Meredith R. Lyons

Meredith R. Lyons grew up in New Orleans, collecting two degrees from Louisiana State University before running away to Chicago to be an actor. In between plays, she got her black belt and made martial arts and yoga her full-time day job. She fought in the Chicago Golden Gloves, ran the Chicago Marathon, and competed for team U.S.A. in the savate world championships in Paris. In spite of doing each of these things twice, she couldn’t stay warm and relocated to Nashville. She owns several swords, but lives a non-violent life, saving all swashbuckling for the page, knitting scarves, gardening, visiting coffee shops, and cuddling with her husband and two panther-sized cats. Ghost Tamer is her first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

While I was writing it, the working title was The Train because the train crash is the inciting incident that changes Raely's life. When the el flies off the rails, only Raely survives. She loses her best friend and acquires an ability to see ghosts. One says he's been with her all her life, and one in particular is trying to take her soul. A lot of the action takes place on Chicago's el train. But not only was that not a very interesting title, the deeper story is Raely learning about who she is—both by taking a look at her past and embracing her new present—and accepting that new person, rather than wishing to be what she was. She has to move through a lot of grief and pain to become herself, which no one ever wants to do, but she is stronger for it. And with grief the only way out is through. She is the Ghost Tamer. And it's a much cooler title.

What's in a name?

I am much better at naming characters now than I was when I started writing Ghost Tamer. Raely had no name for quite a while and then somehow I ended up using an amalgamation of my middle name and the first two letters of my last name as a placeholder. By the time I had finished the book, she was permanently Raely. I did change a few other character's names. I had a habit of just throwing generic names like Bob and John everywhere—again, I'm much better about this now—partially because I'm a pantser and these characters may or may not grow. The ones that became major players I went back and found some good names for them. Lovonia was one who had a good name from the beginning. She kind of sprang out of the ether fully-formed and started bossing me around.

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

She would be shocked and appalled that there are no horses in it. I actually wrote my first novel when I was thirteen. It was hand-written, in pencil or erasable ink—so 90's—on whatever paper I could find. It was a western with lots of horses and was 636 pages long. I still have it in a big three-ring binder.

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

That's an interesting question. It depends on the book. For Ghost Tamer, the beginning was easy, I just wrote the nightmare. As I mentioned, I don't plot things out, so there's always a bit of thrilling panic when I've passed the midpoint and I'm still not sure how the thing is going to end. I always figure it out, though. And everything gets tweaked. For this one, I definitely changed more about the ending, but I can only think of two or three scenes in Ghost Tamer that have stayed exactly the same since they were put down.

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

I drew a lot from my past to create Raely's life. From living in Chicago and trying to carve out a place for myself on stage to trudging through those bitter winters on public transportation. I mined my own experiences with grief to color hers, but, although she's similar to a younger version of me, Raely is herself. She's much cooler than I was at her age, quicker with her on-point snark—she's a comedian after all—and much more damaged. I wanted a flawed, raw character who made mistakes, had struggles and learned from them, but I needed her to be likeable so that the reader would stick with her, so of course she's funny.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I was an actor in Chicago for seventeen years which has had an influence on how I put a story on the page. I start from a place of character and find joy in dialogue. The plot is improved and issues tweaked later, and usually I have to punch up the "set dressing" afterward also. I was also a stage combatant, competitive boxer and kickboxer, and self defense and cardio kickboxing instructor, so I really dig into the fight scenes. Not only do I know how it feels to be hit, but I know how to tell a story with violence that's clear even to the uninitiated. I hope that doesn't sound too nuts. In spite of owning several swords, I promise I live a non-violent life now.

Visit Meredith R. Lyons's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brooke Robinson

Brooke Robinson is professional playwright who has had her work produced at London’s Vault Festival and the Old Vic, among others. She grew up in Sydney, Australia, and has worked as a bookseller, university administrator, and playwright there and in the UK. She started writing The Interpreter, her first novel, when the pandemic ground the theatre world to a halt, and is currently working on her second novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I'm a big fan of titles that clearly and succinctly tell you what the work is about, particularly when we're talking about high concept stories. In the case of my book, The Interpreter, it does exactly what it says on the tin: it's about an interpreter in the criminal justice system who starts to deliberately mistranslate witness statements in order to help convict those who she believes are guilty.

What's in a name?

I must confess that naming characters is not a job I enjoy doing. I have also worked as a playwright and I love that in theatre you can name a character in a play simply after a letter like A or B. My main character, Revelle, is named after a young woman from my home city of Sydney, Australia who went missing in the 1990s. She is assumed to have been murdered, but her body has never been found, and police have never managed to arrest someone for long enough to keep them in custody. This speaks to my novel's themes of justice and the temptation to take the law into your own hands.

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

I know that I would not be able to be an interpreter in the criminal justice system myself, not only because I'm shamefully monolingual, but because I'd find it too hard to stay professionally detached and not take the cases home with me. Probably like a lot of people I do have vigilante fantasies but unlike my character Revelle, I'd never act on them as I am definitely a rule-follower who doesn't like to get in trouble!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Most of my stories begin with something I've read about in the news. I'm particularly a big fan of talk radio - BBC Radio 4 here in the UK, and ABC Radio National when I'm in Australia. If I lived in the USA I'd have NPR on all day.

Visit Brooke Robinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jamie Lee Sogn

Jamie Lee Sogn is a Filipina American author of adult thriller novels. She grew up in Olympia, Washington, studied Anthropology and Psychology at the University of Washington and received her Juris Doctor from the University of Oregon School of Law.

She is a "recovering attorney" who writes contracts by day and (much more exciting) fiction by night. While she has lived in Los Angeles, New York City, and even Eugene, Oregon, she now lives in Seattle with her husband, son, and Boston Terrier.

Sogn's debut novel is Salthouse Place.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My novel’s title Salthouse Place was finally chosen after many different iterations of titles before it. I have to say, it’s my favorite and I’m so glad that it ended up being the final title. The manuscript was originally called The Artemis Institute because that was the original name of the wellness company that inhabited the novel. Through many revisions, that changed as well, so of course the title needed to change with that.

Before I became an author, I had no idea how much went into choosing a title for a book! Salthouse Place was finally chosen because not only is it the name of the wellness community on the Oregon Coast that my main character arrives at, we felt it would be a unique name that would grab someone’s attention as they walked by in a bookstore, for example. I want someone to wonder “Salthouse Place? What does that mean?”

When my main character, Delia, arrives at Salthouse Place for the wellness retreat, she finds that the community is actually an abandoned subdivision that this wellness company has bought and taken over to convert to their retreat center. This idea of creating a façade to hide something decaying or unfinished underneath is found throughout the book and the name of the community is a reflection of that theme.

What's in a name?

For my main character, I wanted her name to reflect her heritage, so her last name is Albio, which is a Filipino last name, but not one you might hear often. Her first name is also unique, but has no special meaning behind it. Recently I learned my sister had a secret theory that Delia was named after her - her name is Danielle, but her Filipino nickname is “Danila,” so her theory was that I took out the ‘n’ and rearranged it to “Delia. This theory is false, but I liked her creativity!

The antagonist is named Sage. Since she is one of the leaders of a wellness community, I wanted her name to reflect nature and calm. In Latin, the name Sage actually means Wise One or Prophet, which we come to learn, is very appropriate as well for this character and her aspirations.

Delia’s hometown of Portsgrove is a fictional town in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, but the name is inspired by real towns in that region, like Port Townsend and Port Angeles.

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

When I began this story, I knew the beginning and the ending - they were the first two things I wrote and ultimately did not change that much at all from draft to finished novel. The difficult part was writing everything in between to connect the two! However, generally, I find it more difficult to write beginnings. I think it’s such a delicate balance of where I can drop the reader into the story at the perfect point - to have something to catch their interest, but not be deep enough already that too much is happening too fast.

In Salthouse Place, we begin with Delia remembering that fateful day on Blythe Lake with her friends when she was a teenager. For me, this beginning was easy to write and made sense. I wanted to convey that feeling of excitement and carefree youth, but also the dread of something bad about to happen, which the reader already expects because from the first sentence, Delia tells the reader that one of them will be lost in the lake that day.

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

For Delia, I saw a lot of myself in her, as much as I actively tried not to put myself into her. We are both biracial Filipina Millennials, we both went to law school (but I didn’t drop out!), and we both navigate the world as skeptical and perhaps shield ourselves too much. I wanted to write Delia because I rarely saw characters like me, women of color, in the stories I read growing up. Or if I did, they were stories specifically about race.

I wanted to write a character that experienced the world around her through this lens and through this history, but not have the story be about her being biracial. The story includes a lot of her upbringing, her immigrant mother’s experience through her eyes, and even some good old Filipino comfort food - but the story isn’t rooted in that per se. It’s a thriller and a mystery with a protagonist who looks and thinks like me.

Visit Jamie Lee Sogn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Carso

Brian Carso, a lawyer and historian, has studied the American Revolution and the life of Benedict Arnold for more than two decades. Gideon's Revolution is his first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Early on, I needed a working title. One of the many sources I used for this historical novel was Benson Lossing’s monumental Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (1860), commonly referred to as “Lossing’s Revolution.” My narrator is named Gideon, so I began to simply refer to the work as “Gideon’s Revolution.”

Over time, the title grew on me. The story is Gideon’s account of his activity as a soldier in the American Revolution, but make no mistake: his revolution is as much internal as it is external. So I think the title hints at some process of change, of revelation.

The name “Gideon” has a biblical reference that I conjure up at the end of the story in the hope that it promotes a bit of an epiphany. The best title I know is Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. For nearly the entire story, the reader assumes it’s an allusion to the anger the Joad family feels about the many depression-era indignities they suffer. But when you hit the last few pages (an ending much different from the 1940 film), you can follow the breadcrumbs Steinbeck provides to connect the name of Rosasharn (for “Rose of Sharon”) and her extraordinary act of mercy with a biblical passage that turns the phrase “grapes of wrath” into an unforgettable gut punch.

In that spirit, I hope the meaning of the title Gideon’s Revolution evolves by the end of the novel.

What's in a name?

Because Gideon’s Revolution is a historical novel, most of the names refer to actual people who participated in the Revolution. I named the narrator Gideon Wheatley because I had a plan for the biblical resonance that the name Gideon brings.

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

I wrote a short story for an English assignment in high school. There’s not another person in the world who would ever read that long-lost story and this novel and see a common thread, but I bet there is one or two. If there’s something about the human experience that really grabs you when you’re seventeen, it’s probably still grabbing you decades later, one way or another.

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

The beginning took a lot of work. Because it’s a historical novel—about a true but little-known secret plot to capture Benedict Arnold—I had to give the reader enough historical context to get the ball rolling. Amidst this, I also needed to establish the tensions that would power the plot for 257 pages. I workshopped the beginning at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, shared it with some trusted friends, and rewrote it numerous times.

But the ending: On the day I began writing, I knew the basic outline of the entire plot, except for how it would end. I took it on faith that at some point, maybe on a long car ride, maybe in the shower, maybe in a dream, somehow the problem would resolve itself into a powerful ending. Eventually—I don’t remember when or where—it did.

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

One way or another, my characters share some of my DNA. Think of it this way: I have cousins I don’t see very often (although I wish I did). Some live several states away, and others on the opposite coast. Recently I visited California and had dinner with a cousin who lives in San Jose. To my best recollection, I’ve only met him four or five times in my life. To be sure, we’re different people: I have blond hair, his is black; he’s a computer scientist, I’m a historian/writer. But as we sat there on his patio, I’m sure we were studying each other for things that were familiar—the way we walked, perhaps, or some barely noticeable similarity of appearance, or speech. Certainly, the stories we told about our respective parents were rooted in the same family history.

My characters are like my cousins. We come from the same place, and if I look hard enough, I’ll find things that are familiar, no matter how different we might seem.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I thought a lot about the film Citizen Kane, because, like Gideon’s Revolution, there’s a mystery at the heart of the film, which inspires a quest to understand the complex motivations of Charles Kane. Similarly, the complicated character of Benedict Arnold has invited inspection and conjecture for nearly 250 years. Why did America’s best battlefield general choose to betray his cause and comrades? Unlike the narrator of Citizen Kane, however, who says “I guess we’ll never know,” (right before the camera reveals a stunning revelation that he, and everyone else, has missed), I think Gideon Wheatley understands Arnold’s character, which makes his mission more difficult, even though we’re inclined think it would make the mission easier. As Gideon gains insights to Arnold, I think the reader, too, can better understand the troubled character of Benedict Arnold, and perhaps find an answer to the question, why did he do it?

Visit Brian Carso's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James R. Benn

James R. Benn is the author of the Billy Boyle World War II series, historical mysteries set within the Allied High Command during the Second World War. The series began with Billy Boyle, which takes place in England and Norway in 1942. Proud Sorrows is the eighteenth installment of the series.

My Q&A with the author:

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

It's a signpost. This is a story full of sorrows. Some come from the after-effects of the First World War, others from brutal family conflicts, racial and religious hatred, and the physical and psychic wounds of warfare. I found this quote from Shakespeare, and it struck me as perfect for the story I wanted to tell:

"I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,
For grief is proud and makes his owner stoop."

There's a sense of resilience in those lines, as well as an admission of a heavy burden. Both are explored as we encounter the characters in this story.

What's in a name?

Oh, I had so much fun naming the characters in this book! While my protagonist, Billy Boyle, was named eighteen books ago, I enjoy coming up with new folks for him to meet. I decided to go old school and search out slightly more archaic names to populate the small village of Slewford where Billy finds himself. Graham Cheatwood, Charlotte Mothersole, Alfred Bunch, Dr. Bodkin, to name a few. Sir Richard Seaton's housekeeper is Mrs. Rutledge, a homage to one of my favorite mystery series, the Inspector Ian Rutledge novels by Charles Todd. I do give a lot of thought to names, but I work at not telegraphing anything about guilt or innocence. Back in my second novel, the killer was a Frenchman named Villard - who couldn't see that coming a mile away?

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

He'd find a delightful surprise. When I was nineteen and a college sophomore entranced by all I was discovering in my English classes, I visited Constitution Plaza in Hartford, Connecticut. It's a rooftop plaza sitting above parking garages, and it's filled with gardens and shops. It provides a view down into the lower floors of the surrounding office buildings. It was the holiday season, with festive lights everywhere. As I looked into the office windows across from me, I saw a solitary cleaning woman at work. The juxtaposition of her solitary labors and the crowds of shoppers struck me, and then and there I vowed one day to write a story about her. I christened her Agnes Day (Agnus Dei, lamb of God). Well, she's not a cleaning woman, but I finally fulfilled that vow in Proud Sorrows; Agnes Day is a nurse who has returned home to Slewford after working through the worst of the Blitz in London, bringing her own set of solitary sorrows with her.

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

I tend to do incremental editing, so I can't say where most changes occur. As soon as I finish a chapter, I read it aloud to my wife and we work out what needs to be improved. But overall, I find beginnings easy. The middle is tough because I still worry that I won't have enough narrative to carry the story into a full-length novel. But around the two-thirds mark, I stress out about how I'm going to fit everything that needs to be said into that last third! It never changes.

Overall, I write with a theme and ending in mind. Often I don't know who the killer is when I begin. It's only when I've populated the story with distinct characters that the murderer becomes apparent to me. I try to focus on the why-dunnit rather than the who-dunnit, but that does cause me to go back to the beginning to rework things a bit once I've nailed the bad guy or gal.

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 a part of me in Billy Boyle, for sure. His anti-authoritarianism comes pretty easily. He's often a sardonic observer, which isn't much of a stretch. But I'm not as quick-witted as he is. The bon mots that roll off this tongue (especially at the end of a chapter) take me a long time to think up. I wish I was as urbane and sophisticated as Baron Kazimierz and as strong as Big Mike, but that is only true in my mind.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Because these books call for action scenes, I pay attention to cinema and how fight scenes are choreographed.

Arkia Kurosawa's Ran is a touchstone for me. Midway through the movie, there's a huge battle scene in which Kurosawa drops out all dialog. The entire battle is filmed without diegetic sound (sound where the source is visible on screen). Only the tremendous musical score is heard, which allows the viewer to focus on the devastation at hand. To me, it has a way of slowing down the action, and reminds me that what I write has to work visually and clearly in the mind of the reader.

Sadly, the news has its own peculiar effect. My books are set eight decades ago during World War II, the global struggle against fascism. Whenever I see swastika banners in the streets of America, it brings an immediacy to my work. Racism and anti-Semitism, those keystones of fascism, are still with us, to a degree that would astonish Billy Boyle. An example of the news leaking into the narrative is this brief scene, in which Billy and Kaz discover an arms cache hidden by British fascists:

“This could have done a lot of damage,” Kaz said.

“It already has,” I said as I threw the Nazi flag to the floor. “It’s gotten people who live in a democracy to embrace and fight for fascism.”

“People who don’t know the value of what they have,” Kaz said.

Too true, Kaz, too true.

Learn more about the Billy Boyle WWII Mystery Series at James R. Benn's website.

The Page 99 Test: The First Wave.

The Page 69 Test: Evil for Evil.

The Page 69 Test: Rag and Bone.

My Book, The Movie: Death's Door.

The Page 69 Test: The White Ghost.

The Page 69 Test: Blue Madonna.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Rooney

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her recent books include the national best-seller Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (2017) and the novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (2020). Where Are the Snows, her latest poetry collection, was chosen by Kazim Ali for the X.J. Kennedy Prize and published by Texas Review Press in Fall 2022.

Rooney's new novel is From Dust to Stardust.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My title gives readers the arc of my 287-page novel in four words. The story follows Eileen Sullivan—soon to be stage-named Doreen O’Dare—from her humble beginnings as a dreamy kid in Tampa, Florida to her reign as one of Hollywood’s biggest box office draws in the 1920s. It asks the questions: what does it take to become a star? And Once you’ve become one, how long do you want to stay there and what might you do next, if you decide to leave?

What's in a name?

The novel is based on the real-life silent movie star and absolutely enchanting comedienne Colleen Moore, which is itself a stage name for “Kathleen Morrison.” I needed a name that would convey the Irish charm of the original, as well as the character’s ambition (to be more, to be daring), hence Doreen O’Dare.

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

My teenage self would be like heck yeah. Ever since I was a kid—and into my teens and beyond—I’ve been a huge fan of the Fairy Castle that Colleen Moore built and then toured around the country during the Great Depression to raise funds for charities. I first saw it at the Museum of Science and Industry here in Chicago when I was eight years old and it’s never totally let go of my imagination, so I think all my past selves would find this novel the logical extension of this long-time love.

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

Because this book is about Hollywood and about actual fairy—which is to say, folk—tales, I knew that I wanted to play around with the idea of a happy ending. I knew where I wanted Doreen to end up, but I knew it would be really hard—full of highs and lows and triumphs and setbacks—for her to get there. I also knew that since my story is in effect a Jazz Age / Depression Era fairy tale, it had to begin in a once-upon-a-time manner, hence my opening sentence, “Once upon a time, an unprepossessing child with mismatched eyes—one brown, one blue—arrived to poor parents at precisely the right moment.”

In general, as an outliner, I always know where I want to begin and where I want to end—I can’t start the actual writing process unless I know both, or think I do. And from there, I can change as I need to as I make my way toward the final draft.

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

I always love my characters so much and have sympathy and affection for them even when they’re messing up. In this case, Doreen has, what I hope is my own sense of wonder at the world and a desire to convey that wonder to as many other people as humanly possible. We only get this one life, so let’s work hard and have fun.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music and movies are huge inspirations. In the case of From Dust to Stardust, I watched as many silent movies as I could get my hands on, all while feeling a colossal sense of loss because the Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films are lost forever. I hope my book gets people to take a look at the ones that are still around to be looked at.

Learn more about the book and author at Kathleen Rooney's website.

The Page 69 Test: From Dust to Stardust.

My Book, The Movie: From Dust to Stardust.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nancy Bilyeau

Born in Chicago and a graduate of the University of Michigan, Nancy Bilyeau moved to New York City to work in the magazine business as a writer and editor. After working for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to Good Housekeeping, she turned to fiction. She wrote the Joanna Stafford trilogy, a trio of thrillers set in Henry VIII’s England, for Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. Her fourth novel is The Blue, an 18th-century thriller revolving around the art & porcelain world. Her latest novel, The Orchid Hour, returns to the early 20th century New York City of her novel Dreamland to once again tell a story of suspense revolving around a compelling heroine.

My Q&A with Bilyeau:

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

‘The Orchid Hour’ is meant to intrigue and entice readers—how can an orchid have an hour?—while carrying various meanings for the story. My main character, Zia De Luca, learns in an early chapter that her gambler cousin, Salvatore, is a part owner of a new illegal nightclub in New York City and its name is The Orchid Hour. Slowly she discovers why it was named that and why the host of the speakeasy, a silent-film actor, would have chosen it. Orchids were fragile and seductive flowers in the 1920s. They were imported, as it wasn’t yet possible to grow them from seeds. They were bought, nurtured, and cherished by the wealthiest people in America. This club had orchid plants on display as a statement about its status and desired clientele. Speakeasys opened late at night, so you could say that this was their hour. But also, the most valued orchid in the club is a variety found in South America that emits its fragrance only during certain hours of the night.

What's in a name?

I wanted an unusual Sicilian name for my main character that carried a special meaning, even if it was never spelled out. I came upon “Audenzia,” which is the feminine version of “Audenzio” and means “one who dares or one is who is fearless.” Instantly I thought: “This is it.” She is strong and quite fearless. No one ever says that is what her name means in the novel. But I knew it. And for short, she’s called “Zia.”

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

Teenage Nancy would not be surprised that I wrote a novel. I had grandiose ambitions in high school! I intended to write novels and poetry and work on the staff of the Washington Post, exposing wrongdoing in order to change the world. But the New York City setting of this novel, The Orchid Hour, might have come as a shock. I grew up in Illinois and in Michigan, and in my teenage years, New York was a far-away, frightening place. The movies I saw in Michigan that were set in New York, like The Prince of the City, did not present it as a place where I would want to live. Of course, I did end up living in the city for more than twenty years.

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

I find the beginning is key to any of the novels I’ve written. Sometimes it springs from me easily. For example, the first paragraph of my debut novel, The Crown, and the beginning of The Blue just wrote themselves. Sometimes there is a lot of revision, but I have the basic idea in my head, such as with Dreamland. But with both The Fugitive Colours and The Orchid Hour, I changed my mind on where to start a few times and overhauled the beginning top to bottom. Maybe it’s because as I go along in my fiction career, I realize how important these beginnings are! It’s nothing to be taken lightly. Novel endings are much easier for me. They sometimes vary from what I had planned in my outline, but that’s a different matter.

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 write autobiographical fiction. I may take elements of my personality and that of people I know to build characters, but my protagonists are fundamentally different than I am. Zia is a Sicilian American immigrant to New York who at the novel’s beginnings is loyal to family tradition, excellent at math, and highly organized. That’s not me.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I make use of art, photography, films, and music. There are a few standbys that I turn to in the middle of every novel or toward the end of the writing process, to help me reach an emotional state. I often watch the film The Red Shoes. With music, I turn to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 or Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals.” Film scores also inspire me, ranging from those for Barry Lyndon to Vertigo to The Ninth Gate.

Visit Nancy Bilyeau's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Tapestry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah J Ledford

Deborah J Ledford is the award-winning author of the Native American Eva “Lightning Dance” Duran Series, and the Smoky Mountain Inquest Series. Part Eastern Band Cherokee, she is an Agatha Award winner, The Hillerman Sky Award Finalist, and two-time Anthony Award Finalist for Best Audiobooks Crescendo and Causing Chaos. Ledford lives in Phoenix, Arizona with her husband and an awesome Ausky.

Book 1 of the author’s Eva “Lightning Dance” Duran Native American thriller is Redemption.

My Q&A with Ledford:

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

Quite a lot, actually. I love titles of one descriptive word. I tend to choose a word that could have several meanings. Best is one that concisely defines an aspect of my lead character, or an overall aspect of what their journey will be throughout the novel. For Redemption, my protagonist Eva and her best friend, Paloma, work to redeem their past behavior in order to regain approval from the people of their Taos Pueblo tribe.

What's in a name?

Most of the characters featured in Redemption are Native Americans living on the Taos Pueblo reservation. I’ve been fortunate to find a wealth of information at the 1929-40 census rolls for the. All of those surnames, and many first names, continue onward generationally. Also, for first names I research quite a lot in order to assign a name based on what I envision as each character’s psychological aspects. It’s fun to hear about when readers take the time to look up the meaning of the character names I’ve assigned. Doing this research also keeps me as the writer on track to make certain I am adhering to my original intent in order to convey the people and their lives and circumstances I’m creating throughout their journeys.

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

In order to make sure I’ll be able to sustain my original concept, I always know the first 5 chapters, main plot and subplot, do exhaustive character bios, and am certain about the ending. I tend to tweak the first chapter as I’m composing the first draft—primarily to make sure the motivating intent is concise so that the reader has somewhat of an overall roadmap of what to expect on the following pages.

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

I suppose each character I’ve created for Redemption features bits and pieces of myself. Life experience certainly plays a big part. The art of listening is key when working with my Native contacts on the Taos Pueblo. It took a long time to cultivate these relationships. Although none of my characters are based on “real” people, the key is to always be respectful of all Native cultures and traditions.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I started out as an oil and canvas painter and also a photographer, and later became a professional scenic artist and carpenter for theatre, commercials and industrial films. I believe this background experience has helped me to convey what I present with words for the reader. My intent is to put the reader in the shoes of my characters—to take every step of the journey with them visually. To not only paint the picture of the location, but also every sensory aspect along the way.

Visit Deborah J Ledford's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Flanagan

Erin Flanagan’s new novel is Come With Me. Her novel Deer Season won the 2022 Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author and was a finalist for the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery and the Midwest Book Award in Fiction (Literary/Contemporary/Historical). Her second novel, Blackout, was a June 2022 Amazon First Reads pick. She is also the author of two short story collections–The Usual Mistakes and It’s Not Going to Kill You and Other Stories. She has held fellowships to Yaddo, MacDowell, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, UCross, and The Vermont Studio Center. She contributes regular book reviews to Publishers Weekly and other venues.

Flanagan lives in Dayton, Ohio with her husband, daughter, two cats and two dogs. She is an English professor at Wright State University and likes all of her colleagues except one.

My Q&A with the author:

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

As with so many final titles, this wasn’t the one I used as I was writing, but it’s one I’ve grown to love. It feels ominous to me, and in combination with the wonderful cover with that weird green sky, it really fits the book. Podcaster David Temple of The Thriller Zone said it feels like “a beckoning and a reckoning” and I love that. I love too that the cover is the two women with their backs to each other, which also feels somewhat ominous to me.

What's in a name?

The protagonist’s name, Gwen, came to me pretty late in the game. She was Anna for a long time, but I could tell it wasn’t quite right. I wanted something with the same number of syllables but that ended with a less upbeat letter. Gwen seemed like a good Midwestern name, and also somehow subdued.

The antagonist, Nicola, also goes by Nikki. Nikki is her childhood name, and I wanted a clear divide between her childhood self and who she wills herself to be as an adult. She’s from a small, lower-class Ohio town. Her mother, Onita, was not what you’d call the greatest mom, but I liked that she would give her daughters these classier names—Nicola and Celeste—as if hoping for something better for them. I think Onita would have been like, those sound French!

A funny aside: I mispronounced Nicola in my head the entire time I was writing the book. I said it like Nick-cole-a, which is typically the male pronunciation. It’s Nick-o-la on the audiobook, which is how it’s usually pronounced for a woman. But I think Onita would have pronounced it like I did when she gave her daughter the name.

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

I think my teenage self would be like, what happened to us? (laughs) Although seriously, I think my teenage self would have thought I’d write more about romantic relationships since society held those out as the idealized and central relationships in a girl’s life, even though my main social relationships were all with friends.

I feel really lucky to have had such wonderful female friendships throughout different stages of my life. With this book, I wanted to honor how significant those relationships can be, both good and bad.

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

I try not to put too much pressure on myself when I write a beginning. I always tell my students, just open up a file and get sexy with it (laughs). All this means is, go in and have some fun—no stress and no stakes. I start by getting to know the character and who they are in the day to day. Once I know them, they are that character in every scene, so in revision I can go back and cut the get-to-know-you and get straight to some action.

As for endings, they rarely change. By the time I’m rounding the last corner on a novel, I have a pretty good sense of where I’m going and it often feels like landing a difficult dismount in gymnastics. It’s quite a rush, and one of my favorite parts of 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 see myself in both the protagonist Gwen who lacks confidence and feels like she’s in over her head, and Nicola, the antagonist who wants to be loved so badly that she holds on too tight. For me, that was the key to cracking the book: seeing myself in both, and not just Gwen. I had to understand Nicola’s motivation for the book to make sense and not have her seem completely off her rocker. That said, I have never taken things to quite the extreme Nicola does, I promise!

Visit Erin Flanagan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Blackout.

My Book, The Movie: Blackout.

Coffee with a Canine: Erin Flanagan & Mavis and Lorna.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Swartwood

Robert Swartwood is the USA Today bestselling author of The Serial Killer’s Wife, The Calling, Man of Wax, and several other novels. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Daily Beast, ChiZine, Space and Time, Postscripts, and PANK. He created the term “hint fiction” and is the editor of Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer. He lives with his wife in Pennsylvania.

Swartwood's new novel is The Killing Room.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The book starts with a businessman waking up in a Las Vegas hotel room that isn't his to find a dead woman in the bathtub. That's literally the first few pages. So the title, The Killing Room, gives the reader a good sense of what they're getting into when they pick up the book.

At the same time, I've always loved books that lead you in one direction and then suddenly go in an entirely different direction. Many times with thrillers, you know where the story is going after the first few chapters. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing! I’ve certainly written books like that.

But for this one, I wanted the reader to get caught up in what they think they know and then pull the rug right out from under them—so it’s challenging to go into much of the plot without giving away major spoilers, though I will note that I love titles that can have more than one meaning, and the title to this book is no exception.

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

I grew up reading Michael Crichton and Stephen King, so I'm not sure my teenage reader self would be too surprised. Though, at that age, I believed I would become a horror writer, so maybe my teenage self would be a bit bummed to learn I ended up going the crime/thriller route.

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

A blank page is always scary, for sure, but before I sit down to write a new book, I usually have been thinking about the plot and characters for a while, and sometimes even have an ending in mind, though oftentimes when I get to the end a few surprises pop up along the way—and that's always fun, because if I as the writer am surprised by what happens, then hopefully the reader will be even more surprised.

Having said that, as the story starts to crystalize, I'll sometimes realize certain parts of the beginning need to change. And sometimes I'll write an ending that doesn't work no matter how hard I try and needs to be retooled entirely. That's happened once or twice before. I don't love when that happens, but if it means the book is stronger for it, then so be it.

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

Some might call me a smart-ass, and my protagonists often have a sardonic streak that runs through them. But I also write about a lot of evil characters, so it's scary sometimes to think that maybe part of me is in those characters, too, just beneath the surface.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Movies and TV, for sure. Readers often comment that my writing is cinematic, which I think is a roundabout way of saying they can easily see the action playing out in their heads. Probably because when I write, I'm just typing out the action as I see it in my head.

Visit Robert Swartwood's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Genevieve Plunkett

Genevieve Plunkett is the author of Prepare Her: Stories. A recipient of an O. Henry Award, her short fiction can also be found in journals such as New England Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, and The Best Small Fictions 2018. She lives in Vermont with her two children.

Plunkett's debut novel is In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I wrote songs before I started writing fiction, so the cadence of the title was important to me. In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel has a catchiness that I hope draws people in, even if they don’t know what the book is about. As for how it connects to the story itself, the title comes directly from a conversation between Portia and Theo. They are bandmates, who are also in love, searching desperately for a way to be together, when it seems otherwise impossible. The lobby of a dream hotel is a central place and also a nowhere place, kind of like hope.

What's in a name?

Elizabeth Bowen was perhaps the first author that I truly loved as an adult reader. Her novel, The Death of the Heart, is centered around sixteen-year-old orphan Portia Quayne. My Portia--Portia Elby-- is not modeled after her, but it was comforting to choose a name that I had a connection to, in a certain quiet, literary way.

Alby Porter, the rock star who Portia obsesses over, was called Alby Porter before I even understood the significance of how the names mirrored each other: Portia Elby > < Alby Porter.

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

Once teenage Genevieve got over the shock of discovering that I actually finished something, she might be surprised at how romantic certain parts of the novel are. She might think I’ve gone soft. And I suppose I have.

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

I was writing on a (loose) deadline, so the end of this book was a distant--but fast approaching--mystery. I was sure of it when I reached it and the ending has not changed since that first draft.

In general, beginnings are more difficult to discern. A novel or story can start at any point, from any angle. Sometimes I must discard what I thought was the beginning to find the true take-off point. Beginnings, for me, require skill, while endings are mostly discovered through intuition, trust, and luck.

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

I have had the great misfortune and pleasure of experiencing manic and hypo-manic highs. I wanted a chance to describe this state through Portia, to write a book driven by mood rather than time. Mania can create the illusion (or maybe it is not an illusion--who knows?) that all events are taking place at the same time, like a kaleidoscope. That might be why the novel is scrambled chronologically.

That being said, I think I put the best of myself into Theo’s character--his sensitivity, his worries, and his dreams.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

So many! I have always been mystified by song lyrics. As a child, I felt that the songs of artists like David Bowie, Grace Slick, Neil Young, and Captain Beefheart, were exclusive worlds. I wanted access, but believed that I was too naive, or not intellectual enough to understand. It took me a while to realize that the songs were not written for the intellect. That’s where I find the stories in my head now--by reaching past the meaning of them, right into the strangeness and confusion. It reminds me of music, and probably comes from the same creative longing, ignited by listening to those artists at such a young age.

Visit Genevieve Plunkett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Flannery Murphy

Sara Flannery Murphy is the author of the novels The Possessions and Girl One. She grew up in Arkansas, studied library science in British Columbia, and received her MFA in creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis. She lives in Utah with her husband and their two sons.

Her newest novel is The Wonder State.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The Wonder State invites readers into Arkansas, even if they don’t realize it! This was the state’s first official nickname, chosen back in the 1920s. The nickname changed within twenty years because it didn’t draw enough new economic growth to the state, becoming the Land of Opportunity and then the Natural State. The moment I stumbled across this original nickname, I knew I had to resurrect it as my title, and I’m thankful my publishing team agreed.

I hope the title introduces readers to the enduring theme of the book, which is the sense of wonder that my characters experience naturally as teenagers and need to reconnect with as adults. And the interplay of “state” as both a state of mind and a geographic territory appeals to my love of puns.

What's in a name?

My protagonist is named Jadelynne. I notice that writers tend to choose unusually elegant or beautiful names for their main characters, which makes sense. Writers are an artistic bunch, and you have to spend a lot of time with your character’s name … why not name them Julian, Penelope, Cassandra?

But I wanted to give Jadelynne a name that reads as more common, less poetic. And she shortens it to Jay, trying to remove herself from her roots. In contrast, the twins who move in from out of town are named Hilma and Max after visual artists, which is the kind of highbrow name Jay envies.

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

My teenage self would probably be shocked that I’m writing about the Arkansas Ozarks. Just like Jay, in my book, hesitates to use Arkansas as source material in her visual art.

In other ways, though, I think my teenage self would love that I’m writing a novel that incorporates portals, magic, and otherworldly houses. It wasn’t until my twenties that I started agonizing over whether I was writing work that was “serious” enough, which wasn’t good for my creativity. My teenage self was still caught in the unabashed childhood love of fantasy that has, thankfully, worked its way back to the surface.

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

Beginnings and endings are equally easy for me … they’re the bookends that keep me grounded. It’s the middle that gets me.

In the case of The Wonder State, I knew I wanted to begin with the perspective of Brandi Addams, the character whose vanishing pulls the other characters back to their hometown. I had an early, clear vision of Brandi walking alone through the Ozarks forests, seeking a mysterious house, and that’s exactly how the published book begins.

And the ending was the bright beacon that was pulling me through the complicated parts in the middle of the story. The exact mechanics shifted around, but I actually cried when I wrote the final scene because I was so happy to have arrived right where I wanted to (no spoilers).

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

In a word: houses. I’ve always been curious about the houses in my own neighborhoods, or in any town or city I visit. This book is a love letter to the many, many houses that I’ve never set foot inside, but that have made a home inside my imagination.

Visit Sara Flannery Murphy's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Possessions.

The Page 69 Test: The Possessions.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Byrne

James Byrne is the pseudonym for an author who has worked for more than twenty years as a journalist and in politics. A native of the Pacific Northwest, he lives in Portland, Oregon.

His new novel is Deadlock.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The editor of the Dez Limerick series (The Gatekeeper, Deadlock) is Keith Kahla at Minotaur Books. He’s a friend and has edited me before. He makes my books better. I met him at a World Mystery Convention and told him I was working on a single-protagonist action/adventure book.

“What’s it called?” he asked.

“Limerick.”

“What’s it going to be called?”

That’s Keith’s very subtle way of reminding me how much freight the title needs to carry!

My second choice was The Gatekeeper. My hero, Dez, worked in a foreign military as a “gatekeeper,” a breach-expert, capable of opening any door, keeping it open for as long as necessary, and controlling who does, and doesn’t, go through. I’d been looking for a unique skill set that I hadn’t read in other thriller/mystery novels, and finally settled on that one. So I suggested it to the awesome team at Minotaur, and they liked it.

They wanted a title for the second book that involved things like keys, locks, doors, gates, etc. I offered a wide array of options and they gave the greenlight to Deadlock.

What's in a name?

I call it the Rumpelstiltskin Effect: If my protagonist has the “wrong” name, the character just won’t work. I spend an inordinate amount of time working on character names.

I also didn’t want to go with the overused, like “Jack” and “Jake.” A whole lotta those guys are running through mystery/thriller novels.

I tried a lot of names in the very early drafts, before I knew Dez was from the United Kingdom. Once I knew that, I threw out every name on the possibles list. I wanted this guy to stand out, and I thought maybe a totally overwrought, ridiculous name might be fun and different. But with a light, bright, punchy nickname. One syllable. I got “Dez” first, which led me to Desmond. OK, different, old-timey. I liked it.

In my teens, I’d read a comic book by the great Denny O’Neill and Howard Chaykin called IronWolf. In it, the pirate character had a ship called the Limerick Rake, which also is an old Irish drinking song. I’m Irish-American. I thought, why not? “Limerick” is a cool word that brings to mind a silly (often ribald) rhyme, an Irish city, a comic book I liked, and an old song. A lot going on there. So I had a first and last name.

And “Aloysius” is just one of those goofy names that are always in the back of my mind, like, “Why in the world would anyone name their boy that?” Desmond Aloysius Limerick. Dez to his friends.

The moment I had that name, I knew I had my character. Rumpelstiltskin be damned, this character would do what I wanted on the page!

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

Some, but less perhaps than I think.

My dad loved action/adventure novels (Beau Geste, The Four Feathers) and shared that love with me. I was a devoted comic book reader (still am), and a lot of what I learned from writing action, I learned from Marvel Comics.

As a teen, I fell in love with a brilliant British comic strip, Modesty Blaise, about a young orphan girl who became the crime lord of Tangiers and retired to England in her mid-20s with her most faithful lieutenant, Willie Garvin. Now bored, she and Willie lend their services to British Military Intelligence and to old friends in trouble. Peter O’Donnell wrote the strip from about 1961 or so, to about 2001. I still read those today, and am inspired by his international settings, his strong female protagonist, his action sequences.

I half suspect that my teen self would have enjoyed Dez.

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

It’s harder to write an Act III than an Act I. I’ve tons of clever ideas in my head for launching a rollicking good story. I just don’t know how to make all of them pay off!

Since I’m a former amateur actor, I think in the Three Act format. I go into a novel usually knowing the inciting incident (the “ratchet-up-the-danger” point) that moves us from Act I to Act II. And I often know the inciting incident (the big set piece) that moves us from Act II to Act III. But I then gotta figure out how to bring this beast in for a landing. That’s the tough part!

At age 18, I was working in food services at the Boise Airport. One night after my shift, I was walking to my car in a drenching downpour. The ceiling of clouds was quite low. I looked up for some reason just as a jetliner broke through the ceiling. It had been silent until it broke through, and then boom! the noise shook me. And it was trailing two horizontal tornadoes of rainwater caught in its thrust vortexes.

True story: I thought, standing then, tired, drenched, “That’s gonna be in my novel someday.” I was 18. My book Crashers was published when I was 50, and that’s part of the inciting incident in Act II.

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

I’ve never been in much physical danger. I can’t fight worth a damn. If I stumbled into a gun battle, I’d shriek and fall into the fetal position.

But I’ve worked for some powerful and successful women, some of whom have mentored me, so I like strong female protagonists, as does Dez. I’m attracted to loyalty, as is Dez. I think I’m funnier than most of the people around me (I crack myself up), a trait that Dez shares.

I’m most similar to a guy named John Broom, who appeared in a couple of Minotaur Books I wrote, Ice Cold Kill and Gun Metal Heart. My wife, Katy King, insists that John is her favorite of my characters. Who knows? I might bring him back.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’m a print journalist, and a lot of my stories are (please forgive this cliché ) “ripped from the headlines.” I wrote The Gatekeeper mostly in 2021. It includes a small bit about political troubles brewing between Ukraine and Russia, and it includes a right-wing political insurrection. Sound familiar? I wrote early drafts of Crashers, which focuses on terrorists bringing down multiple airliners, mostly in 1999 and 2000. Then came Sept. 11, 2001, and I had to shelve that book for a decade.

The movie (and later the novel) The Andromeda Strain had a huge influence on me as a kid. It’s brilliantly put together.

The British comic strip Modesty Blaise remains a strong influence. I often tell people that Peter O’Donnell was one of the truly great storytellers of the 20th century.

As for music: When I’m writing, I often play the score of an action/adventure film (the score is the music that we, the audience, can hear but the characters cannot). If I’m not much in a mood to write one of my thrillers, I gotta tell you, I put on Michael Giacchino’s music from the TV show Alias or Mission: Impossible 3, and wow does that get my juices going. Also Brian Tyler’s music from The Fast and the Furious franchise or Bangkok Dangerous; Christopher Lennertz’ soaring, orchestral work from the TV relaunch, Lost in Space; David Arnold’s moody work for the most recent run of James Bond movies; Hans Zimmer’s big wall of sound for The Peacemaker; James Newton Howard’s work on Salt; and best of all, John Powell’s driving string sections for the Jason Bourne movies, as well as Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The list goes on.

Visit James Byrne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Cody Epstein

Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of four novels that have been published in a total of twenty-one countries around the world: The Madwomen of Paris (2023), Wunderland (2019), The Gods of Heavenly Punishment (2012), and The Painter from Shanghai (2007).

She is the recipient of the 2014 Asia Pacific American Librarians Association Honor Award for fiction, and was longlisted for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Since the book is about women locked up in France’s largest women’s asylum in the 19th century, I think The Madwomen of Paris does a lot of work! Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for that, since my amazing agent Amelia Atlas was the one who actually came up with it. I’d initially wanted to call the novel The Mesmerist, since the story is based on a very bizarre, real-life chapter of medical history in which Jean-Martin Charcot—today widely regarded as the father of modern neurology—used hypnotism to recreate hysterical symptoms with patients from the asylum’s hysteria ward. In the end, though, it didn’t work as well to signpost what the story was about or where it was set.

What's in a name?

Names are always an interesting challenge in historical fiction, particularly when it’s based on real events like The Madwomen of Paris is. Actually, my first big decision with this book wasn’t choosing the names themselves, but deciding whether and how to fictionalize the names of characters in the first place, since most of them are drawn from real people. I went back and forth on that, particularly with regards to Charcot, whom I was at one point going to give the name “Bouchard.” I think at least part of my urge to rename him stemmed from a reluctance to paint such a revered medical figure in a less-than-reverent light. Ultimately, though, I realized I couldn’t do what I’d set out to do with the book—that is, fully hold Charcot and the powerful men he worked with (Freud, Babinsky, Gilles de la Tourrette) accountable for their treatment of women—without naming them, because so much of their power lay in their real-life names and reputations.

For the female characters, though, I wanted to have more flexibility in terms of creating characters who were composites of the real-life, fascinating patients of the Salpêtrière. I was also reluctant to project my own narrative designs on women who’d spent so much of their lives having men do exactly that to them already. So while Rosalie is based pretty directly on the woman who was probably the Salpêtrière’s most celebrated and famous hysteric, Blanche Wittman, I made her into a separate character in the novel. The same goes with Josephine; though she’s drawn loosely from Augustine Gleizes (in particular, from Geizes’s extraordinary photogenic presence) she has some qualities from other hysterics I’d read about, and others I simply made up.

Choosing their names and that of Laure, the narrator, ended up being a process too. I started with names I found on name generator websites like behindthename.com, and which felt intuitively like they fit the characters. Then I worked with my very thoughtful and diligent factcheckers in Paris to refine them to make sure they aligned with naming trends of the time. Laure was actually “Flore” at first; I liked it because it felt simple, strong and unadorned, which is essentially her character. After learning that Flore wasn’t actually very commonly used in France in the 19th century, I switched her to “Laure,” which had the same feel to me.

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

Honestly? Probably less surprised than I would have been by my first two novels! I was fascinated by 19th-century European literature about women as a teen, in particular Gothic classics like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Tess of D’Urbervilles. I would probably have been surprised by the amount of research that ultimately had to go into the novel, however. And given how much I struggled in math and chemistry, I definitely would have been surprised by the fact that it was positively reviewed by Science Magazine.

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

I’d say it depends on the story. With my first novel, The Painter from Shanghai, I rewrote the preface about a dozen times before finding the right setting and scene, but I always knew where I wanted to end the novel. With The Gods of Heavenly Punishment I actually didn’t know either the beginning or the end when I started it, and kind of felt my way to both. With Wunderland the beginning came pretty easily to me, but I wrote about a dozen endings before finally just ending the book at an earlier point.

By contrast, The Madwomen of Paris was inspired, in part, by a real-life detail from the Salpêtrière that I was always particularly struck by: the fact that one of Charcot’s “star” hysterics ultimately escaped him and the asylum dressed as a man. There was something about that role inversion, and the sheer, subversive audacity of the act, that felt so powerful to me, and from the beginning I knew I wanted to build my own ending around it. Of course, Josephine ends up having her own set of dangers and fraught circumstances she needs to escape, and I added some elements to my version that reflected those. But no matter where the novel went before that (and it went a lot of places, as there were numerous rewrites!) I always knew that that was my destination.

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

That’s one of the funny things about writing characters who inhabit such completely different worlds from my own–I always end up imbuing at least a little bit of myself in them anyway. In part, I think that’s because writing different characters is not unlike acting in different roles–in order to make both feel fully-realized, you need to imbue them with observations, reflections and sensibilities that ring true. And the only way to really do that is to draw from personal experience.

But there are definitely elements of myself that go beyond that in the characters I’ve written; things that connect them not only to me, but to one another. I’ve realized, for instance, that each of my books has a character who uses art—and especially literature—as a kind of lifeline. In The Madwomen of Paris, literature is one of the things that binds Josephine and Laure together. Laure has always been a bookworm, and Josephine—whose working class background has limited her access to literature—taps into Laure’s literacy and cache of remembered storylines by having her read and recite stories to her in the dank darkness of the asylum’s hysteria ward. It’s very reflective of my own love of books, and how pretty much since I first learned to read they’ve been my go-to source of safety, escape and intellectual growth.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Nearly all of my books have been influenced by visual images in one way or another. The Painter from Shanghai started when I saw a self-portrait of Pan Yuliang at the Guggenheim and was completely riveted by it, as well as by the brief summary of her extraordinary life that accompanied it. (I also used her paintings to try to understand her story, since there is almost nothing by the way of formal biography about her out there, even in Chinese.) While writing The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, I was deeply influenced by the photographs of Tadahiko Hayashi, whose postwar images in the wake of The Tokyo Firebombing really captured for me the tragic scope and devastating impact of that event. And The Madwomen of Paris started with an image of Augustine Gleizes that I stumbled onto online in 2017. It was just so intriguing; this young, scantily-clad woman with a strangely-contorted arm, staring straight at the camera. Once I discovered who she was and the circumstances of that photograph, I knew I’d found a world I wanted to explore fictively.

But as a writer of historical (and now, I guess, hysterical) fiction, I’ve also been deeply influenced by modern-day political events and currents, because the more I write about the past the more vibrantly in conversation with the present it always seems to be. As I wrote The Gods of Heavenly Punishment America was indiscriminately killing Iraqi civilians with drones, and while I wrote a Wunderland scene about the Nuremberg Rallies—with its torchlight, red flags and violent rhetoric—there was Trump, supporting Tiki-Torch-carrying white Supremacists, demonizing foreign immigrants and denouncing the media with exactly the same term (“lying press”) Hitler had used.

Madwomen was no different: as I wrote it, the news cycle seemed to be continually roiling with revelations about all of the ways in which powerful men (Weinstein, Epstein, Nassar, Cosby, Trump) abuse and exploit women and have largely gotten away with it, and the ways in which many of those women are then required to relive that trauma publicly in their quests for justice. I was working on a scene where Josephine relives a violent sexual attack on Charcot’s stage while Christine Blasey Ford was testifying on national television that Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her, and being mocked by Trump and other Republicans for it. Then, of course, Kavanaugh and another accused predator, Clarence Thomas, helped overturn Roe vs. Wade, effectively stripping American women of control over their own bodies. Even as I was working on revisions, E. Jean Carroll was being called a whack job by Trump on CNN’s Town Hall stage. All of this definitely influenced the sense of anger and urgency with which I wrote the novel, which may have made it more of a heavy read then you might expect a historical novel set in Belle Epoque Paris to be. But I think that ultimately, it also makes it a more resonant and relevant book—something I didn’t expect myself when I started, but with which, in retrospect, I’m very satisfied.

Learn more about the novel and author at Jennifer Cody Epstein's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Painter from Shanghai.

The Page 69 Test: The Gods of Heavenly Punishment.

The Page 69 Test: Wunderland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ken Jaworowski

Ken Jaworowski is an editor at the New York Times. He graduated from Shippensburg University and the University of Pennsylvania. He grew up in Philadelphia, where he was an amateur boxer, and his plays have been produced in New York and Europe. He lives in New Jersey with his family. Small Town Sins is his first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Small Town Sins was fairly easy to write, but the title gave me headaches. I was foolishly enamored of the working title, The Second Girl I Ever Kissed, which was taken from a line a character says. Luckily, my agent and editor talked me out of it and we brainstormed Small Town Sins. That, I think, gives the reader a sense of the setting, and an inkling of the plot.

What's in a name?

The character names are taken from real family names of people in that area. Every time I'd get stuck on what to name a character, I'd google "popular Pennsylvania names" and look to that for inspiration.

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

My teenage self would be incredibly surprised. I grew up as a city kid who roamed the Philadelphia streets. I'd rarely left the city limits. But then I moved to a small town -- Shippensburg, Pa. -- for college, and was completely perplexed by, and soon in love with, small town life.

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

The middle is the hardest to write. I find myself racing through beginnings and plotting out endings. But it's the middle section -- the 'How do I get from here to there?' -- that sometimes gives me a bit of trouble.

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

I've only heard this quote once, but I've loved it ever since: 'We are all the same person, expressed differently.' Meaning, we are all equipped with the same basic emotions, though perhaps in different quantities. In that vein, we are all like our characters, in small ways or large ways. That's why readers are drawn to news stories like 'Man Beats Up His Boss at Work.' We've all been frustrated, and all of us have fantasized about doing something like that. Thankfully, though, even if we all feel like that at one time or another, most of us resist that urge.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I take inspiration wherever I can get it. Mostly it comes from people who tell me stories. Later on I'll be writing and will take a story that I've been told, alter it, and it becomes part of the plot.

Visit Ken Jaworowski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue