From FBI Fantasies to Faithful Adventures: Inside Rob Baddorf's Creative World

Fast-paced action from a Christian worldview is the heart behind Rob Baddorf's books.

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Valerie - Welcome to Bookworthy. Today, we are talking with middle-grade author and illustrator, Rob Baddorf. Rob worked many years as a creative director at a publishing company, and then he started his own, where he has published over 80 titles, including a Christian space adventure, the Kimberly the cat series, a Christian fantasy chapter book, and recently the animal shelter detective agency series. Today, we're going to be talking about his Recruited by the FBI series, which I've heard there's a little bit more coming our way. So welcome to Book Worthy, Rob.

Rob - Thank you. Thank you, Valerie, and thank you for having me here.

Valerie - It is a pleasure to have you. Kind of discovered you through my middle grade reader, who is what I call a book dragon because he devours everything. He's read every book he's allowed to read in our house at least twice. And so we discovered you, and it's been really fun to see your content, see the fun stories that you've produced. But we have to start with our random question of the week. What is your most-used emoji?

Rob - Probably my most used emoji is just the standard smiley face, which is a little bit boring. But probably in second place is the little scooter. For some reason, I really like the little scooter. I think it's one of those hold-ons from my childhood that I just really loved. The little hand-held scooter that you hold the handle and kick along. I just think that's fun.

Valerie - That does sound fun. Sounds like it could communicate a lot. I think right now, when we're recording, this is kind of April, May, and that's kind of the end of the school year for my kids. So we're in this sprint marathon of all the events. So my emoji I'm using the most is kind of the melting smiley face. Like, we are just going to survive this month, maybe. Well, Rob, tell us a little bit about the recruited FBI series.

Rob - Sure. It's kind of an upper-middle grade YA series. So far, it's three books in the series. And it's essentially about a boy who gets recruited into the FBI, believe it or not, through the fact that his dad had been an FBI agent. And so the FBI isn't always forthcoming about the age requirement that they will accept won't. So when they have an opportunity to use a teenager, they hire Robin Banks to come in, and he brings some of his best friends along. So it's a team of two boys and two girls that go around and do the work for the FBI.

Valerie - That's kind of fun. It's one of those books you don't expect to have a Christian element in the FBI. So, how did you choose to kind of weave that into your storytelling?

Rob - Yeah, that's a great question. Think that's part of my passion in writing is to why not bring God into the places that we haven't simply seen him before, like an action story. Why can't somebody stop and pray? Why can't there be conversations about God and with God? Why can't God be involved in the adventures of life? And so that was one of my strong desires with us is to try to incorporate all the parts of our Christian life into a fun, pretty much over-the-top adventure.

Valerie - Gets a little wild at times for sure. But it's really fun, the friendship element that you wove in, that it's not just focused on Robin Banks, but just how he interacts with his friends and how they become part of the process. And just kind of that coming of age element that is so prevalent in middle grade books, but with a really fun spin. Now, were you ever recruited by the FBI?

Rob - Well, if I were, I couldn't tell you. But I'm going to decline that answer. But that was actually what that's part of what inspired this. When I grew up, I went to public school. And on the slower days that were a little boring, I enjoyed daydreaming that the FBI would need some of these kids' help. And what they would do is they would go and they would talk to the principal at the school and the principal would walk into the classroom and ask for a child to the teacher and I would be one of the ones that would be picked and I would be excused and nobody everybody would think maybe I was in trouble but I was going to the principal's office to talk to the FBI to help them out on some case so that was where a lot of this stemmed from.

Valerie - So instead of Harry Potter letters, you wanted to be recruited by the FBI. Too fun. I love how imaginative ideas that we have as kids often come into our stories as we are writers as adults, because what is it? That creative spark is so big when we're kids, but we just can't quite wrap our minds around it. So it's fun to see adults reaching back to stories that encourage them. Well, what do you hope to communicate with kids with this recruitment with the FBI series?

Rob - Well, I think it's the idea that there is adventure in life, and that's how God created it. So often God comes to us and asks us to follow him, and it doesn't seem either safe or necessarily smart. I love stories like Abraham and being called out of Ur when he really had probably a pretty good thing going there, and yet God invited him on an adventure. And so it's this issue of whether we are prepared for the kind of adventures in our lives? And so that's kind of what the story is about. Where is God in the adventures of life? But are we, now, how should we seek them out? And how can they just arrive at us? And how do we respond? So that's some of what intrigued me.

Valerie - Very true. And you've done something a little different with your middle grade books. So middle grade kind of ranges from eight to 12. And so the page ranges for middle grade can vary widely, too. But you have kept these books really short and kind of more serialized fiction. What made you choose to make them in that format?

Rob - I actually studied film. And so that was what my major was in college, screenwriting. So you ended up having to write almost all your scripts as close as possible to 90 pages. And so I learned the art of storytelling to a specific page count. But what I also really liked about it was that I liked it now with the invention of online streaming stories and movies.

Kind of this limited dramatic series intrigues me because you get more with characters, you can go deeper with characters and plots than you can with just a standalone story. So I love the idea of a serialized, you know, episodic story. But I also like trying to take bite-sized pieces so that people don't get bored with too much backstory or too much description. So I'm trying to keep the pace kind of moving.

Valerie - Have done that and kept it very fast pace and it speaks to how kids are reading these days because with video games and just media and how it's just coming at them so fast to have a book that I mean there are so many classical books that they're still reading in high school that would never be published today because the audience just isn't reading that type of book and so you have kind of honed in on your audience and how they're reading and how they are engaging with media. And I think that is clever and unique. I haven't quite seen that yet. And so it's, it's at least for my son, who could read basically one of your books a night, and he would, he'd want to read the next one. Can I read more? Can I read more? And wanting our kids to have that desire to read is, as an author, the goal, right? You want them to dive in and continue to read and get excited about it because it makes us excited. And so it's really a unique direction that you've taken with these books. Now you're also an illustrator. So, tell us a little bit about the illustrator side.

Rob - Yeah, so I've always been fascinated by illustration, and I started practicing when I was young and then did some in school and training, and then I got a chance to kind of start practicing through one of the publishing companies I worked with. And I found that that was just really enjoyable. It was just a way to kind of put an image on the page of what I was kind of thinking about. So, it might not always be used in middle grade. And so that's where I was kind of wrestling with, well, do I do a graphic novel? Can I do a hybrid graphic novel? Are kids still interested in illustrations at all? So, occasionally, I do illustrations, and I put them in my series. I don't do them in all of them, but I do enjoy the process.

Valerie - Yeah. It is very, what is it? Think as a creative person, there's never just one type of creativity you're doing, you know, because you're always exploring something new or different or, you know, I know even in my writing process, I have to draw out some things just to, I see it in my head, but how do I communicate this with words? And so it is a unique medium to grow a story and to connect with all different types of readers. Cause I know I have at least one reluctant reader in my house. And so because he has dyslexia. And so I know graphic novels and books with pictures, you know, really are, he's drawn to that because he gives him a break. It gives him just a mind breath before, now, cause all those words could get very overwhelming. And so it's really neat to see those, you know, I don't know, those elements thrown into books too, still.

Rob - I created a small series, it's three books, called Fighting Fear. So it's fighting fear and monsters, fighting fear and space aliens, and fighting fear and giants. But I had a lot of fun doing heavy illustration for those.

Valerie - Those were, I found those, and I need to look at them a little bit more. Thought that was neat to kind of take those, the scary things, and make them very fun and relatable. So I can't wait to check those out a little bit more. Now, when did your writing journey begin, Rob?

Rob - I think it was when I was pretty young. I still remember in early middle school, you know, middle school, I had an assignment that I had to write a story and I ended up writing a play and I thought the play, and then we actually, and it was only two pages long, but we got a chance to perform it. And I just remember really enjoying it.

The play format because you could wear costumes, you could enter into the character, you had the dialogue, and you could play different people. And that just ended up being fun. And I think that really started to hook me. And one of the stories I tell is that Star Wars, the first Star Wars, which is episode four, was very big when I was a kid. Everybody was talking about it, and I went and saw it. I loved it.

But it wasn't until I got to see the making of Star Wars on PBS that it suddenly changed my world. I didn't, I mean, if you would ask me, is Star Wars real? I would have told you no. But I didn't know where it came from. And I didn't understand that people sat down and made these things. I didn't know that was a job. And once I found that out, I was really hooked. So.

Valerie - Now, what took you from playwriting to learning about screenwriting to writing books?

Rob - Well, that's a good... So in high school, I had a good friend whose family was rather wealthy. And this was in an era where home camcorders were pretty rare, and his family had one. So what we would do is every Friday night we would get together and often have sleepovers. And everybody wanted to know, like, what should we do? And every week, all I wanted to do was let's make a movie.

And every week we would make a new movie, and we would either copy something like James Bond kind of films, and we would do it in our childish, now, childlike way. But we did pirate stories, we did spy capers, we just had so much fun. So that's kind of what led me into screenwriting. And I still enjoy that. I actually got to the point where I moved to Los Angeles and was pursuing work out there. But in the end, I think.

I kind of got turned off by the whole business because it was kind of one of these, where I saw so many of my friends getting chewed up by the industry. They were working 16-hour days, oftentimes six days a week, and weren't even able to see their friends and family. And so I just felt like that wasn't really for me. And so at some point, I kind of just said, think I want to get out of this.

And that's when the Lord, actually, I felt like the Lord inspired me and said, I want you to write manuscripts and novels. And my first response, having written a whole bunch of screenplays, was, I can't do that. I can't write a novel. That's way too much. I can't do anything like that. So it took probably a good 10 years to turn me around. Lots of practicing, lots of doing, learning different readings on storytelling, but also specifically like sentence structure and stuff. But most of that was just to get past my fear.

Valerie - Fear played a very large role in my writing journey, and it's amazing to see how faithful God is when he wants you to go in a direction. Like, we will use every excuse in the book to do it our way. And God's like, okay, give that a try, and I'll see you on the other side. Too fun. Well, what is one of the most impactful books in your life, other than the Bible?

Rob - Yeah, good. Well, I have several, one of which is King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard. That is an action-adventure book that just really swept the rug out from underneath me. I did not expect anything to be that interesting or exciting, especially since that was so

old. And it's not that it's that old. It's only a hundred and like 50 years old or something. If that, but I just was so blown away by that ability to have adventure that I just thought was absolutely thrilling. Mean, that was one book that I just could not put down, and that just really affected me. So that was a beautiful thing. One other book, just to throw out if I may, is E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan. That book, and that was what's fascinating about that book to me, is that it's not action-adventure. It's just such a beautiful, you know, journey of friendship, of, you know, it is adventure, but not in the same kind of sense. It's not high adventure. And one quick little story. One day, my wife rented the audiobook of The Trumpet of the Swan from the local library, and she brought it home. And she was playing it for our young kids at the time. And I walked in and my first reaction was, I have no

idea who did the narration on this, but they are so unprofessional because they had a New

England accent, which usually, you know, like for professional actors and voice coaches, you're supposed to have no accent at all if possible and be very well read and this guy just sounded, in a sense, like a grandpa. Somebody's grandfather read this. And yet, over an hour listening to this, I suddenly came to realize this was the best reading I'd ever heard of a book, and that I didn't want some stale actor reading this. I wanted this person. I wanted an older man to read this book. I wanted a grandfather to read this to me.

And I finally decided we're going to have to buy this, and I need to buy this copy because I won't accept any other copy. Whoever this unprofessional reader is, I want that version. So I got up, grabbed the case, only to find out that it was E.B. White himself reading the book. And I felt terrible that I had betrayed him. But then I came to realize that this is the perfect person to read this.

Valerie - That's amazing. It is kind of funny when I do audiobooks, if they switch between a series, I'm like, hold on, that's not the voice I'm used to hearing. Or there's a book, and some of my friends from church are going through it, and the audiobook does not have the author reading it. But the author is one, it's a Paul David Tripp's book. It was like, I want Paul David Tripp to be reading this book to me. It's one of those like there's a certain tone that he has that you just wanted to hear in your ears. So it's come a long way, but it's very unique how we can get kind of picky about who we listen to, too.

Rob - Yeah. And then we get so attached to it that we can't hear it any other way. Yeah.

Valerie - Anyway else. Too fun. Rob, what is something that we can expect next from you?

Rob - Well, I am currently working on three more books in the Sneaky Ink, recruited by the FBI series. So that's going to be the same cast of characters with more conflict, a new conflict. So I'm working on the third of those three right now. So hopefully they'll come together and sometime maybe by the fall.

Valerie - Very neat. And you have a unique opportunity on your website where you get to kind of sign up for your email list, but you get to be one of your ARC readers, too. How did you come up with that idea?

Rob - Yeah, yeah. I had seen other authors do that, and so I just kind of thought, why not throw that out there? And occasionally, I just get people to sign up. So if you're interested in becoming an ARC reader, which stands for Advanced Review or Reader Copy, you can feel free to go to my website and sign up.

Valerie - It has been fun to kind of see some of your work pop up on there and to get a sneak peek at what's going on. Well, where can people find out more about you and your books, Rob?

Rob - Well, I have a website. It's www.robbaddorf.com. And you can go there and check out pretty much everything that I have.

Valerie – We’ll be sure to have that link in the descriptions for our listeners for sure. Thank you for joining me today, Rob.

Rob - Yeah, thank you. Thanks Valerie. This has been fun.

Valerie - And thank you for joining Rob 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 what your most-used emoji is. And be sure to like and subscribe to discover more great books together.

Happy reading.