Young adult author Jeramey Kraatz had a homecoming of sorts Friday when he visited Reagan Elementary School to talk to students about his unique storytelling point of view and the writing process.
The floor of the school’s library was populated with third, fourth and fifth graders throughout the morning.
Kraatz is in town for the One Book Odessa event going on this month. He also appeared at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy in Midland and the Ector County Library Friday.
Kraatz has written the Cloak Society and Space Runner series and scripts for anime. The Cloak Society books tell stories from the viewpoint of the supervillain — how they got to be that way.
He had to figure out how to get people interested in that.
He decided to come at it from the point of view of a kid who was born into a family of supervillains, but the kid didn’t know he was a bad guy.
This became the basis of an entire book series.
There are references in the books to Odessa. Book two takes place at the Permian Playhouse. There’s also a reference to Stonehenge and the hideout for the villains is underneath the Big Sky Drive-In, located between Odessa and Midland.
The main character in the Cloak Society is Alex Knight. His superpower is telekinesis which means he can move things with his mind. His mother has telepathy.
Kraatz talked about the process of writing his first books.
“It also took a couple of chapters of me just playing around to realize that what I was actually writing was the book that I wanted to read when I was a kid, when I was your age, when I was that kid,” Kraatz said.
He added that he wanted to read a book that read like a comic book with superheroes.
The first Cloak Society book took about a year to write.
“It took me a year and a half to edit and revise the book to go through all those other drafts. It actually took me longer to work on the revisions for the books and work on the edits for the book, to go back and rewrite the stuff and fix the stuff that needed to be fixed in the book than it did for me to write the book in the first place,” Kraatz said.
As a kid, Kraatz said he would get his papers back marked up, but he never actually fixed it, but told himself he’d do better next time.
“The trick to that is you don’t usually do that much better next time if you’re not fixing it. I can tell you that from experience because after going through this year and a half of working on the first book and revising it and editing it, when I sat down to write the second book, I could hear my editor, or I could hear my own editorial voice in the back of my head saying Jeramey this chapter is too long. Jeramey this scene is not working. Jeramey these characters aren’t making smart decisions. … And what happened was my first draft ended up being so much stronger on the second book than my first draft of the first book because I knew what I was doing,” Kraatz said.
The first Cloak Society book came out in October 2012. Space Runners was next and now he’s working on a graphic novel about Lizzie Borden who was tried and acquitted for the axe murders of her father and stepmother. The graphic novel is due out in 2025.
Fifth-graders who attended Kraatz’ visit Friday thought it was neat to meet an author.
Rohan Nagalla said Kraatz wanted to see how supervillains became supervillains.
Charlotte Bird said she thought Kraatz’ point of view was interesting in the Cloak Society because he’s one of the only writers that takes the villain point of view.
“Most people like the heroes,” Eve Brazile said.
Kraatz said it was great to be back in Odessa.
“The students are really wonderful. Reagan is wonderful. Everyone at Odessa Arts has been really amazing. Everyone that I’ve worked with has been great. The nice thing about being in Odessa, though, is that unlike other schools that I visit I can say I literally was where you were sitting. I went to Reagan. I was a library teacher. So it adds an extra layer of inspiration to them, I think, because they get to not just say oh, this random person came and said that I can be a writer if I want growing up. It’s someone who is from their town, from their school. So it’s easier for them, I think, to see a path if they have dreams that they’re hoping to achieve,” Kraatz said.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Texas Christian University. He majored in advertising and public relations there.
He took a master’s in fine arts in writing from Columbia University.
