Ruthanna Emrys

Ruthanna Emrys lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, DC with her wife and their large, strange family. Her stories have appeared in a number of venues, including Strange Horizons, Analog, and Tor.com. She is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, which began with Winter Tide.

Emrys's new novel is A Half-Built Garden.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I wrote this entire novel under the working title of The Fifth Power – a reference to how the people of 2083 think about themselves. They see the dandelion networks – which integrate human opinion with AI advocates for rivers and prairies and trees – as improving on four earlier forms of power (nature dominating humans, religion, nation-states, corporations).

My editor hated that title, though, so I ended up with a whole page of ideas riffing on images and ideas that were important to the story. These ranged from Bring Us To This Season (emphasizing the Jewish characters with a prayer about survival through hard times), to The Reach and the Grasp (referring to the alien Ringers’ obsession with symbiosis), to about two minutes of consideration for Symbiosis and Synthesis. I do think first contact is a kind of novel-of-manners, but this isn’t actually an Austen riff and I’m the only one who’d get the joke.

I finally chose A Half-Built Garden as a metaphor that works for all the conflicting groups in the book. They’re all in the middle of some great effort, whether it’s keeping Earth habitable or building a Dyson Sphere, and for all of them success depends on the outcome of first contact.

What's in a name?

A Half-Built Garden starts with two species of aliens visiting Earth together. They’re from the same solar system, and have been building a syncretic culture ever since the more technologically-advanced planet reached out to the stone-age one and started sharing technology. They expect to build this same sort of beneficial, somewhat patronizing, relationship with humanity.

Early in that original contact, the Ringers started using names that could be translated via molecular diagram. A thousand-ish years later, those names carry meaning related to the substances in question. Cytosine, the ship’s “first mother,” is named for a key component of DNA (and her species’ equivalent of DNA), which carries connotations of centrality and fertility. Rhamnetin, whose job involves asking difficult, annoying questions, is named for what readers might recognize as a compound that makes cloves smell so nice – for Ringers it might also carry a mix of ideas around comfort and sharpness and healing.

Other names might not translate as well: when Cytosine is telling a story about a trickster figure, she calls her “Caffeine” in English where the original name is a Ringer stimulant.

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

First contact stories have always been my favorite sub-genre, and in my teens I was always making up stories about humans learning to communicate with aliens. On the other hand, I didn’t actually like humans very much at the time. If a starship had shown up and invited me aboard, I’d have left Earth without a backwards look! So my teenage self would be most surprised by the degree to which the main characters are attached to their planet, and see learning to thrive there as a necessary precursor to surviving farther afield.

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

Beginnings are easy! I have so many files that are just clever openings that never went anywhere. That doesn’t mean I never have to mess with the start of a book, although for A Half-Built Garden I mostly haven’t. The first scene with Judy going out to investigate a pollution readout on the Potomac, and finding an alien spaceship instead, hasn’t changed much from when I first shared it at a reading in 2018.

Endings, on the other hand, are a challenge that feeds back through the whole process of writing. They have to wrap up everything I’ve done with theme and plot and character, and everything that comes before has to feed into that conclusion. I’m often wrong about where the ending is, because by the time I’m getting close I feel anxious and eager to wrap everything up. So I tend to rush the first draft. In this case, my editor told me that I needed to add an epilogue, which is not something you often hear from editors!

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

For any given book, I give myself constraints to make the writing process more interesting. One of my rules with this book was to be very personally speculative – what is the future of my neighborhood, my home ecosystem, my great-grandchildren? I thought deliberately about how the values and ideas that I’m passing on to my kids might play out in a couple of generations. So Judy and her family have a lot in common with me for that reason – and would also find my limited modern sensibilities exasperating!

Judy has a lot of me in her, from her progressive Jewish spirituality to her desire to balance a lot of different “jobs” rather than focus on one expertise. Her efforts to negotiate with her co-parents also draw from my own experiences raising kids in a group household. On the other hand, she’s not used to being much of an activist. She’s from a generation that takes a relatively just, cooperative society for granted, and would much rather stick to that society’s day-to-day maintenance work than get involved in world-changing events. Part of the story is how she learns to apply her strengths to that level of stakes.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I first came to DC on a policy fellowship at the Environmental Protection Agency. I got very involved with the EPA’s work on crowdsourcing and citizen science, and excited about the potential for democratizing how people interact with the world around them – not just collecting pollution data, but asking and answering their own questions, making decisions about ecosystem management based on a deeper awareness of those answers. The watershed networks build on these social and computational technologies to deal with climate change, and to change the whole relationship that humans have with the rest of nature.

When I first started writing, I sat down with a couple of my old EPA colleagues, and asked, “What are the coolest things going on in watershed management right now?” Their nerdy speculation didn’t all end up on the page, but a lot of it went into the behind-the-scenes worldbuilding. And their excitement itself, the way that DC policy wonks fall in love with the details of solving big problems, shaped the remnant U.S. government that shows up to talk with the Ringers. Who’s still working at NASA in 2083? People who are willing to spend decades fighting impossible battles, and to make Star Trek jokes while they do it.

Visit Ruthanna Emrys's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda Quain

photo credit: Rosalinda Dauval

Amanda Quain is a writer, indie bookseller, and general life enthusiast. When she’s not shouting about her favorite new books, she loves theatre, baking, rock climbing, marching band, and the overall pursuit of adventure. If forced to choose, Quain’s favorite Austen hero is Edward Ferrars, though she’ll always have a soft spot for Mr. Bingley. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her husband and her cat. Accomplished is her first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Accomplished is, as a title, going to offer different things for different readers! For the Austen fan, it’s a direct line to Georgiana Darcy (or, if not to her, at least to a very Regency requirement.) Almost every time Georgiana is discussed in the original text, she’s referenced as accomplished – it’s basically her main character trait.

The (very early on) original working title was Georgie Darcy’s Back on Top, which is definitely more obvious, but I absolutely adore Accomplished and wouldn’t change it – it’s an intriguing title for those new to Austen and a nice wink and nod to my fellow Austen fans.

What's in a name?

The beauty of writing adaptations is that most of the names are already there! I did choose to use nicknames for most of the characters to give the book a more modern feel – plus, in Georgie’s case, the use of her nickname is a sticking point in the strained relationship with her extra-posh mother. It gets shortened even more to ‘George’ by her one friend (and maybe eventually love interest???), Avery, which I just love as an instant way of showing intimacy between two characters. Developing their intimacy verbally – through banter, through inside jokes, through the shared rhythm of their speaking that only they share – was one of the greatest joys of this book.

My only other surprising name choice would be renaming Mr. Darcy as Fitz, short for Fitzwilliam, if only because most adaptations name him Will. I also changed the name of our main antagonist, George Wickham, to make Wickham his first name. Jane Austen may have been able to get away with giving all of her characters the same three names, but in contemporary books, that sort of thing is more frowned upon!

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

The first few books I wrote all had fantasy or speculative twists, so she might be surprised to see that I’d landed in contemporary – but in retrospect, I’d been preparing for this my whole reading life. While I do love reading big splashy fantasy or sci-fi novels, my comfort books, the books I return to over and over again, are all contemporary. There’s a direct line from the dozens of Meg Cabot books I inhaled as a child to Accomplished.

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

Beginnings, for sure! It’s funny – of all of my projects, Accomplished is the only one where the opening is essentially unchanged from the initial draft. In fact, the opening line – “My big brother, Fitzwilliam Darcy, could suck it” – actually is the same first line from my very first draft.

Usually, though, it takes me three or four tries to get to the correct starting point. I love writing endings; it’s so satisfying to wrap up everything you’ve been working towards, to make the point you’ve been hinting at the entire story. Plus, endings usually have a lot more kissing than beginnings do.

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

While no one character in this book has an exact real-world equivalent, I’ve hidden bits of myself and my loved ones all over the page. Georgie’s stubbornness and determination is all me, and so is her older brother Fitz’s fierce protectiveness. The way that Georgie and her best guy Avery talk to each other is the same rhythm that my husband and I always fall into. I think that it’s hard to write characters that aren’t connected to you in some way – even if they’re almost entirely different, I need some thread of connectivity to make them sound authentic and lived in.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

This book would not exist without its non-literary inspirations! Most heavily, it’s influenced by Clueless and Legally Blonde which, in addition to both being near-perfect movies, do an amazing job of taking a protagonist who doesn’t realize the influence she’s having on the world around her and allowing her to grow without forcing her to change.

Clueless, in particular, was one of the first pieces of media that showed me the full breadth of what an adaptation could be. Jane Austen would recognize almost nothing from the world that Clueless inhabits, but she would still recognize the characters as her own (Clueless, for any who may not know, is based on Austen’s Emma) and I think that’s just absolutely spectacular. Accomplished has sometimes been pitched as ‘finally giving Georgiana Darcy the Clueless treatment she always deserved’, and I really tried to imbue the book with that same sense of fun. (Even if I’ll never write a put-down as utterly devastating as “you’re a virgin who can’t drive.” Way harsh, Tai.)

Visit Amanda Quain's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liz Michalski

Liz Michalski is the author of Evenfall and a contributor to Writer Unboxed and Author in Progress. A former reporter and editor, Michalski lives with her family in Massachusetts, where she loves reading fairy tales and sometimes, writing them. Darling Girl is her second novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Depends upon the reader. For the Peter Pan fanatic, the word darling will hopefully bring up an echo of the original story and Wendy, Michael and John. But the book is about more than just Peter. "Darling Girl" is a term of endearment, and the story explores the relationship of the Darling women not just with Peter, but with each other. Also if you read it quickly, the title can be misread as Daring Girl, which I like, since my female characters are all quite brave in their own way. It was Darling Girl from the beginning for me.

What's in a name?

Because I wrote a reimagined tale, some of the names — such as Peter, Tinkerbell, Wendy, and Jane — were obvious. Traditionally, Jane’s daughter is named Margaret, but I felt she was far enough away from the canon that I could change it. I chose Holly because it’s a plant that is evergreen, which worked on several levels — it plays into the idea of Peter Pan not growing up, as well as Holly’s interest in the cosmetics field and beauty. But it also represents hope, which, despite everything I threw at her, Holly always does. And as a bonus, I’d read when researching the plant that indigenous people used it as a heart stimulant, and Holly’s heart is in need of a jolt.

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

Oh Lord, not at all. I was the kid sitting on the floor of the library devouring books about hobbits and magic cauldrons and Merlin and the dark rising. I spent a ridiculous amount of time figuring out a way to bring Frodo back from the Undying Lands. If I was going to write anything, it was going to be this.

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

Beginnings are relatively easy — I tend not to write the first few pages until I have a very clear picture in my head, almost word for word, of what I’m going to say. Endings are much harder. I always know where my story is going to wind up, but the road to that final destination changes from draft to draft.

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

There’s probably a little bit of Holly in me — I definitely have that fierce instinct to protect and shelter my kids no matter what, and finding the sweet spot between stepping back and stepping in can be a balancing act. And I have a private snarky Jane side, if you think of Jane as Dame Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am a big believer in feeding your subconscious a rich and varied diet and then getting out of the way and seeing what happens. I take inspiration anywhere I can get it. Lots of time in nature, primarily, but also movies, museums, and people watching.

Visit Liz Michalski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

May Cobb

May Cobb earned her MA in literature from San Francisco State University, and her essays and interviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the Rumpus, Edible Austin, and Austin Monthly. Her novels include Big Woods, The Hunting Wives, and the recently released My Summer Darlings. A Texas native, Cobb lives in Austin with her family.

My Q&A with the author:

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

For My Summer Darlings, title was very important to me. This one came to out of the blue, and very much hints at the villain's manipulation of the main characters. I also wanted to make clear that it was a summer book! There was some back and forth with my editor about the title - we considered naming it something else - but at the end of the day My Summer Darlings won out!

What's in a name?

I think the name that was most important to me as I sat down to write My Summer Darlings was the name of the neighborhood, Eden Place. I knew going in that I wanted to set myself some structural boundaries--that the novel takes place over a summer and that it takes place wholly within the confines of the neighborhood--so I knew that naming Eden Place would be important. In calling it Eden Place, I wanted to tap into the book's themes of temptation, seduction, and betrayal, and also, the shattering of innocence.

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

Ha! Great question! I would say very surprised. When I was a teenager, I didn't really know I wanted to become a writer but if you'd asked me then what I wanted to write about, it would've probably been a serious, nonfiction book about U2 or something.

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

I honestly find the middle of the book to be the most challenging. Beginnings for me are the fun, exploratory times when my characters are coming to life on the page for the first time for me and there's a million possibilities about what could happen and I'm just trying to listen to them, get it all down, set the tone of what's to come. This is my favorite part of writing the book. And endings are fun in their own way, too, because it's like, oh my goodness I can see the finish line and (usually!) how to get there! So there's this energy in writing endings that kicks in and my daily word count shoots up! It's the in between--the middle section--that gets draggy and tedious for me!

Visit May Cobb's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Mead

Tom Mead is a UK crime fiction author specialising in locked-room mysteries.

He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, International Thriller Writers, and the Society of Authors.

Mead's debut novel is Death and the Conjuror.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title Death and the Conjuror does a great deal to transport readers into the story- it helps to establish an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue. The title went through various changes along the line, and in the end I came up with a number of alternatives and this was the one the publisher liked best. The titular "conjuror" is a retired music hall magician named Joseph Spector who is recruited by Scotland Yard to assist with the investigation into an apparently impossible murder.

What's in a name?

I spent a very long time coming up with the names for my characters; each has various interpretations and hidden meanings. Of course "Spector" is homophonous with "specter" and also connotes "inspector," which helps to bridge the gap between the macabre and almost uncanny atmosphere that accompanies the crimes and the keen logical eye which Spector brings to bear in order to find out the truth. Other key characters include George Flint of Scotland Yard- a stolid, old-fashioned name to match a sturdy, reliable character- and Anselm Rees, a Viennese psychoanalyst who is my fictionalization of Sigmund Freud.

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

I think my teenage self would be pleasantly surprised by Death and the Conjuror. It's the sort of book I've been trying to write for years, but I just didn't have the experience. Developing your own plot and writing style is a craft which you hone over time, so in many ways this is the culmination of a lifetime's worth of reading and writing.

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

I write murder mysteries in the golden age style, where the emphasis is on playing fair with the reader. That means providing all the clues they would need in order to solve the puzzle for themselves. As such, I usually come up with the ending first- I need to know what has really happened so that I can set about creating all manner of confusions and misdirections to thread into the narrative.

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

I don't have much in common with my main character, Joseph Spector, though we do share a fascination with the macabre and uncanny. And of course I love stage magic and am fascinated with all the gimmicks and clever tricks which go into a performance- though I'm an introvert and hopelessly lacking in any skill when it comes to legerdemain.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I'm a huge theatre fan, which is why I like to write about actors and performers. And of course I love stage magic, though I am just as fascinated by the psychology which underpins the art of illusion as I am by the technical gimmicks behind the scenes. Henning Nelms, a professional magician who wrote two brilliant murder mysteries under the pseudonym Hake Talbot, also wrote a fantastic book called Magic and Showmanship which is crammed with insight into the complex relationship between magician and audience. I've found that to be very influential on my mystery writing.

Visit Tom Mead's website.

My Book, The Movie: Death and the Conjuror.

The Page 69 Test: Death and the Conjuror.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liz Alterman

Liz Alterman is the author of a young adult novel, He’ll Be Waiting. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, and other outlets. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and three sons where she spends most days microwaving the same cup of coffee and looking up synonyms. When she isn't writing, she's reading.

Alterman's new novel is The Perfect Neighborhood.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to drawing readers into the story. The title is a wink to the reader, alerting them that this community is anything but “perfect.”

My working title was People in Your Neighborhood taken from a line of dialogue: “Who’s more dangerous: the stranger who picks you up on a highway or the people in your neighborhood?” But in looking at it I’m glad the publisher suggested a change as it's a mouthful and would take up quite a bit of real estate on the cover.

The novel explores the notion that you can think you’ve found an ideal community to raise your family but you really never know what’s going on inside your neighbors’ homes, and I think the title does a good job of hinting at that.

What's in a name?

As my family would tell you, I struggle with naming characters. I often ask my kids for suggestions over dinner. (Sometimes they're willing to help, others, they roll their eyes.) I read a lot of baby name lists from the years the characters were born for inspiration and to see what was popular during that time period. When writing this novel, I wanted the names to have an air of elegance because these characters are well-off and live in an upscale area. I have one character even comment on other characters: "Even their names—Allison and Christopher Langley—sounded clean, rich, regal."

The town's name—Oak Hill—was just as important to me as the characters' names because I wanted it to convey the notion of a bucolic setting, a place families aspire to put down roots.

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

I find the beginning really challenging because I know, as a reader, if I'm not hooked immediately, I’m tempted to move on and I’m sure others feel the same way. With so many things (from novels to streaming services) competing for readers' attention, if you can't capture someone's attention at the onset, you run the risk of losing them pretty quickly.

I knew that I wanted to open this novel with the gossipy voices of neighbors weighing in on the sudden split of the town's golden couple. My goal was to make readers feel as if they were being invited into this community's inner circle. Hearing these rumors also sets the tone for the story and establishes the setting—this is a place where your secrets probably aren't safe for long.

I also try hard to make each chapter ending compelling so readers want to keep turning pages. I love it when I find myself reading a novel and saying, "Just one more chapter, then I'll get up and make dinner!" I find endings a bit less daunting and a little more fun than crafting chapter openings, but that said, I often rewrite them a dozen times until I feel like they're (hopefully) doing the job of making readers want to continue.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My family definitely inspires my writing. As a parent, my greatest fear is that something bad will happen to my children. In The Perfect Neighborhood, a child goes missing on his walk home from kindergarten. I wanted to tap into the terror that sets off, not only for the boy's parents but for the community at large. I also wanted to explore the idea of the guilt working mothers often feel because they can't be everywhere at once.

Visit Liz Alterman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Graham

Barbara Graham is the author of the New York Times bestseller Eye of My Heart, the national bestseller Women Who Run with the Poodles, and Camp Paradox, a memoir. Graham has written for many publications, including O, National Geographic Traveler, Time, and Vogue. Her plays have been produced Off-Broadway in New York, and at theatres around the county.

Graham's new novel is What Jonah Knew.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I hope the title of my psychological thriller, What Jonah Knew, intrigues readers and makes them want to find out exactly what it is that Jonah knew. The reveal drives the novel’s narrative.

What's in a name?

Jonah’s name is important. When Jonah is born, his dad, Matt, asks Lucie, the baby’s mom, “You really want to name him after the guy in the Old Testament who gets eaten by a whale?” Lucie replies: “Yes, because he gets tossed back up on land three days later, unhurt. So actually it’s a hero’s story.” Lucie believes the name will confer extra resilience on their son. Which, as it turns out, he’ll need in spades.

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

I think my teenage reader self would be pleased and not all that surprised, since the seeds of the novel were planted back then. I loved books with magical or mystical elements. One was Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Another was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And when I was a bit younger, I devoured every Nancy Drew ever published. Mysticism plus magic realism plus mystery—and you have a sense of What Jonah Knew.

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

From the moment I conceived the idea for the novel, I knew where it was headed. The challenge for me was figuring out how to get there. I wrote and rewrote the beginning many times. Even after I was sure I’d finally gotten it right, a writer friend suggested that I try flipping the first two chapters. Which I did—reluctantly—and it made all the difference by bringing the reader into the heart of the story right away. Sometimes when you get overly attached to a particular approach, you can’t see what might be obvious to a wise, trusted reader or editor.

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

Though the story of What Jonah Knew is in no way my story, the characters certainly draw on my life experience. Lucie, Jonah’s mom, tends to be anxious and overprotective, something that as the mother of a son I know quite a bit about. Other characters in the book draw on some of the qualities and histories of various friends and family members. I think it’s impossible for that not to happen. Writers are often told to “write what you know.” In fiction, downloading from one’s own life to enrich one’s characters is inevitable and happens organically, even when the story you’re telling is entirely invented.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Many years of studying and practicing Buddhist meditation have profoundly influenced my view of the world, as well as my writing. As an essayist and journalist, my understanding of the core principles of Buddhist teachings have influenced how I’ve seen and written about all sorts of things. In What Jonah Knew, the spiritual influence is pretty overt in both the narrative and a few of the characters. There’s even a Tibetan Buddhist rimpoche—or acclaimed master—who makes an appearance and whose wisdom plays a key role in how the story unfolds.

Visit Barbara Graham's website.

The Page 69 Test: What Jonah Knew.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Temblador

Alex Temblador is the award-winning author of Secrets of the Casa Rosada. She has an essay in Living Beyond Borders: Growing Up Mexican in America and a short story in Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology.

Temblador applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Half Outlaw, and reported the following:

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

When my uncle called me ‘half outlaw,’ I was struck by the phrase. What makes you an outlaw, and subsequently, only part or ‘half’ of said outlaw? To me, ‘half outlaw’ sounds like someone who does good and lives in the light, but if necessary, has no trouble with the dark side, a place beyond the law. And this accurately describes Raqi, a successful lawyer who was raised by her uncle, Dodge, and his one-percenter motorcycle club, the Lawless. Even as an adult, when she has committed her life to the law, she’s continually pulled back to the past by the Lawless who pressure her to represent them in court and convince her to go on a motorcycle ride in honor of the passing of her uncle who she hasn’t talked to in 13 years.

On another level, Half Outlaw represents Raqi’s identity as half-Mexican, half white. Although she exists comfortably as a Mixed woman, she’s always pulled by society or the Lawless toward an identity that she’s not.

What's in a name?

Raqi (pronounced ‘Rocky’) is short for Raquel, which is my sister Tiffany’s middle name. Tiffany has intellectual and physical disabilities that make it so she can’t walk or communicate, but she’s the strongest, most bad ass woman that I know. It felt right to name my character, in part, after my sister, because Raqi has to be a strong woman in a world that is constantly trying to push her down. That said, I didn’t want my main character to go by Raquel because it denotes a softer type of person than Raqi is. And if you think about how Raqi is pronounced, like ‘rocky,’ then you discover another layer to her name. Life is rocky, or unstable, for Raqi in Half Outlaw, but even then, she’s made of hard stuff and won’t easily break.

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

My teenage self would be pretty stoked if she read Half Outlaw. I think she would be a little concerned by how dark the story can get and wonder why the book wasn’t a fantasy novel. However, she would love the magical realism and feel seen as a Mixed girl reading a story about a Mixed woman.

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

Endings are much harder for me to write. I wrote the ending to Half Outlaw four or five times, until I got it right. These days, I write outlines for my books which makes it easier, but even then, I still have difficulty wrapping up a character’s story. When you’ve been with your main character for so long, you don’t want them to go.

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

When I’m crafting a main character, I take pieces of my personality, experiences, and feelings and infuse them into that character. And for people who know me well enough, they’ll be able to see that in Raqi. She is tough and determined, but also very protective of her heart which means she has a hard time opening to those around her because of the trauma from her childhood. I was very much like this in my 20s. Plus, Raqi and I are both half Mexican, half white, and we have some similarity in how we look at and experience our family and the world around us.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Family and social justice issues are the two biggest influences of my writing. I wrote Half Outlaw specifically with the idea to explore the experiences that Mixed people can have in their families. Readers of Half Outlaw will also notice that I touch on and tackle topics like racism, sexism, violence against women, abortion, and immigration policies.

Visit Alex Temblador's website.

My Book, The Movie: Half Outlaw.

The Page 69 Test: Half Outlaw.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leslie Hooton

Leslie Hooton is the author of three novels. Her debut novel, Before Anyone Else, garnered a Zibby nomination. Her second novel, The Secret of Rainy Days, was a book club favorite. Her newly released third novel, After Everyone Else, is the sequel to Before Everyone Else.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I was married to the title After Everyone Else and the phrase before anyone else and used it early on to describe Bailey's love for her husband. He is her "BAE." The phrase "After Everyone Else" appears midway in the book when Bailey and her husband's seemingly strong love has to weather the trials of a murder charge and dueling careers.

What's in a name?

I wanted my main character to have the initials B.A.E. because just like BFF means Best Friends Forever, BAE means Before Anyone Else, so Bailey Ann Edgeworth was born. I wanted the reader to know that Bailey and Griffin were each other's before anyone else and after everyone else.

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

She wouldn't be surprised that Bailey loved vintage and consignment stores. She would be very surprised that I could write a character as confident and self assured as Bailey because at that age I was so full of self doubt.

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

I find beginnings the hardest to write. Like a plane I have trouble taking off but once I get to cruising altitude I'm good. I take pride in sticking my landing.

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

Both Bailey and I are in creative professions so in that way we are alike. She is much more confident than me and she is so cool, I love to hang around her.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Because Bailey is a restaurant designer, magazines like Architectural Digest and Veranda inspired me. My mother was an English teacher and librarian and always believed in reading. And storytelling.

Visit Leslie Hooton's website.

The Page 69 Test: After Everyone Else.

My Book, The Movie: After Everyone Else.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan Drew

Alan Drew is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Gardens of Water and Shadow Man. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. An associate professor of English at Villanova University, where he directs the creative writing program, he lives near Philadelphia with his wife and two children.

Drew's new novel is The Recruit.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The working title for the novel, going back to 2017, was The Supremacists, but as the book went through the editorial process at Random House, we ultimately landed on The Recruit, which I think feels a little more intimate, a little more personal. The title focuses readers’ attention on the central antagonist in the book, the troubled teenaged boy, Jacob Clay, whose indoctrination into a white supremacist group and the racist violence he commits, drives the plot of the novel. It also suggests, I hope, an exploration of how such a kid can get pulled into a domestic terrorist group, something that was really important to me. The book is a thriller and a police procedural, but creating strong characters is central to my motivation to write, and I wanted to try to understand what might cause a young man—emotionally, socially, infrastructurally—to believe in such hateful ideology strongly enough to take violent action. While the novel takes place in 1987, Jacob Clay could be the Buffalo terrorist or the El Paso murderer, and the lies he believes in the novel are similar to the lies that motivated some QAnon followers to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2020.

What's in a name?

With the protagonist, Detective Benjamin Wade, I wanted a name that sounded classically American cop/sheriff/cowboy, but which also suggested some softness, a vulnerability about him since he has an emotionally troubled history. Benjamin resonates with a sense of boyishness for me, and I wanted to hint at a kind of emotional arrested development with Ben—at least in the first Ben Wade book, Shadow Man, when he is forced to face his troubled past. But there’s a bluntness to Wade, something no-nonsense and tough about it, a name like a punch, and I liked the way it sounded next to his softer first name.

With Jacob, I wanted the irony of a white supremacist kid carrying one of the oldest Jewish names, and his ignorance of the history of his own name. And Clay, which in retrospect might be a little heavy handed, to suggest that he’s a vulnerable child that can be molded by the people—good or bad—around him.

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

My teenage self would be surprised that I would/could write a novel at all—and he would probably be doubtful, even with the name on the spine, that I did write it. I was not a particularly good student, didn’t do much writing or reading, and the idea that I would ever take on the task of writing a novel would have seemed impossible to my teenage self.

In terms of the subject matter in The Recruit, I think my teenage self would recognize much from his childhood. I was seventeen in 1987, just two years older than Jacob Clay, and the world I grew up in was very similar to his. Rancho Santa Elena is a fictional version of Irvine, CA, my hometown, a master planned community built for white people to escape Los Angeles. When I was growing up there, it was a sort of white ethno-state, like many American suburbs/exurbs are even today, and you breathed in and internalized a certain racial social order, one built on social segregation and the fear of people of color.

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

I don’t find it particularly difficult to write the beginning of a novel (except for sitting my backside down to do it), though what I think is the beginning rarely ends up being so. What I thought was the beginning of The Recruit is now more than halfway through the narrative. I’m mostly a write-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy, which makes for a messy process. I want, as much as possible, for the plot to develop organically, not only out of the investigative elements, but also out of the actions characters take to deal with their own internal conflicts. That said, I tend to have a rough idea of where I think the book is going and have numerous imagined scenes when I begin writing. The trick is the connective tissue between those scenes, and, for the most part, I rarely land at the end of a book where I thought I might when I began writing.

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 every writer puts elements of themselves into their characters. Authors create their characters after all, and the degree to which our characters come alive, I think, is the degree to which we connect with them, understand them, even the antagonistic characters--which can be a little emotionally dicey at times. Jacob was a difficult character to write, since I felt a need to humanize him, connect with him, even as he takes horrible action in the novel. Not to make him sympathetic, but to not simply dismiss him as being evil. He wasn’t born evil. He was formed into a person capable of evil action. So the question for me as a writer is how did that happen? To answer that question, I think, demands some kind of connection, some understanding. It can be uncomfortable, though, to try to create such characters in such a way.

Ben is me in many ways. Sometimes he’s my fantasy me--when he’s being a tough guy, when he takes down some bad dude. But some of the emotional things he struggles with are elements of me, particularly in Shadow Man. What happens to Ben in that book did not happen to me, but I understand what it is to be groomed by an abusive authority/father figure, so I get what he struggles with in that book—and the lingering struggles he has to negotiate about his self-worth, his identity, etc.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I used to be an oil painter, so my writing, I think, tends to be very visual, maybe even cinematic. Since I don’t paint anymore, the description in my novels sort of fills that need for me. I also sang in choirs from elementary school through college, so music is very important to me—in life in general and in my writing. Sometimes in the editing process I get frustrated with line edits that compromise how I hear a sentence in my head or suggestions that upset the rhythms in a paragraph.

I’m definitely influenced by film—something that always feels like a bit of a dirty secret to say. One of my favorite films is John Sayles’s Lone Star, and I thought about that film a lot while I wrote Shadow Man. Another film that sits deep with me is Chinatown—the noir beauty of it, the very dark secrets exposed, the beautiful and spare jazz soundtrack. There’s something very literary about that film I just love.

Visit Alan Drew's website.

My Book, The Movie: Shadow Man.

The Page 69 Test: Shadow Man.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shashi Bhat

Shashi Bhat’s fiction has won the Writers’ Trust / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her stories have appeared in such publications as The Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, subTerrain, Best Canadian Stories 2018 and 2019, and The Journey Prize Stories 24 and 30. Her debut novel, The Family Took Shape, was a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Bhat holds an MFA in fiction from the Johns Hopkins University. She lives in New Westminster, BC, where she is the editor-in-chief of EVENT magazine and teaches creative writing at Douglas College.

Bhat's new novel is The Most Precious Substance on Earth.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The Most Precious Substance on Earth refers to a moment in the book when the main character's high school band conductor tells them that platinum is the most precious substance on earth. (Their band is called the Platinum Band.) It turns out this statement is false—the most precious substance is either diamonds, rhino horns, or meth. So it’s a bit of a bait-and-switch, which is a pattern that occurs throughout the book. Symbolically, what I had in mind was that the most precious substance is whatever is lost when a girl comes of age—a mix of innocence and hope and confidence and the beliefs that we hold in girlhood.

Very early on, my agent suggested changing the title to Mute, which is one of the chapter titles and is a clear nod to one of the book’s key themes: the ways in which women are conditioned to be silent. My main character, Nina, is a person who often wants to speak and has something to say but just can’t make herself say it. I was attached to my original (and current) title though. I liked the obliqueness of it, and I’m a bit of a sucker for “lovely” sounding titles.

What's in a name?

The name Nina means “little girl,” which makes sense given the book’s subject matter. The narrator has a traumatic experience early in the narrative, when she is really only a little girl herself. But I chose it for more practical reasons—it’s not too long; it doesn’t draw too much attention to itself. It’s also the kind of name a South Asian parent might have given their child after immigrating to North America in the ‘70s or ‘80s, because it’s not conspicuously “ethnic” and eases assimilation.

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

Pretty damn surprised. My novel is set in high school, and though the plot and characters are not taken from real life, details sometimes are. For example, Nina’s high school band wears a distinctive forest green band sweater with a white treble clef embroidered on the right breast—exactly like the one I wore in high school. There’s a reference to a “long, low, mud-coloured radiator at the front of the school where the cool kids sat in a stylish row”—exactly like the radiator in my high school.

I think my teenage self would be surprised at the familiar details combined with an unfamiliar story; I wonder if she would think the jokes are funny, given that so many of them are about the world she lived in and the culture she consumed. I am confident that she would like this book, though.

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

My beginnings tend to change more; I just write something to get started, and then usually the real beginning turns up elsewhere in the first draft.

I love writing endings, especially short-story endings, because I think they hold the greatest potential for emotional power. One of my favourite pieces of writing advice, from one of my college professors, is to always be thinking about what the reader is feeling in “the white,” i.e. the white space after the story ends. I love a gut-punch ending, an open ending, a lingering ending, a devastating ending, an Amy Hempel “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” ending. Since this book is structured as a novel-in-stories, there are many such opportunities here. I don’t know that writing endings is easier, but I feel most driven to get them right.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music was a big part of my life when I was younger. I played the flute and piano and also sang for many years, though I’m very rusty now. I think this has affected both the shape and sound of my prose; I read aloud and edit sentences for rhythm, or I write long sentences to create a feeling of crescendo. The narrative arc feels very musical to me, especially the compressed version we find in the short story, where we see that escalation and retreat so clearly. In this book, Nina is quite musically inclined, so I was able to incorporate descriptions of actual music as well.

Incidentally, my publisher recently had me make a playlist as bonus reading guide material for this book, which was a delightful experience. There’s ‘90s alternative rock, Canadian classics, concert band music—my high school self would’ve loved that playlist.

Visit Shashi Bhat's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Most Precious Substance on Earth.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Santos Donaldson

photo credit: Billy Bustamante

David Santos Donaldson was raised in Nassau, Bahamas, and has lived in India, Spain, and the United States. He attended Wesleyan University and the Drama Division of the Juilliard School, and his plays have been commissioned by the Public Theater. He was a finalist for the Urban Stages Emerging Playwright Award. His writing has appeared in Electric Lit, Literary Hub, and The Rumpus. Donaldson is currently a practicing psychotherapist and divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Seville, Spain. Greenland is his debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title Greenland is purposefully somewhat mysterious—it doesn’t tell you what the book is about in any obvious way. You’d never expect it’s a novel about a young queer Black writer holed up in his basement writing a novel about E.M. Forster’s secret real-life love affair with the Black Egyptian tram conductor, Mohammed el Adl. But as you read on, the title slowly begins to make sense. Eventually the narrator/protagonist, Kip Starling, ends up in Greenland itself, where he hopes to find his true voice in the icy wilderness. For me, the title Greenland has a couple of symbolic references. In the visual sense, Greenland is a land of whiteness—more than 90% of the county is covered with snow and ice; and my narrator is grappling with finding himself amidst a world of Whiteness. He is also socially, politically and artistically finding his own voice on the blank page—which appears to be a neutral thing, but that is only because whiteness is assumed to be neutral. I’m also making a literary reference (almost an inside joke, really), nodding to the work of Graham Greene. Literary scholars have nicknamed his oeuvre “Greeneland.” Greene’s work deals with British colonialism and its spiritual and moral consequences. These are the very themes explored in my novel too.

What's in a name?

Kip is short for Kipling. My narrator was named after his father’s favorite writer, the staunch British colonialist, Rudyard Kipling. So the weight of colonial history is placed on him from birth. He struggles to manage this inheritance throughout the novel. His last name, Starling, is meant to remind us of the black bird with its strange and grating cry. Kip is like a caged bird for the first part of the novel—locked away in his basement study where he’s boarded himself in, nailing the door shut, in a dramatic fashion that some have compared to being like an “Edgar Allan Poe madman.” Symbolically, as a Black queer man in the United States, Kip is also caged in, unable to be fly freely due to the confines of racism and homophobia. At one point Kip compares himself to the bird in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy,” from which Maya Angelou took the title of her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The symbol of the bird also figures prominently in another way—as a path to spiritual freedom. Even the book’s cover captures that, in Devan Shimoyama’s beautiful artwork: a queer Black interpretation of the classical paintings of the myth of the abduction of Ganymede. Zeus appears in the form of a giant bird and sweeps away the beautiful young man. I intended all of these references with the name of Kip Starling. And I also just like how the name sounds—kind of snappy.

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

Not only would my teenage self be surprised by the style and voice of this novel, but even me of a few years ago would be surprised. I never liked writing in first person, let alone things that seemed autobiographical in tone. This novel is quite meta but it’s still fiction. Yet, it reads like autofiction and that was on purpose. I embraced the play with reality and fiction. What is real versus not real. I think this question is more and more something we grapple with in our world. So many of our interactions are virtual. Reality TV stars become presidents of the “free world.” We are even now presented with the idea of “alternative truths.” It’s crazy. And yet, in another way, this questioning of reality gets to the core of some of the most ancient spiritual and philosophical teachings—especially from the mystic traditions. They all say our daily waking life is really an illusion, like a dream; and the truth is the deeper “reality” of dreams. Paradoxical. But I love engaging with this idea in the very form and style of the book. Writing is usually strongest when style and content are in accord. So, this novel’s meta qualities demanded a form that was new to me. I’m still surprised it worked!

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

I find endings a lot harder than beginnings. E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, says that a love story can either end in two ways: either the couple lives happily ever after, or one or both of the lovers die. Endings are hard for me because a story can’t just drop off, you need some sense of closure—even if there’ll be a sequel. And real life rarely has such neat closures as novels seem to require. In Greenland, I knew I wanted to end with something satisfying in terms of Kip’s search for his own voice amidst Whiteness, but I wasn’t sure how that could happen, or if it would come off as too contrived and pat. In the end, I think I organically found a resolution that is both realistic and also gives a sense of closure—or rather, a sense of Kip being able to move on with a fuller more empowered sense of himself. But I tried not to artificially tie ends up. And, of course, there is a death. One reviewer called it something like “the most unhappy happy ending—or perhaps the reverse.” That sounds about right to me. But once I have a good ending, I then go back and rewrite the beginning many times over, to make sure all the seeds are planted up front, so the ending feels inevitable when you look back.

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

Well, I get this question a lot because this book reads very much like an autobiographical novel—and that’s my fault; I did it on purpose. I’ve been tricky in that I set things up from the beginning so that Kip is almost identical to me: Black, queer writer in Brooklyn, British-educated, writing a novel about E.M Forster real-life relationship Mohammed el Adl. As I said before, I like pointing to the fine lines between fact and fiction. I want the reader to think this is kind of a whacky fiction, but then question, “Is it also real?” Because it’s both. As the novel progresses Kip becomes his own person, not like me at all. However, there is still no experience Kip has, that does not also reflect some of my own emotional truth. But the same is true for all of the characters in the book—even the ones who share none of my obvious markers of identity.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’m so glad you asked this question because the truth is, some of my strongest influences are not other novelists but filmmakers and playwrights. The works of Satyajit Ray, Vittorio De Sica and Pedro Almodóvar. Together they make up a strange mix of Neo-realism with deep humanism and then stylish melodrama. I feel like all those qualities end up in my writing. I’m also a huge fan of both Tennessee Williams and August Wilson—both of whom I often quote with the same reverence as the Bible or Shakespeare. These are some of my guiding forces as a writer.

Visit David Santos Donaldson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Hogeland

photo credit: Shelby Kinney-Lang

Anna Hogeland is a psychotherapist in private practice, with an MSW from Smith College School of Social Work and an MFA from UC Irvine. She lives in Vermont.

Hogeland's new novel is The Long Answer.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My hope is that the title invites readers to wonder both, what is the long answer, and what is the question being asked? We rarely feel the space to really tell our stories in their entirety; as a therapist, I have a real honor of getting to hear the long answers, by which I mean the truer, more nuanced answers, to questions as simple as, how are you? When I began trying to conceive a child, I noticed that the stories of how people made families were greatly condensed, and I was desperate to know what those years were really like for people, so I might be better prepared for how they might be for me. This book is in part an attempt to provide those long answers both for myself and for any readers who also feel the absence of them in their own lives.

What's in a name?

I spend way too much time choosing character names! And the names of streets, restaurants, towns, and so on. I change them often during the writing process. Researching names is definitely a way to procrastinate on the “real” writing, but I also feel that a character’s name needs to feel very right to me before I can really inhabit them. So, to a reader, I don’t know that my character names will seem particularly significant, but to me as the writer, they each have the sound, connotation, and region of origin that feels most suited to the character.

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

For this book, the beginning came very easily to me, at first. I wasn’t sure how it would end, because it mirrored my own life so closely, and I wasn’t sure how my own story would progress. A year into writing it, however, I knew my own arc better, and the ending presented itself without too much trouble. But I ended up working and reworking the first ten pages forever, trying to figure out the best way to organize the information, how to ease the readers into the story. Those first pages ended up being the ones I labored on 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?

Since I write autofiction, I definitely share a lot in common with my protagonist (we even share the same name), but we are not the same person. She is a literary construct who lives in a book, and I am a human. I get to evolve past her, and move her around, which is an empowering feeling.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am endlessly inspired by the stories I hear around me: stories from my family, friends, therapy clients, stories I overhear in restaurants. I am always looking for material that feels emotionally and relationally complicated, that moves in a way you wouldn’t expect–and if you are really listening to those around you, these stories are everywhere.

Visit Anna Hogeland's website.

--Marshal Zeringue