Kate Myles

Kate Myles has worked as television producer for a variety of networks, including Discovery, OWN and the Food Network. Before her producing career, she was an actor and comedian, enjoying a two-year stint as a host of the Travel Channel series, Not Your Average Travel Guide, among other adventures. Her short fiction has appeared in Quarterly West, Necessary Fiction, and Storm Cellar Quarterly.

The Receptionist is her first novel. Myles lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The Receptionist is short and to-the-point. People tell me it’s a great title, so that must count for something! It lets us know we’ll be meeting an entry level worker who does something in the thriller vein…something nefarious. As we get into the book, I like the fact that the title character is not the protagonist. She’s more of a change agent in the other characters’ lives.

What's in a name?

Doug. Say it with me, “Doug.” He’s a monosyllable. A gen-xer. A former frat boy running his dad’s company into the ground. In fifth grade, I sat next to a Doug. He was always alert to other people’s vulnerabilities and would pick on me and my best friend, saying we probably still played with Barbies. He wasn’t wrong. Doug.

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

My teenage self would be all in. My favorite movie back then was The War of the Roses, the Kathleen Tuner/Michael Douglas movie. It’s a dark comedy with an off-the-wall plot where things go from bad to worse to absolute hell. I didn’t realize until after The Receptionist was finished just how much that movie influenced me.

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

A beginning is an announcement - about the writer, about the type of book the reader has just picked up. I drop an F-bomb in the first sentence of The Receptionist in a big fat welcome to a certain type of reader and a warning to others. Overall, I do spend a ton of time trying to get the prose in the first few paragraphs just right.

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

Nope. No connection. These characters become so over-the-top awful, I won’t cop to any similarities between them and myself. I’m a good person. I swear.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Religion. I grew up super Catholic and feel like it’s all through my writing although I’m not sure most readers would pick up on it. I’m basically an atheist now, but my whole philosophical framework was shaped by Catholicism. Amen.

Visit Kate Myles's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kira Jane Buxton

Kira Jane Buxton's writing has appeared in The New York Times, NewYorker.com, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Huffington Post, and more. Her debut novel Hollow Kingdom was an Indie Next pick, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Audie Awards, and the Washington State Book Awards, and was named a best book of 2019 by Good Housekeeping, NPR, and Book Riot. She calls the tropical utopia of Seattle home and spends her time with three cats, a dog, two crows, a charm of hummingbirds, five Steller's jays, two dark-eyed juncos, two squirrels, and a husband.

Buxton's new novel is Feral Creatures.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Feral Creatures is a nod to a few elements of the book, which I’m thrilled about since I love how it sounds phonetically and that it has an aura of intrigue. Since the novel is narrated by a crow and is set in a world where humans have succumbed to a deadly virus (a little topical, alas), most of the characters are animals and are indeed, feral creatures. At the beginning of the novel, S.T. the domesticated crow—a fervid fan of all things human and in many ways the last bastion of humanity—finds the impossible: the last child on earth. He vows to protect her against the many dangers of the Alaskan village in which they live, as well as the horror that humanity has morphed into and that continues to plague the planet. S.T. attempts to raise Dee as he knew humans to be, imagining her to grow up well-adjusted and with cultural understanding and education. But as Dee grows, S.T. realizes that Dee is perhaps not the quintessential human being, but rather, a creature with animal instincts. S.T. fear materializes as he realizes that Dee is wild and untamable, and that—much to his chagrin—he is raising a feral creature.

What's in a name?

My main character and crow narrator’s name is S.T., which is short for Shit Turd. This rather vulgar name was bestowed upon him by the man who raised S.T. from a fledging—a crass and vociferous man who called humans “MoFos” and taught S.T. a lot of colorful language. Since S.T.’s world view is filtered through the eyes of the boorish human who raised him, it fits perfectly. S.T.’s beloved charge and the last human child is named Dee. This is the name that S.T. gave her in homage to his bloodhound and best friend Dennis. “D” for Dennis.

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

I think teenage Kira would be delighted that I got away with writing from the perspective of animals and peppering a novel with salty language! Looking back on my life and my upbringing, this book seems in some ways inevitable. It combines my love of animals with my love of language, my horror at climate change and my ardent belief that laughter is the best medicine. Teenage me was a little dark and brooding, so might be a bit disappointed by all the hope and levity in Feral Creatures!

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

I’m not sure I find either “harder”, but I’d say the beginning takes a lot more contemplation and energy. The beginning of a novel is where I am laying out a premise and a promise to a reader, introducing the tone and a character who we must trust to sail us through the narrative seas. I have written most of a novel without being 100% committed to or sure about an ending, and am willing to be flexible if what I had imagined as a finale must change. But as I write, the beginning is my bible, and I will use it to steer, bolster and center me as I take literary risks and journey through a plot.

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 there is a little of me in all my characters, but I also hope that there is a little of every reader in certain characters! S.T. uses humor as a coping mechanism, which I certainly relate to—comedy has been a life raft for me at times in my life. Dee is a character who is deeply connected to nature. I also feel a kinship with the creatures and plants I encounter, but I aspire to her level of instinctive acuity. The sweet musk ox character, Oomingmak has terrible gas, and I’d like to state—on the record and with great relief—that his gastric woes were not inspired by my own.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

One of the first movies that utterly destroyed me was Gorillas In The Mist. I sobbed for days after watching it as a child, and I’m quite sure that, in conjunction with growing up with a family who rescued all sorts of animals and practiced kindness to all organisms, it informed my desire to be an advocate for the creatures we share our planet with. My first job was as a volunteer at a zoo in Indonesia, and I know that every close animal encounter I experienced imprinted a sense of wonder and reverence in me. I spend every day with wild birds I have befriended and actually spend more time with animals than people—it probably shouldn’t be a surprise to me that I have yet to write a novel solely about humans!

Visit Kira Jane Buxton's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kira Jane Buxton & Ewok.

My Book, The Movie: Hollow Kingdom.

The Page 69 Test: Hollow Kingdom.

My Book, The Movie: Feral Creatures.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kelly Creagh

Kelly Creagh is the author of the Nevermore Trilogy, Nickolas Claus and other books filled with darkness and light. Her stories often explore themes of duality, the shadow self and heroes (and villains) who find themselves battling their own psyches. Creagh's major literary influences include Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Gaston Leroux, Susan Kay, J.K. Rowling, Robin McKinley, Stephen King, C.S. Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Libba Bray, Holly Black and too many more to name. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Theatre Arts and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

Creagh's new novel is Phantom Heart.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Titles have always been tough for me. I actually tend to title my books with a poetic mind, but when they reach the publisher, they usually receive a much more straight-forward title. This, I feel, has really worked out. Through the process of revision and editing, I get close to my work, and so the bird’s-eye view titles don’t occur to me. In the instance of Phantom Heart, I think the title accomplishes a lot toward conveying what the story is about. The word “phantom” seems particularly pivotal since the novel is a modern retelling of Gaston Leroux’s gothic classic, The Phantom of the Opera. So, one look at the novel’s cover and title will convey this to the reader, which is a huge plus when it comes to reaching the intended audience. Additionally, Phantom Heart deals with a missing heart and a shattered soul. My phantom character is in an interesting predicament that leaves him with few options regarding how to deal with Stephanie, the protagonist, who has moved into the dilapidated mansion he is bound to through a curse. As the story progresses, the issue of the absent heart compounds the danger, and ultimately raises an interesting question. Can a person’s heart ever truly go missing?

What's in a name?

Names are one of my favorite things to tinker with when writing, and Phantom Heart was no exception. In Gaston Leroux’s original novel, the protagonist is a young soprano named Christine. For my retelling, I did want a heroine with a strong “I” in her name to mirror Christine’s. However, Stephanie is quite different from Leroux’s ingénue, and so I also wanted to give her a fresh introduction as her own person. Additionally, the novel took inspiration from a song called "Stephanie" by El Radio Fantastique. I do not know where or how I stumbled upon the song, but it certainly stuck with me—for years! I had so many questions about the strange lyrics and what the story behind them could possibly be. The song itself is pleasantly odd and ominous, too. I remember listening to this song back in 2010, and I think it just stuck with me and inspired my subconscious. So, as a nod to this slice of inspiration, I named my heroine Stephanie.

In Leroux’s novel, there’s a love triangle. One of the love interests is of course the phantom, and the other is the Viscount Raoul de Chagny. I took inspiration from this name and also from Lon Chaney, who famously played the Phantom, and named my ghost-hunting Raoul-inspired character Lucas Cheney. Phantom fans will find several other names in the book that are direct nods to characters from the source material.

Finally, since I’m such a huge Edgar Allan Poe fan, and because I owe so much of my inspiration and success to him, I always find ways to pay homage. In this instance, the house Stephanie’s family moves into is known locally as Moldavia, which was the name of Edgar Allan Poe’s childhood home in Virginia.

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

My teenage self would be geeking out. I actually wrote Phantom Heart with my teenage self in mind, since The Phantom of the Opera is my all-time favorite piece of classic literature. In middle school, I was absolutely obsessed with book, and I carried my paperback copy everywhere. I used to draw scenes from the novel during math class. I still have both the drawings and the beaten paperback novel. I read the book several times both in middle school and high school, and gobbled up any retellings I could get my hands on. I think if I were to travel back in time and tell my middle school/high school self what we would one day accomplish, she would be quite proud of me.

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

For me, endings have always been the toughest part. Phantom Heart, however, turned out to have a very tricky beginning. While the first chapter hasn’t changed dramatically, the second chapter changed many times. Actually, the whole book underwent several massive revisions. I don’t think I’ve ever revised so much on a single project, and I do a lot of revision, since that’s one of my strengths. That said, I always knew how the book ended. And while the content on those final pages has changed from earlier drafts, the ultimate outcome of the story has not. Historically, though, my endings have always received more overhaul than my beginnings.

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 writers can’t help but imbue their characters with some aspect of themselves. While I’m very different from Stephanie, who has an analytical mind and loves math, physics, and science, I think I’ve instilled her with some of my dry humor. And it is my hope that my readers will see a bit of themselves in my phantom character. During the course of the novel, he wages a war with various aspects of himself, all represented by their own mask. I think we all wrestle with masks and facets of our shadow self. In my mind, that’s what the Phantom of the Opera is—a character who represents the dual nature of humans. He is beauty and the beast—a character who strives for the light but struggles with his own darkness, which is something I think most people can identify with in some capacity.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I draw a lot of inspiration from my friends, my family, and people-watching. I’m always picking up on conversations and interactions, and storing unique sayings and personality traits. Always, I’m threatening to put my brothers in my next novel so they remain wary of vexing me. Music also inspires me as well as travel. Art is another wonderful source of inspiration. My mind plays with lyrics and visuals, so I always have both a playlist and a Pinterest board going while I’m drafting and revising a project.

Visit Kelly Creagh's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelly Creagh and Annabel (September 2010).

Coffee with a Canine: Kelly Creagh & Annabel, Jack and Holly.

The Page 69 Test: Phantom Heart.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zoje Stage

Zoje Stage's debut novel, Baby Teeth (2018), was a USA Today and international bestseller. It was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel, and was optioned for film by Village Roadshow/Valparaiso Pictures. Her second "mind-bending" (NY Times) novel, Wonderland (2020), was one of Book Riot's Best Horror Books of 2020, and one of Overdrive's Best Audio Books of 2020.

Stage's new novel is Getaway, described as "stunning" in a starred review from Booklist. A former filmmaker with a penchant for the dark and suspenseful, she lives in Pittsburgh.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I submitted the book to my agents (and then my editor) under a different working title, but I always knew I'd be asked to change it (it was a little too artsy). As standard practice I prepare a list of alternate titles, and Getaway was the first one I suggested. I like a title that works on multiple levels, and the story involves a group of friends on a "getaway" who then need to "get away" from the situation they find themselves in.

What's in a name?

Naming characters is both tricky and fun. I try to pick names that suit the characters and their background, and are memorable in some way. Since Getaway involves three main female characters, I wanted to pick three names that were very different from each other—Imogen, Beck, Tilda—so it would be easy to learn who's who. And perhaps because my own name causes pronunciation confusion, I endeavor to pick names that are easy to pronounce.

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

Honestly, those are the two parts of a book that I change the least. It can be hard to figure out where a book should begin, but it's a crucial decision and impacts the trajectory of the story so I don't start writing until I'm pretty confident about the opening scene. And though my writing process is very intuitive, I keep an image in my mind of a general ending and write my first draft toward that image (I call myself a "directional pantser"). Once I'm deep enough into the story a more detailed conclusion comes into focus, and I've never changed the endings of any of my books.

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

Sometimes I think all of my characters contain slivers of me (and that's probably true to some degree)—things I've thought about, or saw/read/experienced. But I share some fairly concrete similarities with Imogen, the protagonist of Getaway: we're both reclusive novelists who live in Pittsburgh, who have an older sister and a best friend from high school, and did a fair amount of theatre and backpacking in our teens and twenties. It's interesting to me to see how even a character I share things with becomes completely her own person, by way of living a story that is unique to her.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Perhaps because of my background in film, I think very visually. I see every scene I write as part of a movie in my head. I had a very definite idea of what kinds of films I dreamed of making (back in the day): character-driven stories that relied on realism in spite of an unusual/odd plot element (like Let the Right One In). And that has become the framework for my novels as well, exploring how an ordinary person would process—physically, emotionally, spiritually—some sort of strange and difficult situation.

Visit Zoje Stage's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward M. Lerner

A physicist and computer scientist, Edward M. Lerner toiled in the vineyards of high tech for thirty years, as everything from engineer to senior vice president. Then he began writing full time.

His novels run the gamut from near-future technothrillers, like Small Miracles and Energized, to traditional SF, like the InterstellarNet series and Dark Secret. Collaborating with New York Times bestselling author Larry Niven, Lerner also wrote the Fleet of Worlds series of Ringworld companion novels. Much of Lerner's short fiction has been collected in Creative Destruction and Countdown to Armageddon / A Stranger in Paradise. His nonfiction articles on science and technology centerpiece Frontiers of Space, Time, and Thought: Essays and Stories on The Big Questions.

Lerner's 2015 novel, InterstellarNet: Enigma, won the inaugural Canopus Award for interstellar-themed fiction. His writing has also been nominated for Hugo, Locus, and Prometheus awards.

Lerner's new novel is Déjà Doomed.

My Q&A with the author:

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

For Déjà Doomed, I (like to) believe the title will draw readers straight in—and not merely because of the word play on the—precognitive? trick of memory? delusional?—phenomenon of déjà vu.

If the as-yet unidentified someone(s) of the title is doomed from the get-go, that immediately begs several questions. Who is doomed? Doomed to what, exactly? Who or what brought on this impending catastrophe? And what—if anything—can my unsuspecting, soon-to-become targets do about it?

Add in the wonderful cover art by Christina P. Myrvold—the lunar setting and the mysterious alien artifact—and I choose to think the average browser will be hooked.

What’s in a name?

Ah, character names. My main goal in naming characters is simple clarity. Most any name by itself can be distinct enough, but most novels (and Déjà Doomed is no exception) have lots of characters. So: no two characters should have similar-appearing or (planning ahead for an audio book) similar-sounding names. Dale and Gale won’t do, nor Kirsten and Kristen. And no recurring characters should have eminently forgettable, super-common monikers like Joe or Ann.

When characters come from very different backgrounds—as do the Russians and Americans in Déjà Doomed—decidedly ethnic names can serve as useful reminders to the reader. So, for my Russians, I used nothing as commonplace in both cultures as Anna. I’ve got an Ekatrina, with its diminutive Katya. Now there’s a name.

Many writers are into wink-wink, nudge-nudge cleverness in their character names. Arthur Miller did it with his “low man” protagonist Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Herman Melville did it using biblical references with Ishmael and Ahab in Moby Dick. For my taste, that sort of thing is heavy-handed. I’d rather let the characters speak for themselves.

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

First off, he’d be amazed I turned out to be a writer at all. At that age, I had no such aspirations. But once he got over that shock, the subject of Déjà Doomed would be no surprise at all.

I’m a child of the early Space Age: eight years and a few months old when the Russian launch of Sputnik changed everything. I’ve been an avid reader of science fiction for as long as I can remember. By my mid-teens, I’d decided to major in physics. By virtue of my age, I also grew up through the Cold War, so the Great Power rivalry elements of Déjà Doomed also come naturally.

What else (besides the mere fact of the book) might surprise that younger me? The computer aspects, for sure. Computers were far beyond my experience—or most anyone’s experience—in my teen years of the Sixties. Little did I know back then that physics would turn out to be my gateway major to computer engineering.

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

For me, beginnings are definitely harder. Well before I start to write text, I know—in an outline sense—what happens when. That’s not enough. It’s still typically a good 60 to 100 manuscript pages into a novel before I have my final sense for all my major characters. Till that happens, some of any story remains at risk of changing to fit how the characters will react to one another and to circumstances.

Beyond letting me get to know the characters, the first few chapters—sometimes with a few iterations—turn out to involve experimentation. Settling upon the overall pace of the opening. Deciding which parts of the story will be told in-line and which will be flashbacks. Choosing details to be scattered like Easter eggs, as (hopefully subtle) foreshadowing.

As for endings, at all times I (think I) know how things will end up. That’s not to say the perceived ending never evolves as I write, only that there’s always an ending in mind.

Finally (pun intended), there’s the very end of the end. Every book’s closing sentence or short paragraph—something wry, or poignant, or a hook for a possible sequel—always comes seemingly out of nowhere late in the writing process.

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

I see some of my experiences in my characters, though not me.

But opinions differ. People who know me well have commented they do see me in some of my protagonists. Perhaps they’re more objective about it than I am.

Whoever’s right, I hope never to experience personally the sorts of challenges I routinely inflict on my characters. Those guys are expected to earn their room-and-board for what’s typically a year of taking up space in my brain.

Learn more about the author and his work at his website.

My Book, The Movie: Déjà Doomed.

The Page 69 Test: Déjà Doomed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Willa C. Richards

photo credit: Emma Daryl Richards

Willa C. Richards is the author of The Comfort of Monsters. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review and she is the recipient of a PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I think the title of my book The Comfort of Monsters is a good entry point into the novel’s thematic heart. Interestingly enough, it was a late piece of the puzzle. I had a couple of other working titles. For a while I was very fond of The Torturer’s Horse, which is a reference to the W.H. Auden poem “Musée Des Beaux Arts”. I was thinking about the ways that smaller, or perhaps more specifically, less visible kinds of suffering are always going on in the shadows of more public, more visible kinds of horrors. This is certainly the situation in my novel, in which a teenage girl named Dee McBride disappears in the city of Milwaukee, at the same time that Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes are discovered by the MPD.

But The Comfort of Monsters came to me from a book by Jack Halberstraam called Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. This book investigates a few films, one of them being the Silence of the Lambs, in order to discuss how the monsters in these movies are indicative of our culturally conditioned fears. One quote from the essay, which also appears as an epigraph to my book, proposes that modernity has ended the comfort monsters could provide for us. Partly because, as demonstrated in Nazi Germany, for example, modernity has shown us all to be so much a part of our institutions, and our systems, that evil no longer lives within specific individuals, i.e. specific monsters. It lives very much in the banal. Evil exists so much in our everyday existences, which require us to move through these systems, and therefore forces us into collaboration and complicity.

I think this work is in conversation with the novel, which also shows how it’s much easier to identify and isolate one person as the monster-- (a serial killer, a violent ex-boyfriend, a bad cop)-- and to turn that person into the sole source of evil. It’s much harder to admit our interconnectedness within our institutions and therefore the roles we all play when institutional failures occur.

What's in a name?

Sometimes, I truly feel like the character chooses their own name. That seemed like the case for my narrator Peg McBride. (Her full name is Margaret.) My novel started as a short story, and I don’t remember entertaining any other names for her. Of note, I suppose, is the fact that my aunt, my mother’s sister’s name is Peggy. My mother’s relationship with her sister was one among many of the sister relationships I used to inform the writing of Peg and her younger sister Dee.

In my family, nicknames are a big deal. They are a real language of intimacy, of love. Everyone has different nicknames for one another. So I also wanted Peg’s sister Dee to have a nickname for Peg, which was Pegasus, because Dee was really into Greek Mythology. And Dee’s name is shortened from Candy, which is shortened from Candace.

I think because the sister relationship is at the core of the novel for me, it was important to show that level of intimacy on the page, which is demonstrated even in what they call one another. Sometimes they even call each other babe or baby too. Which I know some readers have resisted, or felt creeped out by, but again, when I was growing up this language of intimacy was very common.

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

That’s a tough question. In some sense, I think my teenage self would be very surprised that I even wrote a novel. When I was a teenager, I very, very much wanted to be a poet. The summer before I left for college, I sent a bunch of my poems via email to Ron Wallace who was the head of the Creative Writing program at UW-Madison at the time. So embarrassing.

But he was really chill about the whole thing. And I did end up taking some poetry classes at Madison, but I also took some advanced fiction classes. Going into those classes, I barely knew what a short story was, because we just didn’t read them in high school, so I was really blown away by the form. I remember I turned in a short story to one of my professors and she handed it back to me, and said, “Well, one day you’re going to write a novel.” It seemed like an absurd comment at the time, but I guess she was right.

On a thematic/content level though, I don’t think my teenage self would be very surprised. I have been interested in many of the issues the novel explores for a long time.

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

I love beginnings. Probably because I enjoy the generative stage of writing the most, where I still feel that sense of wonder and awe, like anything could happen. I change beginnings a lot, and will often try many different ones on for size.

Writing endings is more difficult for me. I particularly struggled with the ending to this novel, because, as one friend pointed out, when you evoke a missing person’s story, generally there are only two outcomes. This was a huge constraint for me, especially since I wasn’t strictly writing a thriller or a mystery, and I didn’t want to be confined to only these outcomes. So working within those constraints and finding a way out of them, while staying true to the specific story I was trying to tell, was a real challenge.

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

With first person narrators especially, I find it difficult not to let parts of my personality, elements of my own consciousness into my characters. I often do character sketches so that these elements are used deliberately and so I can distinguish the character from myself really clearly. One writing teacher I had liked to perform interviews, where he would have writers answer questions as if they were their character. It sounds silly, but it’s effective for differentiating the character from yourself, and also for fleshing out simple details, like a character’s favorite color or ice-cream flavor, as well as elaborating on their more complicated, messier attributes like secrets, fears, anxieties, dreams, motivations, etc. I think these two things combined are what create complicated, fully-realized characters.

Visit Willa C. Richards's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Naomi Hirahara

Naomi Hirahara is an Edgar Award-winning author of multiple traditional mystery series and noir short stories. Her Mas Arai mysteries, which have been published in Japanese, Korean and French, feature a Los Angeles gardener and Hiroshima survivor who solves crimes. The seventh and final Mas Arai mystery is Hiroshima Boy, which was nominated for an Edgar Award for best paperback original.

Hirahara's first historical mystery is Clark and Division, which follows a Japanese American family’s move to Chicago in 1944 after being released from a California wartime detention center. Her second Leilani Santiago Hawai‘i mystery, An Eternal Lei, is scheduled to be released in 2022. A former journalist with The Rafu Shimpo newspaper, Hirahara has also written numerous non-fiction history books and curated exhibitions. She has also written a middle-grade novel, 1001 Cranes.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Clark and Division transports the reader to a very specific intersection in Chicago. I like titles that have special meanings for insiders, yet still resonate with outsiders. For those not familiar with Chicago, Clark may evoke Lewis and Clark, so some kind of exploration. And Division, a separation line, which definitely applies to Japanese Americans being released from World War II detention centers. Even native Chicagoans will not know that the Windy City was the No. 1 destination for these released people. I like stories that surprise.

What's in a name?

We don’t learn of the narrator’s name, Aki Ito, until some pages into the novel. Instead her older sister’s name, Rose, is center stage, representing Aki’s diminished stature in her family. Aki has a Japanese name that is frequently mispronounced in America. At twenty years of age, she has constantly battled with discovering and asserting her identity. I like using short surnames as Americans do have a difficult time with long Japanese names.

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

Surprised that I was able to pull off a novel on the Japanese American experience. I never saw novels like these growing up.

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

Beginnings, definitely! Endings are like rolling down a hill. You can’t really change the trajectory of the story that late in the game. But starting it? That can be anywhere.

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

At first I didn’t see much similarities between myself and my narrator, Aki. She’s a younger sister and a bit unsure of herself in the beginning. I’m an older sister used to calling the shots. But we are both the daughters of an immigrant parent who are family interpreters and protectors. I think that I’m like Aki in we are perceived as being harmless and perfectly normal, but in reality, we are quite dangerous.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Interactions with elders.

Visit Naomi Hirahara's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ally Malinenko

Ally Malinenko is a poet, novelist, and librarian living in Brooklyn, New York, where she pens her tales in a secret writing closet before dawn each day.

Her new novel is Ghost Girl.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I think Ghost Girl as a title does a decent amount of work. Maybe it’s a story about a girl who is a ghost. Maybe it’s a story about a girl who sees ghosts. It could go either way. But two things are definite – there’s a ghost and a girl. And that is factually true in the book. That said, I feel I should mention that I did not come up with the title. My publisher did. My book was originally called The Trick of the Devil. We had a list of other potentials but landed on Ghost Girl. Now I can’t imagine it being anything else. Words are funny like that.

What's in a name?

My main character's name is Zera. Zera is a name I made up (apologies in advance to any and all Zera’s out there) specifically because I wanted it to hew close to the word zero. It creates an immediate underdog status and we all love to root for an underdog. But in defiance of that underdog status, my main character hates her given name and instead goes by Zee. Just the sound of the letter. Short. Simple. Pointed. Stubborn, even. Much like Zee. It was a way to control a name she did not pick and does not like.

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

Not terribly to be honest. I think she’d be more surprised that I wrote so many other stories before finally realizing that middle grade horror was my childhood favorite and that’s what I should be doing. But also I think she would understand why I strayed so far from it. She would vividly remember the way people questioned her reading choices, her love of all things terrifying. She would remember that there was a level of shaming that happened. That being a horror fan, as a kid, was lonely.

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

Neither. I find the middle hard. I’m not a plotter, I despise outlines, so when I sit down to write a story, I know how it begins and I know how it ends. Everything in between is subject to change, other than the central character growth. I write this way so I have time to figure out my characters, to play with events, and most of all to allow myself the open space for changing my mind and reversing course. As long as I know where the road ends, I’m willing to try different paths to getting there.

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 most writers infuse their characters with aspects of themselves – at the very least they are our creation after all. I think there is a lot of me in Zee – from her interests, to her world view, to her questionable decision making.

I think ultimately whenever we create a character, be they like us or world’s apart, we are crafting a story for the purpose of engaging in empathy. We are saying to all the strangers in the world, “This is how I feel and what I think? Do you?” and we are sending that message out and hoping for the answer to be “Yes. Yes I do.”

Stories are about connection, about weaving a slightly stronger web than we had before we wrote or read or shared something.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Art of all kinds has squirreled its way into my work, to be honest, but more than anything it would be music. For Ghost Girl, Zee as a character lived in my head for a long time but I could never find the right story for her. Then I started listening to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. At the start of a track called "Tupelo," there is a thunder crash. It was in that moment, ascending the steps of the subway and hearing that crash that this story started to take place. There was a storm. People were missing. And a stranger with ill intentions had come to town.

The influence grew from there. There are, at printing, seventeen references to Nick Cave’s lyrics in Ghost Girl.

Visit Ally Malinenko's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cookie Hiponia

Cookie Hiponia was born in the Philippines and immigrated to America when she was nine years old. As the mother of children born into two cultures, Hiponia had spent years searching for books that reflect her family’s experience. When she couldn’t find such a book, Hiponia heeded Toni Morrison and wrote the book she wanted to read with her daughters. We Belong is that book, a semi-autobiographical middle grade novel-in-verse about the Pilipina/o/x American immigrant experience that weaves in Tagalog cosmic mythology. It’s in bookstores under Hiponia’s other name “Cookie Hiponia Everman.” Hiponia lives in Seattle with her family.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I chose the title We Belong because it conveys the main theme of my book. You instantly know what it's about by the title alone.

What's in a name?

I chose the names Stella and Luna for the daughters' names in We Belong because they're the equivalents of my own daughters' names, Tala and Diana. Stella in Spanish is Tala in Tagalog is Star in English. Luna in Spanish is Buan in Tagalog is Moon in English is Diana the Roman Moon Goddess.

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

My teenaged self would never have thought she could write about abuse and trauma in a compassionate way. Maybe that's because my teenaged self was still in the midst of the trauma.

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

Neither? Both? I don't write linearly; I don't know if something I write will be the beginning or the ending until it's all done.

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

In much the same way that all the animal characters in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh books was an extension of Christopher Robin, the boy protagonist, all my characters are extensions of me. I often write my stories as "medicine," in the tradition of North American Indigenous and First Nations peoples. Each character is an aspect of me, grappling with and healing whatever that character is going through.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music is the biggest inspiration for my writing. When I draft a novel, I also start drafting an Original Soundtrack Spotify playlist. I tack up a bunch of post-it notes that I've collated of the ideas for a novel, and then put my entire Spotify discography on shuffle. When a song strikes me as having the exact emotional tone I'm trying to hit with a chapter or scene in the book, I add that to the OST. As I get more ideas for emotional beats from songs, I add them to the OST playlist. When I start drafting in earnest, I play the OST playlist and write, rearranging the songs as the story develops. It's organized chaos, but it works.

Visit Cookie Hiponia's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lena Nguyen

Lena Nguyen is a writer of speculative fiction and fantasy. She was raised in Phoenix, Arizona and has studied writing all over the world---including at Stanford, Brown, Harvard, and UCLA. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Cornell University, where she also taught as a lecturer of English, leading classes on creative writing, composition, comparative literature, and cultural studies.

Nguyen's career has been dedicated to writing. Along with lecturing and teaching, she has worked as a researcher of science fiction; a literary novel judge; a creative consultant; a copy editor; a developmental editor; a game developer and writer; and an assistant editor of the literary publication EPOCH. Her science fiction has won several awards.

Nguyen's new science fiction thriller is We Have Always Been Here.

My Q&A with the author:

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

We Have Always Been Here was actually originally titled Biophilia, which can be described as "the innate urge to affiliate with other forms of life." I read that phrase in a book somewhere and was fascinated by the wording of it. There was something very alien-sounding and eerie about both the sound of the word and its meaning, which I thought captured the themes and atmosphere of the novel very well. The book is preoccupied with questions of what "life" is, especially in the context of artificial intelligence and androids. The main character, Park, is almost inexplicably drawn to robots and is fascinated by their psychology and inner lives, while most of the other characters refuse to see their clockwork mechanisms as any kind of life at all. This forms the crux of the conflict of the novel.

However, my writing mentor at the time informed me that Biophilia is both an ugly title and too obscure to really capture reader attention or convey what the book is really about. So I changed it to We Have Always Been Here, which is something the major android character says to Park in the first chapter. She asks, "Are we here?" in that she's inquiring if they've finally reached their destination; the android, being very cryptically literal in his interpretation of questions, responds, "We have always been here." (As in, they have always existed in this plane of existence and have never left it.) I think the title is interesting and complex enough to tease out a lot of the questions the novel poses: namely, it makes you wonder who the 'we' is referring to, as well as the 'here'... Is it a state of mind, a presence, an android, an alien, all of humanity? The title makes you want to find out!

What's in a name?

I chose "Grace Park" as the main character's name for a few different reasons, though her surname, Park, came first. All of the crewmembers in the novel are referred to by their surnames, with one notable exception, and the androids go by mononyms, which makes the human names start to blend in with the android ones. Referring to the humans only by their surnames almost dehumanizes them: I think you automatically relate more to a "Bobby" or a "Rick," but calling someone just "Nguyen" feels distancing, which is what I wanted to capture. In addition, the sound of "Park" sort of began to capture the flat, clinical, brusque nature of the character after enough repetition: it's very short, which she is with other people, and she even comments on the irony of how her name could be interpreted as an open, sunny space (which she is very much not).

I gave her the first name "Grace" because I wanted it to be jarring to the reader when they finally heard it for the first time: Park is associated with awkwardness, introversion, and paranoia, and graceful she is not. There's also some Biblical and religious wordplay that comes into play with her first name later in the book, but I'll leave that for readers to see for themselves.

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

I think my teenage self would be extremely surprised to see that my first novel is a science fiction thriller. Growing up, I was a hardcore fantasy reader, to the point where I don't think I read very much else. I would have been shocked as a teenager to see that I wrote something about space and robots and science, rather than a story with magic and swords and romance!

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

I find it infinitely harder to write beginnings. I think I wrote the ending to We Have Always Been Here extremely early in the writing process, and it didn't change at all, plot-wise, throughout the entire creation of the manuscript, only getting tweaked for prose reasons. But I changed the beginning of the book at least six or seven times, rewriting it over and over again from scratch. I think I just find beginnings so much more intimidating. They're your hook, your first impression to the reader, your first introduction to the world and characters. You need to give just enough context so that people can figure out what's going on, but not so much that the story is horribly bogged down and boring, but not so rapidfire that things are disorientating and confusing. It's a difficult balance to strike, especially when you're setting up the puzzle pieces of a mystery!

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 a good question. Generally, my protagonists are fairly similar to me in personality (or at least to my idealized version of me). However, Park was the first character that I thought was vastly different in both temperament and thought process: on the surface, she's extremely disparate from how I behave in real life.

However, with some introspection, I've come to realize that, while we're very dissimilar in general personalities, I think a lot of Park's mindset stemmed from my own state of mind during the time that I was writing her. She's a snapshot of my life at that particular moment, though not a window into my overall personality or soul. I tend to think I'm talkative, confident, social, and charismatic; Park is cold, independent, abrasive, and sharp. But looking back, I think her isolation, awkwardness, and homesickness for others was a reflection of my own feelings, since I was in this icy, wintry foreign place missing my friends and family; her feelings of being an outsider looking in probably pulled from my own. But I'm back home among loved ones now, so she feels more separate from me every day. Still, she's an interesting peek into my psychology from that time!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I think the biggest non-literary inspirations for We Have Always Been Here were definitely films, namely I, Robot, Alien, and Ex Machina. I also listened to "Space Song" by the band Beach House--set to a fan-made video edited from clips of 2001: A Space Odyssey--over and over on repeat when I was in the trenches with the book!

Visit Lena Nguyen's website.

The Page 69 Test: We Have Always Been Here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Lange

Richard Lange’s stories have appeared in The Sun, The Iowa Review, and Best American Mystery Stories, and as part of the Atlantic Monthly’s Fiction for Kindle series. "Apocrypha" was awarded the 2015 Short Story Dagger by Great Britain's Crime Writers' Association. He is the author of the collections Dead Boys and Sweet Nothing and the novels This Wicked World, Angel Baby, which won the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers, The Smack and the newly released Rovers. He received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.

My Q&A with Lange:

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

A title should intrigue potential readers but not confuse them. I usually end up pulling a word or phrase from the book, something evocative but also mysterious, so that when the reader stumbles upon it in the text, there’s a bit of an “Aha” moment.

In the case of Rovers, the working title was The Little Red God, which came from a poem written by a Montana convict in the 1950s. Rovers tells the story of Jesse and his mentally-challenged brother, Edgar. The brothers are rovers, vampire-like beings who must drink human blood to survive. Jesse turned Edgar into a rover in order to watch over him in the wake of their mother’s death.

Edgar believes his craving for blood is caused by an actual creature living inside him, a creature he referred to in the first draft as the Little Red God. I changed this to “the little devil” in the second draft, which didn’t feel like a great title possibility, so I ended up going with Rovers. It’s a good word, painting a picture in your mind, and its meaning in the book is explained in the first chapter. There’s already so much going on in the story, I decided to keep the title simple and fairly direct.

What's in a name?

I generally make the names pretty generic in my books. I like to keep readers moving along without them pausing to chuckle at my cleverness. This is a good rule of thumb for every element of a book. Naming the characters in Rovers, though, required a little more thought than usual, as some of them were born in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, in France, Spain, and even Africa. I looked up names from these eras and regions, sometimes consulting lists of authors, scientists, politicians, and other prominent people and recombining first and last names to make my own. I still kept them simple, but also historically accurate, thus Claudine Dejardin, Diego Mateo Casal, and Amadu Beaumont.

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

Fourteen-year-old me would be less surprised by Rovers than 40-year-old me. The elevator pitch for the book is “Of Mice and Men with vampires.” I was a big horror/sci fi fan as a teen, and some of my earliest fictional output was in these genres, so that kid wouldn’t be shocked at all that a hundred years later I’d write a vampire novel.

Forty-year-old me, though, whose literary tastes and models ran more to William Faulkner, Ray Carver, and Elmore Leonard than Stephen King; who, in fact, had not read or written horror or science fiction since discovering Kerouac and Hemingway at age sixteen, would certainly be thinking “What the hell?” Of course, he couldn’t have known how restless he’d be as a writer once he had a few books under his belt, how unwilling to be pigeonholed, and how eager to explore new avenues as an artist. Forty-year-old me thought he had everything figured out, but he was wrong.

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

They’re equally as hard but present different challenges. With beginnings, I’m trying to grab readers and drag them into the book, intrigue or excite them. With endings, the goal is to encapsulate the experience of the entire book in a few paragraphs and make it resonate as something larger than just the plot wrapping up, something philosophical or thematic. I probably work more on endings, tweaking them. Those last paragraphs are going to be what readers take away from the book. They’re going to loom large in their memories, so they better be good. In the case of Rovers, the last paragraphs mirror the first. It’d be a major spoiler to discuss this any further, so I won’t. I will say that I hadn’t planned the book this way – I don’t plan ahead much when writing – but when it happened, I knew it was great.

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

You can’t write well-rounded, realistic characters without putting something of yourself into them. It’s like dreaming. When you dream of your brother or your wife or an old friend, it’s not actually that person in the dream, it’s your construction of that person. Everyone in your dreams is created and voiced by you, is you. Similarly, all the characters in Rovers think the thoughts I’ve given them and speak the lines I’ve written for them, and therefore can’t help but have aspects of me if I’m doing the hard work of writing truthfully.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

A conscious non-literary influence for Rovers were the ’70s-era drive-in tragedies that captivated me as a kid (the novel is set in 1976), films like Aloha Bobby and Rose, Billy Jack, Macon County Line, Buster and Billie, Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, etc., etc. These films had a scuzzy romanticism and an anti-establishment attitude that set them apart from more mainstream fare and were as heartfelt as they were lurid, a range I was going for in Rovers. I didn’t set out to write a horror novel, I set out to put Dusty and Sweets McGee on the page, and I hope I succeeded in capturing some of the same shambling magic that it and other films of its ilk have.

Visit Richard Lange's website.

The Page 69 Test: This Wicked World.

The Page 69 Test: Angel Baby.

The Page 69 Test: The Smack.

The Page 69 Test: Rovers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Moisés Naím

Moisés Naím is a Venezuelan author and prize-winning journalist whose writing on international affairs is read worldwide, appearing in such publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, El País, and many others. He is the author of twelve nonfiction books, including Illicit and the New York Times bestseller The End of Power. A former contributing editor to The Atlantic, Naím was also the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine for fourteen years.

Two Spies in Caracas, his first work of fiction, is based on his experience as a former member of Venezuela’s economic cabinet. Naím lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Plenty.

This is a story of two seasoned spies who work undercover in Caracas, the capital of the country with the largest reserves of oil on the planet. The century-old alliance of Venezuela and the United States has been broken, and Hugo Chavez, a new charismatic military leader, now controls the country. Instead of closed links with Washington, he wants close ties with Havana. The CIA sends its best operative – a woman – to Caracas to lead the effort to stop Venezuela from falling into Fidel Castro’s lap. Castro, in turn, has sent one of his top agents to Caracas with the mission to neutralize the US influence. Inevitably, the two meet – and like each other. A lot happens until they discover who is the person they love. Thus …Two Spies in Caracas.

What's in a name?

The title, the opening phrase, and the last paragraph: these three elements deserve –need –the most attention. I have watched as excellent columns, interesting cover stories and book covers are undermined by a forgettable title, a mediocre cover, an unoriginal opening phrase, or an unsurprising end. Fortunately, none of the editors in the many countries where Two Spies in Caracas has been published asked me to change the title. Even when I told them that I would consider changing the title if they –who know the audience—felt that a different title would be better. It was reassuring when they didn’t want to change the title.

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

A young me would have been completely surprised by the story of my first fiction book but not by the fact that I managed to write one. The surprise would be to realize that the democratic country in which I grew up was no longer a democracy.

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

As I said, these are two critically important elements. I give them a lot of thought and change them often. The first title I use is never the one we (me and the publisher) pick for the published book.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Curiosity.

Visit Moisés Naím's website.

--Marshal Zeringue