Picture Charlotte Kandel, a first-time author at age 63, sitting in her home office in Los Angeles, clutching her hair and groaning "No, no!" as a character in her novel heads off in an unanticipated direction — or, alternatively, laughing out loud as one says something amusing.

Many fiction writers will recognize this blessed state when, as Hemingway said, "the book was writing itself."

Kandel, who had abandoned a top-of-the-heap Hollywood job as head of worldwide publicity for Warner Bros., thought she'd died and gone to heaven — a heaven in which she was privileged not just to create the sort of world she had so enjoyed as a bookish young girl, but one where, as a mature woman, she found herself setting to rest childhood issues.

The book that resulted, part one of a planned three-part series, is "The Scarlet Stockings, The Enchanted Riddle," a young adult novel that was snapped up by Dutton Children's Books and which is expected to make a splash next holiday season (if it waits that long).

With a delightful pink-on-pink cover touched with gilt, a plot blending magic and mystery, about a young orphan girl who longs to be a ballerina (but whose needs go much deeper), and an elusive riddle that pushes the action of the book forward, it's likely to draw in many a young person.

Even Kandel, who will visit Hawai'i this weekend, has been surprised at how wide a net Daphne and her magic stockings can cast. Just last week, she was invited to give a reading in inner-city San Diego. She expected an audience of 9- to 12-year-olds. Instead, she got tattooed, tough-looking urban teens and pre-teens, bused in from a government-run special school for homeless and troubled youth. The boy in the front row, who topped her by several inches, wore a T-shirt that said, "I would rather chew on barbed wire than listen to you."

"My knees were knocking," said Kandel, who, even after many years in America speaks the soft, cultured accent of her British childhood. "But I started talking to them about the book as both an interior and exterior study of a character. She is lonely. She can't love. She can't trust. She has absolutely no self-confidence — all this dating back to my own childhood, let it be said. ... And the rest is proverbial history. There was not a movement, not a sound once I began to read. And they got it. And it was those huge, scary boys that asked the most questions. That that should happen means so much to me."

In writing "The Scarlet Stockings," which posits a spell cast by the 17th-century inventor of ballet designed to ensure the survival of the dance, Kandel wanted to write a book like the ones she loved in childhood, when books were her escape and her solace.

She was, she says, "fat, insecure, very shy," sent to boarding school at a young age though she begged to stay home.

She loved books with magic, mystery, glamour, excitement, fun, adventure and humor — "Anne of Green Gables" was her very favorite. She wanted her book to have all these attributes (and it does, most charmingly), but, she said, "I really was most interested, within the context of the genre, to try to portray the inner life of this person."

It is the life of someone whose outward quest is but a mirror of their inward search for confidence, security, a sense of self and of proper place. This is the quest, indeed, of every human, which may be why the book reads so effortlessly and enjoyably for adults as well as young people.

Kandel, who had never even kept a diary before, said she knew nothing about writing — but, after 15 years in the movie business, and six years before that in theater publicity for Minneapolis' prestigious Guthrie Theater, she did know plot and story.

She knew from the beginning that she wanted to set the book in London and Paris, where she had grown up, and in the 1920s, a rich artistic time. She also wanted it set behind the scenes in the world of theater.

She wanted a truly nasty bad person (and succeeds, with the prima ballerina assoluta Ova Andova — a person so wicked you want to hiss when her name is uttered, and you shed not a tear when she finds herself ... well, you'll have to read the book).

And she knew her main character would be Daphne, who would — unlike children in such magical classics as the "Narnia Chronicles" and the "Harry Potter" series — meet magic not in a separate world, but at home, in the form of a pair of ballet tights with a mind of their own. The stockings would interact with her, bless her, endanger her and complicate her life immensely.

Kandel doesn't dumb down her characters or her language because she's writing for young people. She uses rhyming Cockney for Daphne's adopted family in Hoxton, and a thick Boris and Natasha-style Russian accent for Andova (always worth a chuckle when she reads aloud to a young audience). She writes as people speak, even if some of the words will fly over younger heads.

"Children make sense of these things. They get it from the sound and the context even if they don't know the words," she said. And beneath the musicup-and-under melodrama of the plot are life's big issues.

As to the fact that she's writing her first book for children when she herself is so far removed from childhood, Kandel says, thoughtfully, "I don't think I could have written this book before now."

All her life's experiences — and in particular, her years at Warner Bros. dealing with "the insanity of fame at any price" — went into the book: "Knowing something, and being able to write it in a way that everybody gets what you're saying is two different things. You have to have lived it to be able to do that."