Amulya Malladi

Amulya Malladi is the bestselling author of eight novels, including The Copenhagen Affair, A House for Happy Mothers, and The Mango Season. Her books have been translated into several languages, including Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Danish, Romanian, Serbian, and Tamil. She won a screenwriting award for her work on Ø (Island), a Danish series that aired on Amazon Prime Global and Studio Canal+. Currently living in California, she is a Danish citizen who was born and raised in India.

Malladi's new novel is A Death in Denmark.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I’m one of those writers who needs the title before I can start writing a book. A Death in Denmark was called Sinnerman when I started working on it. Since my protagonist Gabriel Præst is a blues musician, he plays the guitar, and is a fan of Nina Simone, this title fit well.

However, my editor wondered if people would be expecting a serial killer novel instead of the political mystery and thriller the book is. We went a few rounds and decided that A Death in Denmark said everything we needed it to say. I love the title. It’s simple and draws the reader in immediately: a murder took place in Denmark…don’t you want to know more?

What's in a name?

When I first started to write this book, my protagonist was called Bo Baptista. But as I started to think about him more and more, the name started to feel wrong. I think I went a little biblical with the name when I finally came to it. I thought of my PI as someone who takes confessions and hence the last name Præst. Gabriel, just sort of slid into the name, I think inspired by Archangel Gabriel, or Gabriel Byrne who is one of my favorite actors.

Names are a mystery to me. I have no idea why something feels right or wrong—and I usually go through a lot of “baby names” websites to settle into one that I know will embody my character.

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

My teenage self will absolutely not believe I wrote a book set in Denmark about World War II in first person from the perspective of a middle-aged white Danish man. None of these things were my reality growing up in India. I started to write when I was 11 years old, but even then, I wrote from a female perspective. I also knew nothing about Denmark and World War II was all about how India supported the British to get our freedom.

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

Writing is hard work. I find it all hard. Most of the time it’s hitting the wall in the middle that is the most difficult. I edit…a lot, so everything can change based on where I’m at.

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

Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. In A Death in Denmark, Gabriel likes good food and wine as I do. But he is a musician and I’m tone deaf. He loves philosophy, which is a lot like my younger son who also has a penchant for existentialism; and Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre as my protagonist does. Characters are an amalgam of people we know or people we want to be—they are authentic to who they are, which means they’re not like anyone else I know.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am inspired by so many things. With A Death in Denmark, Nina Simone and her music were in the background as I wrote. My love for good food and wine come through as does my love for Copenhagen. I am intrigued by learning from history, and so a lot of the World War II facts that found their way into my book come from my curiosity.

Visit Amulya Malladi's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Death in Denmark.

The Page 69 Test: A Death in Denmark.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mia Tsai

Mia Tsai is a Taiwanese American author and editor of speculative fiction. Her debut novel is a xianxia-inspired adult contemporary fantasy titled Bitter Medicine, which is published by Tachyon Publications. She lives in Atlanta with her family, pets, and orchids. Her favorite things include music of all kinds and taking long trips with nothing but the open road and a saucy rhythm section.

My Q&A with the author:

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

On a scale of "says what it is exactly on the tin" to "metaphor several layers deep," Bitter Medicine scores in the middle. "Bitter medicine" describes the main theme of the book--the hard-to-swallow lessons you have to learn in life, whatever they may be--but it is also literal, as the title appears within the text. It's also a bit of editorializing about the taste of Chinese medicine, most of which has disagreed with my taste buds. More to the point, Elle, one of my main characters, is a descendant of the Chinese god of medicine and a pretty good doctor in her own right, so the title is relevant in multiple ways.

Prior to a big rewrite that pushed the novel more into the realm of fantasy, it was titled A Brush with Love, which worked for me because Elle is a calligrapher and a lot of what she values revolves around her art. But it could also be misconstrued as a romance about dentists. Bitter Medicine is definitely the better title, and that has stuck, from querying all the way to the finished product.

What's in a name?

Oh, names. I struggle a lot with names, so when I do have to name someone, it takes me quite a while to pin something down. Names have a huge role in Bitter Medicine, from the true name trope found in Western European mythologies to the various names and nicknames Chinese people have and the relationships that can be determined from their usage. I wish it were as easy as saying that Elle and Luc both just appeared the way they are, but the truth is that both characters, and by extension, their families and colleagues, had a lot of time and care put into their names.

To name someone is to recognize them and have power over them, and that's why names are so important in the world of Bitter Medicine. No one ever goes by their real name, so each character has multiple names. For Elle, who starts the story in hiding, her name is a part of an older name she used to go by. I thought a lot about the most common English names that Chinese women take, plus I looked at some lists of popular names, and went from there. Elle doesn't want to be found, so a nondescript name worked out best for her. The surname she uses, Mei, is a little joke and maybe a dig at how often Chinese women are named Mei in Western literature. Thus, Elle Mei: a very forgettable name.

Of course, Elle couldn't just have one or two English names. She needed a Chinese name as well, and this is where things got difficult, because naming children can be a complicated and involved process in Chinese. My family, for example, went a traditional route and consulted a fortune-teller, and then I was given my name by the patriarch of the family. For Elle, and by extension her brothers Tony and Will, I needed to consult friends in Taiwan for an accurate surname to give her, then find a generational name she could share with her siblings, then decide on her actual given name. This is a pretty common process for Chinese-speakers who give their characters Chinese names, and--I'm just putting this out there--if someone decided to start a side hustle to help authors find Chinese names that could pass the Chinese mom sniff test, that person would have constant business.

Luc wasn't that much easier, as I needed something that was sort of historically accurate. And he has multiple names too, in addition to needing a name that would be suitable for a romance hero. Hours of poring over late eighteenth-century baptismal records later (the Bas-Rhin website is such a great resource!), I made my decision to use a saint name for a given name, then attach place-name surnames.

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

Probably not that surprised about the romance part, as I've always loved romance and wrote romance fanfics when I was a teen. But I hadn't considered myself someone who could write a novel, only short fiction, so teenage me would probably be pretty impressed by adult me. Teenage me was a regular fixture at the Barnes and Noble, loading up on mass market paperbacks, and it never gets old seeing a cool book on the shelf.

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

Oh, beginnings are harder, for sure. They're like overtures, especially in romance. The audience doesn't know it yet, but you have to introduce basically everything that's important and noteworthy in the beginning, and when you're writing the beginning, you don't even know what's noteworthy yet, even if you've outlined everything! Endings are far easier, and they're also my favorite because I will have spent the entire book writing toward that ending and not letting myself have the reward of the ending until I finally get there. And then I just enjoy myself. Like saving the best bite of the plate for last.

My endings don't change, but my beginnings always do. I usually fiddle with a couple of different starting points before settling on the one I think is right. I've learned not to be too fussed by beginnings.

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 little bit of myself in every character I write, but I do my very best not to put too much of myself into my characters since I'm curious about who they are and would like to find that out during the writing process. The characters who are the most different from me are my favorites. Elle's brother, Tony, is self-centered and very vain and has a very high opinion of himself--and he lets everyone know it. It's such a blast to write him because he could say or do something ridiculous and because he's so self-assured, it works. Tony is aspirational for me, though I know I'd never be like him!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I'm always listening to music, so I do find inspiration in it. In one of my other lives, I'm a classical musician, so structure is what holds my writing together. Two-act operas and musicals were hugely important for Bitter Medicine's structure, as I was struggling with how to organize the information and the emotional beats before realizing the story was not going to fit a three-act. I also find inspiration just by being alive and going through daily life. Any interaction could spark the imagination, and it's conversations with other people that have given me the majority of my ideas.

Visit Mia Tsai's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liam Callanan

Liam Callanan is a writer and teacher. His novel, Paris by the Book, a national bestseller, was translated into multiple languages and won the 2019 Edna Ferber Prize. He’s also the 2017 winner of the Hunt Prize, and his first novel, The Cloud Atlas, was a finalist for an Edgar Award. Callanan’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The San Francisco Chronicle, and he's recorded numerous essays for public radio. He's also taught for the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and lives in Wisconsin with his wife and daughters.

Callanan's new novel is When in Rome.

My Q&A with the author:

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

In When in Rome, 52-year-old Claire Murphy heads to Rome to help some American nuns there sell their crumbling convent—built for 300, it only houses 3 (and at least one ghost). Once there, though, she falls in love with the city, the convent, and most unexpectedly, the nuns' life—so much so that she considers joining their ranks. Just then, her old college flame shows up. What to do? Well, when in Rome...

What's in a name?

The names in this book come from a variety of sources—friends, family, and some, out of the blue. The name of the protagonist's daughter, Dorothy, comes from Dorothy Day. The order of nuns who runs the convent is called the Order of Saint Gertrude, in honor of my Great Aunt Gertrude, who was not a nun but the life of every party she ever entered.

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

Very surprised and not, I think. I went to an all-boys school and had little exposure to nuns. Then again, it was a Catholic school, and that experience has fed more than a few of my novels. The narrator of my first book is a Catholic priest; the setting of my second is a Catholic school. I suppose it was only a matter of time before I made it to Rome.

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

Beginnings. It's only when I finish a book that I see where I need(ed) to start; in all my books, I've always written the opening last. This book is somewhat of an exception— I wrote the prologue years back on a high-speed train to Shanghai, of all places—-but the first chapter I was wrestling with down to the 11th hour.

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

For the record, I never do, but my readers—especially my family always do. The protagonist of my first novel is named Louis; my mother thought he was quite like me, as our names both began with L. I noted that there were differences; the protagonist, for starters, was an 80-something year-old priest in Alaska...

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Travel. My book start with places: Alaska, California, Paris, now Rome. If I was a painter, I'd sketch in the hills and fields first before I got to the people in the middle of the painting. Maybe that's not how painters are supposed to do it, but it seems to be how I work. I set the stage and then wait and watch to see what characters walk on from the wings.

Visit Liam Callanan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Vibhuti Jain

Vibhuti (“Vib”) Jain lives with her husband and daughter in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she works in international development. She began her career as a corporate lawyer in New York City. She holds degrees from Yale University and Harvard Law School. She grew up in Guilford, Connecticut.

Our Best Intentions is her first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title Our Best Intentions evokes how the novel represents a community; the story is told through multiple perspectives to achieve as much. It also conveys how each of the characters is striving better themselves or their loved ones – even though, as we learn, this can bear ugly consequences.

What's in a name?

Babur was the name of the founder of the Mughal Empire in India. I liked the idea of naming Babur Singh, a mild mannered man, a name associated with might and strength.

Also, part of the Indian-American experience is trying to fit in with a name people may view as unusual or hard to pronounce, like Babur, and shortening that name or swapping it out for a nickname, like Bobby, as an attempt to assimilate.

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

I think my teenage self would have loved reading this novel and seen a lot of her own growing pains in an adolescent in Angie. I’m not sure the content would surprise her, but I think she’d be thrilled and proud to know that I wrote a novel.

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

Definitely the ending! It’s so hard to know when to end a story and how many loose ends to tie up. Moreover, I want my writing to mirror real life, where there may not be endings, per se – things just fade away.

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

Absolutely. I identify with many of the characters. I’m a first generation Indian-American, like the Singhs. I appreciate Babur’s well-meaning attempts to set himself and his daughter up for economic stability, if not success. I was once a self-conscious teenage girl who would have been quite confused and morally conflicted about when to speak up for fairness, as Angie is in the novel. I’ve also had moments when I’ve felt unheard or alienated like Principal Burrowes, or felt lonely and defensive like Chiara, for example.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Growing up in the Northeast suburbs inspired a number of the details about Kitchewan – including the ubiquity of water, having grown up near the coast and a number of rivers.

Visit Vibhuti Jain's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Mandelo

Lee Mandelo (he/they) is a writer, critic, and occasional editor whose fields of interest include speculative and queer fiction, especially when the two coincide. His debut novel Summer Sons, which has been featured in publications ranging from NPR to the Chicago Review of Books, is a contemporary southern gothic dealing with queer masculinity, fast cars, and ugly inheritances. Mandelo has been a nominee for awards including the Nebula, Lambda, and Hugo. Aside from a stint overseas learning to speak Scouse, he has spent his life ranging across Kentucky, currently living in Louisville and pursuing a PhD at the University of Kentucky.

Mandelo's new novella is Feed Them Silence.

My Q&A with the author:

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

As a title, Feed Them Silence serves to set the story's tone first and foremost. There's an unsettling effect, a bleakness, created by juxtaposing "feed"—with its implications of nourishment, consumption, and hunger—with "silence," a word at the least partly associated with death, isolation, and absence. Plus, silence is an inedible thing! Then, lastly, "them" calls to the readers' mind an outsider: someone whose needs for survival, perhaps, are being left unsatisfied.

Between the title and the cover design, my goal is for the overall discomfiting vibe of the novella to come across.

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

Honestly, probably no real surprise for my teenage self.

Feed Them Silence wrangles together several themes, or concepts, that have always been compelling for me. Humans projecting their feelings onto animals; queer relationships with a realistic amount of grown adult mess; speculation on cognition and technological interventions; and the general experience of being upset by art sometimes—all the prickly stuff I'd have appreciated gnawing on, even back then.

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

Can I thread the needle here, and say middles?

Between those two, though, I'd choose beginnings. Not because getting started is necessarily the hardest for me, but because once a draft is finished… it's almost always necessary to revise the beginning sections to better match the rest of the book. The endings themselves tend to turn out (at least roughly!) the same as I'd intended when I started dratfing, so it's definitely the beginnings that change the most during those revisions.

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

Depending on the angle of approach, there's a couple of answers I could give, really! On the one hand, art always arises from the perspectives, experiences, and life-worlds of its creator; no matter how separate, or disconnected, a character might be… the disconnection itself still has a deep relationship to "me," as the person who's doing the creating.

On the other hand, as compared to, say, my last book Summer Sons—which drew deeply in some places from "real life"—Feed Them Silence's characters are further away from me. Our protagonist Sean is honestly pretty troubling, especially in the ethics of her relationships to others. So, her relationship to me derives more from the thematic and social critiques it's possible, and interesting, for me to make through her and the story overall.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

While I'm a huge fan of the visual arts, and also film and television media, for this particular project the biggest inspiration was the academic research that led me to write it! Closer to the release of the novella, Tor.com will have an essay from me exploring that research in depth, but to summarize… Feed Them Silence was drafted during the early pandemic lockdown, when I was in a doctoral seminar co-taught by a multidisciplinary faculty team on "animals." In the process, I read a lot of what anthropologists call multispecies ethnography, combined with the theoretical works of Donna J. Haraway, Christine Marran, and other philosophers of science/culture.

We were wrestling with questions about ethical research practices, and also what it means to say we're "in kinship" with nonhuman animals. Like, are we, really? What does consent look like, and what does power look like, in our relationships with other creatures… and with one another? So, the novella grew from that soil.

Visit Lee Mandelo's website.

The Page 69 Test: Summer Sons.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of several works of fiction, including A Thin Bright Line, which was a Lambda Literary Award and Ferro-Grumley Award finalist. She is the winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Award, a Yaddo Fellowship, a California Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships, and a finalist for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Award.

Bledsoe's new novel is Tell the Rest.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My novel is about two survivors of a conversion therapy camp, and how friendship, community, and creative expression are the roads to healing. I love the title Tell the Rest because it comes from an emotionally poignant moment in the novel. I usually find titles excruciatingly difficult to write. I was calling this novel Champion for a while, in a kind of ironic use of the word, but in the end it sounded too much like the title of a Young Adult novel. I was also—briefly—calling the novel The New Fugitives, but that was far too weighty and it emphasized the trauma when I wanted to emphasize the survivor aspects of my characters’ story. Tell the Rest opens up the question about what is not said, what secrets are being harbored, and even more importantly, states that the “rest,” the unspoken, will soon be revealed.

What's in a name?

Naming characters is a tricky and important part of writing novels. I want my characters’ names to fit them, to carry some meaning, and at the same time I don’t want the names to be heavy-handed. My two main characters in Tell the Rest are Ernest and Delia. These are straightforward names, but not too common, and they suit my characters. As a poet, Ernest is committed to telling, and caring about, the truth. The name Delia sounds like a flower to me, something beautiful, something that blooms, but not necessarily flamboyantly. A secondary character named Robin is friendly and kind and an expert in “happiness studies.” Pastor Quade has a name that is as opaque and hard and cold as he is. The trick is to find names that evoke the characters without hitting the readers over the head with symbolism.

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

I don’t think my teenage self would be very surprised by my novel! Which is another way, perhaps, of saying that I haven’t changed much? So much of what I cared about then, I care about now: the beauty of Oregon, the intensity, both negative and positive, of community, and a strong belief in redemption. The triumph of the underdog is also something I would have cared about a lot at sixteen, and still enjoy delivering today. I think what would have surprised me is that I pulled off publishing my novel!

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

Beginnings are definitely more difficult for me than endings. I usually have a pretty good idea of where I want to go, with my story and characters, but rarely know how I’ll get there. I’m a messy and organic writer. I can’t do outlines. I have to write scenes to figure out the story. And I do a lot of rewriting. Often I drastically rewrite the beginning near the end of the writing process, after I’ve already done several drafts. I always want my novel beginnings to hold a composite of the whole book, a way to take the reader right into the world. More often than not, I end up cutting a bunch of pages from the beginning of a late draft. The ending of a novel, on the other hand, often comes to me whole cloth, early in the writing process. I’m particularly fond of the ending to Tell the Rest.

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

In general, I write from my imagination more than many writers do. I wouldn’t say, as some writers do, that my characters represent different parts of myself. My characters are more interesting than I am! It’s true that they do often have some of my passions. And of course lots of my personal experiences are attributed to my characters. But the gestalt, the way those details and experiences come together on the page, are rarely autobiographical. I come to love my characters in the way I love my friends. That said, readers who know me personally often think they know who I’ve modeled certain characters after and no amount of denial convinces them otherwise!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’m deeply moved by settings, especially beautiful ones. So the environment is very important to my stories. I like to show how very specific settings, whether urban or wilderness or something in between, change and motivate my characters. I think of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion as a grandfather book to my new novel, Tell the Rest, and I love the way he uses the Oregon rain as a character. I also think I’m inspired by a lot of film. I’m a very visual writer, so I think of my stories in a filmlike way, the scenes and characters and dialogue flowing cinematically through my brain.

Visit Lucy Jane Bledsoe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jumata Emill

Jumata Emill is a journalist who has covered crime and local politics in Mississippi and parts of Louisiana. He earned his B.A. in mass communications from Southern University and A&M College. He’s a Pitch Wars alum and member of the Crime Writers of Color. When he’s not writing about murderous teens, he’s watching and obsessively tweeting about every franchise of the Real Housewives. Emill lives in Baton Rouge, La.

Emill's new novel is The Black Queen.

My Q&A with the author:

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

It gives the reader a direct answer to who this story is centered around. Even if you don’t know immediately that she’s being murdered, you at least know that girl, who is black and who is queen of something, is the nexus of whatever action unfolds. The title of this book came before I even knew who the characters were that would inhabit this story. I also think it does a great job of teasing the reader. You hear/see The Black Queen and you want to know more. Who is she? What is she the queen of? What does she do? Or what happens to her? And then the synopsis takes care of the rest.

What's in a name?

Well, for Tinsley McArthur, it’s a privileged, somewhat delusional, rich and tone deaf real housewife. I named Tinsely after Tinsley Mortimer, a socialite and former cast member of The Real Housewives of New York. Mortimer even had a little run-in with the law in 2016, like my book’s Tinsley. The name just sounded so rich and white that I felt it was perfect for my book’s Tinsley, who is kind of the worst when the story begins. When I first started writing it and would tell other people who the characters were their immediate reaction when I said Tinsely’s name was always, “Oh God, I don’t know her but I already hate her.” That’s when I knew it was the perfect name for my pseudo anti-heroine.

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

Very, since novels like mine didn’t exist when I was a teenager, which is why I wrote it. I loved mysteries and thrillers as a kid. Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys books were my favorite, but I read them always wishing there were books like them that featured characters that looked like me and were dealing with the same issues I was. I wrote The Black Queen for Black kids like me who deserved to see themselves as “the smartest kids in the room.” The criminal justice system in this country affects brown and black people very differently than it does white people, and I’ve never understood why there weren’t more voices of color in the YA mystery/thriller space.

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

The endings come to me almost instantly. Before I even write the first sentence or outline. I have to know “who did it” before I can map out how my sleuth will uncover the truth. I always know where the story is going to end and how the hero will take down the villain, and then I spend months writing to get to the scene that I envisioned. And the endings in my head rarely change.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

True crime documentaries and podcasts heavily influence my work. As does my career as a journalist that covered lots of crime and murder trials. What I learned on the crime beat is sprinkled throughout my debut novel. Honestly, had I not been a crime reporter I don’t think I could have written this story. Knowing how real police officers go about solving crimes helped me devise how my amateur sleuths could stay one step ahead of the police to get to the truth.

Visit Jumata Emill's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Lyu

Sarah Lyu grew up outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She loves a good hike and can often be found with a paintbrush in one hand and a cup of milky tea in the other. Lyu is the author of The Best Lies and I Will Find You Again.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I have this habit where I come up with a title, pitch it to my editor, and then almost immediately hate it. We spent a few months going back and forth before landing on I Will Find You Again. It’s a bit long, but I love it—there’s a sense of loss and grief but also determination and hope. It encapsulates what the story is ultimately about: an intense love story and the aftermath of a deep, cutting loss.

What's in a name?

Chase Ohara, the main character and narrator of I Will Find You Again, has a name that’s a little on the nose. She’s always in pursuit, always hunting achievements like she’s starving. For her, it’s never enough. Reach a summit and she’s already plotting her next ascent. It’s also part of the novel that her father named both her and her sister traditionally male names (her sister is named Aidan, but chooses to go by Dani) as a not-so-subtle and misguided way of “encouraging” them to do anything, be anything, as if male names could shield them from any sexism or misogyny in their future. Her last name is Japanese and a nod toward No-No Boy by John Okada. There’s a memorable scene in that book where a character with the same last name is turned away from a hotel in the era after WWII because he’s Japanese, despite having called and made a reservation. They’d mistaken “Ohara” for the Irish “O’Hara” on the phone. So close, yet so far away. It’s a great metaphor for Chase’s experience. She was born in the US, like both of her parents, but there’s still this barrier, however slight, that separates her from her White classmates.

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

Shocked, probably. I wrote this novel in part for my teenage self, and it’s the book I needed back then. Like Chase, I was obsessed with achievements and the veneer of success—too deep in to see how it was destroying my sanity, poisoning my soul. When I was younger, I was a more impatient writer, always in a rush to gather enough material for a story, but now that I’m older, I realize that some things just take time. I wouldn’t have been able to write this book until now, until I had enough time to grow and enough distance to both understand and empathize with my teenage self.

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

Endings are hard. Usually, I know what happens before I start a story, but once I get to that point, it can be a little excruciating to write it out. There’re a lot of emotions: it’s often the most intense part of the novel, and it’s the end of the draft, when I’m exhausted and excited, nervous and hopeful. For I Will Find You Again, I didn’t change the beginning or ending much. With each draft, I added more and tried to layer in complexity while keeping the plot and emotional arc largely intact. But the very last scene did change pretty late into the process and came from a casual comment from my editor. Chase is a runner, and the story opens with her running in the dark, alone. She’s anxious, depressed, suicidal. When we leave her, she on another solo run, but this time, she’s not running from anything, not running toward anything. There’s a sense of space and freedom and hope. It was a perfect moment of symmetry—I love endings that echo back to the beginning.

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

The way I create characters is to take a part of me and give it to them. It’s my “in” with them. They might like totally different things, might have goals that are foreign to me, but if I understand a particular piece of what makes them tick, then I can build everything else around it. I need to have that strong sense of empathy for a character, even if I vehemently disagree with them, in order to create someone believable. In many ways it was easy to write Chase and Lia because the pieces I gave them are part of a push-and-pull within myself: the perennial debate of pursuing the idea of success vs. giving up the rat race to find joy in the moment. But for Chase’s father, who can be seen as a kind of villain in the story, I had to dig deeper. Why does he push her so hard? Why does he push himself so hard? It was important to me that he didn’t seem like a caricature of a mean, demanding parent. For him, my “in” was his all- encompassing fear of genuine starvation. His scarcity mindset came from a hungry childhood, and even though he knows logically he’s made enough money to attain financial security, he’s still that scared little boy at his core. It’s hard to empathize with a terrible parent, but it’s easy to empathize with a scared and hungry child.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a big influence. Chase and Lia live in Long Island, and they venture out to Montauk as often as they can. “Meet me in Montauk,” a refrain from the movie, is something they text each other as a Bat-signal to escape their daily, high-achiever grind. I was also inspired by Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow, a crime film about Asian- American teens who start a cheating ring that takes a dark turn. Aside from movies, I’m really inspired by the everyday politics of being Asian-American. The model minority myth, the perpetual foreigner, Asian adoption by White parents—these are subjects I explore in the book. It was also important to me to tell stories that aren’t just centered on the immigrant experience; those stories are crucial but can in some ways re-enforce the idea that Asian- Americans are perpetual foreigners. My goal was to widen the types of stories Asian-Americans are seen in. I wanted to write characters who aren’t necessarily clashing culturally with their parents but whose experience are still completely informed by their Asian-American identity.

Visit Sarah Lyu's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Poeppel

Amy Poeppel is the award-winning author of the novels The Sweet Spot, Musical Chairs, Limelight, and Small Admissions. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, and Working Mother. She and her husband have three sons and split their time between New York City, Germany, and Connecticut.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I thought of the title for The Sweet Spot early in the process of writing this book. I wanted a title that worked on multiple levels, and most importantly, one that set the right tone for the novel. Greenwich Village, the setting of my story, is in many ways the sweet spot of New York City; it’s beautiful, a little gritty, and very lively at any time of day or night. In the novel, there’s a dive bar in the basement of the family brownstone called The Sweet Spot, and it’s a place where all manner of fun and happenstance can occur. The many characters in the novel are trying to find their own sweet spots, the exact place where “duty and delight” converge, as Thomas Mann said.

What's in a name?

I love coming up with character names – and I often change quite a few once I realize the names don’t quite fit the characters as well as I originally thought. I spend a lot of time naming my characters, even the pets. (In The Sweet Spot there’s a hamster named Pixel, a dog named Bumper, and a deceased guinea pig named Milkdud.) Two children in the book, Waverly and Horatio, are named after streets in Greenwich Village as both a tribute to the neighborhood and as a kind of wink to highly original names. How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel? I think my teenage self would be quite surprised! My book is irreverent in ways that my rebellious younger self would definitely appreciate.

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

I find endings much harder to write than beginnings. I rewrite my endings over and over again to make sure I have the exact mood and closure I want for that last chapter, last paragraph, last sentence. In The Sweet Spot, Felicity is our (3rd-person) narrator for both the prologue and the epilogue, the only two chapters I wrote from her perspective. I had to balance my desire to give all the characters satisfying outcomes, while having Felicity, a woman who is wonderfully ambitious but also quite egotistical, stay true to herself. The question was could a hint of her potential warmth come through in the very last moment?

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

Some of my characters are a lot like me. I write about women of all ages and want to show them as they find humor and strength in difficult situations. I’m the kind of person who needs to laugh, even when I’m upset about something. I always try to keep my sense of humor in the face of absurdity, hardship, and even pain. Like my characters, I’ve had to reinvent myself many times in my life.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I was inspired during my formative twenties by female-centered movies of the late eighties, stories in which strong women are in situations that force them to start over, rethink their choices, and rebuild their lives. I remember watching Baby Boom, Working Girl, Moonstruck, and Broadcast News and thinking that I wanted to write stories featuring women on the brink of change. I am also inspired by my family. From my kids to my pets, my grandparents to my in-laws, my family provides me with are an endless supply of ideas.

Visit Amy Poeppel's website.

The Page 69 Test: Musical Chairs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peggy Rothschild

After losing their home during a California wildfire, Peggy Rothschild and her husband moved to the beach community of Los Osos along the central coast. When not at her desk or out walking, you can usually find her in the garden. Rothschild is a member of Sisters in Crime National and Sisters in Crime Los Angeles.

Her new novel is Playing Dead.

My Q&A with the author:

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

From the very start, this book was titled Playing Dead. It was one of those magical moments where the title popped into my head and matched the story—since dogs, dog-training, and murder all figure into the plot. The title evokes both a trick you can teach your dog as well as a survival technique a character might use—pretending defeat in order to strike or escape.

What's in a name?

I spent a lot of time thinking about Molly’s name. I liked the idea of alliteration and since she had originally lived in Brockton, Massachusetts, I wanted a last name that sounded East Coast-ish with a bit of history to it. Molly Madison fit the bill! I didn’t realize until after book one was already published, that I hadn’t just picked the name Molly out of the ether. When I first met my husband, Molly was the name of his golden retriever. Doh! Molly’s new hometown, Pier Point, came more easily—inspired in both name, location, and architectural style, by the Pierpont area of Ventura, California.

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

Finding the starting point for the story is the bigger challenge for me. I don’t want to start the story too soon and bore readers with details of the character’s life pre-mystery, and I don’t want to start the story too late, leaving readers wondering “What’s going on?” That’s not to say endings don’t have their own challenges, but—hopefully—by the time I get to the story’s climax, there’s a logic and inevitability to it. But who knows? This may change over time. For now, I find myself tweaking, cutting, and rewriting the beginnings more.

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

Molly is much braver than I am. She’s also more coordinated and athletic! But we do share some characteristics. Her sense of humor is very much like mine—as is her total lack of—or interest in learning any—culinary skills. (She and I both rely heavily on the microwave.) I also share her love of animals and her need to keep them safe.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My husband was the first person to say to me, “You should write a mystery.” I loved reading them and watching them. When we would watch one together, I’d apparently make a noise or move in such a way that he’d know I’d already figured out the ending. Though I loved writing, it had never occurred to me I could write an actual book. His encouragement sparked me to take a mystery-writing class and begin my journey. On a more “about this book” note, my friend Nancy was a huge inspiration for the Molly Madison series. She invited me to meet her at an agility trial and, as I watched, I got the idea to write about a handler and her agility dog getting entangled in a murder mystery. So, without that day, I don’t know what I’d be writing about right now!

Visit Peggy Rothschild's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jenna Miller

Jenna Miller (she/her) writes Young Adult books about fat, queer, nerdy girls who deserve to be seen and have their voices heard. When she’s not obsessing over words, she can be found making charcuterie boards, befriending people online, cross stitching, or adventuring in the Minneapolis area. Miller’s debut novel is Out of Character.

My Q&A with the author:

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

In the roleplay world, speaking "out of character" is when you have a conversation with another roleplay as yourselves rather than your characters. It hints at the bonds between online friendships and how close people can become when letting the group become a friendship rather than just a gaming/writing group. The title is also a reference to how the main character, Cass, is keeping secrets from family/friends in her physical/"real" world to hide her online roleplaying addiction, which for her is considered incredibly out of character as she is not typically someone who lies or hides parts of herself.

What's in a name?

Most of my characters are names that sounded right for their personalities with little meaning behind them. The one that stands out to me for Out of Character is Greg Jensen. I wanted a name that had a token Midwestern football bro vibe to it. For some reason, he's also the only character who I refer to with his full name.

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

Teenage Jenna would be both surprised and proud. Like Cass, I am fat and a lesbian. Unlie Cass, I wasn't comfortable with my body in high school, and I didn't realize I was a lesbian until I was 30. I simply didn't think about it or realize it, so I think it would surprise me, but I'd also be proud because I've always been supportive of the LGBTQIA+ community. I'd also feel relieved to know I got to a place in my life where I love myself for who I am, and that fat, queer teens deserve to see themselves in these types of stories.

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

I usually have a pretty good sense of how to start and finish a story, but I almost always need to tweak the beginning somehow. Setting the stage in the right moment with the right characters can be a challenge, and I sometimes need to shift things around to get it right.

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

Cass has many pieces of me, but she's also very different, which I've already touched on some above. We share similarities like having anxiety, being familiar with online roleplay addiction, and overthinking... a lot. As for the rest of the characters, there may be a trait or quirk that relates to me, but mostly they are completely different.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I'm inspired by my own interests and the people around me. I pulled some things from my own experiences and relationships, and I love adding in memories from my youth and fictionalizing them. I'm also inspired by other media such as movies and music, but I try not to get too close to anything in particular.

Visit Jenna Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leslie Vedder

Leslie Vedder (she/her) is a queer ace author who loves fairytale retellings with girl adventurers and heroes! She grew up on fantasy books, anime, fanfiction and the Lord of the Rings movies, and met her true love in high school choir. She graduated from San Francisco State University with a B.A. in creative writing and currently lives in Colorado with her wife and two spoiled house cats.

When she's not reading or writing, you can find her watching anime and sci-fi shows, walking in the woods and pretending they're enchanted forests, or playing old video games. She always collects all the Skulltulas in Zelda and all the Dalmation puppies in Kingdom Hearts.

Her debut YA novel The Bone Spindle was an indie bestseller. The sequel The Severed Thread comes out this week.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I think the title, The Severed Thread, slips into the mind like a dangling thread, and the more you pull it, the more it unspools. The tagline for this book is: which threads of fate will hold and which will break? The villainess of the book uses golden thread to spin her dark curses. And a single ever-so-breakable thread of destiny connects the now-awakened prince and the girl who saved him. The word severed just says it all. (Though I can’t take credit for that title—it’s all thanks to my wonderful team at Penguin!)

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

My teenage self would be over the moon for this book, and especially for Shane! When I was growing up, in addition to reading a ton of fantasy, I was a big fan of Xena, and I would have been all about a book that didn’t just have a girl warrior, but also an unapologetically queer one. (Something there wasn’t a lot of when I was a teen!) Writing her was a dream come true.

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

I find beginnings way harder than endings. When I’m just starting out, I’m still finding the characters’ voices and seeding clues and worldbuilding for the whole story. By the end, I feel like I have all this momentum behind me. For The Severed Thread, I must have written at least five different versions of the opening chapters, but the end—which involves a high-stakes gambit, a battle, and an epic showdown—came together just as I imagined.

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

I’d like to think there’s a little bit of me in both my heroines—but really just a little bit. Fi is a bookish, no-nonsense historian, and while I share her love of books, I definitely do not have her cleverness. Shane is a queer ax-wielding huntswoman with a hot temper, who can pick a fight with anyone and is fiercely loyal to those she loves. She’s everything my teenage self dreamed of in a heroine!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The Severed Thread has lots of treasure hunting in old ruins, solving riddles and books codes, and big knock-down drag-out fights! It’s very much my love letter to action movies like Indiana Jones and The Mummy that are one long chase scene from start to finish, with the characters getting into trouble everywhere they go!

Visit Leslie Vedder's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cailean Steed

Cailean Steed is a writer, teacher and aspiring dog owner. Steed lives near Glasgow with their husband and son. They have also resided in Aberdeen and Dublin, and hope one day to live somewhere with less rain.

Steed’s work has been published by New Writing Scotland, Boudicca Press, and Barren Magazine. Their mother would like them to write something more cheerful.

Steed's new novel is Home.

My Q&A with the author:

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

That's a really interesting question, because the title changed so many times! Home was a suggestion by my publishers, and I loved the simplicity of it, and the way that 'home' can mean many different things to different people. It does a lot to set up the story as a place that will happen at 'home', but in the book that refers both to the place that the main character Zoe has built a life for herself, and the isolated compound of the cult she ran away from, which is not very homey at all! Zoe returns to one home, while desperately seeking the entire time to get back to the other one.

What's in a name?

Naming is really important in Home, principally because the female characters in the cult have names bestowed upon them and taken away without their control. I wanted to give a sense of how powerless the women were kept, and how they are treated as possessions in a way. Many characters don't have names at all, only titles, such as Father (the leader of the cult) and the Hand of God, Father's right-hand-man and enforcer, who takes an unusual interest in Zoe (or Catherine, as she is known as a child in the cult). Taking control of your name becomes a way for characters to show they are taking control of themselves.

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

I started writing what eventually became Home when I was 13. My teenage self would probably be surprised by how much it has changed - initially it was about a secret British government training facility for child assassins, which seemed very plausible to me at the time. That idea got ditched as I worked on the story into my twenties, but I kept the central character, and kept the idea of children being raised in a very strict and isolated environment. So I think my teenage self would be pleasantly surprised!

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

Endings are harder because they take so long to get to. I generally have a fair idea of what the ending will be, but I'm not a detailed planner so the vagueness of the idea is like a general target to reach for. Beginnings I love writing, but I do tend to start a story a bit early, so a lot of it gets chopped off in the edit. That's ultimately for the better, though it can be painful to see it go!

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

This is a hard one to say. I don't think I'm very like my characters, though I do use bits and pieces from my own experiences to build them. Zoe is quite socially awkward, and observes people closely in an attempt to understand social interactions, and that definitely has parallels with my own experience! I think it's quite a useful position for a writer to be in, though - somewhat on the outside looking in.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I enjoy watching movies and tv, and I think some of the best writing out there is in tv at the moment! I've really enjoyed the series The Bear recently, set in a restaurant. The characterisation is so natural and subtle, and the humour and tension builds out of real-life situations really elegantly. I'd definitely recommend it!

With regards to writing Home, I did think about politics as I was writing - mainly while in the editing stage, where I could step back and think about what I want people to take from my story. There is a huge and concerning backlash against LGBTQ+ people right now, and I wanted my characters to be representative of LGBTQ+ people living their lives and being happy.

Visit Cailean Steed's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen Policoff

Stephen Policoff is the author of Beautiful Somewhere Else, which won the James Jones Award, and was published by Carroll & Graf. His second novel, Come Away, won the Dzanc Award, and was published by Dzanc Books in 2014. He was writer-in-residence at Medicine Show Theater Ensemble, with whom he wrote Shipping Out, The Mummer’s Play, Ubu Rides Again, and Bound to Rise, which received an Obie. He was also a freelance writer for Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, New Age Journal, and many other publications. He helped create Center for Creative Youth, based at Wesleyan University, and has taught writing at CUNY, Wesleyan, and Yale. He is currently Clinical Professor of Writing in Global Liberal Studies at NYU, where he has taught since 1987.

Policoff's newest novel is Dangerous Blues.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Dangerous Blues was the title of this novel from the moment I first imagined writing it. (Full disclosure: it was originally The Dangerous Blues, because that is the title of the song which helped inspire the novel, but Bill Burleson, my editor at Flexible Press exhorted me to drop The, which he said was clunky and possibly pompous. I profoundly disagreed with him at the time, but now think he was right). Clearly, the title is imagistic rather than direct but I do think it conjures up a fitting picture of what Paul, the main character is going through, and what his eerie world seems to offer. My editor also added kind of a ghost story as a subtitle, which I love, and which I think helps cue a reader into the mysterious atmosphere of the novel. The song, “The Dangerous Blues” is a primal howl of the blues attributed to Mattie May Thomas, who wrote it while incarcerated some time in the 1930s. When the novel was a mere wisp of a thought, I heard that song in a Greenwich Village bar, and it immediately clicked with me, as if I had known it all my life.

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

Since I never imagined writing a novel when I was a kid, my kid self would probably be mildly but not completely surprised. I was in love with the theater as a boy, and dreamed of writing plays—my college honors thesis was a rock musical called Two Dwarves in a Closet, which amazed and amused audiences with its psychedelic nonsense. But I was also a voracious reader of novels, and a budding writer from the age of 7, when I wrote animal fables and long rhyming poems. So, I guess writing anything (and/or everything) would not have surprised me all that much. For whatever reasons, writing was what I saw myself doing even when no one else shared that confidence.

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

I often come up quickly with the opening line or two of whatever I am working on, and fairly frequently, that ends up as either the actual beginning or as the second paragraph. Dangerous Blues had a few openings but the first words I wrote are the beginning of the 2nd chapter. Endings are much harder for me. I almost never know exactly how I want my novel to end—I may have a final image in mind or a situation or even a line of dialogue but exactly how I get there and what the ultimate scene is, I rarely know. I rewrote the ending to Dangerous Blues at least 4 times. I knew that I wanted the 5 main characters to be in the same place, and that music (which plays a huge role in the novel) needed to be part of it. But what they were actually doing, who said what to whom, what kind of forgiveness and forbearance Paul has toward the enigmatic Tara, those things were what I struggled with. Somebody once said that when he removed commas and then put them back again he knew he was finished with his book. I removed a conversation, put it back again, took it out, then shortened it, made it slightly more humorous, and put it back… and that’s when I knew I was done.

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

Paul Brickner, the narrator of Dangerous Blues is emphatically a more unstrung version of myself. I allowed him to have my voice (a number of people have told me he sounds like me) and a few of my eccentricities but gave him a much different background, different family relations, and a propensity for the supernatural which I do not have. I liked the idea of allowing him to behave in ways I would never behave and to be open to things I would never consider.

Although Dangerous Blues is in some ways the most autobiographical novel I have written—my beloved wife did in fact die young, we did have a house in upstate New York—none of the events of the novel actually happened to me. Paul’s daughter Spring is a blend of my 2 daughters—Anna, who tragically passed away from a horrifying genetic illness in 2015, and Jane, who recently graduated from college. Jane likes to say she doesn’t need to read the novel because she is in it, which is semi-true, though Spring is almost-12 while Jane is now 22, so fortunately there are many differences. The other characters are either amalgams of people I have known or, like Paul’s father-in-law Dr. Maire, a specialist in occult lore, they are the product of my feverish imagination.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music has been undoubtedly the greatest nonliterary influence on my writing. Dangerous Blues is filled with music, especially the blues which I loved as a college student, then kind of forgot about until shortly after my wife died when those plaintive songs seemed to conjure up a world of sorrow mingled with the absurdity of life, which was exactly how I was feeling in that blue moment. I invented the spectral musician Ghostie Boy Wilson to allow for some of that music and some of the legends of those amazing performers to be part of the novel. I would also have to say that a lifelong interest in the inexplicable ways people behave toward one another, and a fondness for eerie phenomena like hauntings and nightmares have also been huge factors in what I find myself thinking about, what I find myself writing.

Visit Stephen Policoff's website.

The Page 69 Test: Come Away.

My Book, The Movie: Come Away.

Writers Read: Stephen Policoff.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Brennan

New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Allison Brennan believes life is too short to be bored, so she had five children and writes three books a year. Reviewers have called her “a master of suspense” and RT Book Reviews said her books are “mesmerizing” and “complex.” She’s been nominated for multiple awards, including the Thriller, RWA’s Best Romantic Suspense (five times), and twice won the Daphne du Maurier award. She lives in Arizona with her family and assorted pets.

Brennan's new novel is Don't Open the Door.

My Q&A with the author:

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

While Don’t Open the Door could be taken literally, and likely most suspense readers would see this as a teaser of the suspense (don’t open the door! There’s a bad guy outside!), the title is actually more figurative in the story itself. We all lie to ourselves at different times -- sometimes because we don’t want to see the truth about a friend or situation, sometimes because we don’t want to see what’s really in our heart or mind. Sometimes, we shut the proverbial door to our past in order to be able to survive, especially when we’re dealing with pain, grief, betrayal.

Regan Merritt could leave this door closed — the murder of her son a year ago, the betrayal of her husband when he blamed her, her grief and buried anger. She walked away from her career, moved cross- country, was rebuilding her life. Yet … can she really walk away, shut the door on her past? Because once you open the door, you never know what you may find.

What's in a name?

Some characters walk on the page and tell me exactly who they are, some characters take time to reveal their secrets as I write. I rarely name my characters — sometimes I go through multiple names until I hit upon the right one. Before I wrote a word of The Sorority Murder (Regan’s first book), I thought I knew who Regan Merritt was — her name came to me, I could picture her fully, I knew how she would react to every situation, every conversation. Yet … the more I wrote her, the more I realized she had depth I needed to unearth. Regan is a strong name, quiet, confident, smart — which matches her character.

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

Somewhat surprised. I read mostly horror and mysteries when I was a teen, so my 15-year-old self would be thinking, okay, you have suspense and mystery here, but where’s the jump-out-of-my-skin scare? Where’s the blood and gore?

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

Beginnings. Hands down, beginnings are hard. It takes me three times longer to write the first 100 pages of my books than it takes me to write the last 300 pages. And almost always, I have more editor revisions/notes in the first 100 pages than in the rest of the book.

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 some of my characters are more like me than others, but none are me. I think my main characters most align with my worldview — which is why I write crime fiction and solve what is sometimes unsolvable. I try to put myself in the shoes of every character I write, to think how they think and do what they would do. But I am definitely not as exciting or brave as my characters.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

True crime — mostly true crime books. I was a true crime addict when I was younger, starting with In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, which I read when I was 13. I follow the news — mostly crime news. But I think my biggest inspiration is people watching. I’m always observing others, especially strangers, and making up stories about them. I listen to their tone, watch body language, look at how they dress, how they talk to others, assess their emotional state. My imagination then runs away with me…

Visit Allison Brennan's website.

My Book, The Movie: Don't Open the Door.

The Page 69 Test: Don't Open the Door.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carole Johnstone

Carole Johnstone is an award-winning writer from Scotland, whose short stories have been published all over the world. Her debut novel, Mirrorland, is a psychological suspense with a gothic twist, set in Edinburgh. Her second novel, The Blackhouse, is a very unusual murder-mystery set on a fictional island off the west coast of the Isle of Lewis.

Having grown up in Lanarkshire, she now lives in Glencoe in the Highlands of Scotland, although her heart belongs to the wild islands of the Outer Hebrides.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Setting is hugely important in all my books. I always try to write a story that could only be set where it’s set and nowhere else. The setting therefore becomes almost another character, so it’s pretty inevitable that my novels end up being named after that place.

Originally, The Blackhouse was actually titled A Thin Place, but this had to be changed because of another book out around the same time with a very similar name. A thin place is a place where the walls between our world and other worlds are said to be at their thinnest; they are often considered to be very spiritual and important landscapes, such as Stonehenge. The Outer Hebrides were considered in Celtic mythology to be thin places, and the Norse that settled there in the 9th century believed something similar. The Blackhouse is set on a fictional island off the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Lewis and Harris. The Outer Hebrides are wild, isolated, and brimful of legends and cautionary tales. They are islands that are sometimes as frightening as they are beautiful; as dangerous as they are peaceful, and I really wanted the title to reflect that contradiction and otherworldliness.

Equally though, the blackhouse itself is very central to the story. Blackhouses are the traditional domestic dwellings of Hebrideans going back centuries. The titular blackhouse is the place that both main characters, Maggie and Robert live, albeit 25 years apart. As Maggie tries to find out who murdered Robert and begins to uncover the truth about his terrible fate, Robert’s own story is told from his own perspective, so he very much inhabits the same space, almost like a ghost. The blackhouse also has a hidden earth cellar that is pretty pivotal to the plot, so the title made sense. And, of course, blackhouse as a word has a very gothic and creepy vibe to it, which is exactly how I wanted the novel to be perceived!

What's in a name?

The name of the fictional island in The Blackhouse is Kilmeray. So many place names in the Hebrides are derived from Scots Gaelic and/or Old Norse, and so I went to great lengths to make sure that all the place names on this fictional island were as authentic as possible. Kilmeray translates in Scots Gaelic as the ‘Church of (St) Maraigh’ (an entirely fictional saint!), and I had great fun making many of the landmarks of Kilmeray as spooky as possible, in keeping with so many of the real islands themselves:

Gleann nam Bòcan: Valley of Ghosts
Sid a’ Choin Mhòir: Lair of the Big Dog
Glumag a’ Bròin: The Pool of Sorrow
An Droch Chadha: Wicked Pass

However, it was a lot of work, and I’m not sure I’d have the stamina to do that again – particularly in terms of researching Old Norse!

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

Probably not very (although hopefully impressed; I’d always written from a very young age, but never truly believed I would ever be published, let alone a fulltime writer!) In my teens I discovered Stephen King, and for many years my writing, my voice, everything was as near to his as I could make it. It took a long time and many years of selling short stories before I discovered my own voice and style of writing.

I’ve always been drawn to the darker side of fiction, and I’ve always been so fascinated by people: what makes us tick; what makes us break; all the wonderful and terrible things we are capable of doing and why. I also love gothic fiction: books like Rebecca, Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, Beloved, The Haunting of Hill House, Gone Girl, The Dry – basically anything with a memorable setting that’s full of atmosphere, passion, betrayal, and secrets – that’s always been what I love the most, so it’s always been what I assumed I would write.

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

Beginnings always. I start with the end. That’s always the beginning of the idea, that and the setting. I always know the ending so well I can literally see it in my mind like the closing scene of a movie, and this rarely changes in the writing. The beginning is much harder. Knowing where to start in a story is such a crucial decision. Your opening has to grab the reader, has to be interesting and compelling, and it has to make the reader want to read on. You can’t start with long passages of description or backstory. But you have to be equally careful that you don’t start too far into the story either, or the reader will struggle to keep up or to understand what’s happening. You also risk losing any element of suspense. I spend a lot of time plotting before I start writing, and often working out what my starting point is going to be takes the longest time of all.

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

I almost always write in present tense, first person. In The Blackhouse there are two stories: Maggie’s story in the present day as she returns to the island with very strange motives for wanting to find out what happened to Robert and needing to prove that he was in fact murdered. And Robert’s story, following the last few months of his life, up until his untimely and disturbing death. I wrote both of these stories in first person without expressly intending to, it just felt most natural.

One of the most brilliant things about writing in first person is that you can create a whole almost 4-D experience for the reader. They are in that character’s shoes. They are seeing and feeling what she is. They don’t know what she doesn’t know. Everything is written through that person’s eyes, and it helps the reader not only understand or empathise with a character, but to feel like they are there in that place and in that situation far better than anything else.

I think when you write in first person it’s inevitable that something of yourself will creep in as it’s such a personal and intimate way to write. There’s generally a lot of inner monologue; you have to know everything about that character as you’re effectively playing their part. That said, I don’t think that personality-wise there are many similarities between me and any of the characters I play, although I do pull from personal experiences, thoughts, values etc. when I’m writing in general. I think that’s probably true of all writers, but it’s always so important that you remain completely invisible and let the characters tell the story.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Anything and everything. I try to read widely, in all genres. I keep up with the news (even when, as in the last few years, I don’t really want to). I read articles that interest me, particularly if I can mine them for story ideas! I watch movies all the time, again in all genres. All stories interest me, and definitely influence my writing in one way or another. But although I come across stories or ideas I wish I’d had first all the time, I’m always so careful not to poach them. As a teenager, I remember watching Aliens for the first time and then immediately writing a story that was so exactly the same I realised that there had been no point and no satisfaction in writing it at all. Writing should always be an amalgam of all the things that you see, hear, feel, and experience, but told through your own unique lens.

I’m also very guilty of always listening in to strangers’ conversations on trains or in pubs – a goldmine of ideas!

Visit Carole Johnstone's website.

--Marshal Zeringue