Mr Ripley's Enchanted Books welcomes Danica Davidson on the Minecrafters Blog Tour! Over the next few weeks, bloggers across the internet will be taking part on the Danica Davidson’s Minecrafter book blog tour for middle-grade readers. There will be a host of interviews, guest posts, book reviews and much more! My post by Danica is about the balance between "Minecraft and Humour." It is a brilliant post to find out more about these best-selling books. Please also check out the other stops by using the #BooksForMinecrafters on twitter. I hope you enjoy this post.
There are a lot of things you can do with Minecraft — build castles, fight monsters, even improve your math and science skills. What do I like to do? Write adventure novels for kids that take place as if Minecraft is a real world. When I do this, I’m balancing an actual video game, adventure with lots of chapter cliffhangers, and real-world issues like cyberbullying. And I like to keep in a touch of humor.
Millions of kids around the world are in love with Minecraft, so when I was first coming up with ideas for these books, I thought it should be told from a kid’s point-of-view. So enter the main character, Stevie: an eleven-year-old boy who lives in the Minecraft world. He has trouble fitting in with the kids from his village and fighting off monsters, which has him feeling insecure about himself. But then he accidentally discovers a portal to Earth, and everything changes.
Stevie meets Maison, an 11-year-old girl who doesn’t fit in at her new school and who is bullied by some older kids. When monsters from Minecraft also break through the portal, it’s up to the new friends to stop them. From there, the two continue to go on missions, including stopping a zombie takeover of Minecraft spearheaded by a cyberbully to stopping Herobrine, a mythological villain in Minecraft lore.
These are adventure stories first and foremost, so people who don’t play Minecraft can read them as well, but Minecraft players will notice a lot more references. This is part of where the humor comes in. Stevie experiences total culture shock finding Earth, and I like to play around with what he thinks about stuff that’s normal to us but absurd to him. For instance, I’m typing this right now with fingers. But for Stevie, who lives in a world where everyone has finger-less, box-shaped hands, fingers are pretty weird. Likewise, he’s baffled by cars, schools, computers, the Internet, all sorts of things. I think this can be fun for kids, too, because it gets them thinking about how different people will have different perspectives, and gets us thinking about things we take for granted. It might be a fun thing to do for a class project — ask kids, “If you’re a Minecraft character who just came to Earth, what would stand out most to you?” You can have quite a bit of fun with this. A number of my reviews, including ones from big publications like School Library Journal, point out the humor I make sure to include.
Sometimes just day-to-day life gives us plenty of humor, like with people’s idiosyncrasies. As the series continues, more characters are included with their own set of quirks, like Stevie’s cousin Alex who loves adventure, no matter how much danger it may put her in, or Yancy, a boy from Earth who usually has a few pretty good one-liners. Humor can also be a great way to talk about serious issues, because it can take some of the sting out of them and get to people’s real feelings. I hope when kids read my books, they can’t stop turning the pages because they care about the characters and what’s going to happen to them — and I also hope they get in a few good laughs.
Adventure Against the Endermen: An Unofficial Overworld Heroes Adventure - Published by Sky Pony Press (23 Nov. 2017)
About the Author
Writing has been my greatest love for as far back as I can remember. I've always enjoyed telling stories. I started writing at the age of three by dictating stories to my parents and then drawing pictures to accompany them. This continued during elementary school, though eventually I stopped writing picture books and began writing longer and longer stories. By middle school, I was regularly completing novels. The Los Angeles Times gave me the great honor of interviewing me as a fourteen-year-old novelist.
Since then I've gotten involved in professional journalistic work, writing for about fifty different magazines, newspapers and websites. Some samples of these can be found on my Published Articles page. I have also written the English adaptation of Japanese graphic novels when they were published in America. Alongside this I'm constantly penning out my fiction and working to accomplish my dream of becoming a full-time novelist. You can find out a bit more about this on my Novels page, and you can order my MG novel, Escape from the Overworld, here. I've never found anything more gratifying, emotional and consuming than putting stories down on paper and seeing where my imagination leads me.
Website: http://www.danicadavidson.com
