Today, I’m excited to post an interview with the author of this fun middle-grade adventure.

How long have you been writing?

In school, I was good at writing and I did well at assignments, but I was motivated by grades so I never gave myself the time to sit with a topic and think creatively about it. There were topics I enjoyed writing about, (I wrote at least three college papers on the different aspects of chocolate), but my creative writing honestly started with my kids. I was reading a ton of picture books with my daughter when she was a toddler and it eventually sparked my own story idea. That was in 2017 and ever since I’ve been jotting down story ideas as they come to me, researching agents and editors I’d like to work with, and writing in any spare moment I can find.

Is Ghost Town Treasure Hunt your first novel?

It is! When I first started writing for publication, I wrote picture books. As I sent those manuscripts to agents, I kept receiving feedback that my voice might be more suited for the middle-grade audience. Around the same time, I came up with the idea for Ghost Town Treasure Hunt. So I started drafting it, sent it through countless rounds of revisions with critique partners, queried it to over 130 agents and publishers, and here we are!

Where did you get the idea for your story?

During my first year of teaching high school, I was chatting with another teacher and she told me about Forrest Fenn. If you haven’t heard of him, here’s the short and sweet version: In 2010, Forrest Fenn hid an actual treasure chest somewhere in the Rocky Mountains that was said to contain gold and other valuables worth at least a million dollars. Afterward, he published a memoir that included a poem that held clues for people to find the treasure. I was captivated by the story and I even did some research of my own to try and solve the mystery. Spoiler alert: I didn’t find it. Then, years later, I learned about geocaching and something just clicked between those two worlds. I began to wonder what would happen if a geocache hunt developed into a real-life treasure hunt. Now we can find out through Layton and Sherry! 

Tell me about your main character.

Layton Clark is eleven years old when his best friend moves away and he wonders if he’ll ever have another adventure. He’s a shy kid who doesn’t like change and doesn’t believe he’ll have anything in common with any of his classmates. Then he meets Sherry and she introduces him to the treasure-hunting world of geocaching. Their thirst for adventure eventually sends them hunting for mysterious geocaches in an abandoned Kansas ghost town. Layton and Sherry must work together to unlock the clues in the strange geocaches, solve a 100-year-old mystery to clear a dead man’s name, and convince Layton’s archaeologist dad that the ghost town is worth studying further so his family doesn’t have to move. 

What are you hoping that readers take away from GTTH?

I would love it if readers discovered the hidden magic lying within their towns. It would be wonderful if every reader picked up geocaching and experienced the thrill of treasure hunting in a modern way, but ultimately if each reader just found something beautiful or something they hadn’t noticed before in their town, I’d be pretty happy.

Did anything surprise you in the process of writing the book?

I surprised myself when I started writing the spooky parts of the story. I don’t read scary or horror stories and I rarely read spooky books, but I had fun weaving in some low-grade spooky elements into Layton’s life.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently working on the second book in the Geocache Club series. It follows Layton and his friends as they form the school’s first geocaching club. They create geocaches of their own to hide, some tension develops that threatens Layton and Sherry’s friendship, and there may or may not be a geocache heading into space.

Ghost Town Treasure Hunt releases Oct. 1st, 2024. Pre-orders start Sept. 1st through https://chickenscratchbooks.com/

Abbi Lee taught high school English and Social Studies before turning her full attention to writing. She now works for a marketing agency, has been published in multiple magazines, and is proud to announce Ghost Town Treasure Hunt as her debut middle-grade novel. Outside of reading and writing, Abbi also enjoys making (and eating) no-bake cookies, geocaching for hidden treasures, and going on adventures with her husband and two daughters. 

You can find Abbi via her website or on Instagram, Twitter/X, and Facebook: @abbileebooks