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