Guest Post: Danica Davidson and The Minecrafters Blog Tour!

We at the Library Ladies are excited and honored to participate in the Minecrafters Blog Tour along with author Danica Davidson! For those unfamiliar, the Overworld Adventures books take place within the “Minecraft” Universe, and have proven to be a popular series for kids of all ages. Kate can personally attest that she sees a lot of these books being checked out her her library. We are very excited to have a guest post from Danica Davidson, the author of the upcoming “Adventure Against the Endermen”, the first in a whole new series of books! Today she is going to talk about what libraries and literacy mean to her, and we are very thankful for her perspective. Thanks, Danica!

I don’t know what I would do without libraries. I was the kid who went into the library and walked out with a pile (wait, that’s still true). I love the smell, feel and experience of holding a book. I love how books will open up new worlds and new perspectives to me in a way that nothing else does. I love all the options libraries supply, where there are so many books on different subjects, and that they’ve been there for me when there was no money to spare for buying books. When everything else is gone, there’s still the library.

It’s not a big surprise that has someone who had an interest in storytelling from an early age would end up a voracious reader. (According to my mom, when she would tell me bedtime stories and I was three, I would take over the stories and tell her what happened.) I always appreciated that my parents encouraged me to read and let me read what I wanted, and after initially dictating stories to my parents, I started writing down my own stories in early elementary school. I was making picture books for myself in first grade and by sixth grade I was writing short novels. My dream was always to be a professional author. I started working as a journalist in high school and got my first book contract three years ago. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t been a reader and had access to books.

Since then, I’ve written kids’s books and YA books. My book Manga Art for Beginners will soon have a sequel, Manga Art for Intermediates, and my Minecrafter books (middle grade novels for ages 7-12 that take place as if Minecraft is real) have turned into two series. The first series, Escape from the Overworld, Attack on the Overworld, The Rise of Herobrine, Down into the Nether, The Armies of Herobrine and Battle with the Wither, are coming out as a box set November 7, the same day the first book in my spinoff series, Adventure Against the Endermen, comes out. The new series will have the same main characters, but different villains and adventures. I have also written a Barbie graphic novel, where Barbie and her sisters throw a puppy party to get all the local shelter pets adopted, and a Tales from the Crypt comic where a fight in the high school locker room leads to a deadly act. Just as I like reading in all different sorts of genres, I love writing in all different sorts of genres. This is how I experience the world and I want to write more books for different ages, including books for adults.

I believe that literacy is one of the most important issues out there, because so much stems from being able to read and from reading on different topics. I’ve been told by librarians that my books are hard to keep on the shelves, and that’s what I want. I want to write stories that keep the pages turning, that readers up later to see what happens, to have characters that people find involving. I find very few people don’t actually like to read; most of the time when I hear kids say they don’t like to read, it’s because they could use more help in their reading, or because they haven’t been introduced to books that interest them. Often the books I was assigned to read in class didn’t interest me much; I liked the books I could pick out for myself at the library better. If kids know “Yes, there are books about [plug in your interest]” I think that would make a world of difference for some young readers. I believe in encouraging kids to follow their interests when it comes to reading and their own creativity. Oftentimes when kids find books they like and learn that reading can be fun, they’ll expand into reading about other subjects as well and become more well-read on different topics.

Many librarians use Minecraft in their libraries these days, especially for STEM reasons. I hope they can also like their Minecraft-obsessed patrons know there are also books for Minecrafters! In my books, 11-year-old Stevie lives in the Minecraft world, but they he finds a portal to Earth, making Earth friends and paving way for adventures that take place in the Overworld, the Nether, the End . . . and, yes, on Earth as Minecraft infiltrates it! The books also talk about real world things, like friendship, cyberbullying, insecurity, stuff like that. I want to mix the fantastic and the realistic, so kids can read about issues they have . . . while being right there with my characters as they fight zombies and save the worlds from the villainous Herobrine. Hey, anything can happen in books!

For more information about this fun blog tour, please visit  https://littleredreviewer.wordpress.com. Thanks again, Danica! And happy reading, everyone!