work, even that awful feeling when you’re about two-thirds done with a manuscript and your brain has turned to mush and there’s no strength in the plot and you think one of the characters might be secretly poisoning your coffee. I even love that, because it’s one of the steps that gets you to a finished book. And all a finished book does is make you need to start another one.

Beth Bacon: What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Will Taylor: Okay, I might have just answered this in the question above. I’m one of those weirdos who genuinely loves every stage of writing, but if I had to choose the best thing, I’d say for me it’s that I get to spend my time dreaming. Someone once described writing as living “the life of the imagination,” (please forgive me for not remembering just now whether it was Annie Dillard or Anne Lamott) and that is exactly what I love about it. I love standing on the light rail platform waiting for a train, interviewing one of my characters to find out why they keep bringing up death. Or staring into space on a slow afternoon at work, trying to figure out how many magic keys I can squeeze into a manuscript and get away with it. Being a writer is basically like being a wizard, because you get to dream up remarkable, strange, compelling, beautiful things, and then bring them into the world.

Neverending Pillow Fort Book
Will Taylor’s 2018 debut.

Beth Bacon: What’s the most memorable response you received from a reader about your writing?

Will Taylor: Absolutely the very best thing has been people sharing pictures of the pillow forts their kids have built after reading my first book.  My hope is that people who read the Maggie & Abby books look around at their world and their homes (and their sofas, in particular) with a little extra wonder, imagining just for a second that everything they’ve learned about the global pillow fort networks is true. When kids (or grownups) build pillow forts, and bring in tokens, and try and find a link to crawl through, they’re bringing that magic to actual, real, literal life. And that makes me ridiculously happy.

Beth Bacon: What’s next for you?

Will Taylor: Apart from the book launch (Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, Saturday August 24th! 6pm! Bring your friends!) I just sent a new contemporary MG to my agent, and I’m currently out on sub with a picture book. I’ve got six or seven more projects (MG and YA) that I’m desperate to start work on, ranging from a MG ghost story/mystery set in Wales, to a YA post-apocalyptic road trip in a bookmobile, to a MG Lord of the Flies meets Peter Pan meets Bob’s Burgers romp set in a condemned mall. Basically I’m gonna keep on writing as long as I can!

Will Taylor
Author Will Taylor

About the people in this post

Beth Bacon is the editor of the SCBWI-WWA blog. Her books include I Hate Reading and Blank Space. She earned an MFA in writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She also has a degree in Communication Theory from NYU and a degree in Literature from Harvard University. Beth grew up in Boston, Massachusetts and now lives in the Pacific NW. Visit her site at https://bethbaconauthor.com/.


Will Taylor is a reader, writer, and honeybee fan. He has a degree in Sacred Architecture, a collection of Peanuts strips where Snoopy is on the phone, and an antique key he’s carried everywhere since he was ten just in case it’s magic. He lives in the heart of downtown Seattle surrounded by all the seagulls and nearly all the books. When not writing, he can be found hawking caramels for a local chocolate company or completely losing his cool when he meets longhaired dachshunds. Over the last few years Will has been volunteer-teaching a picture book course for Freshman English classes at a local high school, and he cannot wait to get more involved helping kids and teens find and develop their voices in storytelling and writing in the future. Visit his site at http://www.willtaylorbooks.com/ and check out his social media posts at @inkandhive.

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