Mystery, Adventure, and Family Fun with Amanda Trumpower

Amanda Trumpower tells us more about her Collar Case universe and being a writer for Jesus lovers who dig dragons, detectives, and droids.

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Valerie - Welcome to Bookworthy. Today, we're talking with middle-grade author and co-host of the Ice Cream with Authors podcast, Amanda J. Trum Power. Amanda's Christian adventures for kids are a whole lot of fun. She has the Collar Cases and a power pup, which are fun reads full of lovable characters. Of course, a bit of tween adventure. So let's discover more about Amanda and her books. Welcome to Bookworthy, Amanda.

Amanda - Thank you, Valerie. I'm excited to be here.

Valerie - It is a pleasure to have you. We've kind of been playing phone tag in a lot of different ways, haven't we?

Amanda - Yes, thank you for your graciousness with that.

Valerie  - Thank you for yours, too. What is it? I think our original interview set-up time was apparently the last day of school, which they decided to make a half day. And I'm like, I can only be so many places at one time.

Amanda - Yep, you've got to be there for your kids. This is a lesson that I'm really learning this year.

Valerie - Yes, yes. Well, to start us off, Amanda, let's start with our random question of the week. So, when you were a kid, if your family dressed up for Halloween, what was your most memorable Halloween costume?

Amanda - All right, we did dress up for Halloween. I really can't remember any notable ones from my childhood, but I have six-year-old twins, so I have a funny one from that time, if that's okay. Okay, so we've done three Halloweens with our kids at this point, and they're little enough that I can get away with family themes. I don't know how long I'll be able to do that. I'm very pro-costume. Love Ren Fairs. I'm a former children's librarian. I'll wear a costume in the middle of the grocery store if you let me. My husband is a little less so. So his requirement for the family costumes is that it has to be pretty chill for him. So our best one that we've done so far was two years ago. My kids were obsessed with Paw Patrol. So I got them, just your Paw Patrol costumes, you can buy from any store. And then I wore a pink long-sleeved shirt for myself. And if you're watching the video, you can see that I kind of have long hair. And so I put my hair out into pigtails like this so that I look like Skye's ears. And then my husband has some of the basic coloring of Ryder from Paw Patrol. He has brown hair, and his winter jacket genuinely looks almost identical to Ryder's jacket, so he didn't even have to try, and everybody thought we looked amazing.

Valerie - That's awesome. It was that I have three boys so I they're getting a little old so I don't know if I'll ever be able to pull it off but I want them to be the three musketeers at some point and for my husband to be the king and I be the queen and I don't I haven't yet convinced them to do that so we did you Star Wars one year.

Amanda - That's amazing! Maybe. So my husband and I are huge Star Wars nuts, and we have boy-girl twins. We almost named them Luke and Leia. And we want to do multiple Star Wars themes. The one I'm most excited about is Ewoks because I think it would be adorable while my kids are still young. But yeah, lots of Star Wars ideas.

Valerie - That's fun. Yeah, one of my youngest was, I think, the only one at the time. And so he was an Ewok when we did Star Wars. And so it was a lot of fun. Well, Amanda, tell us a little bit about your books.

Amanda - I like to say that I am a writer for Jesus lovers who dig dragons, detectives, and droids. And the reason that I picked that for my tagline is that I like to read three things. I'll read fantasy, I'll read sci-fi, or I'll read mysteries. So if there's not a dead body, a dragon, or a spaceship, I'm not interested. And just like I enjoy reading those things, I also enjoy writing those things. So I wanted kind of an umbrella to house all three of those genres. I'm also a second-generation homeschooler, which means I was homeschooled myself, and I'm homeschooling my children. And so that's kind of the other part of my identity is all of the books that I write are meant to be, first and foremost, for homeschool families.

Valerie - Very neat. Now you have the Collar Cases stories, which are a mystery, and follow the sweet dog and cat friend as they go through their adventures. And then you also have, what was it? The power pup? Power Pup Series. I was about to say Pup Power. I'm like, that's not working, but power pup, which superhero, and a little bit of investigative reporting in there too. So, what led you to kind of kick off with those types, those stories?

Amanda - Um, well, uh, I call it my collar cases universe. And, uh, eventually there will be more series in the universe other than just Collar Cases and Power Pup. But the way it all started, um, I'm currently 33 years old, I think. Um, when I was a late teenager, I've wanted to be an author ever since I was a toddler, basically. Um, but when I was a late teenager, I made a promise to myself that by the time I was 20, I would take some sort of definitive step, even if it was just a small one, to prove to myself that this was going to happen. And so what that looked like when I would turn 20, I had a young friend who was elementary aged, and for her birthday, I wrote her a book, a chapter book. And I collaborated with a friend who was an amazing artist. So it was illustrated. I had edited I formatted it. It was my first foray into producing a book. And obviously, I made a lot of mistakes and I learned a lot of things over those years. But Collocase is number one, as it exists today, is the descendant of that book that I wrote for my friend. The story is more or less the same. The characters are the same, but it has grown up quite a bit to become a professional product. But that's how collar cases started many years ago. And then I had to take a break for life because I was in grad school, and then I got married, and

then I had twins, and it was 10 years of just life stuff. And then I finally got back to the point where my husband and I were like, all right, it's go time. And we decided that Collar Cases was it. So we started Collar Cases, and then Power Pup came along because I knew I wanted to expand the universe, and I wanted to add some sci-fi in there. Well, light sci-fi, which is where the superheroes came from. I'm a big superhero fan, so it was not hard. And that's kind of where we came from. And then, like I said, we've got other projects planned for the universe in the future too.

Valerie - It's a lot of fun. You have created a universe with these characters, and it shows just the care and detail that you've taken in each of the books. You know, it shows your love for both creating and for the kids that you're writing for. What do you hope to communicate to kiddos through these books?

Amanda - My primary goal is to make them laugh. I just want to give them a good, clean read that they truly enjoy reading and that their parents can feel good about. I grew up right before Christian entertainment got good. We had all the cheesy, cheesy things. If it were a Christian movie, that meant it was pretty terrible. If it was Christian music, it was okay. Christian music, I think, was ahead of its time. Christian fiction was still coming into its own. So I love producing entertainment now in an era where just because it's Christian doesn't have to mean that it's cheesy or inferior. So my big goal is to give the kids the most excellent level of

product that I am capable of giving them and making it funny and giving them a great time, and making them feel like they have friends in these characters. And then my second goal is also to teach them a little bit about God as it comes up organically in the story. But I don't want them to feel like I'm preaching at them or that it's this. Now the moral of the story is.

Valerie - Very neat, and it's very fun to read. It reminds me of one of those middle grade books that I read as a kid, now, that were more serialized fiction that you could just read. There are 50 of them, and you could read them all in a day if you wanted to, or you could read them throughout your entire summer. And that's kind of sweet memories of just cuddling up with these friends and walking through their day-to-day, which seems both normal and extravagant. And this is the same time, a really fun set of stories. And so I've enjoyed reading them myself.

Amanda - That means a lot. Also grew up on a lot of that serialized children's fiction, and I loved it. So that means a lot to me to hear. So, thank you.

Valerie - You're welcome. You're in the right spot, right? Well, you said that you'd always wanted to be an author, and you set your goal to accomplish something by 20. When did you first decide that you wanted to be an author? What was that journey like?

Amanda - The story, yeah, the story I like to tell is actually my mom's story, because I was too young to be cognizant of it at the time. My mom said even when I was like a preschooler and I was coloring, I would color for sure, but I'd also take the crayon and I would draw scribble lines, and then I'd be like, hey, mommy, let me read you the story I wrote. I'm not a prodigy or anything like that. It's just genuinely the only thing that I'm good at. It's how God wired me. I just love writing, and that was what my childhood was spent on when I wasn't playing with my brother or playing video games with my dad. I was writing on my word processor, and that's how I spent my whole childhood. And my parents were amazing. They really leaned into that. We were a homeschool family, so we had the flexibility to do that. And they were, they were great because they were like, we see you want to do this, and we're going to support you. We also want to make sure that you can pay your bills and feed yourself. So they were really helpful from a very early age. They helped instill in me this practical expectation that you can do this thing, but you also need to make sure that you can provide for yourself. So they got me some excellent training and some mentorship, and they just really helped me make those wise choices as a young adult, so that I was prepared to go forward and try to do the things.

Valerie - To be a, not a successful, but a sustainable member of society, right? The goal of every parent is just to be able to live a life.

Amanda - Not a starving artist. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Absolutely.

Valerie- I love how, because of your homeschool experience, you were able to lean into that gifting and to express it and explore it in lots of different ways. When you got to college, you said you were a librarian. How did you make that turn?

Amanda - I started as a high school English teacher because I knew that I was not going to be able to get a job exclusively teaching advanced fiction techniques. That's not really a thing that they teach you in school. But I was like, okay, I like kids. I like education. Like teaching. My mom was a teacher, so I got that love from her.

And so I was like, okay, high school English Ed, that's gonna be the closest I can get. I'll get like one unit where I get to teach fiction, and then I have to put up with poetry and essays and all the other things I don't care about. So that was the goal. And then I taught at a summer camp

that was a Christian summer camp that had inner city children. And I realized that I was not called to teach inner city children. I have a lot of respect for people who are. I did not have those skills, at least not at that time. So I was like, all right, I think we need to pivot. And I looked at some options, and I decided on librarianship. So I actually have a master's degree, and I like to say it's the least impressive master's degree in the world because nobody knows that you have to have a master's degree to be an official degree-holding librarian. That's not just a thing that you can walk in and get a job at. So that's what I did. I got a graduate degree in information library science, and I worked as an adult reference and teen slash children's librarian for a couple of years.

Valerie - Yeah, librarians do get the short end of the stick in that. They do have to get a master's to manage all the books and be able to point us to something that we'd like to read. So, they have a talent that is not, was not celebrated enough for so certain.

Amanda - It's a very misunderstood field because it's changed a lot in the last 20 years with the advent of technology. So what a librarian used to do is not the same thing as what a librarian does today. So it's a very evolving field.

Valerie - Always evolving into something, trying to work with you know both kids and adults, and how we're reading and how we're consuming information, and that is a Field of study all in itself for sure. Amanda, what's your favorite book other than the Bible?

Amanda - That is such a hard question because I have these pockets of passion. Just overall for me as a personal individual, not related to like my business and the type of books that I try to write, my personal hero is Agatha Christie. She was an amazing lady in real life. She has

outstanding professional accolades and accomplishments. And she was perhaps on the surface level Christian, certainly culturally, the country and period she grew up in were more or less Christian. I hope when I get to heaven that I will see her there. We will see. But either way, she is my hero. And because of that, I absolutely love her books.

Valerie - I recently read Murder in Mesopotamia for a kind of research project I'm working on. And it was kind of fun to see. I had never read any of her Perot mysteries. And so, it was neat to kind of be like, okay. I've heard about the Orient Express. I've heard about Hector Perot, but it's like, okay. I see how this got interesting.

Amanda - Yeah, she has, it's really interesting. She has these distinct piles. So, not to turn it into the Agatha Christie hour, but she had two marriages, and in her first marriage, she was in England, and a lot of her books were influenced by her time as a nurse during World War II. So there were a lot of poisonings as the death mechanism. But then her second husband was an archaeologist, and she traveled the world with him. And that's where a lot of her archeology-based mysteries came from was kind of that second time of her life. And then she also wrote a couple of romance novels under a pseudonym. So that's kind of like a separate category of things that she tried.

Valerie - What is it? It's very rare for an author to be just, wear just one hat, right? Too fun. And I could see how that mystery and intrigue that Agatha Christie knows weaves into her stories. Kind of see that a little bit in the Collar Case universe, too.

Amanda - It's difficult to pull that off for kids because kids want, you know, they want it to be entertaining and visual, and not necessarily, it doesn't have to be action heavy for all child readers, but that helps. But you do have to keep it moving. And Agatha Christie is rather cerebral. There's a lot of discussion and dialogue and pondering of clues. So the closest I came to trying to do a proper Agatha Christie style was Collar Cases 3 where it's called a locked room mystery where they're in like one setting, whether it's a house on an island or in my case, it was a ski lodge in the middle of a blizzard and all the suspects are trapped in the location and they can't leave. So that was my very flawed attempt at an Agatha Christie-style mystery.

Valerie - It adds another layer to things, to make all the characters stuck in one place. And it's like, the murder's in the room. My parents growing up, we'd always, when I was a teenager, would do these murder mysteries parties. And my sister was always the butler, or we were part of it too, because we had nowhere else to go. So they had to put us to work. But it was fun to kind of just think in that mindset of who did it. Think everybody enjoys that kind of thinking, just different types of thinking. It's true.

Amanda - It makes you feel smart. That's the appeal for the readers. People who read mystery novels want to feel smart. Like that's just the psychology behind it.

Valerie - Okay, I learned something new today. Too fun. Well, what is it? What is the most impactful book in your life other than the Bible?

Amanda - For this one, I'm going to answer from the perspective of not my reading tastes, but the books that I tried to produce. There are a lot of books that influenced my style and the goals of what I'm trying to achieve, but probably nothing more impactful than the Bloodhound Inc. mystery series by Bill Myers. It's about two siblings and a dog who have their detective agency. And it's hilarious. There's a lot of slapstick humor.

Yeah, it's just, it's a fantastic series, and I'm on this mission to collect all of the original editions because I prefer the old covers to the new covers, and I'm only about a third of the way there. So, we'll see if it ever happens.

Valerie - There's another author that I follow who collects the Indiana Jones books. And he recently found a couple of ones that he didn't have. And I was like, oh, yay. Go find the hole-in-the-wall bookstores and find those good books. That's right. That's right. You've got to know where to look for them. Well, Amanda, what can we expect next from you?

Amanda - So, I have an answer for this, and it is not like the expected author's answer. This year has been very challenging for me because I've been homeschooling my kindergarten twins, and I've also been trying to run a business and publish books. And so literally just within the last couple of weeks, my husband and I, who is just a wonderful support in my business and a partner in every sense of the word, we had a conversation and I was like, I don't know that we can continue keeping the schedule that we have been trying to keep. Our commitment to the readers has been one new book a year, so that every time we go to homeschool convention, we have a new book to sell. And so I've been doing this for about three years, and I was like, I think we need to adjust that a little bit. So, as of just a couple of weeks ago, we decided that for the betterment of the business's long-term ability to survive and my sanity. We're not necessarily committing to a book every year. Now that does not mean that I'm not writing anymore. And that does not mean that the Collar Cases universe is dead. It just means that I need to not have a collapse of my mental faculties. So until my kids have finished third grade, I am just going to keep taking the next step that I can on whatever timetable that

takes. And I'm really scared to say that out loud. This is the first time I've ever said that into a microphone because this is a very new decision. And I am terrified of letting my precious little readers, down because I value them so much. But I also want to be here for them in 10 years. If I keep going at the rate I'm going, I don't know that that's possible. So, for anybody who's listening, I share all that because I just want you to know that you can't always do all the things all the time at top speed. And like you and I were talking about at the beginning, Valerie, your kids come first, and it is okay to change and pivot as needed. So it is scary to say that out loud. I kind of feel like I'm failing a little bit, but I know that this is good for my family, it's good for my business, and it's good for me. So yes, I am writing Powerpup 4. Will it be out in January of 2025 as I had hoped? Possibly not, but I can certainly let people know when it is done.

Valerie - I love that honesty and that authenticity. Mean, it's just that, you know, our lives do come in seasons and there are seasons when you can have all the plates spinning perfectly and there are seasons when you cannot. And it's one of those things to say it's not a failure. It's just doing what's best for your family. And I know for our family, it's been lots of little conversations here and there, and to be like, okay. What does the next few months look like? Is this possible? Is this not possible? And trusting God that he's put this desire in your heart and he has set your business up and they could set you and your business up in a really good way that, you know, even with some delays, you know, your readers still love these characters, still love these books, love you, and I'm sure that they'll continue to follow along with you for sure.

Amanda - Yeah, I appreciate that. My biggest goal right now is making sure that my kids are literate. And I have several grade levels to do that, and we're making really good progress. That is like, once my kids are literate and they can read and they can write and they can follow instructions, then my homeschool journey gets a lot easier. And then I can go back to trying to do the business even more than I had in the past. But for right now, this is where we're at.

Valerie - That's a good place to be. Well, Amanda, where can people find out more about you and your books?

Amanda - The best place is just my name, amandatrumpower.com. I have all my books there. I have a couple of audiobooks that are free on the website, so you can try them out without spending any money. And also, the podcast that I do with Becca, we share updates on what we're working on. So when I have book news to share, that would be a good place to hear it, too.

Valerie - We'll make sure to have all those links in the description so people can find you and your podcasts in your books easily. Well, Amanda, thank you so much for joining me today.

Amanda - Thanks so much for having me.

Valerie - It was a pleasure. And thank you for joining Amanda and me on this episode of the Bookworthy Podcast. Check the show notes for any books or links that we discussed and let us know in the comments if you have a most memorable Halloween costume for you or your kids. And don't forget to subscribe and leave a review so we can discover more great books together.

Happy reading.