Emily Carpenter

Emily Carpenter is the bestselling author of Until the Day I Die, Every Single Secret, The Weight of Lies, and Burying the Honeysuckle Girls. A graduate of Auburn University,
Carpenter has worked as an actor, producer, screenwriter, and behind-the-scenes soap opera assistant for CBS television. Raised in Birmingham, Alabama, she moved to New York City before returning to the South, where she now lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her family.

Carpenter's new novel is Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters, 

My Q&A with the author:

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

I love my title so much! I was on a writing retreat with a couple of writing friends and they actually came up with the title for me. Because this novel is a follow-up, I wanted it to echo the title of the first book Burying the Honeysuckle Girls. And I love the word "reviving" - it conjures up miracles and also death. It's so dramatic.

What's in a name?

Dove, the main character in the 1930s timeline and Eve's grandmother, has many names. Her birth name is Ruth Lurie, a simple name given to a little girl born in a state hospital or asylum for the insane in the 1920s. When she runs away and joins up with a gang of street children, she decides to call herself Annie, after Little Orphan Annie from the radio show because she's plucky and has red hair. Then when she takes a job she calls herself Ruth Davidson, using the last name of her best childhood friend at the asylum. Then, when she runs away with Charles Jarrod to become a tent preacher with him, she gives herself another name Dove!

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

I think teenage Emily would read this book, nod knowingly, and say, "Exactly what I expected." I loved books like this when I was growing up - Southern Gothic mysteries, with lots of spooky elements and some romance thrown in.

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

Beginnings are incredibly difficult for me. It's always so hard to know exactly how to get into the story. I don't like to jump in too fast like a thriller - I mean, I'm not writing Jack Reacher, you know? But if I take it too slow or start too early in the story, the pace can lag. That first chapter is a really tricky beast. I usually rewrite that one the most.

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

All of my characters are part of me, even the villains. Because I have to find something I identify with or can empathize with in all of them in order to make them feel human and complex and accurately drawn. On the other hand, none of them are "me." They all come from backgrounds that are wildly different than mine, and have had experiences that I've never had, so in that way, they're nothing like me. I identify with Eve's feeling of protectiveness over her family because of their mental health and the need they have to believe in Dove's legacy. I identify with Dove's determination to take care of herself no matter what, even if she has to fudge a little to keep herself safe.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Movies and TV have had a huge influence on me. I see things visually - cinematically - when I write so every time I see a great movie that's visually so immersive, I'm inspired. Also, there's nothing like movies and TV to teach you how to write great dialogue. Also, music really inspires me. I love it when I stumble on a great, moody, emotional song that really inspires me for a scene or a character. Sometimes, I can get entire ideas for a scene just by listening to a song!

Visit Emily Carpenter's website.

My Book, The Movie: Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters.

The Page 69 Test: Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Ellory

Anna Ellory is the author of two novels, The Rabbit Girls (2019) translated into 14 languages and The Puzzle Women (2020).

She has always been an avid reader and after becoming a mum she started writing too. Prior to this she worked as a nurse. In 2018 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. The Puzzle Women was written, in part, on this course.

Ellory lives with her family, including a dog called Seth, and writes in pockets of borrowed time. She is currently working on her third novel. 

My Q&A with the author:

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

I think The Puzzle Women has a dual meaning as a title. It’s actually what the men and women piecing together the Stasi’s archived and shredded documents are called. But it’s also a metaphor for all the women in the book, all missing pieces of themselves.

Lotte is desperate to know her Mama.

The women they encounter in the refuge Rune recognizes are all broken in some way.

The role of Nanya and Isolde to help women to find themselves again.

How even The Puzzle Women themselves have lives that are fractured.

How Berlin was broken and divided, then united, but the differences between living on either side are still very present.

This book looks at breaking and mending, scars and trauma, puzzle is a great word to embody these themes.

What's in a name?

Everything.

Rune means keeper of secrets. When he first started talking to me, it must have been back in 2016 he came ready made with his name. It hasn’t changed.

Lotte means light and life and she is both to the reader, I hope, but also to the narrative and everyone she meets.

As a side note – when you cannot type a name and have a character have that name and feel so attached you cannot possibly change that name, your manuscript mark-up is peppered with Isodle, Isdle, Isode, Isodde – you name it I have typed every single alteration to Isolde there is, even now, still seems to be a very tricky name to type!

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

Beginnings are the hardest thing about writing. The beginning of this book as it stands now was written almost at the very end of the process, on the second round of edits with my editor. We first meet Rune and Lotte at home, Lotte is looking at some of Rune’s drawings and passing comment. This opening allows the reader to see just how dedicated Rune is to Lotte and how much he is struggling under the surface. This was the last scene I wrote.

Endings however, are great. I know them before I start, I write them when I struggle to see an end point to the draft (around half-way), I tinker with them when I’m having a hard day and then when I get to them there’s always something else, just that tiny touch that I missed that needs adding, like the bow. I love endings, maybe one day I’ll write a novel in reverse, but then I may never get to the end, because the beginning … is always so elusive to me.

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

I think all my characters are me in some way, some closely linked and others far removed. They have to come from a truth within me somewhere so that they land fully formed on the page. My favourite character in The Puzzle Women is Lotte, she balances the light and dark of the book perfectly. I finished writing The Puzzle Women in April and I miss writing her already, she was utterly joyful.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

While writing The Puzzle Women I discovered Kathe Kollwitz and I absolutely love her prints, I have a copy of her self-portrait beside my desk – she’s looking hard at me telling me to do better, go darker, push harder. She was an incredible artist who spoke to masses, never shying away from exploring the suffering of others, you can see pain in her work, it makes many turn away, but there is such tenderness and fear in her prints that I am absorbed in them.

I also, very rarely, watch movies, but when I do I tend to re-watch them a lot. I like to see how things come together, how different visuals work to form the whole. Recent movies I have watched were German ones, Nina Hoss is a wonderful actress, I may have watched all her English subtitled movies. Barbara is one I have watched many times over. I also enjoyed The Lives of Others.

I like being outside, so taking the dog for a walk always helps unknot a problem in my writing. I like being around nature and its infinite inspirations.

Visit Anna Ellory's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Puzzle Women.

My Book, The Movie: The Puzzle Women.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christiane M. Andrews

Christiane M. Andrews grew up in rural New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, on the edges of mountains and woods and fields and sometimes even the sea. A writing and literature instructor, she lives with her husband and son and a small clutch of animals on an old New Hampshire hilltop farm.

Spindlefish and Stars is Andrews's first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Because the entire story was inspired by a picture of a stargazy pie (a Cornish fish pie, sometimes decorated with pastry stars, where the fish heads are left poking through the crust and “gazing” at the sky), the working title for this novel was “Stargazy.” However, while the fish and the stars became the center of the story, the pie itself never made it into the draft, and my editor and I worked together to find a new title.

Though Spindlefish and Stars suggests the direction of the story, it deliberately does not take readers too far into it; in fact, it was a bit of a struggle to find a title that did not reveal too much! So many of the ones we brainstormed would have given away significant parts of the plot—Why did Clo’s father send her to this desperately gray island?—or identified aspects of the characters—Who is this old woman who locks Clo away? Why is Clo given such repulsive chores with the fish?—not meant to be understood until later in the text. Though the word “spindlefish” does not appear anywhere in the novel, I think readers will come to see how it fits… and I have actually seen readers using it to identify something left otherwise unnamed in the book.

What's in a name?

As is the case in fairytales where characters are identified only by some element of their identity (the woodsman, the witch, the prince, etc.), many of the characters in Spindlefish and Stars also remain unnamed: Clo’s father, the swineherd, the parchment-skin man, the bosun, the old apple-faced woman (though there is, in fact, a passing reference to her actual name slipped into the text!). Only a few characters—and the piggish cat—have names, and here, I tried to reference (but not reveal) the myths from which I lift them: Clothilde (Clo), the main character; Cary, the boy she meets and befriends on the island; and Haros, a man Clo must journey to find by the sea.

Locations, too, are left unlabeled, with the goal of not limiting Clo’s place in the world. Though her story is inspired by Greek myth, variations of this myth appear in many different legends and tales, and because Clo and her sometimes-thieving father travel from village to village to village always seeking out new homes, she really could be from anywhere.

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

I think my teenage self would be moderately surprised. I was reading a good deal of Russian literature then—so not, I would say, particularly close to Spindlefish and Stars—but I remember also being very taken with myths and retellings, so teenage-me would likely not find it unexpected that the novel re-imagines several Greek myths. Teenage-me probably would be surprised by a middle grade novel, though, as I had not thought seriously of writing for children until I had my own son and began re-discovering the beauty of children’s literature with him. However, now that I think about it, I did have to write a children’s picture book for senior English in high school, and I remember absolutely loving this project, so perhaps I wouldn’t be surprised after all!

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

Endings! Endings are definitely more challenging for me, and this is absolutely my own fault. I spend a lot of time thinking about a story before I even begin writing it, so I usually have a good idea of where I’m starting and where I’m going… but only up to about the middle of the book. When I wrote Spindlefish and Stars, I knew how Clo would arrive on the island, I knew what she would discover about the old woman and herself when she was there, I knew the image and scene I was writing toward (which is now the chapter “In Which Our Hero Dies”), but I did not really know how I would help her off this island where I had trapped her. Because I had left her in a rather bleak place with only a few personal possessions, I had, in a sense, also trapped myself: I had to reconsider all the details I had seeded in the earlier parts of the story to see how they could be used to resolve the plot. This was a good exercise—and one that fortunately worked out well!—but in current projects, I have been trying to keep at least a vague idea of the ending in mind, even if it’s constantly shifting as I write.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

In Spindlefish and Stars, there are a few non-literary inspirations. Brueghel’s paintings—especially his Landscape with the Fall of Icarus—shaped not only the portrayal of Clo’s father and his work with art, but also the development of the book’s plot and themes. The pre-Raphaelite painters, too, with their re-imaginings of myths and legends and tales (particularly the different renderings of the Lady of Shalott by Waterhouse, Rossetti, and Hunt) probably also had some influence here.

Place was likely an inspiration as well: I lived in Downeast Maine in high school and grew up vacationing with my family on various islands (and even now take summer camping trips with my own family to quiet sections of Atlantic Canada), so I’m certain I drew from these experiences when writing about Clo’s ocean journey. Clo is desperate to escape the perpetually gray island she travels to, but I’ve always loved the coast more when it’s foggy and silent and gray.

And lastly, though I wasn’t necessarily thinking of them as I was writing, I’m sure my mother and grandmother, who spun and sewed and wove and knitted, inspired the portrayal of the old apple-faced woman—at least her dedication to her craft, if not her (rather chilly) personality! I was always struck by how much time and care and artistry went into my mother and grandmother’s projects: I wanted to honor that in the old woman’s weaving and show her work as art, and not, as it has often been dismissed, just “women’s work.” Because women who are engaged in fiber crafts are often making household objects or items of clothing for others, I also wanted to honor the generosity of this art, and to explore how both the crafting skills and the objects themselves are passed from generation to generation.

Visit Christiane M. Andrews's website.

My Book, The Movie: Spindlefish and Stars.

The Page 69 Test: Spindlefish and Stars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yoon Ha Lee

Yoon Ha Lee's novel Ninefox Gambit came out from Solaris in 2016 and quickly garnered massive critical acclaim and was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo and Nebula Awards. It won the Best First Novel Award in the Locus Awards and the Reddit Fantasy Award. Revenant Gun, the third novel in the Machineries of Empire series, was nominated for a 2019 Hugo Award.

Lee's new novel is Phoenix Extravagant.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I've always thought a title should intrigue the reader and, if possible, just sound cool. It might be weird to have a story about a mecha dragon (featured on the cover!) called Phoenix Extravagant, but that was the title that came to me when I conceived this novel. It refers to a magical paint pigment with fiery and destructive power, and I picked the phoenix reference because it's based on a real-world watercolor pigment, PO49 (Quinacridone Gold), that has a glowing golden tone. The secret behind the creation of these magical pigments is at the heart of the story's exploration of themes of colonialism and assimilation.

What's in a name?

My setting, Hwaguk, is loosely based on Korea during the Japanese occupation; the Japan-analogue is called Razan. My protagonist's name is Jebi, which means "swallow" (as in the bird); their sister is Bongsunga, or "balsam." These aren't typical names, but I wanted to avoid colliding with the names of well-known people and frankly, there's not a huge amount of variation in Korean names. Many Koreans love nature so names derived from the natural world seemed like a good choice. I made the perhaps unusual decision to use a constructed naming language for the people of Razan rather than actual Japanese names, again to avoid colliding with the names of historical figures.

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

My teenage self wouldn't be surprised by the fact that it's a fantasy, as my original ambition was to write fantasy, not the science fiction I'm better known for. But all the stories I produced as a teenager were about Western characters. It literally hadn't occurred to me that I could write a story drawing upon my Korean heritage and the years I lived in that country. The other thing that would startle teenage-me is that I spent middle school complaining loudly to my best friend that dragons were cliché. Obviously I've changed my mind since then!

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

Beginnings for sure. I don't even start writing until I know the ending; I learned in college that writing without a goal in mind is a great way to end up with unfinished story-corpses all over my hard drive. In this case, I goofed on a colossal scale. Not only was my opening wrong, my first 40,000 words (not a typo) were wrong. The first draft of Phoenix Extravagant was set in a fake fantasy Renaissance Europe, and several months into it I realized it wasn't working, tossed out all those words, and started over, this time with a setting I could connect to--Korea.

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

The only way I can write is to find some point of connection between myself and my characters, even the most despicable villains. In the case of my protagonist Jebi, they're a painter. The arts figure prominently in the novel, and I picked painting instead of pottery (although Korean celadon is arguably better known) because I'm a watercolorist, albeit in the Western rather than the Eastern style. Jebi is an ordinary person caught up in politics and intrigue and war, and they're rather poorly equipped for it. All they want to do is paint! I identify a lot with Jebi; I have no martial skills worth mentioning, and I'm not notably brave. Like Jebi, my basic desire in life is to make beautiful things. Of course, Jebi will find that they may have to take a stand.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

For this novel specifically, I did a lot of reading up on Korean art history. In general I get most of my worldbuilding ideas from nonfiction, especially history, or games (both computer games and tabletop games). The really ironic influence is anime, which is of course Japanese. My then-boyfriend now-husband Joe introduced me to it in college, and I still enjoy it to this day, from the outlandish mecha robots to romantic comedies or sf/f shows. My mecha dragon, Arazi, was directly inspired by watching anime like Visions of Escaflowne.

Visit Yoon Ha Lee's website.

The Page 69 Test: Revenant Gun.

Writers Read: Yoon Ha Lee (June 2018).

My Book, The Movie: Ninefox Gambit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Cosmos

Christopher Cosmos was raised in the Midwest and attended the University of Michigan as the recipient of a Chick Evans Scholarship. In addition to being an author, he is also a screenwriter and has had his work featured in the annual Black List of best Hollywood screenplays of the year. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Cosmos's s debut novel is Once We Were Here.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I love titles, and think that they are and can be extremely important, and I think of titles as the first opportunity to introduce readers to what they're about to dive into. I also think that the best titles add something imperative to the story. An example I often think about is the movie You Can Count On Me. In the movie, Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo play siblings, and towards the end, in a very emotional scene, he asks her something along the lines of, "Do you remember when we were kids, do you remember what we used to say to each other?" And she responds, through her tears, "Of course I do!" They don't have to say it to each other again, because that's not how people talk, but we already know what it is that they used to say to each other, because it's the title.

The title of Once We Were Here is similarly relevant and important to the story and the novel, though I don't want to say too much about it as the moment it becomes fully clear is towards the end, and I don't want to spoil or give anything away!

What's in a name?

I again don't want to say too much about this, because in addition to being a generation-spanning love story, there's also a certain element of mystery and family mystery in Once We Were Here, and the names of the characters play a very important role in that. So without getting into too much detail, I'll just say that I think names are extremely important, and the names in Once We Were Here were all very carefully chosen for specific reasons that I think readers will very much enjoy and appreciate.

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

I first heard the stories that ended up becoming Once We Were Here at the Greek Orthodox church that I went to growing up. I always knew since I first heard those stories, when I was very young, that I wanted to turn them into something to celebrate and remember those that were a part of the vitally important events in Greece during WWII, including members of my own family, and so my teenage self wouldn't be surprised at all that this is my debut novel.

If I could tell my teenage self one thing in return, though, it would be this: here we are. There will be hurdles at every step - hurdles that have to be overcome, as there always are in anything worthwhile that we do - but the walls will all be climbed, because the stories that we've been given are the stories that we're meant to tell. And so here we are.

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

I love both beginnings and endings, for different reasons, and they're often the first things that I think of when I think of a story. There's a writer named Robert Towne who said something along the lines of, "A great story is really only four or five moments between two people; the rest exists to give those moments their resonance." I always think about those four or five moments in my own stories, and know that the beginning and ending have to be included amongst them for a story to resonate and last.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music. Movies and television. Sports. The world around me. I've always tried to be a keen observer of the world, and as such, writing for me can often be a pursuit to try to help better understand and make sense of it. I write about history a lot, like I've done in Once We Were Here, as I've always thought history is such a great way to learn about the present and who we are by studying the past and who we've been.

Visit Christopher Cosmos's website.

The Page 69 Test: Once We Were Here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Masello

Robert Masello is an award-winning journalist, television writer, and bestselling author of many novels and nonfiction books. His historical thrillers with a supernatural bent have been published in seventeen languages and include The Night Crossing, The Jekyll Revelation, The Romanov Cross, The Medusa Amulet, Blood and Ice, and the Amazon Charts bestseller The Einstein Prophecy.

Masello's new novel is The Haunting of H. G. Wells.

My Q&A with the author:

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

For once, I got a title that works well with the book. (Picking titles is my nightmare.) The hero of the book is, of course, H.G. Wells, arguably the founder of sci-fi, and the author of such classics as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. The book is set during the First World War, and Wells is sent to the Western Front, by Winston Churchill no less, to investigate rumors of a brigade of angels descending from Heaven to repel the German troops. Such a story actually did make its way into the public consciousness. While at the Front, Wells is drawn into a world that even he could not have imagined, a world whose denizens come back to haunt him upon his return to London.

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

Oddly enough, I think my teenage self would be totally onboard with it. I say this because my older brother just sent me a packet of stories and poems that I wrote as a kid, and which my late mother had preserved. Reading them over now, I was astonished (and a bit appalled) that my artistic career and aims seem not to have advanced a jot. Even then, I was writing short stories based on history, and colored with a supernatural or highly speculative twist. Geez, I was the same guy then as I am now. I had hoped for more improvement.

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

Beginnings are scary, but fun. The whole world is open to you, and the characters are just taking on shape. You’re just starting to hear them talk. But I have been known to junk whole first and second chapters when the book felt like it just wasn’t starting off on the wrong foot. As for endings, the good ones have a sense of inevitability about them. I don’t know my endings when I start a book, but I do have a vague sense of who will be living, who will be dead, and where the climax might take place. With this one, for instance, I knew that the ending would have to take place in London, and somehow involve an iconic English landmark. I alighted on St. Paul’s Cathedral, for various plot reasons.

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

Since many of my main characters are real people, and from earlier eras, they’re pretty foreign. But it does not escape my attention that I write many books whose protagonists are famous writers – such as Bram Stoker (in The Night Crossing) and Robert Louis Stevenson (in The Jekyll Revelation) and now H.G. Wells. I can certainly identify with, and I think convey with some authenticity, the struggles involved in the writing process. Wells was astoundingly prolific all the way through his life (he died in 1946). I so envy him that. It appears that he never had to wait for inspiration or for the Muse to arrive. I, on the other hand, am always waiting around for a good idea to occur to me, or for the Muse to knock on my door. Something tells me that she long ago lost my address.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

No one can entirely avoid the influence of movies and TV on what they write today. I do know that whenever I start writing a book set in a certain time and place, I seek out all the movies I can find that share the setting. I just want to get that landscape, and the look of the streets, the clothes people wore, the carriages they drove in, etc., into my head and visual imagination, so that as I’m writing, I can see my own scenes come to life more easily. Movies like those made by the Merchant Ivory company, for example, were especially useful, as they strove for accuracy in every detail. God bless ‘em!

Visit Robert Masello's website.

The Page 69 Test: Blood and Ice.

The Page 69 Test: The Medusa Amulet.

The Page 69 Test: The Einstein Prophecy.

My Book, The Movie: The Einstein Prophecy.

The Page 69 Test: The Night Crossing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Antony Johnston

Photo by Chad Michael Ward

Antony Johnston is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling graphic novelist, author, and games writer. He has written more than thirty graphic novels, comic series, and books, and his graphic spy thriller The Coldest City was made into the multi-million-dollar blockbuster Atomic Blonde, starring Charlize Theron and James McAvoy. He lives in England.

Johnston's new novel is The Exphoria Code.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I spend a lot of time on titles, because they set expectations for new and returning readers alike. The word ‘Exphoria’ had come to me in a flash long before I even conceived the story, just sitting in my notebook for months.

In the book, terrorists attempt to steal the design for a top-secret military drone project, while our hero Brigitte — a hacker working for MI6 — tries to uncover the mole. When it came time to give that military project a name, I remembered that word ‘Exphoria’ and it slotted into place perfectly, like the universe was giving me a nudge.

From there the full title The Exphoria Code grew logically, as it has so many implications. First and foremost, taken as a whole it implies a thriller; without knowing anything about the book, the rhythm and cadence of the full title puts one in the right frame of mind.

Then there are the words. Exphoria is invented, and strikingly unusual, but close enough to a real word that it feels somehow genuine. The classic ‘x’ substitution hints at technology. And making this unusual word a Code invites questions as to what sort of code it could possibly be. Computer code? Coded messages? A code of honour? While one of those is strictly the correct answer, all three elements define the character of the book.

I also knew The Exphoria Code would be the first in a series, which in today’s world must be taken into consideration. As a title format I figured it was flexible enough to use again in future books, without restricting the contents — and I was proven right with the second book, called The Tempus Project.

What's in a name?

Like titles, I spend a lot of time on names. There are practical considerations; I try to avoid multiple characters with the same initial so readers aren’t confused, and I keep them simple to aid memory. But a name also has to feel right for the character.

I’d already written a quarter of the book before Brigitte Sharp received her final name; up until then she’d had several different names, including ‘Gabrielle’ and ‘Sophie’ (which I eventually gave to her mother instead). As she’s Anglo-French, I wanted a name that was unmistakeably French but wouldn’t cause English readers to stumble.

When I noticed Brigitte shortens easily to ‘Bridge’, I knew I had it. The character herself is a bridge; between traditional spycraft and cyber-espionage, between France and England, and between her own traumatic past and a future she must face. Again, it felt like fate.

‘Sharp’ is simple and stark, easy to say and remember, and very English. So the two sides of her heritage are both present, right there in her name. ‘Sharp’ is also in the grand tradition of thriller protagonists named for nouns or verbs, and matches her personality!

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

I’d guess fifty-fifty. On the one hand, as a teenager I thought I’d be a pure sci-fi writer; probably three-quarters of my reading back then was SFF, and it’s still around half.

But I’ve also loved spy fiction and mysteries since I was a child. So perhaps combining all of these things into a high-tech spy thriller, with a mystery at its core, isn’t so surprising.

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

I find endings much harder. I can write beginnings all day long without breaking a sweat. I’m never more excited about a story than when I start, full of anticipation about the characters and the journey they’re about to go on.

With The Exphoria Code that feeling was heightened; it was the first time I was writing these characters, so I was getting to know them better with every page I wrote.

But sooner or later one has to write the ending, as well, and by contrast they fill me with a kind of dread. I try to mitigate that feeling by outlining thoroughly before I begin writing.

I hate wasting a reader’s time, so I want to make sure the ending is satisfying and exhilarating (hard enough in itself) while also wrapping things up so nobody’s bored by endless epilogues. I take my cue from film and screenplays; once the climax is over, get to ‘The End’ as quickly as you can.

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

There are minor aspects of me in all my characters, which is only natural. An author’s role is to be sympathetic to all facets of humanity, good and bad. How else can you possibly write a good character, whether hero or villain? But all my characters also draw on other people, or personality types, as well as pure imagination.

Bridge’s taste in music and books is very close to my own, for example. But the rest of her personality and character is nothing like mine.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’m a magpie. Fantasy role-playing games, music (both listening to it and composing it), film and television, video games, science and technology journalism, even stand-up comedy… I draw inspiration from everywhere.

Wasteland was inspired by goth and heavy metal music. The Fuse drew on TV shows and popular science. The Long Haul came from a combined love of heist movies and westerns.

The Exphoria Code itself is heavily inspired by spy fiction, of course, but also by my love of computers and technology. You could even say it draws on James Bond movies – I love those films, but I tried very hard to make this book not feel like a 007 caper…

Visit Antony Johnston's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kimiko Guthrie

Kimiko Guthrie grew up in Berkeley, California, dancing like her mother and writing like her father. She teaches dance and theater at CSU East Bay and is the co-artistic director of Dandelion Dancetheater. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from UC Santa Cruz and an MFA in Choreography from Mills College. Guthrie has worked with many Bay Area-based dance companies, including Asian American Dance Performances and the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Block Seventeen, inspired by her experience growing up with a mother who was incarcerated in an internment camp during WWII, is her debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title of the book refers to the place where the main trauma of the story occurred – so the location and point in time from which everything ripples out. During WWII, when Japanese Americans were made to leave their homes and give up their possessions to be imprisoned for an indefinite period of time in confinement centers, known as the internment, or “Camp” as people referred to it then, the barracks were arranged into numbered blocks. Block Seventeen is the number of the block where our main character Akiko’s mother was held as a child, and where she witnessed something horrible that haunts her to this day. So, in a way, Akiko’s mother has never really left Block Seventeen. Akiko, a mixed race woman in her mid-thirties who is attempting to lead a normal, happy life in the Bay Area of 2012, has unconsciously inherited aspects of her mother’s trauma, and therefore is also, metaphorically speaking, still trapped in Block Seventeen.

What's in a name?

My main character’s given name, Akiko, is tied to a long-buried family trauma. As a girl in middle school, when Akiko first became aware of the existence of this hidden trauma, she chose to take on a new, more “All-American” name, Jane. So Jane/Akiko’s two-name identity reflects the friction within herself between many conflicting pulls: her two identities and cultures, white and Japanese; her family’s past and her own present; herself and her mother; memory and denial. I was inspired to use naming like this because when my own mother arrived back in Los Angeles after her incarceration during the war, on her first day in her new school, her teacher introduced her to the mostly white class with a brand-new, All-American name that the teacher had simply chosen in that moment, with no connection to my mother. My mother was then called by this strange new name for the rest of the year, and my mother, an eight year old child, was expected to somehow integrate these two identities within herself, and all they symbolized – the racism of her country, her family’s recent imprisonment, her renewed invitation back to American society that had so many strings attached … Of course kids today are often put in a similar situation, being asked to process so many conflicting aspects of the unjust, often even hateful grown-up world around them, and it’s too much. So this internalized confusion often manifests in unconscious ways and can have insidious effects. It’s these insidious effects – the lingering, unconscious effects of trauma - that I was interested in exploring with my novel.

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

Maybe not so very surprised; this is a story that has been forming in me for a long time. Ever since I was a teenager, I knew wanted to write something that explored my childhood confusion about the fragmented glimpses of my mom’s, and her family’s, experiences in “Camp.” And one of my favorite books as a teenager was A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, a story that also explores wartime trauma, the play between memory and denial, and mother-daughter relationships. This work – to this day, one of my all-time favorite books - very much inspired me to write my novel.

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

Beginnings are much harder for me. Blankness is a daunting thing! So many possibilities. I love the editing process – for me, that’s where the fun really begins, honestly. So once something exists, no matter how raw or unformed, I am always excited to dive in and find definition, clarity, to follow its threads to their logical ending points.

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

I would say yes. I think as an artist it’s hard or maybe impossible to make something that doesn’t have something of yourself in it. For this story, I drew inspiration from many people and places, and I’m sure I also unconsciously took various parts of myself and scrambled them up to embody these new characters. The main character, Jane/Akiko, shares many obvious similarities with me, such as being mixed race, growing up in the Bay Area, having a mother who was incarcerated during WWII … but she’s also very different from me. For one, I would like to think that I am significantly more well-adjusted than her! But well-adjusted people don’t make for very interesting characters or stories, do they? I often start with something I know, then allow it to grow beyond the limits of reality – for me that’s the joy of art.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

In my “other life” I am a choreographer, so the physical, visual, performative art form of dance has strongly influenced my writing. The dynamic play between time, space, the body, and energy. Also nature – being away from crowds, buildings, cars, and all human technology, and instead being surrounded by open space, trees, rocks, bodies of water. The textures of nature are teachers to me. My family and friends inspire me, too – probably more than anything. They remind me of what’s most important in this world – connection, love, forgiveness, looking at things from someone else’s perspective.

Visit Kimiko Guthrie's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah McCraw Crow

Sarah McCraw Crow grew up in Virginia but has lived most of her adult life in New Hampshire. Her short fiction has run in Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Good Housekeeping, So to Speak, Waccamaw, and Stanford Alumni Magazine. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College (AB, history), Stanford University (MA, journalism), and Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA in writing). When she's not reading or writing, she's probably gardening or snowshoeing (depending on the weather).

The Wrong Kind of Woman is her literary debut.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My novel’s title is The Wrong Kind of Woman, and I hope it raises a few questions, like “Who is this wrong kind of woman?” and “What does that phrase even mean?” and “Who gets to define the right kind of woman?” I think titles are difficult for many, if not most, writers—I went through long brainstorming lists with my agent and editor. My earliest titles referred to the fictional town (Westfield) and college campus (Clarendon College) where the novel is set, and to a character’s death (After Oliver), because my character Oliver dies on the first page. But none of those early titles took the reader into the story, because the story isn’t really about the campus, the town, or even Oliver. At its heart, The Wrong Kind of Woman is about Virginia, a 39-year-old widow, and her quest to move forward with her life, and she does that after she starts to see the world through a more feminist lens.

What's in a name?

I think character names can serve as great shortcuts to help the reader place a character in time and setting, and they can help the writer understand the character better too. My character Virginia Desmarais grew up in southeastern Virginia, and decades ago her given name was a common one for girls born in Virginia. But in my imagining, she has that name because she was the baby of the family and her parents had run out of good ideas for names by the time she was born. And Virginia’s last name, Desmarais, reflects her husband’s French-Canadian, New Hampshire-born father. None of that background made it into the novel, but it helped me envision her as a fuller person with a life history behind her.

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

First of all, my teenaged self would be embarrassed! I spent middle school and high school trying to be invisible, and was mortified (though secretly pleased) when my tenth- and twelfth-grade English teacher, Mr. MacConichie, praised the short stories I’d written for his class. After coming to terms with her embarrassment, my teenaged reading self would be surprised that this novel wasn’t a big sweeping saga, like The Thornbirds, or something kind of cynical or noir, like a Graham Greene novel. I think she’d also be a little surprised that this novel follows three characters: Virginia, an almost-forty-year-old woman, Sam, a twenty-year-old male college student, and Rebecca, a thirteen-year-old girl. But then she’d say “I’m nothing like Rebecca. Well, maybe a little, but only a little.”

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings?

Endings are so hard! I know some writers have an ending in mind when they start a new project. I didn’t, but I knew that I wanted this story to stay within the timeline of a year or so, which in turn helped me figure out what to write toward. Still, at one point, I wanted the novel to end by circling back to twenty years before the present of the story, when my characters Virginia and Oliver had just met, when they were grad students. That was a terrible idea, and it took away from the story, but I was attached to those pages until my agent gently let me know that I had to let go of them.

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

While I hope that my characters are believable people quite different from me, I do see some of myself, though mainly more surface-level traits, in them. For Virginia, it’s mainly her background—like me, Virginia is a transplanted Southerner, temperamentally a New Englander, and someone who often feels in between, not one thing or the other. Rebecca (Virginia’s almost fourteen-year-old daughter) is an obsessive reader, as I was, though much more of a one-best-friend girl than I was. And Sam, the lonely college student, is a pop- and rock-music nerd, as I was.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Probably the two biggest ones are music and landscape. When I hear an old song that I first heard long ago, like maybe in eighth grade, the sound of it can take me right back through the decades, to the confusing mix of emotions, of feeling half-adult, half-little kid. The landscape inspiration is more indirect, but whenever I take a long walk on one of our beautiful New Hampshire trails, if I’m just alone with my thoughts and not listening to a podcast or music, then chances are something will come to me that I can use in my writing.

Visit Sarah McCraw Crow's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Danielle Girard

Danielle Girard is the author of Chasing Darkness, The Rookie Club series, and Exhume, Excise, Expose, and Expire, featuring San Francisco medical examiner Dr. Annabelle Schwartzman. Girard’s books have won the Barry Award and the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award, and two of her titles have been optioned for movies.

A graduate of Cornell University, Girard received her MFA at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. She, her husband, and their two children split their time between San Francisco and the Northern Rockies.

Girard's new novel is White Out, book one of her Badlands Thriller Series.

My Q&A with the author:

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

For me, titles are the hardest thing about any book. I almost never have a title before I have a completed story and, even then, the title will change multiple times before it’s finalized. My preference is a title that is only a vague indication of what to expect from the book, something that can be interpreted several ways. White Out is a good example. A white out is a snow storm is the obvious definition of the title, but the words also allude to other things. White out is a metaphor for being unable to see clearly, the idea of something hidden or even lost or erased, as in whiting out words on a page. My goal is to make the book do the work of informing the title, not the other way around.

What's in a name?

Unlike titles, a character’s name is firmly rooted from early in the writing process. Just as you probably can’t imagine raising a child without giving him or her a name, the same is true of characters. For example, Lily Baker from White Out. Lily has implications of innocence, as in lily white. The name and image of flower also suggests growth, birth or rebirth, all of which apply to the character in the story. When choosing names, though, it’s more instinct than planning. I don’t consciously write down a bunch of names and chose one. I discover a name more by feel—what resonates, what fits. In that way, it’s not so different from naming children. And then, I find, that the character grows into the name in a way that is similar to how children grow into a name.

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

I think my teenage self always recognized the darkness in her own head. It’s been there forever. I suspect she would be satisfied (and maybe even proud) to see that we have found a way to put all that angst to a constructive use.

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

Beginnings. I’ll rewrite the beginning of a book over and over while writing the book. And then I’ll rewrite it again a few more times while I’m revising. It’s like building a house—the beginning is the foundation on which everything else is built. The end is the windows or the wall paper. It’s easy to change those things out if the foundation is solid. But if the beginning doesn’t work, the windows won’t fit and the wallpaper will hang askew.

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

My characters are infinitely braver than I am. Villains, heroes and protagonists. After all, I spend my days in the basement and they’re out chasing (and being) killers. More than that, they speak the truths that I cannot. But there is a seed of the writer in every character—from the most evil to the most innocent. And I think that’s true of not just the writers but the readers as well. A strong villain pulls at the universalities of each of us, in the same way a strong protagonist does. Characters are manifestations of our best—and worst—instincts as humans. If done well, we can see ourselves in each of them.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’m inspired by all sorts of things when writing my books and few of them literary. That is, I don’t find myself reading other books to inform my writing or plot. Although I do read a ton for pleasure. Instead, ideas come from regular life. The idea for my first book, Savage Art, came from a profile written in the New York Times Magazine. The idea for Expose came from a camping trip with my family. White Out’s premise was drawn from a dream. Our job as writers is to identify a normal thing—even something mundane like driving on a gravel road at a campsite—and shift the perspective so that they become something else entirely. I believe anything can make a story if you find the right light to shine on it. Anything.

Visit Danielle Girard's website.

The Page 69 Test: White Out.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margi Preus

Margi Preus is a New York Times bestselling author of the Newbery Honor Book, Heart of a Samurai and other novels and picture books for young readers, including the Minnesota Book Award winning West of the Moon, and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award book The Clue in the Trees, part of the Enchantment Lake mystery series.

Preus's new Enchantment Lake mystery is The Silver Box.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title, The Silver Box, was originally the working title of the second book in the series, which was ultimately entitled The Clue in the Trees. (The first in the series is Enchantment Lake). This was until a writer friend of mine read a draft and said she didn’t think it should bear that title unless what was inside the Silver Box was revealed by the end of the story. I realized she was right; my editor also agreed; and so we had to come up with a different title for Book #2. After filling notebooks with failed titles, my editor suggested The Clue in the Trees, which turns out to be so perfect and has so many layers of meaning that you could practically solve the mystery by the title alone. (Dear Readers, do try it!)

So now you’ve learned a lot about the title of a different book! But it turns out that The Silver Box is the best title for Book #3, which really revolves around solving the puzzle of this box, and by doing so, revealing the secrets of Francie’s family. Readers who have read book one and two are familiar with the mysterious box—and the mystery of Francie’s mother—and I hope they are excited to find out what secrets the box hides. Readers who haven’t read the first two books should not be put off! They can start with book three, and I hope the title will entice them to do so.

What's in a name?

My protagonist’s full name is Francesca Frye. But she is known by many nicknames: Francie, Franny, Frenchy, French-Fry. She points out (p. 38) that she is like Pippi Longstocking in part because of their very many names. (Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Dandeliona Peppermint Longstocking.) I didn’t plan on her having so many nicknames, it just happened, and I think it shows the different facets of her character and how she is (like most of us are) a little bit different with different groups of people: our friends, our parents, our teachers.

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

Hmmm. Not? I was a Nancy Drew fan, and Francie (notice the name similarity? Nancy Drew; Francie Frye—also unplanned) is a kind of Northwoods Nancy Drew. I’m pretty sure I would have been happy to read this series! I would have enjoyed the fact that there is a mystery solved in each book, but there is another overarching mystery that continues throughout the series.

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

They are both impossible. But endings are always a little scary because I never know how a story is going to turn out, so that makes it challenging—especially with a mystery. Having said that, I actually did know the ending to The Silver Box. It was the only thing I knew when I started. And when I say I knew the ending, I knew exactly one thing about the ending. I rewrite both beginnings and endings and everything in between over many times.

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

That is kind of a funny question, because in this series there are a couple of slightly loony great aunts (sharper than they seem) who were originally modeled on some of my aunts and my mother, but I have recently realized that I, myself, have become one of those dotty old aunts myself.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The woods and lakes of northern Minnesota. Environmental issues. People and places I know, since I grew up and still have a cabin on a lake not unlike Enchantment Lake.

Visit Margi Preus's website.

The Page 69 Test: Village of Scoundrels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Avery Bishop

Avery Bishop is the pseudonym for a USA Today bestselling author of over a dozen novels.

Bishop's new novel is Girl Gone Mad.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Many years ago I was in NYC for a business trip and I met up with a friend of mine who works in marketing at a major publishing house. We got drinks at a bar near the Ed Sullivan Theater, and we talked about books and movies and at one point we discussed the ongoing trend of suspense novels that had "girl" in the title and I made some crack about how I'd always wanted to write a book like that and my friend turned to me all serious and said, "You should." So that interaction of course stuck in the back of my mind, and one day the title Girl Gone Mad came to me, and I checked Amazon to see if it had been used before and was pretty shocked to learn that it hadn't.

And, well, the novel eventually evolved from there. After all, it wasn't just writing a book and sticking "girl" somewhere in the title; I wanted to make sure the book earned the title.

The thing I like most about the title Girl Gone Mad is how it can be viewed two different ways (at least, from what I've been able to tell so far; maybe others can read even more into it). The novel is about a group of mean girls who bully the new girl to her breaking point, and then fourteen years later — the girls all having gone their separate ways — the protagonist, Emily, learns that one of the girls from her old clique has reportedly killed herself, and then later she learns that another one of the girls has also killed herself, and she soon finds herself wondering if the girl they bullied is back for revenge. So, in that respect, you have the idea of this girl gone mad based on how she was once treated. And on the flipside, throughout the novel Emily starts to question just what's real, and so you potentially have her "gone mad" which is a crude way of saying she's gone insane.

What's in a name?

Hopefully it's not too heavy-handed, but it's no mistake that the bullied new girl is named Grace. One of the definitions for "grace" is courteous goodwill, so you could argue one of the reasons Grace falls in with the mean girls is due to her courtesy and politeness. In many ways, her "grace" makes her a target.

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

Back in middle school and high school I was reading Michael Crichton and Stephen King, so my teenage self might be a bit surprised. Though, maybe not, as I'd like to think this book is just as page-turning as any good ol' Crichton or King yarn.

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

It really depends book by book. Some books are easier to start than others. Oftentimes I find myself getting in the way: I want my first draft to be perfect when that's obviously ridiculous, so after I remind myself that the first draft can and is meant to be extremely rough, I'll just start writing. Sometimes first lines come to me and they stay the same, and other times they get changed. As for endings, I don't plot my books beforehand, though I often have an idea in my head where each book is going. There are times when something happens halfway through the book and suddenly it veers in another direction, and I love when that happens. Overall, though, most books lead toward one particular ending, and while it's not easy to get there, I find it's not too difficult either.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Movies and TV, hands down. Obviously there are certain things you can do in those mediums you can't really do well in novels — a long Paul Thomas Anderson tracking shot, for instance — though I do try to make my books as cinematic as possible. While readers are able to see into characters' heads, as they can't really do in movies, I try to keep the scenes short and sweet so the pacing doesn't falter. Law & Order often comes to mind: you don't see the detectives parking their car and knocking on a door and introducing themselves and saying they have some questions; you get that dun dun and BAM, you're already in the apartment with the victim's sister who is answering the detectives because we, the audience, already know what the question is.

Visit Avery Bishop's website.

The Page 69 Test: Girl Gone Mad.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Colt

Peter Colt was born in Boston, MA in 1973 and moved to Nantucket Island shortly thereafter. He is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island and a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq. He is a police officer in a New England City and the married father of two boys.

Colt's new novel is Back Bay Blues.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Back Bay Blues is set in 1985 and is about a Vietnam Veteran and Private Investigator, Andy Roark. He lives in the Back-Bay section of Boston and the blues alludes to his struggles with coming to terms with his survivors’ guilt and missing the war. I am very inspired by music and in my mind, it was called Stray Cats Strut. My editor asked me if I could come up with something else. In the end it was Back Bay Blues.

What's in a name?

My protagonist is named Andy Roark. He is half Boston Irish and half German. I wanted him to have an American/Irish name which lead to the Andy portion. In my mind I turned over and tried many other Irish sounding names and then I settled on Roark as the last name. There are two characters in the book; “Chris” and “Tony” who are Green Berets and they are only referred to by their first names in keeping with the habit of Special Forces soldiers doing so.

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

My teenage self would be surprised that I could focus on anything long enough to write a novel. On the other hand, I have loved mysteries and detective novels since I was a pre-teen. In the teenage years I started to read a lot about the Vietnam war. My teenage self wouldn’t be surprised at the melding of the two as the subject matter for my novel.

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

Neither. I usually have kicked the idea for the story around in my head for several weeks or months, sometimes even years. I have a good idea of the beginning and the ending is usually 95% done in my head. When I sit down at the keyboard. I have already, roughly outlined the book and the characters before I sit down to write. The middle bits are the ones that are most likely to change, plot lines get added, plot lines get deleted, characters are added or character ideas I had at the beginning don’t fit anymore. I am telling myself the story, entertaining myself with it, as I write it.

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

I do see much of myself in my characters. My main character is tougher, and cooler than I am but he has a sense of humor like mine, we share our taste in music, books and whiskey. That is mostly because it is easier to write about what I know about. I tried to write a character that is someone who isn’t a fictionalized version of me but rather someone that I would think is interesting or would like to hang out with. I think that a writer has to have that connection to the characters they write about.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

History. History is one of the big influences. I have read a lot about Vietnam and especially U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam. That lead to my main character’s backstory. The plot of Back Bay Blues was taking shape in my mind, I had a couple of vivid scenes in my mind and was trying to figure out how to get my protagonist into them. Then I saw two Frontline (PBS) documentaries, one was about the last days of Saigon and the U.S. withdrawal and the other was about a group of South Vietnamese Army officers in the U.S. who were raising money to try and overthrow the current Vietnamese government. Like that I had two major plot lines for Back Bay Blues and the book poured out of me. I am also heavily influenced by music when I write. For me it is like a soundtrack for the novel, which I see as a movie in my mind while I am writing it.

Visit Peter Colt's website.

My Book, The Movie: Back Bay Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Back Bay Blues.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Heska Wanbli Weiden

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is author of the novel Winter Counts. Winter Counts is a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and has been selected as an Amazon Best Book of August, Best of the Month by Apple Books, a September main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and was an Indie Next Great Reads pick for September.

My Q&A with Weiden:

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

The title of the book, Winter Counts, refers to the calendar system traditionally used by the Lakota people prior to European colonization. Rather than numerals, little pictographs were used to depict the most significant events of the year. And of course, the phrase “winter counts” also refers to the fact that winter is traditionally a difficult season for indigenous people, and most of the action in the book takes place in the winter.

So, I think the title works on several different levels to take readers into the book. There was a request by my press to consider changing the title, but I felt strongly that it should not be changed for a number of reasons. Happily, they worked with me, and everyone seems to like it.

What’s in a name?

I love this question! I use character names to give some hint as to the character’s personality and nature. “Virgil Wounded Horse,” naturally, gives a sense that this character is injured in some fundamental way. Another example would be the villain, Rick Crow. I thought that name implied some malevolence, not to mention that the Crow people were traditionally enemies of the Lakota nations. Finally, Chef Lack Strongbow was named to indicate his (perhaps overweening) self-confidence in his ideas regarding indigenous cuisine.

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

I really struggled to find the right ending to the novel, and I changed it several times. I don’t want to give anything away to those who haven’t read the book, but I believe it ends on the correct note.

The beginning of the novel depicts my protagonist, Virgil Wounded Horse, engaged in fight with a child molester on the reservation. Virgil is a hired vigilante, but he took that job for free. Although it’s a fairly brutal beginning, I thought it was important to show Virgil’s sense of ethics as well as his status as an iyeska, which is a Lakota slur for half-breed. I think the beginning of the book also realistically depicts life on the Rosebud reservation, and I felt it was important to set up the novel in this way.

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

Yes, I am an iyeska just like Virgil Wounded Horse, and I tapped into my own memories of growing up in two different worlds. But I think that the fear of not fitting in is universal, and I’ve heard from readers that they identify with Virgil’s struggles, even though they are not Native themselves. I also used my own experiences of being the father of two teenage boys in writing the book. Virgil is the guardian of fourteen-year-old Nathan, and I definitely related to that, and used my own hopes and fears as a parent while writing those scenes.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

In my day job, I’m a professor of Native American studies and political science, and there were a number of political issues that influenced the writing of the novel. Specifically, I wanted to write about the broken criminal justice system on Native reservations. Because of an 1885 federal law known as the Major Crimes Act, Native nations can’t prosecute felony crimes that occur on their own lands. Instead, they must refer these cases to the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office. However, the feds are declining to prosecute a large percentage of these cases, which means that the offender is set free. So, the victims in these cases often go outside of the law and pay a hired enforcer—like my protagonist Virgil--to go after the person who committed the crime. I’m hoping the book stimulates a discussion of the Major Crimes Act and whether the enforcement of felony crimes should be returned to Native nations. Readers who would like to learn more about this issue should check out the op-ed I published in the New York Times on July 19, 2020.

Visit David Heska Wanbli Weiden's website.

The Page 69 Test: Winter Counts.

My Book, The Movie: Winter Counts.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jamie Beck

Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author Jamie Beck’s realistic and heartwarming stories have sold more than three million copies. She is a two-time Booksellers’ Best Award finalist, a National Readers’ Choice Award winner, and critics at Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist have respectively called her work “smart,” “uplifting,” and “entertaining.” In addition to writing novels, she enjoys dancing around the kitchen while cooking and hitting the slopes in Vermont and Utah. Above all, she is a grateful wife and mother to a very patient, supportive family.

Beck's new novel is Truth of the Matter.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Generally, I aim for my novels’ titles to quickly convey a major story element. Truth of the Matter is the perfect title for this book because it not only hints at the hidden life of one of the three point-of-view characters (Marie, the grandmother with dementia), but also goes to a core theme about how our perceptions shape our realities, so when we seek to change ourselves or our situations, we need to start by getting to the truth of why we think or feel the way we do. Anne’s identity has been wrapped up in being a wife and mother for almost two decades, so she must discover the truth of who she is after she’s stripped of those roles. She will also need to reconcile the truth about her beloved grandmother with the woman Anne believed her to be, and how her misconceptions shaped Anne’s views about motherhood. Meanwhile, Katy is a highly gifted yet anxious teen who is trying to figure out where she fits in with her broken family and at her new school. Readers love secrets, too, so I hope the title intrigues readers enough to peek inside.

What's in a name?

I confess, the characters’ individual names in this story don’t have all that much meaning, but the name of the fictional town (Potomac Point) is deliberate. A welcoming setting can be a hook for domestic fiction readers who want to be whisked away to someplace charming. Thus, I made up a name that would signal that this series is set in a small town on the Chesapeake Bay, because what could be more welcoming than that? Secondly, the setting is tying three books together, so I needed to make sure the name was easy to identify and different from my other series’ settings. Lastly, I like alliteration!

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

I was quite a romantic in my teens and would fantasize about writing dramatic love stories for television or film. Then I became a lawyer! When I began my writing career in my forties, of course I had to begin with romance novels because, in the words of a friend and fellow author (Kristan Higgins), kissing makes every book better. I enjoyed writing those, but after four series, I was ready for a change. Women’s fiction gives me a much broader canvas for exploring interpersonal relationships (which is really what I liked most about love stories). I’m in my mid-fifties now, so I’ve seen and lived through a lot that has affected what I consider important and worthy of a story. For example, as a mother of two, I’ve learned a lot about the epidemic of teen anxiety in this country, which is largely what motivated me to write Truth of the Matter. I can’t imagine my teen self would’ve foreseen something that unromantic as being an issue near and dear to my heart.

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

I’ve never thought about this before, but it varies by the story. In this case, it was the ending, mostly because I made material changes to Anne after completing the first draft. Part of the problem was that I got so invested in Katy’s painful self-image and sorrow that I lost sight of Anne’s development. The other problem was that I was focusing so much on Anne’s mothering that I failed to dig deeper into her womanhood. Thankfully, my wonderful editor helped me reshape key elements of this story to bring Anne more fully onto the page, which changed a lot of the latter half of the book. Now she will resonate with many readers, particularly with women who are in the middle of life—in the middle of marriage, of parents and children, and of careers.

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

Pieces of me creep into all my protagonists because I am writing about relationships (family, friendship, romantic) and I cannot divorce myself entirely from my own real-world perceptions about any of that. In this particular book, I imbued Anne with a lot of myself (moreso than any prior female protagonist). Prior to writing novels, I was a lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mom who probably spent too much time worrying about my kids and not enough time on myself. When I finally decided to try a new career, it took a lot of courage, but like Anne in this book, I learned that it’s never too late to start living your best life.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

First and foremost, music. I am awed by songwriters (particular favorites include Sara Bareilles, Ed Sheeran, Sting, and Dar Williams). I get a lot of character ideas from song lyrics, working up elaborate backstories for the “character” who wrote the lyrics to a particular song. I also get inspired by psychological studies about various mental health matters and how they affect relationships. The human mind is fascinating. Conflict often springs from the different yet valid way people respond to events, which is great fodder for a novel. I love working through the tangle of how those responses shape a person’s (or character’s) ability to be happy.

Visit Jamie Beck's website.

--Marshal Zeringue