Sunday, February 9, 2025
Calling all middle-grade fantasy adventure lovers: a new book by a local author checks all those boxes.
Isaac Rudansky, of Cedarhurst, is the author of “Georgie Summers and the Scribes of Scatterplot,” a book for children ages 8 to 12 — middle-grade readers — who are fans of the Percy Jackson and Harry Potter series.
The book is a product of so-called hybrid publishing, in which costs are shared by the author and a publisher, and will be released on Feb. 4 and distributed in more than 60 bookstores and on Amazon by Simon & Schuster.
Rudansky, 37, grew up in Huntington, in an Orthodox Jewish home with no television, and he regularly rode his bike to the Huntington Public Library, where he read Stephen King books.
“Reading all of those books nurtured my creativity and instilled this thirst for good stories,” Rudansky said. “Reading good stories led to writing good stories, and I eventually made a career out of it.”
After high school, he had no interest in going to college, and instead went to a rabbinical seminary for a couple of years before taking a gap year in Israel. He was attending a program at Hofstra University and selling art at the time. He started writing 13 years ago.
“We had this cottage behind where I grew up in Huntington — it was a very old neighbor who lived there,” Rudansky recalled. “I have a scene of a portal opening up, like a vertical tear in the space, and a villain climbing through and wreaking havoc on the cottage and the neighbor.”
As he was writing the scene, an idea struck him from a math class he was taking at Hofstra about scatterplots, graphs that use coordinates to display values for two variables.
“In my mind, scatterplot sounds like a place, and maybe it’s the name of the place on the other side of the portal where this villain came from,” Rudansky said. “I get to thinking, what will happen in Scatterplot? and I thought there they definitely needed scribes — it just sounded right.”
He always knew that his title character would be named Georgie Summers, because he always loved that name, and after he had the title, he continued to expand on the adventure and started putting the pieces of the story together.
Rudansky contacted Webster Stone, an editor at Rugged Land Media who he found online, when his draft was 500 pages long, with no ending in sight.
“Isaac’s first draft was rough, but he’s such a smart, driven, and enthusiastic guy,” Stone wrote in an email. “His excitement for the project was infectious, he definitely had a vision.”
Rudansky felt disheartened by the notes he received from Stone, which suggested he rethink his story. “I didn’t have the heart to start over from scratch,” he said.
He told Stone that he would call him back in a week, and that week turned into 10 years. During those 10 years he was forming a company called Adventure Media Group, a full-service management agency.
Then, Rudansky said, “I wanted to finish something that I started. I called Web and we started working together again.”
In 2021, he picked up where he left off on his draft. “After a while, a long while, his writing started to improve, he learned how to paint poignant scenes,” Stone wrote. “He could be moving, fun and funny too. He also developed a capacity for narrative drive — that’s when you have to turn the page and keep reading.”
After the pair worked together for a year on an outline, Rudansky’s story started to come to life.
“His story is at once intimate and wide-ranging, there is so much action, but it’s leavened with softer set pieces,” Stone wrote. “Isaac has a nice ear, the dialogue rings true and sounds right, there is conflict, scope, twists and a big ending. What’s more, it has ideas and themes that are at once timely and important.”
Every day for three years, Rudansky rose at 4 a.m. and write from 4:30 to 7:30 a.m., before his children woke up, and eventually finished his manuscript.
Stone said he has immense pride in Rudansky and high hopes for his book.
“That personality of his, and that voice, comes across in ‘Georgie Summers’, the character and the book,” Stone wrote. “It’s a terrific book, I want to see it a New York Times bestseller and a Hollywood blockbuster too. Long live Scatterplot!”
As he neared completion of the book, Rudansky worked with Jim Thomas, an editor at Random House.
“The first wash was how accessible his writing is,” Thomas said. “It’s very open, engaging, lively — the characters jump off the page and the story draws you in from the first page. He doesn’t wait with the action, there’s something compelling happening from the first page. That’s nice for an adult editor. It makes it interesting and draws me in.”
Thomas was excited about the book’s conceit, because it was something he had never seen before in a middle-grade fantasy adventure.
“The idea is that our memories, the memory of every person alive in the world we know, is stored in massive libraries in an alternative universe,” he said. “I found it really engaging and fun.”
The best part of editing the book, Thomas said, was working with Rudansky.
“It’s a collaboration — a writer brings material to an editor and then a lot depends on how well the editor and the artist can communicate,” Thomas said. “It’s been such a pleasure working with Isaac. He and I just really click and speak the same language. During his revision process, he took what I offered him and did more with it.”
