JC:  Why’s the book called Middleworld – and what’s it all about?

JV:  “Middleworld” is what the Ancient Maya called the world of men, because they believed it was literally sandwiched between the heavens above and the underworld. The book tells the story of Massimo Francis Murphy (Max for short), a pampered Boston teenager who finds himself lost and alone in the Central American rainforest. He meets up with Lola, a modern Maya girl, and together they discover that Max’s parents are being held prisoner by the Ancient Maya Lords of Death. As Max and Lola plot their increasingly desperate rescue attempts, they find themselves on the frontline of an epic battle between good and evil.

JC:Where did you get the idea for the book ?

PV:Jon grew up in Central and South America, and he has a love/hate relationship with the jungle. He used to tell our children bedtime stories based on his childhood and the book came out of those stories. The hero is a city boy who’d rather stay in a comfortable hotel, with TV and room service, than sleep out under the stars. That was how Jon felt about it. He was a missionary kid, but his heart was in the consumer society. If his parents had a meeting in the States, he used to beg them to smuggle Big Macs back in their suitcases. At the time, he thought he was deprived and felt sorry for himself. Now he recognizes how lucky he was to have had all that freedom and so many amazing experiences.

JC: How would you describe it?

JV:First and foremost, it’s a rollicking adventure story.

PV:It’s a fantasy, of course, but it also contains a lot of factual information on the Maya and life in the rainforest. The underlying message is about unplugging your laptop and reconnecting with real people in the real world.

JC:How accurate is the historical information in the book?

JV:All the details about the gods and the construction of the pyramids and life in the royal palaces are based on the latest research. There’s also a lengthy appendix on the Maya world, which has been checked by a professor at Harvard. We’re hoping that the book might even correct a few misconceptions. For example, the accepted truth used to be that the Maya were a peaceable nation of priests, astronomers and scholars. Now we know that warfare was rife between the various city states and, in the end, this lack of unity played a large part in allowing the Spanish to conquer them.  (Although, despite the twin onslaught of germs and firearms, the Maya held out against the Spanish for 170 years.)  But they were never as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs. The Maya rarely held mass sacrifices and, contrary to Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, they didn’t round up peasants to sacrifice. The Maya went for quality rather than quantity, preferring to dismember rival kings and high-born captives in a show of military strength.

PV:In many ways, the Maya were the Romans of Mesoamerica. They developed an advanced civilization, they had extraordinary building prowess (they even built straight roads through the jungle) and they had highly organized civic skills. But just as the Romans had the Colisseum to entertain and intimidate the populace, the Maya had their bloodletting ceremonies. It’s amazing to me that the Maya Empire lasted three times as long as the Roman Empire. But people should know that when their great civilization crumbled, the Maya did not just disappear. There are still six million Maya living (often in poverty and oppression) in Central America today.

JC:How did you go about researching the book?

PV:We read every book and every website we could find, and we gradually learned to distinguish fact from fiction. We visited museums, watched the History Channel and Jon took a course on reading and writing glyphs.  We also traveled to Belize, which is the model for the fictional country of San Xavier in the book, and tried to imagine Ancient Maya life for ourselves. We climbed pyramids, canoed underground caves, and went tracking howler monkeys in the jungle. We hope to go back to Belize, and also to Guatemala, this summer.

JC:What ages/genders will this book appeal to?

JV:It was written for middle-graders, boys and girls aged 10-14, but younger and older readers will enjoy it too! I often read with my 13-year-old and it drives me crazy when kids’ books are shallow or badly plotted or clunkingly humourless. I wanted to write a book that kids and their parents would enjoy.

PV:But there are some scary bits, so I might not recommend it for faint-hearted readers under ten to read alone before bedtime.

JC:What separates this book from others in the genre, such as Harry Potter?

JV:Middleworld has been called “Harry Potter meets Indiana Jones”, but it’s actually much more than that. It brings together a fast-paced contemporary adventure story with a huge amount of factual living history. It’s impossible to read it and not come away with a better understanding of the Maya, past and present.

JC:Middleworld is part of a trilogy, isn’t it?

JV:Yes, it’s called The Jaguar Stones Trilogy.

PV:  Book One, Middleworld, introduces Max and Lola, and explains the legend of the Jaguar Stones, the five sacred stones of the Ancient Maya. Book Two, which is all plotted out and ready to write,  takes Max and Lola to Spain, in the footsteps of the Conquistadors. Book Three will send them down to Xibalba, the Ancient Maya underworld.

JC:Are the Jaguar Stones real?

PV:No, the entire plotline about the Jaguar Stones is fantasy. But you could say that the qualities the stones represent – courage, wisdom, creativity, prosperity, and truth (in the sense of establishing the true bloodline) – were the driving forces of the Ancient Maya.

JC:What makes Max Murphy a unique protagonist? Are you similar to him at all, Jon?

JV:Unlike many heroes in children’s fiction, Max is not immediately likeable. He says and does the wrong thing a lot of the time, and he has a lot of lessons to learn. But fourteen is a difficult age and the mood swings can be intense. Like Max, I was a pretty selfish kid and I sometimes felt (sorry Mom!) that my parents’ work took precedence over family life. I know what it feels like to be alone and scared in the jungle. Max is extremely materialistic and I think my wife would say that I am too. (I own ten guitars.)  And I’ve always preferred luxury hotels to sleeping rough. Oh, and when I was a kid I had red hair.

JC:Who is your favorite character and why?

PV:I like Lola, of course, because she’s strong and brave and she knows her own mind.  I like Lady Coco because it’s so much fun to imagine an Ancient Maya queen enjoying all the freedoms of modern day life. I also have a soft spot for Ah Pukuh, the god of war and violent death, because he’s just so wicked!

JV:  I guess for me it would have to be Hermanjilio, the Maya archaeologist.  I like his appetite for life, his inquisitive mind and the way he struggles to balance traditional ways with modern life.  I also like the Death Lords, who behave like naughty children – their mix of practical jokes and pure villainy reminds me of a few of the guys in my old band.

JC:  Jon, it’s interesting to know that your parents were missionaries because one of the villains

       in the book is a Spanish missionary, Friar Diego Delanda. Are these facts connected?

JV: Not at all. I mean, do I think the Spanish Conquest was the best thing that ever happened to the Maya? No, of course not. But even by conquistador standards, Friar Diego Delanda was out of order. You have to remember that we didn’t make this guy up. He was a real-life Franciscan monk who decided to burn every single one of the Maya’s priceless folding bark books. And written in those books were all the secrets of this incredible civilization. Imagine if we still had them today! But this was no act of impulsive vandalism. DeLanda lived among the Maya for thirteen years before he built his bonfire. Thirteen years.  So, in a way, the story of the Jaguar Stones is a fantasy about what might have happened in those years and why DeLanda did what he did.

JC:In the blurb for Middleworld, it says that Max Murphy has to face his deepest, darkest fears. So I’d like to ask what scares you?

JV:  Spiders.  A few nasty specimens I met in the jungle put me off all of them for life.

PV: Heights, rollercoasters, ghost trains, mice, rats, gerbils, tunnels, clowns, snakes, flying, basements, horror films …. pretty much everything - except spiders!

JC: So you deal with Jon’s spiders? Sounds like you make a good team. Did you find it easy to work together on the book?

PV: There were good days and bad days. But we didn’t sit down together and agonize over every sentence. Jon planned out the bones of the story first, all the action scenes and so on, then I took over and fleshed out the characters and added the dialogue. Then we’d review the manuscript and start all over again. At any one time, one of us is writing and one of us is editing or researching.

JC:   Are you superstitious at all?

JV:   No.

PV:No, I make a point of walking under ladders.

JC:If you could share one experience with the characters in this book, what would it be?

JV: I’d like to experience the power of the red Jaguar Stone at the temple of Chaak, when Lola and Max discover they can use it to control the weather.  But only, of course, if I could avoid what happens to them next.

PV: I’d like to eat one of Raul’s breakfasts.

JC: What is the most adventurous thing you've ever done?

JV:  For me it would have to be when I left South America at 16 while still in high school and moved up to the US on my own.  I put myself through college playing in a rock and roll band.  My band’s tour of Minnesota mining towns is quite a hair raising adventure story all on its own. Thinking of it now still gives me the willies.

PV: With a friend from college, I once traveled around China on trains without speaking a word of Chinese. And I once allowed my wild Brazilian friend to persuade me to dance with her samba school in the Rio Carnival. It was extremely brave of me (and of her) because I’m the world’s worst dancer – think Elaine on Seinfeld. I was measured for my feathers and everything. Luckily for everyone, by the time February came around I was six months’ pregnant and couldn’t do it. But the most terrifying thing was probably the cave-canoeing in Belize. It combined my fears of bats, caves, pitch darkness, bats in pitch dark caves, rowing-boats, deep water and water with fish in it. (Big, blind, ugly catfish.) Oh, and claustrophobia. I really, really didn’t want to do it - but I didn’t think I could make Max Murphy do it, if I wouldn’t. Max is a lot braver than me, though.

JC:  What was the most difficult aspect of writing the book?

JV:  Getting started. I was supposed to be writing a marketing book. Our advertising agency in London had produced some ground-breaking campaigns and I’d been asked to write a book about our approach. But when I sat down to write it, I realized  that my heart wasn’t in it. It was quite a difficult moment to tell Pamela that I wanted to drop the marketing book and write a children’s novel instead.

PV:Especially since we’d just moved from England to America, built a house and had a surprise third child, all in the space of 12 months. Once I’d got over the shock of it all, the hardest thing was believing that we could do it. And the next hardest thing was giving it to the owners of our local Norwich Bookstore to read and waiting on tenterhooks for their verdict.

JC:  What was the most rewarding part of writing it?

JV:  For me, it’s been learning to read and write Maya glyphs. Understanding the language has helped me to understand the people so much better.

PV:All of it. Learning about the Maya, learning how to write a book, learning about the publishing industry. Creating a new world, peopled with (I hope) memorable characters. But most of all, seeing the pride on the faces of our three children.

JC:  What do you hope readers take away from Middleworld?

PV:  The desire to read more about the Ancient Maya.

JV: The desire to buy Book Two!

JC: So when and where can I buy it?

JV: Official publication will be around Columbus Day, which seems appropriate for a book about the Maya and the Conquistadors, don’t you think? We’ll be checking the Maya calendar for the most auspicious date. You can buy Middleworld in all good US bookstores and the usual online sources. It’s also probable that we’ll have an advance sale and pre-publication party at the wonderful Norwich Bookstore in mid-September.  Watch this space!