Linda Kao

Linda Kao grew up in California and spent most weekends throughout elementary school hauling books home from the library to read on the living room rug. After completing her degree atStanford University, she taught elementary school for several years before earning a Ph.D. in Education from UCLA. Along the way, she discovered a love for writing fiction, and in 2014, she received the SCBWI Sue Alexander Award. She has published short stories and poems in Highlights for Children, Ladybug, Fun for Kidz, and Boys' Quest.

Kao currently lives in Southern California with her family. A Crooked Mark is her debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I think it does a lot! It’s an immediate hint that this story is going to be dark and suspenseful, and the very first line of the book confirms it: “I don’t know how it feels when the Devil scratches a soul.” The title came to me early on, and it stayed throughout the first draft to the final version. I especially like how it gains meaning as the story progresses and the questions and consequences surrounding the Mark become clear.

What's in a name?

I chose “Matthew Watts” for my main character’s name because I loved the simplicity of it and the fact that it allows him to be “Matthew” to some people but “Matt” to others. This has meaning, because it says something about their relationship. I also like that it’s a fairly common name. Matt’s story may be unique, but in some sense, he’s just a regular teenager, and that brings his story closer to home.

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

Very! Teenage Linda would probably choose a story free of speculative elements and with no possibility of Lucifer lurking in the wings. I wasn’t one for psychological thrillers that ventured into the supernatural; I preferred my mysteries straightforward and firmly grounded in this world. I think this has changed as I’ve gotten older, and when I was writing A Crooked Mark, it didn’t bother me at all. The premise just made sense: If the Devil Marks a soul, you have to burn it. Done.

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

Beginnings are much harder for me. Before I started writing A Crooked Mark, I already knew the end of the story, and more importantly, I knew the feeling I wanted readers to have when they finished the last line. I also had a sense of who Matt was and the central problem he would face, as well as what he was like as a person. Figuring out just the right point to bring the reader into his story was tougher, and I ended up making significant changes to the original beginning.

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

I see myself in Matt, in that he’s trying to figure out how to make sense of a world in which there is conflicting information. This is hard as a young adult, but it’s also hard as an older adult, especially these days when so many voices are saying different things. Deciding where the truth lies, where I stand, and then acting on it – even when it’s not easy – is something I’m always working on.

Visit Linda Kao's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

C.M. Alongi

C. M. Alongi has published short stories and novellas in the sci-fi and fantasy genres and talks about sci-fi, fantasy, and horror through a feminist lens on her YouTube channel.

Alongi's new novel is Citadel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Citadel is the name of the city, the only human city on the alien planet Edalide. The actual definition of a citadel is that of a protective fortress, and the people living here are in a constant state of war—both for their lives and for their souls (or, so they’re told).

I’ll be frank: I’m not good with titles. Earlier drafts had titles like Predators and Demons—demons being what the humans call their alien counterparts and “Predators” being what they actually preferred in those earlier drafts. And there was that whole unsubtle “humanity is the real predator and demon” layer to it.

What's in a name?

This is a futuristic sci-fi, so these characters are descended from our society from over four hundred years, closer to five. But they’re also very religious. The first people to build Citadel, the Founders, mostly had modern European names like Riley, Evelyn, Sarai, Gabriel. But those people still had access to older, more unique names like Augustus, Mia, Asiya and Ormus. Being the conservative society they are, they’d try to keep the names the same as the Founders.

This creates a weird dissonance where you have characters with modern names like Olivia and Riley in a very archaic, draconian society. It’s sci-fi in that it’s far in the future and on an alien planet, but humanity has lost so much knowledge and technology that they’re down to bows and arrows. One of the earliest deaths in the story is someone being executed for heresy, something you’re more likely to read about in a medieval history textbook rather than a newspaper.

The chimera (“demons”) on the other hand, are well on their way to creating their own language. Olivia first meets a chimera with distinctive spots that look like freckles, which is why she nicknames him “Freckles.” When they’re finally able to fully communicate, she learns that his actual name “Cyrij” means “spotted” in their language. Their ancestors didn’t have the luxury of names, so they take theirs very seriously.

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

Probably not that surprised. I’ve been writing some version of this story since I was twelve. The main character Olivia was originally a side character to give the heroes direction and guidance. The earliest version of Cyrij was a wolf cub named Mouse, and his personality and role in the story have remained largely the same. Olivia’s best friend Riley also originally appeared in very early drafts, although he usually had greater physical disabilities than the chronic migraines he has in this version.

The biggest surprise would probably be in the role of Olivia’s father, Ormus. In earlier drafts, he was the villain. Now that role goes to Riley’s father, Augustus, and Ormus gets to be a much more complicated character.

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

It’s definitely harder for me to write an ending. I’ll know where I want to start and vaguely how I want everyone to end up, but as I’m crossing that bridge, I’ll often find myself changing the outline, especially regarding the ending.

With Citadel specifically, I changed the ending multiple times, specifically which characters lived and died and what position Olivia specifically found herself at the end. There are about five alternate endings lurking in my laptop somewhere.

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 these characters definitely have some overlap with me. Olivia and I both have a passion for reading and learning, we both have a low tolerance for BS, and we both have an interest in martial arts. (I got a black belt in youth self-defense when I was thirteen and then did a stint with archery.)

Ormus’s story is also a bit similar to mine. I’ve never executed anyone, but I’ve certainly been in a position of social privilege and didn’t understand the harm my society was doing until it was directly impacting the people in my life.

Sergeant Peterson’s personality is similar to my grandfather’s—gruff, no-nonsense, heart of gold. Asiya’s is closer to my grandmother’s, in that she’s also a badass, just not loud about it.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Anyone who reads Citadel is going to see a lot of parallels and problems with our own world, both modern and historical: the mixing of religion with politics, the demonization and silencing of communities, the erasure of history to suit a regime’s own political agenda, etc. All of those definitely influenced the world of Citadel and its people.

On a lighter note, the Flooded Forest was directly inspired by a wildlife documentary about the Amazon. There are freshwater dolphins swimming in the rivers, and I just thought that was so cool and alien. That’s why the Flooded Forest—and the city of Citadel—experiences biweekly flooding in the form of tides from the freshwater sea. Depending on the week the forest could be dry and walkable or twenty feet under water.

Visit C. M. Alongi's website.

The Page 69 Test: Citadel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine Lin

Katherine Lin is an attorney and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area and a graduate of Northwestern University and Stanford Law School.

Her debut novel is You Can’t Stay Here Forever.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My agent and I went through tons of iterations of titles, and polled lots of friends and colleagues. In one brainstorming email, I threw out You Can't Stay Here Forever as a possibility–it was a line that one character in my book, Fauna, says to Ellie, the protagonist, near the climax of the novel. I thought it captured Ellie's journey: the yearn to run away in tension with the fact that everyone has to face their demons eventually. My agent took to You Can't Stay Here Forever and, happily, Harper Books liked it as well. The line was eventually cut from the book, but I am glad it got us the title.

What's in a name?

I am terrible at naming characters but two names came to me clearly and loudly: Eleanor Huang (aka Ellie) and Fauna. Ellie's mother is a striver, and she desperately wants her daughter to climb the social ladder–Eleanor was therefore a natural choice for what she'd name her only daughter. Since Eleanor can be a mouthful, especially for someone young, I thought it made sense for her to go by Ellie. And because Ellie is Taiwanese like me, for the surname, I asked my own mother about popular Taiwanese last names, which led me to Huang.

Fauna, in sharp contrast to Ellie and her mother, is wild and undomesticated, someone who lives life a little carelessly. I wanted a name that was a bit raw, and that was Fauna. Because she's unknowable in many ways to someone like Ellie, I never share Fauna's last name in 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?

When I write, in order for any character to feel truly alive, I have to understand them. It's easier to understand people, I think, when you can relate to them, even if it's in some small way, and so I see a bit of myself in every character, even ones I might vehemently disagree with, or characters I would never want to associate with. Relatedly, I enjoy novels in which I find myself relating to characters I wouldn't have guessed. It makes me not just admire the author's skill and craft, but makes me more sympathetic and understanding of humanity, which is a lovely thing when books are able to do that. It reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel acceptance speech when he said, "But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?"

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Without a doubt, television and movies have influenced me. I tend to bristle a bit when I hear people turn up their nose at them, as if they're some sort of lesser form of art–it's a different medium of storytelling, of course, but I can find myself inspired by my favorite TV and movies as much as my favorite authors and books. Good writing is good writing is good writing, kind of thing. I try to keep up with TV and movies as they come out, just like with books, and so I spend lots of time digesting stories in different formats. I am particularly delighted and intrigued when these two worlds intersect, like when Ang Lee adapted Sense and Sensibility, which I rewatch at least once a year. I am eagerly awaiting Sofia Coppola's adaptation of Edith Wharton's Custom of the Country.

I also find that the people around me–friends and family, mostly–get me thinking about relationships and interpersonal dynamics in a way that feeds my creativity. I don't base characters or storylines off of people I know but if, for example, I have a friend who is navigating a difficult relationship dynamic, their situation might prime me to be open to ideas that lead me to characters or stories.

Visit Katherine Lin's website.

The Page 69 Test: You Can't Stay Here Forever.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Grace Loyd

Amy Grace Loyd is an editor, teacher, and author of the novel The Affairs of Others, a BEA Buzz Book and Indie Next selection. She began her career at independent book publisher W.W. Norton & Company and The New Yorker, in the magazine’s fiction and literary department. She was the associate editor on the New York Review Books Classics series and the fiction and literary editor at Playboy magazine and later at Esquire. She’s also worked in digital publishing, as an executive editor at e-singles publisher Byliner and as an acquiring editor and content creator for Scribd Originals. She has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University MFA writing program and a MacDowell and Yaddo fellow. She lives between New York and New Hampshire.

Loyd's new novel is The Pain of Pleasure.

My Q&A with the author:

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

As preface I should say that I almost called the novel Heavenly High as a reference to the Nietzsche epigraph at the start of the novel, that pain and pleasure are inextricably linked and if one wants a heavenly high, they’d better be prepared for its opposite. I thought about The Habits of Pain, Habits of Pleasure, given our habits at either extreme, and in between, are actually written into our brain, on a synaptic level.

But finally, The Pain of Pleasure just felt most direct. It gets to the thematic stuff pretty effectively—that our pleasures can become our pains—and it’s an intentional reversal on the more familiar S&M phrasing, the pleasure of pain.

The story is largely based in a headache clinic and digs into the science of pain. For migraine sufferers in particular, on a super literal level, a lot of the fun and/or delicious stuff on offer in this life—like booze, too much junk food, too much sugar or salt, getting too little sleep, getting too much, and storms coming and landing hard—can lead to a migraine attack.

Then I also wanted to get to what we do to avoid pain—sex, drugs, whether prescription or illicit, distractions, even obsessions of one kind or another. There’s a missing woman at the heart of things in this novel, a former patient of the doctor who runs the clinic. She’s left behind a journal for the doctor, an account of her affair with a married man. At first, her lover is the answer to a lot of what ails her — she feels “a different woman in a different body.” There are sensual discoveries in store for her, in great contrast to the sensual wallop she gets when she’s stricken, and she believes she’s fallen in love, but that gets complicated, as intense relationships can, and painful.

And in these times we’re living, post a global pandemic, it seems crucial to be honest that physical and emotional pain is part of being alive, not an indictment of who you are, not a cause for shame or apology. Just the cost of being human, though we can’t seem to help but try to outrun that cost, even if it’s often fruitless.

What's in a name?

For the missing patient, I picked the name Sarah not only because it’s a common name, full of music and history, but for this: “…the last syllable of her name, ah, always recalling the relief that wanted to come but wouldn’t.”

For a stretch while I wrote and rewrote, the doctor was just “the Doctor” — no name and capitalized because his whole identity is taken up with doctoring. Eventually, I named him Louis Berger because he acts as a kind of shepherd (berger in French) for his patients and because of the great art critic John Berger and his Ways of Seeing. As Dr. Berger says in the novel (and he’s not the first), in talking about our perceptions of ourselves, whether while we’re in pain or feeling pleasure, “We see things not as they are but as we are.”

Finally, there’s Ruth, a biblical enough name like Sarah, but also solid, old, and part of it is found in the word “truth.” Like so many of us, she’s trying to determine what’s true and what isn’t about her, those around her. What is true and what is just the story we tell ourselves about our lives and keep refining? A story we think needs to have a clear beginning, middle, and end and with some pay-off and all the loose bits all tied up but never are. Thank goodness for literary fiction in that it allows us to play with those expectations, that order, and arrive at an experience far more like life.

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

My teenage self could be a real asshole and was pretty miserable. I was one of the popular girls who around fourteen got ousted from the clique (and what a terrifying clique it was). I was plenty ostracized (endless crank calls, stuff posted on my locker and written on the bathroom walls, nasty things said about me loudly, in earshot, and me sitting alone at lunch) and was at sea for some years. But eventually in a high school in a town over, I found my footing; and it was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter read in ninth grade that helped this along. I saw in Hester Prynne’s story that being in exile, being outside convention, was a freedom, that keeping up with any Jones was a trap that would keep getting tighter. Also, being on the outside and being ill now and again, as I was even back then with migraines, makes you so much more compassionate and open. I don’t wish any pain on anyone, but, boy, does the chronic kind keep you humble and adaptable.

All that said, I think Amy at, say, fifteen or sixteen would have gotten into the atmosphere and eeriness of the book, the sense of a world being overthrown by environmental currents and other human events and misfires—and understand the discussions of physical pain, which are, in this novel, of course both metaphoric and literal. My hope is that she and any reader would get that there’s no outrunning our pains regardless of all our careful planning and pretending otherwise, and that if we can just relax into this fact, rather than resist it, we can cope with it a whole lot better. Not saying it’s easy; it’s not, but it sure is alive with lessons and mystery.

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

I think endings might be harder to write or at least decide on, but I think I review and tighten that first 25 to 35 pages of a book more than any other part—I work and rework it—because as an editor I know other editors, literary agents, and reviewers, if it comes to that, aren’t going to give a book many pages before they have to move on—they read for a living so have to pace themselves; they can’t go much further than their engagement takes them. The beginning of any story, fiction or non, should have some hooks built in and express a lot of what the story is up to in terms of subject and style so it gives someone a sense of the stakes and the world they’re entering into.

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

Yes, in the doctor of the story, by way of his crippling sense of duty and trying to fix things that may not be fixable. He can’t solve human pain, can’t cure migraines, only treat them (there are no cures as I write this for an affliction that is in large part still a mystery), but he digs in, shows up, tries and tries.

In Ruth, I see that sense of being in exile that I can fall into, that we all can, if we’re being honest.

In Sarah, who’s a migraine sufferer like me, whose experience of pain, while more extreme than my own, is something I understand too well.

And all the experiences of love in this story are experiences I’ve had—unrequited love; love that felt like an addiction, that was probably more lust than love; the sweetness of new love; and time-worn, at-home love; love that seemed more about control than connection; and also the disallowing of love, stopping it before it can take hold.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music is always a big inspiration for my work, and for years now, I’ve been mesmerized by Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and listened to it to transport me—into my feelings, out of them—to get me in a mood that would help with writing, at the very least out of the urgencies and distractions of everyday living. So it was great to incorporate that piece of music into the novel: Adele Watson, an overbearing and wily force in this book, uses the otherworldly opening movement of the piece to seduce Ruth, who’s new to New York and desperate for money and a little belonging, into not just coming to work for her as a nurse in the clinic that Adele’s created, but to being her creature, really. Adele talks about how music heals and she’s right, it does, and certainly inspires, but it can also encourage someone to let down their guard, let their longings show.

Of course, there’s also the music of the wind, of storms, and of the city in all its moods and seasons, that urban kind of silence which is never fully silent; it breathes and sings (sometimes with harsh, jagged sounds) and makes you feel part of its breath and that song. It can really work on the imagination and sensory self. I wanted that to be part of this story too—the unpredictability of our climate today, of city living, the fragility of our day-to-days, particularly on an island like New York with its ancient infrastructure and insufficient protection from the rising water.

Visit Amy Grace Loyd's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Pain of Pleasure.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Weizmann

Daniel Weizmann is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Billboard, the Guardian, AP Newswire, and more. Under the nom de plume, Shredder, Weizmann also wrote for the long running Flipside fanzine, as well as LA Weekly, which once called him “an incomparable punk stylist.”

Weizmann'ss new novel is The Last Songbird.

My Q&A with the author:

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

It wasn’t the first title of my manuscript, but I think it does a better job of setting the mood. First, a songbird is a thing of mystery and beauty…and like the victim in my mystery, former folk icon Annie Linden, there is a fleeting, capricious, or uncatchable quality to a singing bird. But there’s another even cooler meaning to the title which I myself didn’t see until the book was already off to the printer. Songbird is slang for a female singer, of course, but especially one that came up in the 20th century jazz age—the “canaries” started as caged birds, singing to support the big bands, but by the late ‘60s, many brave female singers really were free entities, writing their own songs and often performing solo too. Annie is the last of a certain tradition, the endgame.

What's in a name?

I specifically chose the name Annie because I’m in love with the Heart LP Dreamboat Annie, which is a kind of non-linear rock opera that tells the tale of a woman out of step with the hustling world around her. Also Little Orphan Annie, another wayward soul who’s all heart. I called my detective Adam after the late great Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys who always struck me as a soul searcher.

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

My teenage self would be so pleased but maybe not surprised! I started trying to write mysteries at age 15 after years of listening to old time radio like The Saint and Dragnet and being completely obsessed with Chandler, The Rockford Files, Darrin McGavin’s The Outsider, etc. If anything my teenage self would say, “What took you so long?!”

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

I wouldn’t describe beginnings as hard, exactly—it’s more like, if I’m not furiously compelled to enter the story, I can’t get started at all. Endings also have to have a kind of inevitability to even take shape, otherwise I back off and wait. Without a doubt, the hardest part of every story for me is 50 to 75%--I never get away with less than a half-dozen rewrites there!

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

I guess my protagonist, amateur detective, failed songwriter, and Lyft driver Adam Zantz and I share some characteristics—like Adam says, “I’m about as hardboiled as scrambled eggs.” More importantly though I see people I love in the other characters. One thing I learned the hard way: If I don’t really love a fictional character, if they don’t have some aspect of someone I really care about in real life, they never come off.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

It’s a great question. Although I read a lot lot lot and not just mysteries—psych, high lit, poetry, etc.—to the degree that’s possible, I try to seek out answers to my stories in the non-literary, in the world around me. I don’t follow the news as closely as some, but I’m a chronic people-watcher and eavesdropper and anytime I see something that makes me feel something, especially watching strangers, I try to make a record of it.

Visit Daniel Weizmann's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Songbird.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marjorie McCown

Marjorie McCown has spent her entire professional life in the story-telling business, though she started out on the visual side of the craft. She spent more than twenty-five years in Hollywood working as a key member of the costume design teams for a string of successful movies that includes Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, The Firm, A Bronx Tale, Wag the Dog, The Aviator, Hairspray, Angels and Demons, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. McCown has a BA in Theater from the University of Virginia and an AAS in Fashion Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Southern California.

McCown's new novel is Final Cut.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Final Cut is a great title for a couple of reasons (and let me start by saying I can't take the credit -- Madeline Rathle, the head publicist at Crooked Lane Books suggested it.) The story is a murder mystery set behind the scenes of a big budget Hollywood movie in production that's plagued by a string of disasters, starting on the first day of principal photography when key costumer Joey Jessop discovers the body of a murdered coworker on set. So Final Cut gives us the obvious film reference. But the actual sound of the title is sharp and snappy, and I think that provides readers with a subliminal cue that they're in for a fast-paced (that's the goal, anyway) plot-driven book. And there's also a slightly sinister overtone that can be read into those two words.

What's in a name?

The sound of a name carries its own particular energy, and I wanted my main character's name to sound crisp with an upbeat rhythm. I like the alliteration and bounce of "Joey Jessop." I also wanted to name her after her father who died before she was born; that tells us something about her family history and dynamic. Joey's mother, to whom she is very close, mourned the loss of her husband and wanted their daughter to share his name. My intention was to indicate the system of values that molded Joey as she grew up.

Marcus Pray, the powerful producer/director of the movie that Joey is working on as a key costumer, is another character whose name (Pray being a homophone with prey) winks at his personal traits. He's a sexual predator whose behavior has been tolerated within the film industry because his movies are always blockbuster hits.

One of the primary locations in the book is a costume rental house called Left Coast Costumes (a tip of the hat to its real-life inspiration, Western Costume Company) a business that's a mainstay of the movie community in Los Angeles, though it attracts designers from all over the world who come to rent their costumes. As Joey describes the place: "LCC, as it was known to everyone in the industry, was the biggest commercial costume house, not only in the city, but the world. Its main claim to fame was a stock of hundreds of thousands of costumes from various periods in history available for rent." When I worked as a costume designer and costumer in film, Western Costume was often our base of operations, truly our professional home, and so it deserves a featured role in Final Cut.

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

My teenage self might not be all that surprised I wrote a novel, but she'd be shocked that I've written a book set in the heart of the film industry. I've been a voracious reader all my life, and from a young age I dreamed of someday being a writer. But I grew up surrounded by the corn fields of East Central Illinois, and even when I left home to go to college, I had no idea that I'd end up working in Hollywood for 27 years or that I'd one day know more about making movies than about any subject I ever studied in school.

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

I find beginnings somewhat harder to write. At the beginning of a book, you're starting on the journey of the story and trying to do so many things at once -- engaging readers' interest, introducing some of the major characters, as well as providing information and some context about the world of the book. Which is a lot more fun than I'm probably making it sound because telling stories is a joyful way to spend one's time. For me, I find the endings are easier to write because you've already traveled far with these characters on their journey and the options for the end are to some extent based on the action that has gone before. Which doesn't mean I do less rewriting on my endings than on my beginnings. I don't find much difference when it comes to the amount of revision required. For me every book is different in that regard.

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 lot I share with my protagonist, film key costumer Joey Jessop, starting with our professional skill set. We both love working with antique clothing and all kinds of fabrics, and we both prefer costuming period or fantasy films to modern dress movies. We also share a deep appreciation for Nature and take special pleasure in the beauty of the Pacific Ocean -- and we both love animals. We share a fascination for puzzles, which has sometimes gotten each of us into trouble.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My work in film has definitely influenced my writing, beginning with some of the fine screenplays I've been fortunate to work on by giant talents like Eric Roth, John Sayles, and David Mamet. Their brilliance with pacing, dialogue, and character development have all been inspirational to me. And in terms of story structure in particular, working on movies for all those years and watching films being created shot by shot on set each day taught me so much about how to build a narrative.

Visit Marjorie McCown's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig Clevenger

Craig Clevenger was born in Dallas, Texas and raised in Southern California, where he studied English at California State University, Long Beach. He has travelled extensively and lived in Dublin and London, but currently resides in California.

His new novel is Mother Howl.

My Q&A with the author:

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

When I first began work on the novel, Stephen Graham Jones, Will Christopher Baer and I were a virtual trio of sorts; we had separate web sites that we linked to a shared readers’ forum (this was before social media as we know it today). Stephen had just released Demon Theory and Chris was neck-deep in Godspeed; I wanted a title that bridged the two, and came up with Saint Heretic. But the story was still forming in my mind, and forcing a title to create some sort of verbal triptych felt misguided in the end, so I abandoned it.

But my usual obsession with names, identity and memory kept bleeding through as the story took form. While I’m not religious, there are elements to the old and new testaments that I find quite poetic: creation as a product of god not only calling things into existence, but naming them (yes, I’m aware there are different translations and even more interpretations)… “…he called the light day and he called the darkness night.” Then we go to John in the new testament, where ‘god’ and ‘word’ are one and the same. So this notion of naming and the power of naming took hold, and gave me a way to present the two main characters.

When Icarus first appears, his name is the first word in that chapter, and the first word he speaks. And in imagining how a newly incarnate celestial being such as Icarus might view the world (and everything else), my crude knowledge of physics crept in. Icarus sees all of creation as variants of a wavelength, so references to sound and light occur throughout the story, particularly sound. This underscores the idea that these two characters are each creations of their own doing, such as when Icarus speaks his own name as he takes form during his freefall… not a messiah, but still “word made flesh.”

Lyle is at the story’s center and appears first, but his arc—his self-creation—is gradual. Unlike Icarus, Lyle fades into focus. We don’t learn his name for the first several pages, but only know him as “the boy.” He eventually takes on the surname Edison, but keeps it at arm’s length, introducing himself by saying, “My name’s Lyle (Edison).” Eventually, he claims it fully when he says, “I’m Lyle Edison.” Ultimately, he’s forced to choose whether to acknowledge (and speak aloud) his real name—the “Jr.” to a serial murderer—or keep hiding under an alias at the expense of losing his family.

Their voices, the words they speak, the world they see… every wavelength of light and sound, every superstring vibration, all of it eminates from a single divine frequency that is the source of all creation. That’s what Icarus calls the Mother Howl.

What's in a name?

I shy away from being too symbolic or allegorical with names. As for Lyle, I simply like the name; there’s no real significance behind Edison, either… I just like the rhythm of the two together. The particular spelling of Sera’s name is a nod to the late John O’Brien (Sera was the female protagonist of Leaving Las Vegas).

Icarus, believe it or not, wasn’t meant to invoke Greek mythology. As with Lyle, I just like the name… but I suppose there’s some level of metaphor that’s going to come with it, no matter what.

For a year or so, I volunteered at the Aids Foundation needle exchange program while I was living in the Bay Area. We had three different syringes—longs, shorts, and micros—that were different combinations of needle length and barrel size. If someone didn’t have any to exchange, they could still have up to twenty, just for the asking (it helped move clean needles into circulation and encourage their return, which mitigated the health hazard). Throughout my Saturday morning shift, folks would arrive saying, “I’m looking for twenty long…” That’s where my underground street surgeon, Twenty Long, got his name.

I made the decision early on that we would never learn Lyle’s real last name. Whatever name I chose would be anticlimactic to the reader, I was certain of this. His name’s significance—being the Jr. to a serial-killer father—would weigh on Lyle regardless of whether it was Smith or Anderson or whatever. The same way movie monsters are scarier when they aren’t overexposed, I wanted to evince the gravity of Lyle’s real name by keeping it out of sight (but if anyone asks me what his real name is, I say it’s MacGuffin).

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

Very. As a teenager, I read (and watched) exclusively fantasy and science fiction. While Rod Serling and Richard Matheson were (and remain) profound influences, the rest was purely for escape. And I wanted badly to escape. I college, I simultaneously discovered mid-century pulp noir and magical realism (particularly Italo Calvino). Those two sources have been slowly merging in my head ever since then.

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

I wouldn’t say that beginnings are particularly difficult, but I do spend more time on them. Endings, however, always come to me in an instant and very early in the process (even if I don’t have a clue how I’ll reach it). And I don’t mean the final scene, but the very last line. With Mother Howl, I had the closing line of the novel in my head years before I finished the first draft. When I had a steady workspace, that line was written down and pinned to the board above my desk. Otherwise, with every new notebook I unwrapped (my working drafts are always longhand), I would write that closing line on the very bottom of the last page, then go back to the first page and write toward it.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Politics, definitely. Not so much news or current events, but larger social issues. I don’t write to express my particular stance (not in my fiction), but certain issues always bleed through. Music, art and film all have an influence on me, but it’s usually a tone, mood or emotional reaction that I’m responding to. With a story or specific scene, I might have an photograph, painting or song in mind; whatever my emotional reaction to it, I want to evoke the same feeling from a reader. I’m always moved when someone posts about my work online, pairing the reading with a particular musician or album. They’re all vastly different, but somehow nail it.

Visit Craig Clevenger's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu

Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu was born in South Africa and raised in a number of places including Boston, Massachusetts, where she currently resides. She is a graduate of the University of Cape Town, where she received a BA in English literature and film and media production, and she uses those skills to write stories, pitch media and watch movies. Ride or Die is her debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Ride or Die does all the work of taking the reader into the story. It immediately denotes action, flare, and a dash of mystery, while also relaying that this is a story about deep friendship. I’ve always been proud of the multilayered nature of the title’s meaning. The protagonist, Loli, and the mystery figure at the center of the novel embark on a game of dares with high psychological stakes, and they really do believe it is either “ride” or “die”. They feel an urgency to take dramatic, competitive action or it’s the end of the world. My publisher and I tried brainstorming more unique titles when the book was sold (so many songs, movies, books, etc. have the same name) but we ultimately couldn’t find a more perfect title for this story.

What's in a name?

My protagonist is named “Loli” after a song I loved as a teenager, (also featured in the book) but as I outgrew teenhood I thought she needed a “proper” name. While doing research, I happened upon the Malawian name “Naloli” which means “it is true”. If you read the book, you’ll find that Loli has a complicated relationship with the truth. Yes, she is always her most authentic, truest self; she’s unafraid to speak her mind and exist loudly and exactly as she is. But she often lies to herself about what she wants because the truth isn’t exactly what she wants it to be…

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

I don’t think she’d be much surprised! This is exactly the novel I wanted to read as a teenager, so maybe she’d be surprised that I finally did it. Though she might be scandalized to find that I tucked a curse word somewhere in there…

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

I really struggle to write beginnings, but endings come naturally to me. I know exactly where I want a story to go and how I ultimately want things to be resolved, but I find it difficult to know where to start a story that is so full in my mind. It’s daunting having to approach a mass of activity in your mind (character backstories, desires, appearances, personalities, twisting plots) and concisely lay it out. By the time I’ve finished writing a book the beginning has been re-written at least half a dozen times.

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

I never used to think I had anything in common with any of the characters in Ride or Die but somewhere in my revisions I began to see a lot of myself in Loli’s best friend (and potential love interest?) Ryan Pope. We have a very similar “glass-half-full” mentality, we play the same role in our friend groups, we’re both majorly conflict-averse (often to our detriment), and I’m always so enamored by glittering, egocentric people like Loli. It’s so easy to get swept up and lost in their world.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

This is the perfect question for Ride or Die because it was mostly inspired by non-literary art. To me, teenagehood has always had a sound, and perhaps because rock was the dominant genre for teens when I was a child it has remained the sound of teenagehood in my mind. I was listening to a lot of Cage the Elephant, The White Stripes, Led Zeppelin and some Weezer while writing this book. Born to Die by Lana Del Rey was a huge influence for Ride or Die as well. That album is a seminal work for so many artists of my generation.

Visit Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Corinne Demas

Corinne Demas is the award-winning author of thirty-seven books, including five novels (among them The Writing Circle and Returning to Shore), two short story collections, a memoir (Eleven Stories High: Growing Up in Stuyvesant Town, 1948─1968), a poetry chapbook (The Donkeys Postpone Gratification), a play, and numerous books for children (including Saying Goodbye to Lulu, The Littlest Matryoshka, and The Disappearing Island). Her short stories have appeared in more than fifty publications. She is also the editor of Great American Short Stories: From Hawthorne to Hemingway.

Demas is a professor emerita of English at Mount Holyoke College and a fiction editor for the Massachusetts Review. She divides her time between Western Massachusetts and Cape Cod.

Demas's new novel is The Road Towards Home.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My working title for my novel was The Lady with the Dog, the title of a favorite short story by Anton Chekhov, which is quoted in my epilogue. The novel does more, though, than focus on one female dog-owner, so my editor, my agent, and I explored dozens of other titles. I kept mining the text of the manuscript, looking for a phrase that would speak to the core of the novel, and I ended up discovering it in the last line of the book.

I hope The Road Towards Home will suggest to readers not just a physical road, but a psychological journey as well. There are a number of “homes” in the novel: the houses each of the characters once owned, the retirement community where they find themselves, and the rough Cape Cod cottage where most of the story takes place. Home, of course is not just a physical place, but a state of mind.

I chose “towards” rather than “toward” for the title because of the sound. I was relieved to find that the Merriam-Webster dictionary says they are interchangeable and dispels the myth that “towards” is more properly British.

What's in a name?

Naming characters in a novel is such a tricky business! I selected “Noah” and “Cassandra” for my two main characters because the names were familiar but not too common. In her kind blurb for the book, novelist Valerie Martin touched on the way the names might resonate, as well: Noah (saved the world with a boat) and Cassandra (sees the future way too clearly).

Cassandra can be pronounced two ways, and my character makes it clear that her name is not pronounced in what she calls “‘the ‘snooty way,’ the second ‘a’ pronounced like an ‘o’ as in ‘on.’ When people mispronounced her name Cassandra felt it gave her a certain edge over them.”

Early in the story, Noah is surprised to discover that Cassandra Joyce is the Sandy Karras he knew back when they were in college. As their relationship develops he calls her Sandy in private, but introduces to others as Cassandra. “Because Sandy is what I call you,” he says. “Cassandra is for everyone else.”

When I named the senior living community where the story begins, I made sure there wasn’t an actual place by that name. The cottage my characters escape to is on the Outer Cape, but I didn’t name the town so I’d have freedom to move things around. I imagine readers will have fun arguing about the locale.

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

My teenage reader self wouldn’t be surprised by my novel, but I expect she’d be curious about my portrayal of Cassandra’s two daughters as well as Cassandra’s relationship with her sister, Judy, when they were young. Because I’m an only child, I think the teenage me would find it intriguing that the novelist me has obviously been studying the way siblings interact as children and exploring the way their childhood experience shapes their relationship as adults.

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

The opening of my novel: “There was a new resident at Clarion court. Noah normally didn’t pay attention to the arrival of newcomers, but he couldn’t miss this one because she was accompanied by one of the biggest dogs he’d ever seen,” echoes the opening of Chekhov’s short story, so my beginning was all set.

I knew where I wanted my characters to end up, but I couldn’t force that ending on them. Once I created them and they became real to me I had to let them do whatever was right for them; I had to sit back and let things play out. The ending was not surprising, but I couldn’t have predicted the way we’d get there.

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

Just as in my all of my other books, The Road Towards Home incorporates little bits of my own reality—the smell of a Stilton cheese, the feel of the sand on “winter-soft” feet-- but my characters are entirely themselves. Cassandra is feistier than I am. Noah is more ironic. Of course while I was writing this novel I had to become them, see the world as they see it. And I had to capture their distinct voices.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

One of the most important influences on my writing is the natural world. I’m not a scientist, but I’m an enthusiastic amateur, and concerned about environmental issues. Cassandra is an entomologist, so I relied on the help of scientists I know and the many field school classes I’ve taken at Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. (I took the one on insects twice—and there’s still so much more to learn!)

I didn’t include references to politics in the novel because I wanted the story to be timeless, but contemporary politics certainly influenced me--and my characters. Cassandra, for example, has a challenging relationship with her son-in-law, who is a climate change denier.

Music plays a role in this novel, and I’ve been influenced by my own adventures taking violin lessons and my appreciation of and struggles with Bach. I had fun selecting the cello music Noah is working on. The name I gave his sailboat, “Sarabande,” was in the running for the title of the book.

Visit Corinne Demas's website.

--Marshal Zeringue