Marti Leimbach's latest novel is Age of Consent.From her Q&A with Caroline Leavitt:
I’m always curious about why a writer needs to write a certain book. What sparked you?--Marshal Zeringue
I was preparing for a class for I was teaching for University of Oxford and feeling a little stuck for ideas on writing exercises for my students. So I went to Writer’s Digest—why not? There was a competition being advertised on the site. I didn’t enter the competition, but I noticed the “writing prompts” that were used. One of them was a large Motel sign lit up in neon colors against a night sky. For some reason, the image stayed in my mind.
Shortly after, I wrote a scene in which a girl, newly fifteen, enters a motel room and has sex with a man she doesn’t like much. That has become her habit, to allow the sex because she doesn’t know how to stop it. I knew immediately that I’d tapped into a memory from my own life. The motel was like one I’d been taken to under those same circumstances.
The girl in the novel has been to a motel like this before, too, always for an hour or so with this same man. She isn’t attracted to him, doesn’t like the sex, is ashamed to be there, but also ashamed to disappoint him. She feels obligated. She is bound to him. I knew how she felt. I remembered...[read on]