It was 2001 and 10-year-old Catherine Klug, should have been focusing on the math lesson her teacher at Woodland Park Public School, in Hespeler, was giving, but her mind was far away in a realm of her own imagination.
“We were doing long division that day and I don’t like long division,” Klug said. “I just happened to glance across the room at my sister and our four friends and a flood gate opened in my head about these six kids with similar personality traits running around a fantastical world and saving it from evil. It just kind of snowballed from there in my mind.”
Klug had already prepared her active imagination for such moments of inconvenient inspiration.
“Without fail, all your best ideas will come to you when you are in bed trying to sleep, in the shower or some other place where you can’t immediately write it down,” she said. “I couldn’t start making notes because my desk was right by the teacher’s, and she would have seen if I wasn’t doing my math. So, I had to just sit there and think.”
Klug was able to hold her thoughts long enough to write them down and eventually expand the concept into a four-book series that follows the adventures of identical twins Jenna and Hallie and four other pre-teen protagonists Alan, Jules, Lindsay and Thomas collectively known as the Sought Six.
“The twins were based on me and my sister Amanda, and the other four were based on four of our friends in my Grade 5 class at that time,” said Klug.
“My sister is three minutes older than me and the twins in the book are the exact same. There is a line in the book where I say how the older twin, Hallie, treats the three minutes like three years. When we were growing up my sister did that too.”
Klug had decided, long before fifth grade that she wanted to be a writer and, as luck would have it, the inspiration came to her just after she climbed into bed for the night.
“I was five, when I had the epiphany, if you will, that books don’t just appear out of thin air,” she remembered. “Somebody has to write them, and I thought, ‘I want to do that’. The next morning, I went downstairs to the basement where the writing desk was, stapled some pieces of paper together then wrote and poorly illustrated my first book.”
She would spend the next 26 years perfecting her craft and in 2022 published, The Sterling Cone, the first book in the Sought Six series.
“The second one, Secret of Inferno Rock, is on its way soon, as well as another dark fantasy, The Puppet Master, for the same age group,” she said. “It’s not part of the Sought Six series. It is totally different.”
Klug, a former school librarian with the Waterloo Region District School Board and tutor, is often invited to do readings from her book at schools and to talk with students about the joys of reading.
“One of my goals as a writer is to turn reluctant readers into lovers of books and I have done that for a few,” she said. “I’ve had parents send me emails thanking me for writing the book because their child didn’t like reading until they sat down with mine and all of a sudden, they loved the book, and they are trying other books now.”
Klug has tried to retain the same childhood wonder and perception of the world that inspired her to create the characters and stories she has committed to the page
“I think that is one of the reasons kids really like the Sought Six,” she said. “The very first seed of it came from a 10-year old’s brain. So, they can relate to it.”
She often learns as much from her discussions with kids as they learn from her.
“What some writers might do is go to Google and see what is trending in the children’s market,” Klug said. “Those lists are made by adults. Ya, they are books children are reading, but it is because adults told them to read it. I am going directly to the source to ask them what they want to read.”
The answers are not all that different from what she might have given two decades ago.
“Dark fantasy was one of my favourite genres to read growing up,” said Klug. “Not necessarily horror books, but a little scary, a little spooky. I don’t think it is coincidence that every single time I ask kids what they want to read, scary books are on the list. Without fail, it’s horror, fantasy, friendship, those three.’
Reading those types of books when she was young helped Klug make sense of a confusing and often scarier, real world.
“The year I came up with that book, was the year 9-11 happened,” she said. “Things were starting to become clear in my mind that the world isn’t quite as rosy as I might have thought. I was always looking for the next escape, a book, a movie, or something to go into. Not to shut out the real world or ignore it, so to speak, but to just get away from it for a while.”
She hopes her stories will inspire and empower kids the same way.
“It does make kids feel powerless when they’re seeing all this stuff unfold around them and they can’t do anything about it,” said Klug. “In the book I gave these kids the ultimate power. Everything depends on them.”
The Sought Six are facing those challenges without cell phones or other modern technology.
“Whether kids recognise it or not there is something incredibly freeing by being away from technology and I think it is safe for them to step away from their phones if it’s not real,” said Klug. “They can go into a book and into a world where those things don’t exist. That is, definitely, one of the reasons I write for kids. I want them to have something they can escape into even for a short time.”
Encouraging kids to put down their phones and pick up a book is important to Klug but she has been in touch with people in the film business and is quick to point out how easily her stories could be adapted for the big screen.
“All of the adult characters are based on Canadian actors.” said Klug.
They include Rachel McAdams, A.J. Cook, Ryan Reynolds, Colm Feore, and Catherine O’Hara.
“The entire book is so quintessentially Canadian,” she said. “If a film deal were ever to come up, I already have the cast.”
The Sought Six is available on Amazon and more information about Klug is on her official website.
