Insider's Guide to The Mostly Invisible Boy
The tree-fort idea that survived 1,000 rejections to become Casey Grimes
Hello, and welcome back to the Spy. A couple summer break highlights, then exclusive behind-the-scenes content for Casey Grimes book 1.
Back in June, we drove an hour and a half to where the Buffalo National River flows through the Ozark Mountains. Not knowing our new home state of Arkansas very well, we were surprised and delighted to find climbable waterfalls, explorable caves and whitewater so close to home. The best part was a raft trip down the Buffalo. At the boat launch, the guide told us to keep an eye out for Class 1 rapids—which, if you don’t know, are mostly for decoration.
But as we paddled down the river, it started raining. And kept raining. When it rains hard on a large river, the water rises fast. By the time our float trip was over, we were navigating Class 3 rapids in a steady downpour, yelling as our raft plunged between boulders and fighting to keep from crashing into trees along the banks.
Did we capsize? Nope. Did we have a great time? Yeah—we decided that afterward.
Last month we took a surprise trip to Colorado where we hiked, paddled, and played disc golf on a mountainside. It took us three tries in three days to finish the course because of weather interruptions. At one point an afternoon hailstorm turned the sky black and drove us off the course, screaming, as we ran for cover.
I can confirm that a plastic disc does a good job—not great—protecting your head from grape-sized hail. I suspect a blisc, a bladed disc, would do better, since what chance does hail have against something that can cut through a solid steel monster cut-out? Unfortunately, I didn’t have a blisc with me.
Nevertheless: thrilling, fun, and we’re getting better at disc golf.
All of us at the Vanderhorst School for Young Adventurers hope your summer has gone well. Now, the Insider’s Guide.
In the future this content may appear inside a new edition of Casey Grimes. For now, this is the only place you’ll find it.
Insider’s Guide to The Mostly Invisible Boy
Back in 2018, I was talking with a couple of my kids as I grilled burgers. One of them—I think it was Asher—said in his squeaky voice, “Dad, dad, do you know what would be really cool?”
I thought about how to answer. It would be cool if you picked up your legos so I could stop stepping on them at night. But he already knew I thought that.
So instead I said, “What?”
“It would be really cool if all the neighbors had secret tree forts in their backyards and they were connected with trails in the air so you could go from one hideout to another all over the neighborhood without touching the ground.”
“Yes!” said my other kid—Miles, I think. “So cool.”
“Man,” I said. “That would be really cool.”
None of us were kidding.
That was the moment The Mostly Invisible Boy began to happen. Before then, it hadn’t been clear I would ever write another book. I’d already written one, the badly-written first book every writer has to write before he can write a good book. Despite how bad it was, it received a lot of interest in 2013, right up until 1000 literary agents rejected it. That wasn’t fun.
But now I’d write another book, because my kids and I agreed on something: that treeways—sky-high, elevated walkways tying homes and woods together in a winding, leafy, secret maze—were things that should exist.
We still think that. Maybe you do too.
The conversation with my kids launched a new writing process: me, sitting at a table on the back deck, sipping ice water, protected by a sun umbrella, typing the new story a chapter or two at a time. It was usually too hot for me to have company, and that was kind of the point. Hummingbirds sometimes hovered by to check on me. I thought about writing them into the story, but I went with Butcher Beasts instead. Hummers are too cute to make into monsters.
Above all, I wanted two things to come alive: Casey’s thoughts and feelings. And that wild, secret spiderweb of trails, twisting through the trees.
As I wrote the first draft, I read it out loud in our living room to everyone—my wife and all six of our kids, even our youngest, who was three. Sometimes when the story flowed, it kept us up late. I knew a chapter was on the right track when the kids chanted “Read another!” When the manuscript was finished, we voted on possible titles. Some of the finalists were The Sentry Oak, The Fierce Frontier, and The Monsters of Sylvan Woods. You know how the voting turned out.
The book ends up answering a lot of questions along the way. What happens when a clueless brother and sister stumble into an ancient forest society in charge of monster control? How hard would it actually be to defend yourself from a hungry monster, even a small one? Could you pick up swordplay or mace-fighting fast—if you were motivated enough?
But the real question underneath all of it, the one that drives the whole plot, is this: what should you do if you’re overlooked, ignored, unseen—invisible? I'm proud of the characters, the monsters, the action, the conversations. But giving that question a real answer by the end of the book was the hardest part of writing it, and the thing about this one I'll remember longest.
If you want to see how it plays out, book 1 is on sale on my author store here.
Prefer Kindle or Amazon? It’s there too.
Until next time,