Jonathan Payne

Jonathan Payne is a British-American writer based in New York City.

His first novel, Citizen Orlov, was named a Book of the Month by Apple Books. It won the 2024 IBPA Silver Medal for Mystery/Thriller and the 2024 IPPY Bronze Medal for Suspense/Thriller.

Payne previously worked in national security for the British government.

He holds a Master of Arts degree in Novel Writing from Middlesex University, London.

Payne's new novel is Hotel Melikov.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Hotel Melikov is the sequel to Citizen Orlov. It picks up a week after the first book finishes, in the same unnamed, fictional central European country between the two world wars. The sequel kicks off with a bang, as tensions between the government and revolutionaries erupt into civil war.

This series revolves around Citizen Orlov, an unassuming fishmonger who accidentally becomes a spy. But, of course, I can only use his name as a title once. Naming the other books in the series is an interesting challenge.

I've always loved stories set in hotels, like A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles and John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire. Since this novel both begins and ends in Hotel Melikov, the grandest hotel in my fictional capital, I hope the title will tempt readers to wonder what happens behind those walls, and what role the hotel plays in the civil war.

Also, since there are nuns on the cover, and one of them is carrying a gun, readers will hopefully be wondering what on earth is going on!

What's in a name?

With the exception of nuns, no one in the Orlov novels is given a first name. This is because it's a rather strange, formal society in which everyone is known by a title. So, anyone who's not an Officer, Judge, Minister, Prince, etc, is known as Citizen.

Since the novels are set nowhere, the family names are taken from everywhere. I use popular family names from all over central and eastern Europe. Orlov, meaning eagle, is a common family name in Russia. Orlov is an everyman, which is conveyed in part by giving him a common name.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I like writing both the beginning and ending of novels; I struggle with the middle. In the middle of a novel, there are so many strands in play, and all of them need to be wrangled in a way that sets up the ending.

In Hotel Melikov, I knew that the plot had to kick off with the civil war erupting, and I knew where both Orlov and his beloved nation would end up. The tricky part, and the fun part, was plotting the route between those two points.

Whenever I get tough homework from my editor, it usually relates to the middle of a novel.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Orlov is both me and not me. When I think about politics and government, and perhaps life more generally, I often find myself bewildered by the things that go on in the world and the strange ways some people behave. In a sense, the character of Orlov is my bewilderment turned up to 11. The result is a protagonist who's well-meaning but also very confused and utterly paranoid.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I'm a huge movie fan, and that definitely informs some aspects of Hotel Melikov. In particular, the middle of the novel is set at a convent at the peak of Mount Zhotrykaw, the highest mountain in the kingdom. In setting it there, I'm referencing a couple of classic movies featuring religious communities at the top of mountains: Lost Horizon, based on the novel by James Hilton (from which we get the concept of Shangri-La), and Black Narcissus, made by one of my favorite cinematic partnerships, the brilliant Powell and Pressburger.

Visit Jonathan Payne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brittany Amara

Brittany Amara is an author, screenwriter, actress, and model with a passion for science fiction and fantasy that ventures beyond space and time. She loves writing about curious aliens, morally gray protagonists, other dimensions, rifts in reality, and all things playfully wicked. When she’s not working on something new, Amara can be found stargazing, collecting stuffed animals, and baking pumpkin bread. She grew up in Bronx, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from SUNY New Paltz in 2021 with a degree in digital media production, creative writing, and theater arts. In 2024 she furthered her storytelling journey at Queen’s University Belfast. Since then, her work in various genres has been recognized by film festivals and writing competitions across the globe.

Amara's new novel is The Bleeding Woods.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The story behind The Bleeding Woods’s title is actually very special to me. Its very first incarnation was simply called The Woods, since I like to give all of my stories codenames as they lounge in the “dreaming phase.” Later, my beloved antagonist, Jasper, insisted he take center stage, and so the title switched to Jasperwood. His suggestion reigned supreme until the final stages of editing, when my publishing team suggested we try out some alternatives.

After weeks of brainstorming, I asked one of my closest friends if she had any ideas. She followed my question with a question, “What are some things the book wouldn’t be the same without?” I started rambling through a handful of disjointed elements ranging from thematic to aesthetic. “Blood”, “woods”, and Jasper’s unrelenting desire to make his sinister mark on the world kept returning. The Bleeding Woods flowed from her lips as intuitively and effortlessly as a stream. We paused in stunned silence, then in unison, muttered, “It’s perfect.”

I immediately sent an email back to my publisher, and we all fell in love. I think The Bleeding Woods harnesses the essence of the story from both a direct, visceral perspective and from a more symbolic one.

To me, the inclusion of a The channels Jasper’s inflated sense of self-importance. It could have just been Bleeding Woods, but Jasper simply wouldn’t have it. He relies so heavily on the idea that he is above humanity, and that his presence is one of borderline divine retribution. There’s a lot of power in labelling something a The, and he feeds off of that power.

The Bleeding Woods portion of the title is where our intent to express gory intrigue meets layers of symbolic undergrowth, pun intended. Of course, a lot of blood spills in Blackstone Forest. At this point, the soil is more cadaver than earth. The trees themselves are victims of Jasper’s, twisted and mutated to decorate his domain. However, the mere existence of the forest is due to the monstrous blood that coats human hands. That is to say, it takes a monster to make a monster, and Jasper and Clara are very much made-monsters. This forest doesn’t just blossom from blood; it was born in it.

What's in a name?

I absolutely love the process of naming things in my work. Sometimes, the names find me more than I find them. I’ve known Jasper would be Jasper and Grayson would be Grayson from the start. However, Clara’s name has shifted many times over the years.

Before she was Clara Lovecroft, she was Selena, then Alina, then Odette. Selena and Alina were both references to light, moonlight to be specific. I wanted to convey the idea that she is a force of light, but one surrounded by deep, suffocating darkness. In order to glow, she must reflect and alchemize all that comes her way. I toyed with the idea of calling her Odette later on because of Swan Lake, a ballet in which a woman faces the horror of turning into a swan against her will. Much like Odette, Clara feels cursed by what she turns into. In the end, I think I landed on Clara because I liked the idea that she finds clarity within herself by being as bright a light as she can in the world.

Unlike Clara, Jasper and Grayson have always had their names. It wasn’t until later in life that I researched their meanings, and was delightfully surprised by their synergy with the story. Jasper is said to mean “treasurer”, and his role is very much one of keeping what he deems to be treasure (Clara). Grayson, on the other hand, is said to mean “son of the steward”, and a steward is someone meant to look after others. I can’t dive too deeply into his name without touching on spoilers, but I will say it serves up a serendipitously delicious double meaning.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self would be positively delighted by my novel, but I can’t say she’d be surprised. I wrote the very first version of The Bleeding Woods when I was only thirteen years old. After a particularly creepy drive with my family, I raced to my laptop and typed up a short story about a demon hiding in the forest that had just run alongside our car. I printed and proudly toted it around my middle school the next day, telling all of my teachers and classmates that I’d just become an author. I am genuinely starstruck every time I hold my book in my hands now, because every time, it feels like my younger self gets the chance to say, “See? I was right!”

My teenage self believed in me without question and without fail. Nothing could sway her confidence, and whenever I harness her energy now, I become just as feral and unshakeable. This book wouldn’t have existed without her fearlessness. Therefore, she wouldn’t be surprised by this, because she knew I could do it all along.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings are definitely more difficult for me than endings. The Bleeding Woods’s beginning has changed so many times over the years because I just couldn’t settle on a good place to “set up the portal” into this world. It has started at the gas station, in the lab, at Jasper’s creation, at Clara’s conception, and so on and so forth. There were so many options. Inevitably, the publishing team jumped in to help out, and we decided on a more linear approach. We start with the moment Clara realizes she is doomed to mutate into a full-fledged monster if she can’t find a suppressant for her inhuman power.

Endings, on the other hand, are a lot easier and more fun to arrive at for me. I may have an inkling into how things resolve, but oftentimes, the story itself surprises me. My inklings and expectations are superseded by the flow of the story, more alive than it’s ever been. With beginnings, I’m tasked with building a portal. With endings, something otherworldly takes over, and the story’s conclusion only becomes clear as I arrive at it.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

This is one of my favorite questions to receive about my work. The answer varies from story-to-story, but I think there are shades of me to be found in each one. Sometimes, I am of the characters; I bleed the same astral blood, so to speak. Other times, I am in perfect alignment to meet the cast, albeit from a considerable distance. Regardless, there are shades of me to be found in everything I write.

In the case of The Bleeding Woods, I don’t have a direct in-story incarnation. Clara is the main character, but she isn’t me. She’s more like a distant friend who reached out her hand and offered to help me through what I’d been going through at the time. Together, we ventured through Jasper’s forest to process our pain, different in nature but similar in sentiment.

Jasper, Grayson, Jade and Joey are part of Clara’s world, and so, they became part of mine. She introduced me to them, and over the course of many drafts, we got to know one another. I definitely have to note that it was Jasper who found me first. I’ve felt connected to him for years. To this day, I suspect there was some kind of portal hidden in upstate New York, and through it, he sent forth a ghostly, “Hello~”

Jasper may appear as the antagonist of this version of the story, but only because he agreed to. Through him, at this moment in infinity, Clara and I both got the chance to process our pain. There are other versions of The Bleeding Woods where he gets to step into a more heroic role. There are even stories completely separate from this one where I’ve had him meet my main characters. Jasper’s a complex entity, one I’m grateful to have collaborated with to make this novel a reality.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

In my experience, I’ve found creativity to be something of an interconnected web, and artists across space and time hold keys for one another whether they know it or not. The first major piece of media to offer me a key so that I might unlock my own creative doors was Marvel. Both the comic books and movies filled me with such unparalleled wonder. Experiencing those stories felt like coming home, or at least, locating many paths to many homes.

Music has this effect on me, too. I couldn’t even begin to quantify the number of times I’ve heard a song and physically felt gateways blasting open in my mind. Suddenly, an onslaught of ideas, like impossible memories, pour through, and I’m left scrambling for my keyboard to type it all out. My current favorite artists are Midnight Kids, Avicii, and Bebe Rexha.

I suppose life itself is full of these keys if your heart is open to feeling them and your eyes are primed to see them. I once saw a terrible video of a praying mantis attacking a hummingbird, and in the midst of my horror, I “came up with” a story idea. Another time, I heard a clown’s nose squeak, but somehow sadly. In some small, inexplicable way, that too was a key. They’re everywhere, waiting just as eagerly to be found as I am to find them.

Visit Brittany Amara's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Bleeding Woods.

Writers Read: Brittany Amara.

The Page 69 Test: The Bleeding Woods.

--Marshal Zeringue

T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher is the New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award–winning author of fantasy, horror, and occasional oddities, including What Feasts at Night, Nettle & Bone, What Moves the Dead, Thornhedge, A House with Good Bones, and A Sorceress Comes to Call. Under a pen name, she also writes bestselling children’s books. She lives in New Mexico with her husband, dog, and chickens, and does not trust roadrunners.

Kingfisher's new novel is Snake-Eater.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Snake-Eater describes a predator, and furthermore, a predator that feeds on animals many people find alarming. Hopefully the reader will go “Wow, badass!” and want to see what got that name and why. This is the story of a woman who comes to a small desert town, fleeing an abusive relationship, and finds that the desert is full of beings, and that the one called Snake-Eater has an eye on her in particular.

What's in a name?

As much as I’d like to claim that I have a very deep and meaningful process, the truth is that coming up with names in novels, particularly after you’ve written a dozen or so, gets harder and harder. I eventually devolve into looking at baby name lists and going “No, no, no…could work…no, no…hey, I like that one!” For minor characters, I have been known to use the Latin names of plants. Sometimes it’ll end up being a placeholder until I think of a better one, but there’s a narrow window in which I can change character names. After a point, that’s just their name in my head and that’s the way it is. The only hard and fast rule I try to follow is not to have two major characters whose names that start with the same letter, since that’s just visually confusing for the reader.

In the case of Snake-Eater, the only standout is that Father Aguirre, the Catholic priest, is named after my fourth-grade teacher, who was a very kind and patient man and didn’t ever yell at me for reading ahead when we had to read aloud in class.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self made a point to be blasé about everything, so I suspect she’d at least try to play it cool. The setting of the Arizona desert wouldn’t surprise her at all, nor would many of the individual spirits. And I had a black Lab growing up, so that wouldn’t be surprising either.

Hmm, actually at fourteen, I had the boundless confidence of the untried that I could write books, so she’d probably just go, “Yeah, yeah, obviously we wrote a book. Now explain this smartphone thing to me. And do they still make Amiga computers?”

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

The beginning almost never changes—I can think of maybe one or two books where I changed the opening scene. Things do get edited, mind you. I wrote the first part of Snake-Eater over a decade ago, and when I came back to it, I found myself editing as I went along. At times, it started to feel like a collaboration with my younger self.

I always start at the beginning, but unlike Alice, I don’t go straight on until the end. I am not an outliner at all, and I tend to write very much out of sequence. If I know a scene happens over here, I write it, and if I don’t know what happens in a scene, I’ll just skip it until later, when I do know. So the book, for quite a long time, is just a word .doc full of disconnected bits, and sometimes the word “gap” to denote that something ought to be there, but I’m not sure what yet. Then I’ll go back and write the connective tissue required to get from this scene to that one.

I don’t write the ending until the end, though. Once it’s done in my head, so is the book.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Any character whose head I want to get into has to have some connection to me, even if it’s a very small one. In the case of Selena, I did in fact work in a deli. But mostly I was trying to tap into experiences I’ve had at very low points in my life and the sense of being completely unable to go on but having to anyway. I certainly got better, and I wanted Selena to get better and find herself too.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Practically everything influences my writing in some fashion—I’m like a weird sponge who grew up Catholic. In the case of Snake-Eater, I was influenced a lot by the landscape of Arizona. I spent four years there as a kid, during that critical window when you imprint on what the world is supposed to look like, and I’ve loved the desert ever since. (I live in New Mexico now.) The enormous skies, the way the shrubs all grow almost-but-not-touching, all the plants and animals that live in this incredibly harsh environment…all of it helped shape the book.

Also, there was a moment a few years back when my husband and I were in Albuquerque, in a little jewelry shop with glass doors, and a roadrunner came up to the door and began tapping on the glass with its beak. (They have quite large and pointed beaks.) My husband staggered back and said, “Is that a roadrunner?” He’d never seen one and was astonished by how they looked in person. They’re basically velociraptors. If you ask anyone in the Southwest about them, they will almost all have a story about some horrible thing they saw a roadrunner do. So that definitely went into the book as well!

Visit T. Kingfisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mirta Ojito

Born in Havana, Mirta Ojito is a journalist, professor, and author who has worked at the Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and the New York Times. The recipient of an Emmy for the documentary Harvest of Misery as well as a shared Pulitzer for national reporting in 2001 for a series of articles about race in America for the New York Times, Ojito was an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University for almost nine years. She is the author of two award-winning nonfiction books: Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus and Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town. Currently, Ojito is a senior director on the NBC News Standards team working at Telemundo Network.

Deeper than the Ocean is Ojito's debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I don’t exactly know when I decided on Deeper than the Ocean as the title, but I do know that I never considered any other. The narrative in my historical novel is anchored on a very real event: the 1919 shipwreck of a Spanish ship, the Valbanera, with 488 people on board; most of them, immigrants who left Spain and were en route to Havana, Cuba, in search of a better life. A devastating hurricane derailed those dreams, and the ship sank far from Havana, off the coast of Key West. When it was found, the ship was buried in a bank of soft sand, and the bodies had disappeared. It is believed they were buried deep, deeper than the ocean. But the title also alludes to the love story that drives the story and to the ties that run deep and connect families across the oceans, migrations, generations, and unimaginable losses.

What's in a name?

Everything. When I first conceived of this book I saw an image: a woman wearing a mauve dress running on naked feet, desperately searching for her infant daughter in a ship, her long curly red hair flowing behind her. That was it. I didn’t have any more. But I knew her name: Catalina Quintana, the name of my maternal grandmother, whom I never knew. She died at 40, a day after my mother turned 16. Mary Oliver has a poem that begins with this line: “Needing one, I invented her.” I’ve always needed my grandmother, and so I invented her. I infused the character with all the stories my mother had told me about her, and the rest… the rest is the novel.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Very surprised. When I was a teenager, my mother’s stories were such an integral part of my life that I never saw them as magical or inspiring — essential elements for a novel. It wasn’t until later, much later, that I began to pay attention and to remember my own visits to my mother’s birthplace and to understand that her entire life was the stuff of novels. Not surprisingly, she told me several times that she had always wanted to be a writer. “One day,” she used to tell me, “I’m going to write the story of my life.” In many ways, this book is her gift to me, and, of course, mine to her.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings. Always the beginnings. As a journalist you know that you must grab the reader with the first sentence. And while a novel gives you more freedom and possibilities as a writer, I still sweat out that first sentence as if I were writing a lede on deadline. Endings have their own force, of course, but they happen organically. The story takes you there, and, instinctively, you know you’ve reached the end.

For example, I changed the beginning of this novel several times, but never the ending. Because my novel is a dual narrative in two different timelines, I had the choice of beginning with Catalina Quintana, the character in 1919, or with Mara Denis, the character a century later, in 2019. Ultimately, I went with the contemporary character because Mara is the one investigating her family’s past. It seemed appropriate, then, to begin not in the past but at the beginning of the search, the quest that informs what happens later.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Yes, readers who know me are certain that I modeled the character of Mara Denis after my own, and they are not completely wrong. Of course, I’m not Mara, but I gave her many elements of my life and of my own memories. She is Cuban and a mother, like me. A journalist, like me. And she is 55, the age I was when I began writing the book. Crucially, I also gave her a flare for scarves — which I’ve been told I have — and a love for Santander, a city by the sea in the north of Spain where I used to spend summers when my children were young.

Interestingly, Mara has inspired me to follow her steps. In the book, she is searching for her Spanish ancestors; specifically, her great-grandmother. I’d never done that before, because I never knew where my great-grandparents were from, but I’ve just learned that my mother’s grandfather went to Cuba from the Canary Islands, and now, like the character in the book, I’ve begun my own search.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Paintings have always inspired me. For some reason, before I begin a writing project, I visit a museum. Sometimes I take notes. Sometimes not, and I just stand there focusing on a painting, and trying to understand the art and the process.

I’m also influenced by the news. I can’t help it, I’m a journalist. In fact, Deeper than the Ocean begins with a phone call in the middle of the night. Mara’s editor in New York wants her to go to the Canary Islands to cover a story about a boat full of African immigrants that capsized near one of the islands. Mara goes, of course, because reporting is her life, and because, unknown to her, those islands are imprinted in her DNA and in her soul.

Visit Mirta Ojito's website.

My Book, The Movie: Deeper than the Ocean.

The Page 69 Test: Deeper than the Ocean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brigitte Dale

Brigitte Dale is an author, editor, and historian. She graduated from Brown University and earned her master's degree in women's history at Yale University. A book editor by day and an author by night (or early morning), Dale lives in Connecticut. The Good Daughters is her first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

My book is called The Good Daughters, but for a very long time while I was writing my first drafts, I called it The Jail Keeper's Daughter. One of my main characters, Emily, is in fact the daughter of the warden of Holloway Prison, the notorious jail where suffragettes were imprisoned in London. When Emily comes face to face with a young suffragette, Charlotte, on the other side of her father's prison bars, she's forced to confront the similarity of their lives, and begins to work in secret on the behalf of the women's suffrage campaign. Eventually, that title didn't serve the story well enough, because it's bigger than just Emily. The Good Daughters is about four wildly different young women at the frontlines of the battle for women’s suffrage. All four women weigh their familial and societal expectations with their own ambitions and sense of justice. That's how The Good Daughters came to be the title (and, of course, the meaning of "good" changes as the story develops).

What's in a name?

I love coming up with character names. Emily is perfect for a working class girl from a simple background; she was raised to never cause trouble. Charlotte, Beatrice, and Sadie are all names that serve the characters' personalities (and I just like them!). The most important characters to name intentionally were Adeline and Isabel Hurston, a mother-daughter team that leads the suffragette campaign in the book. The Hurstons are stand-ins for the real historical figures, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, who led the Women's Social and Political Union. I fictionalized enough of the story to justify changing their names, but I hoped the astute reader might pick up on the parallels.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

There are two answers to this question. First of all, my teenage self would be inspired, enraged, and captivated by the story of the suffragettes, a story she never learned in school. She'd be devastated that the incredible perseverance, resilience, and determination that these women demonstrated over more than a decade fighting for the vote is barely a footnote in most history classes, and I know this book would spark her desire to learn more.

Secondly, my teenage self would be absolutely thrilled that she (I) wrote and published a novel! It's been a lifelong dream to become an author, and I know she'd be blown away that this dream came true.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I didn't know how this novel would end, even though I knew how this historical era concluded. My characters needed personal journeys, not just historical benchmarks, and so although we all know women eventually won the right to vote, I needed to find an equally satisfying ending for each characters' personal arc. That said, the novel is circular; it opens with the ending, and that actually never changed across my many drafts. If you read the first page, you'll know how the book ends--but you have to read the rest of it to figure out exactly what happened and why!

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I fell in love with all four of my main characters. Charlotte is independent and bold, Emily is quietly fierce, Beatrice is unexpectedly daring, and Sadie is deeply passionate. But if I had to choose a favorite, I think it’s Charlotte: she embodies the bravery and fearlessness I sometimes wish I had more of myself.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I studied women’s history in my undergraduate and master’s programs, and did on-the-ground research in London’s archives to uncover the story of the suffragettes. When I decided to write The Good Daughters, I knew I wanted to draw on that research, and although my characters are fictional, their experiences are based on real historical figures and events. Suffs: The Musical premiered on Broadway after I finished writing, but it's a fantastic representation of the American story of women's suffrage activists (and that soundtrack helped me power through revisions and copy edits!).

Visit Brigitte Dale's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Brook

A former Spanish teacher, Allison Brook (AKA Marilyn Levinson) writes mysteries, romantic suspense, and novels for young readers. She loves traveling, reading, knitting, doing Sudoku, and visiting with her grandchildren on FaceTime.

Her new novel, Death on Dickens Island, is the series debut of the Books on the Beach Mysteries.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I'd say Death on Dickens Island is an apt title for this, the first book in my Books on the Beach series because it says it all. The peaceful community of Dickens Island has been shaken by a murder. A word regarding titles: I may suggest titles to my publisher, but they often select one of their own.

What's in a name?

I give my characters names that I think suit them. A name has to sound right to me. I often look up the meaning of a name to make sure that it's right for that character. Also, in this series I've used a few names that we associate with literature quite deliberately. I called the island Dickens Island as a tribute to Charles Dickens. And my sleuth Delia Dickens is actually named Cordelia, like King Lear's youngest daughter.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

Not very, I'd think. Death on Dickens Island is about Delia's relationships: with her son, her parents, her aunt and uncle, and with her first love now back in her life. I also have a ghost as a character, which wouldn't surprise my teenage reader self at all, having loved reading the Topper books, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and seeing Blithe Spirit.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I don't find either difficult to write. I usually begin my novels with a dialogue because that pulls my reader immediately into the story. The endings always seem to fall into place naturally, often in the oddest of places.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I've created many characters over the course of writing twenty-six books, and I'm not thinking about myself as I write about them. That said, I'm sure many personal aspects can be found in my characters like my love of animals and enjoying dining out.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

That's difficult for me to pinpoint, but I'm sure that movies I've seen, books I've read, personal experiences, what's going on in the world--all influence my writing to some degree. In the last two children's books I've written I was surprised to see how politics inspired a major theme in the series.

Visit Allison Brook's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Edwards

Martin Edwards has been described by Richard Osman as "a true master of British crime writing." His novels include the eight Lake District Mysteries and four books featuring Rachel Savernake, including the Dagger-nominated The Puzzle of Blackstone Lodge. He is also the author of two multi-award-winning histories of crime fiction, The Life of Crime and The Golden Age of Murder. He has received three Daggers, including the CWA Diamond Dagger (the highest honour in UK crime writing) and two Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America. He has received four lifetime achievement awards: for his fiction, short fiction, non-fiction, and scholarship. He is consultant to the British Library’s Crime Classics and since 2015 has been President of the Detection Club.

Edwards's newest novel is Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The aim of Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife is to give readers the chance to play mystery games of various kinds as well as enjoying a twisty mystery. Titles are very important, but it wasn’t easy to find a fresh idea that worked for a crime novel set at Christmas. I was keen on Evil under the Snow, as a jokey riff on Agatha Christie’s Evil under the Sun, but my editor suggested Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife. In the end we compromised. Evil under the Snow became the title of a podcast that plays an important part in the story. And I enjoyed finding ways to make my editor’s choice of title highly relevant to what happens in the remote village of Midwinter – even though there is no character called Miss Winter in the story. But the elements of the title all come together, again in a jokey way, in the final pages.

What's in a name?

Names, like titles, are very important. I think it makes sense to choose names that differentiate the characters to some degree and also to fit in with the tone of the book. It’s also a good idea to avoid names that start with the same letter if possible. However, as a lawyer, I’m aware of the dangers of accidental libel. So many of my characters have surnames (but not first names) borrowed from sportsmen of the past, mainly footballers and cricketers.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Very surprised and very happy, because I dreamed of being a detective story writer from the age of just eight years old, although I didn’t come from a literary background and never even met a writer until I was much older.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

For me, middle sections are the hardest. I usually have a strong idea for a beginning, and by the time I get to the end, I’ve set up my characters and puzzles, so it’s great fun to tie up all the loose ends. Middles are hardest, because you need to sustain the energy and excitement of the narrative without resolving things too quickly. I revise the whole book plenty of times, always striving to make every part of it better. Once it’s gone into print, there’s nothing more you can do, so you have to give it your best shot and work on the manuscript until it’s as strong as possible.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

One of the joys of writing fiction rather than fact (and I write both) is that you can make stuff up. And you can make up people, which I love doing. I’m not trying to write about people in real life, but inventions who are believable and not two-dimensional. But of course my own tastes and experiences influence the way I write and in Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, to some extent I identified with Harry Crystal, a detective novelist who keeps stumbling into calamities.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My parents were gifted people who were not ambitious but had happy lives. Growing up, however, I felt they could have achieved a great deal if they had had more ambition. I had a much narrower range of talents than either of them, but I was determined to make the most of my passion for books and writing, and they gave me a good deal of support and encouragement. They also urged me to get a ‘proper job’, which was good advice, because it enabled me to write the books I wanted to write, not the books that publishers told me to write. In the end, that’s worked out pretty well.

Visit Martin Edwards’s website.

Writers Read: Martin Edwards (April 2013).

The Page 69 Test: The Frozen Shroud.

The Page 69 Test: Dancing for the Hangman.

The Page 99 Test: The Arsenic Labyrinth.

The Page 99 Test: Waterloo Sunset.

My Book, The Movie: Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife.

Writers Read: Martin Edwards.

--Marshal Zeringue

R. T. Ester

Originally from Nigeria, R.T. Ester moved to the United States in 1998 and, catching the creative bug early on, studied art with a focus on design. While working full time as a graphic designer, he began to write speculative fiction in his spare time and, since then, has had stories published in Interzone and Clarkesworld.

Ester's new novel is The Ganymedan.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I think it belongs to the same naming convention as titles like The Martian and The Bear where there's an ironic layer to it. It's a reference to the main character, but the story itself ends up complicating that connection, and the character you may have assumed would be a typical Martian or bear is revealed to be the outlier in some profound sense. If you're already sort of aware of this convention, I would say the title does a lot. It tells you the protagonist will not be your typical Ganymedan, but an outlier. Briefly, before googling it and seeing that the title already belonged to an excellent short story by the scifi author Derek Kunsken, I considered Ghosts of Ganymede. Parts of the story revolve around a dissident group with chapters that all use the word ghost in their names. One of them had a significant influence on the protagonist growing up and their anti-AI ethos comes back to haunt him at pivotal moments throughout the book.

What's in a name?

I'm a pantser most of the time, so when I name a character, it's often a very in-the-moment placeholder name, but then the character becomes the person with that name, the more I write them. With The Ganymedan, I actually had an outline before I started writing and I was already thinking about who all these characters were. For V-Dot, or Verden Dotnet, I think I knew early on that I wanted to explore a connection between the corrupting influence his employer LP has on him and the devastation his homeworld endured during a war that was also started by LP. Dotnet is a silly name I came up with early on, but to me it made sense to just leave it alone. Old internet term have lost their original meaning here. By contrast, Verden bring

s the word verdant and the color green to mind, which I wanted to reinforce as who V-Dot was before coming in contact with LP.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I think he would probably wonder if I was pulling a prank on him. I wasn't much of a reader back then, but I did write a lot of compulsive nonsense that will never see the light of day. Also, it just never occurred to me that I would pursue writing the way I have over the last eight years or so. I think my teenage self would be very pleasantly surprised.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I always knew I wanted The Ganymedan to begin with V-Dot wanting to go home again. Early on, the idea was that the encounter he has with the officers at the spaceport would be a sort of in media res introduction to the story's world, but also it would quickly connect readers to V-Dot as just someone being harassed for no apparent reason. I ended up preempting all of that with parts of the story's original ending because I think it eventually made more sense to lean into the structure the story now has where it first tells you what happened, then it tells you how it happened. All that to say, I probably struggle a little more with beginnings than I think I do with endings.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I come from a design background, so first, I would say some of the principles I employ in my day job as a designer make it into my writing in some way. These are principles that primarily concern how information is presented and made consumable for a specific audience. I don't know if my stories always excel at both but I think a background in design generally means the writer who has it will be experimenting with structure a lot.

Visit R.T. Ester's website.

Writers Read: R.T. Ester.

The Page 69 Test: The Ganymedan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maryka Biaggio

Maryka Biaggio is a psychology professor turned novelist who brings forgotten lives back to the light. Specializing in historical fiction inspired by real people, she is celebrated for illuminating overlooked historical figures with psychological depth and narrative grace. Her debut novel, Parlor Games (2013), launched a distinguished career that includes Eden Waits, The Point of Vanishing, The Model Spy, Gun Girl and the Tall Guy, and Margery and Me (forthcoming from Regal House in 2026). Her work has earned numerous accolades, including the Willamette Writers Award, Oregon Writers Colony Award, Historical Novel Society Review Editors' Choice, La Belle Lettre Award, and a Michigan Upper Peninsula Notable.

My Q&A with Biaggio:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Gun Girl and the Tall Guy is based on the true story of a young couple who went on a robbery spree in 1924 Brooklyn. I wanted the title to include both the main characters, and I had to look no further than the headlines of the day to discover the many monikers the press applied to the duo, including the bob-haired bandit and her handsome companion or the feisty gun girl and her shy man. I settled on gun girl for Celia because it’s short and catchy and tall guy for Ed because it makes it clear he’s in a supporting role.

At its heart, the story is about why this young couple resorted to crime and also why New Yorkers—and the whole country, for that matter—were so fascinated by these two. They were the Bonnie and Clyde of the 1920s, with a few twists. So I wanted a title that featured both Celia and Ed and provided a sense of the story to come.

What's in a name?

I decided to use Celia and Ed Cooney’s real names because I stuck to the facts as much as possible, although dialogue and many day-to-day details are obviously manufactured. But I had to include a whole cast of other characters, and I enjoyed selecting names that gave some sense of the characters and the times—like Em and Rosie to lend the ring of familiarity to Celia’s friends and Mr. Gualazzi for the neighborhood grocer because lots of Italians lived in New York at that time. Another invention of the novel is the many varied terms of endearment Ed came up with for Celia, which I liked because it showed how devoted Celia and Ed were to each other.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self would be very surprised by this novel, particularly my decision to write about crooks. I was a bookish youngster who enjoyed stories of adventure, like the Tarzan novels and tales of North Pole expeditions. When I was a teenager, I did think I’d like to write novels, but I hadn’t a clue as to what those novels would be about. It took me a few decades to settle on first, writing fiction, and second, basing my stories on real people whose lives had been forgotten. Now I enjoy the hunt for fascinating characters from the past, and Celia and Ed’s story just drew me in.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings are hard! I like to feel that I’m capturing a sense of my main character in the first few sentences of a novel, and sometimes that takes a while to manage. I just keep plowing ahead with my research until I feel that I’ve “found” the character’s voice. Endings are easy by comparison. I don’t worry about them until I get to the end. And once I’ve cranked out the bulk of the story, I find that the end tends to flow pretty easily from what came before.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I’ve written about quite varied characters—a conwoman, an older couple who establish a utopian community, a young writer with a tragic life, a World War II spy, and, in the latest, robbers. I find that parts of myself always come through, however, because what writer doesn’t use her own thoughts and feelings to enrich the portrayal of characters? When it comes to Celia Cooney, I’d say she has certain principles that she lives by—even if she bends the rules from time to time—and that is something I borrowed from my own “psychology.” Still, I labor to give each of my protagonists distinctive traits, and I hope my readers enjoy the greatly varied characters I write about.

Visit Maryka Biaggio's website.

My Book, The Movie: Parlor Games.

The Page 69 Test: Parlor Games.

Writers Read: Maryka Biaggio (February 2013).

--Marshal Zeringue

Christa Carmen

Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the Bram Stoker Award-winning and two-time Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island, Beneath the Poet's House, and How to Fake a Haunting, as well as the Indie Horror Book Award-winning Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated "Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell" (Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror), and co-editor of the Aurealis Award-nominated We Are Providence and the Australiasian Shadow Award-nominated Monsters in the Mills. She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.

When she’s not writing, she keeps chickens; uses a Ouija board to ghost-hug her dear, departed beagle; and sets out on adventures with her husband, daughter, and bloodhound–golden retriever mix. Most of her work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes, and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briars only to disappear.

My Q&A with Carmen:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title is very much the premise of the novel. My main character, Lainey, is married to a man named Callum who is an alcoholic but not on paper. He’s ruining her life and their daughter’s life with his drinking. She feels that if she were to take him to a judge to try to divorce him and get full custody of their daughter, she’s not going to have a lot to go on, and that’s heightened by the fact that he has a very influential family. So Lainey’s wild and crazy best friend comes up with a wild and crazy plan to stage a haunting in the house so realistic that it drives her husband out of the house for good.

What's in a name?

I do occasionally give my characters names that are symbolic (Saoirse White and Emmit Powell as having the same initials as Sarah Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe in Beneath the Poet’s House, for example), but in the case of How to Fake a Haunting, I just went with whatever I felt in the moment (with a small shout-out to Lainey Wilson, whom Lainey Taylor is named for, but only because my daughter loves her music).

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I have been writing in one capacity or another for as long as I can remember—painstakingly bound and hilariously illustrated short stories as a child, emo journal entries as an adolescent and when I was in treatment for substance abuse, impassioned nonfiction essays and decidedly weak attempts at memoir—but I didn’t start writing fiction seriously until about 2014, so I think my teenaged reader self would be surprised…and maybe a little impressed!

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I’d say the hardest scenes for me to write are both the first and the last, or, maybe not the last, per se, but the climax. The first scene I have to get right before I can move on, even on a first draft, because the tone and content of that scene will set the stage for me for the rest of the novel in terms of my headspace and how I’m approaching the characters and narrative. I’ll go back over it thirty-six times if I have to, and once I feel like it’s “right,” I’ll allow myself to write the next chapter. And I feel like climax scenes are hard for any writer, no matter how skilled or experienced. It’s the place where you have to put everything together, where you have to prove to the reader that they’ve made the right choice by following you as far as they have.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Every character I write is the result of small elements of my own personality or experience, which I then force through the blender of edits, beta reader observations, rewrites, cuts, late-night analyses, and (sometimes impulsive) additions. For me, emotionally satisfying characters are a matter of examining them over and over again from all different angles. Is this character believable? Relatable? Driven by clear motivations? Neither all good nor all bad? And onward through the editing process until they resemble both “real” people and “real” players within the drama of the story’s narrative.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Place inspires a lot of my writing. I’d say 95% of what I write takes place somewhere in my home state of Rhode Island; How to Fake a Haunting is set in Newport, RI, my last novel, Beneath the Poet’s House, is set in Providence, my debut, The Daughters of Block Island, was set on Block Island, and many of my short stories take place in Mysticism, a fictional town that exists somewhere between Westerly and Charlestown, and borrows a portion of its name from Mystic, Connecticut.

I think the consistent use of Rhode Island as setting can be attributed to a combination of two factors. First, there is absolutely something haunted and horrific about the smallest state in the United States. Especially in the beach communities at the southern part of the state, there’s such a sense of isolation in the winter, of things lurking in the cold and waiting to awaken. Additionally, while I don’t necessarily subscribe to the oft-repeated ‘write what you know’ adage, I find that in terms of place, setting a work of fiction in a locale with which you are intimately familiar makes for fiction that’s more dynamic to read, and more enjoyable to write.

Visit Christa Carmen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beneath the Poet's House.

--Marshal Zeringue