Author
From a rejected manuscript to twenty-five years of Wonderland.
Frank Beddor didn’t set out to become a novelist.
By 1998, he had spent years in Hollywood developing and producing other people’s stories. That summer, There’s Something About Mary, which he produced, became one of the biggest comedies of the year.
But Frank increasingly wanted to stop producing other people’s stories and create one of his own.
The inspiration came from an unexpected place.
A Deck Of Cards
Later that year, in London for the premiere of There’s Something About Mary, Frank had an afternoon to himself and went to the British Museum.
He was studying a set of playing cards Napoleon had commissioned to depict his battles when something to his right caught his eye.
An incomplete deck of cards seemed to be glowing.
Frank looked around for the source of the light. There wasn’t one.
When he moved closer, he found strange, unfamiliar versions of the characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The images brought back questions that had fascinated him since childhood. What if there were more to Wonderland than Lewis Carroll had written? What if the nonsense actually made sense? What if Wonderland wasn’t a dream at all?
A chance encounter with an Oxford collector who owned the rest of the deck pushed those questions further.
Frank began writing.
Five Years. And Every Major Publisher In America Said No.
It took five years to finish The Looking Glass Wars.
Frank had transformed the Wonderland of his childhood into something entirely different: a real civilization with its own history, politics, technology and wars. Alice became Alyss Heart, a princess forced to flee her world after her aunt Redd murders her parents and seizes the throne. Stranded in Victorian England, Alyss tells her story to Lewis Carroll, who misunderstands it and turns her history into a fairy tale.
Frank believed in the book. American publishing did not.
“It was painful.”
But the story wasn’t finished with him.
Egmont published The Looking Glass Wars in Britain in 2004. An American author reinventing one of England’s most treasured literary creations proved impossible to ignore. Some embraced it. Others were outraged.
Readers found it.
In 2006, Dial Books brought it home to the United States, the country that had turned it down, and Scholastic released the audiobook. The Looking Glass Wars and its sequel, Seeing Redd, went on to spend a combined thirty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Book Became A World
What followed wasn’t simply a series of sequels.
Frank kept discovering more of Wonderland.
With his longtime writing partner Liz Cavalier, he expanded the trilogy into the Hatter M graphic novels, which follow Hatter Madigan’s thirteen-year search for Alyss across our world. Other stories pushed beyond the trilogy, as new characters, histories and generations revealed a much larger mythology.
Over more than twenty-five years, that mythology has grown across novels, graphic novels, audiobooks, music, art, games, apparel, and projects for film, television and the stage.
And it is still growing.
The Story Found Its Readers
A Love Story
Looking back on the journey from a manuscript no American publisher wanted to a world that has filled more than twenty-five years of his creative life, Frank puts it simply:
“The greatest satisfaction I’ve had in this whole endeavor is that I had faith in the story, and I had faith in the readers, and the two have found each other. It’s not every day you find a project you want to devote years of your life to, and when you do, whatever the content might be, for you, personally, it’s a love story.”
