Interview with author Shari Green
Shari Green is an award-winning MG author who lives on Vancouver Island in Canada. She was also my Pitch Wars mentor for 2017 and I am in awe of her generosity and insight. Her third novel, Missing Mike, is being released in the U.S. on September 14, 2018. Canada already had the pleasure this past spring. Below is an interview so you can get to know her better before you buy her book(s).
Could you please give a brief overview of your writing journey?
After dabbling in nonfiction for several years, I heard about NaNoWriMo* late in 2005 and dove into fast-drafting my first fiction manuscript. I was hooked! I wrote a couple more novels (all YA), attended conferences (SiWC) to learn more about writing, started a critique group, met amazing writer-friends, and rode the publishing roller coaster. In 2014 my first MG manuscript was selected for PitchWars. I worked with a terrific mentor, and the book eventually sold to Pajama Press and was published in 2016. Since then, I’ve published two more MG novels with Pajama Press.
(*NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, when writers try to complete a 50000-word first draft in 30 days. Crazy-making, fun, and possible!)
Do you remember what prompted you to write Missing Mike?
I’d been wanting to write a dog story for a while, and last summer, I was daydreaming possible storylines, but meanwhile, British Columbia (my home province) was having its worst-ever wildfire season. Fires were bad in Alberta, too, and in California. Every day the news had stories and images of the fires, and of course I was impacted and influenced by that. My story became the story of 11-year-old Cara, whose family is evacuated due to wildfires, and her dog Mike, who gets left behind.
Do you consider yourself a dog person? Or do you like cats the same amount?
Absolutely a dog person. I like cats, too, but I’ve never had one in my family – it’s always been dogs.
Tell me about the dog that informs the character of the dog in your book.
Mike’s sweet, loyal nature is a reflection of my dear Mac – a Brittany Spaniel who owned a big piece of my heart for all of his 13 years. But the similarities end there, really. Mike is fictional. He’s a rescue dog, a mutt that was injured in a fight with coyotes. He had a loving family once, and after some time building trust, he and Cara fell madly in love. (That love part? That wasn’t hard to imagine. 
