Jeffrey Archer

A matchless spinner of engrossing tales, Jeffrey Archer is a bestselling British novelist and former politician. His hugely successful body of work includes Kane and Abel, First Among Equals, and the multi-volume Clifton Chronicles.

Archer's new novel is An Eye for an Eye.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Titles are very important. They can tempt you to read a book and they can stop you from reading a book. I spend some considerable time thinking about my titles and they rarely come easily. I think Kane and Abel, Only Time Will Tell and Not a Penny More have helped sales, so I will always take the problem of titles very seriously.

What's in a name?

Names are very important, because they set the tone of what the person is like, for example William Warwick is clearly a good and decent person, whereas with Miles Faulkner you cannot be sure and, certainly, Hani Khalil sets the tone even before you read about him.

Sometimes, just first names can give it away: Beth, Jojo and Artemisia all tell their own story, as do Jackie, Christina and Alice. Surnames are equally important and I spend some considerable time making sure a name and place are correct.

Once a year, I offer the chance, for charity, for someone to have their name in a book and that is a challenge in itself, because some want to be baddies and some want to be goodies and some don’t care. I wonder if you can spot who paid £26,000 to be in the next book.

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

I loved all the Just William books and Swallows and Amazons when I was a boy so, frankly, I don’t think I would be surprised.

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

I must confess I don’t find the beginnings or the endings at all difficult. It is the middles, when you must hold the readers’ interest, keeping them guessing and wanting to turn the pages. There is only one sin for a writer: boring the reader.

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

Of course, one has a tendency to put characters in that you are familiar with and, certainly, in the case of my wife, Mary, she is Beth in the William Warwick series. Christina is based on a friend, as is Ross, so I advise prospective writers to write about people they know, because they will be able to describe them more easily and will know their characteristics.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I watch a lot of very bad films and television programmes and sometimes only manage twenty minutes.

However, when I watch something wonderful, like The West Wing, Call my Agent or the German film The Lives of Others, I learn from the skill of the writer and the translation of the actor, in the hope it will help my own work.

Visit Jeffrey Archer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elom Akoto

Elom K. Akoto immigrated to the United States from Togo (West Africa). He earned a bachelor’s degree in Education and a master’s degree in TESOL (Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages). He is the founder of Learn and Care, a nonprofit organization that aims to promote Literacy and Adult Education, not only among immigrants but also among Native Americans who missed the opportunity to earn a high school diploma. The program offers ESL, literacy, GED preparation classes, and more. He self-published two ESL workbooks: Ideal Companion, ESL level 1 and Ideal Companion, ESL level 2. He teaches French in a high school and ESL at a community college in Omaha, Nebraska, where he lives with his family.

Akoto's debut novel is Blindspot in America.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The final title of my debut novel, Blindspot in America, was not the original title I gave it. I was unhappy when my publisher decided it was best to find a new title for the book because of how cliché In the Dream of America would appear to potential readers. The publisher then included me in the task of finding a new title. After tossing words around, Blindspot in America seemed to fit the story better, as it depicts how prospective immigrants’ conception of America excludes or instead omits some crucial aspects and realities of their future adopted country. Those aspects and realities constitute the spots they didn’t see in their dream of America.

What's in a name?

I was looking for an uncommon name for the protagonist of my novel, and Kamao came to me quickly. Although it doesn’t mean anything, to my knowledge, it sounded like a good name for an intelligent, idealist African young man immigrating to the United States.

Brad and Lindsey McAdams are good names for a wealthy, influential, conservative US senator and his more down-to-earth, well-mannered daughter.

Nana, a name attributed to a “chief,” “king,” or “royalty” in Ghana, is most fitting for Kamao’s father. This well-respected and wealthy academic also happens to be the health secretary.

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

Referring to what Toni Morrison said about writing a book that one wants to read but hasn’t been written, I would have loved to read Kamao’s story if it had been written by someone else when I was a teenager because it would have allowed me to discover another side of America that I didn’t know about racism, discrimination, the influence of class, and power.

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

Surprisingly, I had little trouble writing this novel's beginning and ending. They were the two most important parts I settled with quickly and relatively easily. Once I knew and liked how the story started and ended and felt comfortable with them, I thought it would be a good story. The part that I had to rewrite mostly was the middle part, the story's evolution, and the plot's details.

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

Kamao appears knowledgeable and idealistic, and I see myself posing those attributes a bit.

Besides those, I don’t feel like I have much in common with other characters, many of whom are immigrants from different parts of the world I’m only familiar with through my research and readings.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My experience as an immigrant in America has tremendously influenced my writing. What I dreamt about the US was not what I’ve experienced in my almost twenty years in this country. There are some things I went through that felt senseless and nearly inhumane, but I also always believe in America’s promise of freedom and opportunity for all. I think I’m an example of the story of my novel because I’m becoming a published author today, besides the struggles that I knew. Although it is not given nor a guarantee, the opportunity is always there, somewhere in this country, for every individual to achieve their goal and potential.

Visit Elom Akoto's website.

My Book, The Movie: Blindspot in America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tess Callahan

Tess Callahan is the author of the novels April & Oliver and Dawnland. Her essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Writer’s Digest, National Public Radio, Agni, Narrative Magazine, AWP Notebook, Newsday, The Common, the Best American Poetry blog, and elsewhere. Her TEDx talk on creativity is titled, “The Love Affair Between Creativity & Constraint.” Callahan is a graduate of Boston College and Bennington College Writing Seminars. A certified meditation teacher, she offers meditations on Heart Haven Meditations and Insight Timer. She curates Muse-feed.com, a toolbox for aspiring writers. A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, she lives in Cape Cod and Northern New Jersey with her family and number one life coach, her dog.

My Q&A with Callahan:

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

During a weeklong family reunion on Cape Cod, a stretch of beach the characters refer to as Dawnland, two brothers convene at their father’s house with their wives, teenage children, and deeply held secrets in tow. Dawnland is the Wampanoag and Wabanaki name for the northeastern seaboard, the place of the first sunrise, a symbol of hope and renewal. The father figure in Dawnland, Hal, finds this indigenous name more fitting than Cape Cod, especially now that most of the cod have been fished out. Like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the title establishes the setting as central to the story while also acting as a metaphor. The primal forces of nature collide with the unresolved past of the characters and, kaboom! In Dawnland the natural world is a reckoning force. Hope is born of hard-won realizations. ‘Dusk Land’ would be a different novel.

What's in a name?

Dawnland’s central character, April, is named for the month she was born in, “like a date received stamp,” she says. Her parents, who play a peripheral role in the backstory, are emotionally tone deaf. Self-worth is a challenge April meets head-on in Dawnland. Can she step into her own power? I chose Oliver’s name both for its consonance with April, sharing the “L” and “R” sounds, as well the musicality offered by those long, luscious vowels. Oliver is a musician. April’s volatile teenage son Lochlann, who hides beneath layers of armor, is a ‘lock” she longs to crack. It turns out she needs Oliver’s musical magic to do so.

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

Young Tess would be quite shocked to see some of her own ancestral dynamics—patterns of avoidance and deference, the weight of unworthiness—laid bare in Dawnland. Part of her would say, “Thank God my family is nothing like this.” Another part would see down through the ancestral line to patterns of addiction, not so much to substances (although one character, Al, is fond of booze), but to habits of mind, default modes of helplessness and despair. The characters in Dawnland are forced to reckon with their own forms of autopilot and embrace the possibility of radical agency. I think teenage Tess would find her head spinning. It’s quite a ride!

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

Beginnings are pure joy. I love the headlong dive into a story. Dawnland opens with April’s teenage son, Lochlann, falling off a skiff into the ocean at night. He symbolizes everything that can be lost through avoidance and noncommunication. I enjoy exploring where a mysterious opening scene will lead me. Endings often remain a mystery well into the writing. I tend to compose the way a goose migrates, one flap at a time. The goose may not have a mental picture of where it is going, but its inner GPS knows when it has arrived. From the get-go, I sensed the fate of these characters. Getting there was a line-by-line act of trust.

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

A reader asked me recently how I could have come up with a character like Al, a carousing hard-drinking sportswriter who she said, “is nothing like you.” I assured her that I am in touch with my inner loose cannon. I once heard Milan Kundera say in an interview that his characters start where he leaves off. That feels right to me. April, Oliver, and the whole crew each represent some unlived, unexpressed part of me. I’ve taken my own proclivities and let them play out to their worst-case scenarios. By letting the characters suffer the full fallout of their choices, they reveal to the reader, and to themselves, who they are. In life and in fiction, our most daunting challenges show us what we’re made of.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The dynamic topography of Cape Cod greatly influenced the writing of Dawnland. Having vacationed here for 25 years and lived here part-time for the past eight, I have witnessed firsthand the spectacular power of the sea, the erosion of dune cliffs, and the fall of beachfront homes into the ocean. Stellwagen Bank off the tip of Cape Cod is a summer feeding ground for whales and other mammals. A growing seal population has led to the recent return of the area’s apex predator, the great white shark, a development which Cape Cod has embraced as a sign of a healthy ecosystem. All of this plays into the events of Dawnland, in which intimate encounters with marine life play a pivotal role.

Learn more about the novel and author at Tess Callahan's website.

The Page 69 Test: April and Oliver.

The Page 69 Test: Dawnland.

My Book, The Movie: Dawnland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mansi Shah

Mansi Shah writes novels centering Gujarati characters that speak to generational differences across the Indian diaspora, and she's the author of the acclaimed novels The Direction of the Wind and The Taste of Ginger. Shah was born in Toronto to Indian immigrants, raised in the midwestern United States, and is now based in Los Angeles. She left her long-time career as an entertainment attorney in Hollywood to travel the world and write full time. She loves to cook and is often experimenting on new culinary creations that blend Indian flavors with other cuisines.

Shah's new novel is A Good Indian Girl.

My Q&A with the author:

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

A Good Indian Girl is the perfect title for this novel and really sets the tone for the story. Coupled with the cover, which features an Indian woman with a smirk, the reader can intuit that this is going to be a story that challenges the stereotypes of what is expected of a “good Indian girl.” The story starts off with Jyoti, who is a 42-year-old woman who finds herself divorced and estranged from her parents after she was unable to conceive the child that her husband so desperately wanted. She’d given up her chef career to focus on having children, so she approaches the second half of her life having lost everything that she thought she was supposed to have at that stage of her life. With no obligations, she spends the summer in Italy with her best friend, Karishma, a fellow social outcast from their conservative Gujarati community. Through the experiences of Jyoti and Karishma—and a lot of pasta and Chianti—the story changes the narrative of what type of life a good Indian girl should have, and is grounded in the universal themes of reinventing ourselves after loss, learning to live for ourselves, and the significance of found family.

What's in a name?

Jyoti Shah is the quintessential Gujarati American woman, so I had to make sure she had a quintessential Gujarati name. In my novels, I showcase names from the Indian diaspora, and in A Good Indian Girl, I wanted to make sure I highlighted a name that is often mispronounced in North America in the hopes that others with the same name might have a slightly easier road ahead if more readers are exposed to it. And her last name Shah, which is the same as mine, was chosen not because she and I are similar, but because in the Indian community, the last name is often a signifier of the caste and region of India that a person comes from. Shah is an incredibly common last name in Gujarat, and many of the cultural aspects of my life—and Jyoti’s—are specific to that subset of Indians, so that is why the majority of my protagonists throughout my novels have the last name “Shah.”

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

I don’t allow myself to start drafting until I have a clear sense of the beginning and ending scenes. In a story about a chef in Tuscany, I knew I had to start the story with the reader being able to taste the food, and the truffle gnocchi dish described on the first page is from an actual restaurant in Florence and sets the tone for the mouthwatering story ahead. Given the focus on food in this novel, I made sure to include recipes for the Indian-Italian fusion dishes that Jyoti creates. I won’t give away the ending to this story, but so far, in all the novels I’ve written, my ending scene has remained unchanged from the first draft to final publication.

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

Jyoti was an interesting character to write because while we have cultural aspects in common, the essence of her personality and life experience are not the same as mine. At her core, Jyoti is a people pleaser. She spent most of her life doing what she thought would make others happy: her husband, her parents, her community. She never stopped to think about what she wanted, including whether she wanted children for herself or to give up her career, or whether she just subjected herself to a decade of torture trying to conceive to satisfy the dreams of someone else. I haven’t struggled with people pleasing to the extent that Jyoti has, and wouldn’t say that trait is part of my core personality, so it was very interesting to get into the mindset of someone who is driven by different goals than I am. While I have never been a chef, I do share of love of cooking with Jyoti, and those aspects of the story were incredibly fun for me to write because, as authors, we get to live out other lives through our characters and words—without the late restaurant hours.

Visit Mansi Shah's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Asha Greyling

Asha Greyling lives in Maryland with her furry four-footed muses, Gwin the terrier and a guinea pig who thinks she’s a cat. She likes nothing more than swinging in the playground (unless the local children scare her off), collecting acorns, or sitting down with a good book.

Greyling's new novel is The Vampire of Kings Street.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I think The Vampire of Kings Street is a very posh, elegant title with a bit of punch. It’s the kind of title that screams elite society – and then throws in a vampire. I think it does a great job setting up the historical vibe of the book, while suggesting darker undertones.

What's in a name?

One of my favorite characters in this book is Evelyn More, the vampire. I remember it jumped out and surprised me when I realized the name sounds like “evermore.” I love Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, so this interesting twist on “Nevermore” from a vampire’s perspective—being bound to this worldly existence evermore, instead of nevermore—I just couldn’t resist.

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

Sadly, not surprised at all. My teenage self was singing musical numbers from Sweeney Todd in the shower.

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

The middle is the hardest for me. I reach a point where I’m thinking, is this really that good? Will anyone enjoy reading this? I have to go back and review, and get my energy back from reading what’s come before to assure me that yes, this book is worth writing.

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

I think every character I’ve ever written has a little of myself in them. For me, writing is like acting. If I can feel it, I can write it.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Computer games! Movies! Music! Music especially helps me visualize the story. I feel like I owe a lot of this book to the music I was listening to at the time, like The Razor Skyline’s “Vittoria” and—on a more classical note—Laura Wright’s beautiful rendition of “Canon in D.” Give those songs a listen—you might be inspired, too!

Visit Asha Greyling's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Vampire of Kings Street.

My Book, The Movie: The Vampire of Kings Street.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Wolff

Caroline Wolff is a writer and editor. She holds an MFA in Fiction from New York University, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. She lives in downtown Manhattan.

Wolff's new novel is The Wayside.

My Q&A with the author:

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

She wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest. Teenage Caroline was drawn to anything darkly beautiful. (For context, the summer I was 15 I listened to Elliott Smith every night before bed and cried, just to evoke an intense emotional response and so have more fodder to draw from in my writing.) When I was creating the moody atmosphere of The Wayside, I also drew on a few of the books I loved as a teenager, like the campus vibe of The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis and the gothic overtones of Night Film by Marisha Pessl. And she would definitely approve of Jake’s taste in music.

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

It’s harder for me to write endings. I tend to fly through the first chunk of my drafts, because I’m just so energized by introducing these voices, and then I reach a sticking point about halfway through. I usually maintain a little bit of stuckness right up until the end. I need to write more logically, rather than intuitively. I found it especially tricky to write the ending of a thriller, since the genre has certain conventions that need to be honored, including an ending that provides some kind of “answer” to the question we’ve been pursuing for the past 300 or so pages. So I ended up changing the ending of The Wayside at least twice, because the first iteration was just a little too far-fetched.

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

The short answer is no. This is the first time I’ve written characters that weren’t thinly- veiled reflections of my own personality, and I actually found it liberating to inhabit these unfamiliar voices. That said, of course some parts of yourself or your world come through in your writing. In order to do justice to Jake’s struggle with his mental health, for example, I had to draw on my own experience with depression as a young adult. Superficially, I relate to Luna aesthetically. We have a similar wardrobe and a penchant for Japanese skincare products.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music is a major inspiration for me. It can really help me enter into the mood of the world I’m creating, or even the mindset of the characters. For The Wayside, I was listening to a lot of Chelsea Wolfe (specifically her album Pain is Beauty, with the song “Feral Love” on repeat), Bauhaus (“All We Ever Wanted is Everything” gets a shoutout in the novel), and SASAMI’s album Squeeze.

Visit Caroline Wolff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cynthia Swanson

Cynthia Swanson is the Denver-based author of the psychological suspense novels The Bookseller, The Glass Forest, and the newly released Anyone But Her. An Indie Next selection, New York Times bestseller, and winner of the WILLA Literary Award, The Bookseller is slated to be a motion picture produced by Julia Roberts. Swanson is also the editor of the award-winning anthology Denver Noir, which features dark, morally ambiguous stories set in and around Denver, written by 14 notable literary and mystery authors.

My Q&A with the author:

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

On page 7 of Anyone But Her, we hear these exact words (“anyone but her”) spoken by Alex, mom of Suzanne, the novel’s main character. Six months earlier, Alex was killed during an armed robbery of her record store on Colfax Avenue in Denver. Now, she appears as a ghost to 14-year-old Suzanne, a clairvoyant, and urges Suzanne to intervene in the relationship between Suzanne’s father James, and his girlfriend, Peggy, whom he’d dated in high school. Alex explains that after meeting Peggy at James and Peggy’s high school reunion, she’d jokingly told him that if she died, he could marry “anyone but her.”

Lost in grief and loneliness, Suzanne heeds her mother’s warnings and does what she can to break up James and Peggy. The repercussions of this decision are severe and long-lasting, both when Suzanne is a teen in 1979, and in 2004, twenty-five years later, when she returns to live in Denver with her husband and children after decades away.

What's in a name?

Ooh, I worked long and hard on this one! As a record store owner, Alex obviously loved music, so I wanted her to give her daughter a name inspired by a musician or a song. I ultimately landed on Suzanne, after the Leonard Cohen song. I made up a scene in which Alex, pregnant at the time with Suzanne, hears Judy Collins sing “Suzanne” in a little club in Denver in 1964. The scene is purely fiction, in no small part because Cohen didn’t publish “Suzanne” as a poem until 1966, so I had to take poetic license there. However, Judy Collins did record the song that same year (1966). She was a graduate of the high school that Suzanne attends, Denver East High. Collins was in the class of 1957—the year before James and Peggy also graduated from East.

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

Suzanne and I are about the same age, so my teenage self would definitely recognize the cultural references in Anyone But Her—music, clothes, movies, books. I’m not clairvoyant, but I’ve always had an affinity for ghost stories. My teenage self wouldn’t be a bit surprised that I wrote one.

Teenage Cynthia might be surprised that the novel is set in Denver, because I didn’t grow up here. However, I think she might (as I do) sort of wish that I did. I have numerous friends my age who are Denver natives, and their stories helped shape the narrative—and also made me a bit envious that I didn’t share their experiences here in the seventies and eighties. I would have loved going to a concert at Red Rocks when I was a high schooler!

I didn’t plan this, of course (I started writing the novel in 2019), but Gen X/Gen Jones is having a moment right now, and it’s fun to have a novel coming out that’s set in the era when those generations were young. Like many of us born in the 1960s, my teenage self would be pretty excited about that.

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

For me, it’s the middle that gets tough! I usually have a solid beginning and at least somewhat of an idea where things are going to land. With a clear picture of where to start and a general sense of where I’m ultimately headed, it’s the “getting there” that can be a challenge. I completely rewrote Anyone But Her, top-to-bottom, five times, changing key elements and plot lines—this is not counting dozens of interim revisions. Because of this, the ending changed quite a bit, as did much of the middle. But the beginning never did; it always started with that scene between Suzanne and the ghost of her mother, Alex.

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

As mentioned above, Suzanne and I are similar in age and share many cultural references. Additionally, like I was as a teen, Suzanne is introverted and trying to figure herself out. That’s where the similarity ends; she’s otherwise way more badass than me. In the 2004 timeline, adult Suzanne has married and had children at a much younger age than I did—and as the mother of a teen and a 9 year old, she faces motherhood challenges that I did not in 2004, when my first two children, twins, were infants. Despite these differences, Suzanne is one of my favorite characters that I’ve ever written, in both her teen and adult lives.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

For Anyone But Her, certainly music played a big part. I have 1970s playlists that I listened to as I wrote. And as anyone familiar with my writing knows, I’m greatly influenced by setting. When I was younger, I had aspirations of being an architect, and this shows in my writing via the homes that often play a part in my novels. In Anyone But Her, the house where the family lives is an 1888 Queen Anne Victorian, complete with turret. This house, while fictional, is common in its neighborhood, Capitol Hill, and throughout much of Denver. I’m currently writing a new novel—a mystery set in Denver and the Colorado mountains in 1938—and readers will recognize this same house playing a role in that book, too.

Visit Cynthia Swanson's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Bookseller.

The Page 69 Test: The Glass Forest.

Writers Read: Cynthia Swanson (February 2018).

--Marshal Zeringue

Erica Wright

Erica Wright's new novel Hollow Bones, a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, is out now! Her essay collection Snake was released as part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. Her mystery Famous in Cedarville received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was called "a clever little whodunnit" in The New York Times Book Review. She is the author of five other books, including the poetry collections Instructions for Killing the Jackal and All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Wright was the senior poetry editor at Guernica Magazine for more than a decade and currently teaches at Bellevue University. She holds degrees from New York University and Columbia University. She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with her family.

From my Q&A with Wright:

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

Hollow Bones is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and the title comes from the line “…thy bones are hollow; impiety has made a feast of thee.” It is a condemnation—the villain’s absence of faith has lead to an absence of character—but the phrase “hollow bones” also references birds. And a bird is a perfect symbol for the book’s protagonist Essa who is slight and fragile but determined. While not what Matthea Harvey might call a license plate title, grounded in information, I do think Hollow Bones establishes an appropriately gothic tone.

What's in a name?

This story is told in three POVs, and I decided to give Juliet the same name in my version that she has in the Shakespeare play. In Measure for Measure, she only has seven lines, so I was starting from scratch in some ways. Of all the characters in the play, she’s most affected by the events but given least attention. Her fiancé Claudio has been sentenced to die for impregnating her, and she’s sent off to what sounds an awful lot like prison. In Hollow Bones, she’s also in tough circumstances. Her fiancé has been arrested for burning down a church and killing two people inside. Instead of wallowing, though, she tries to control her own fate, not relying on the whims or rules of others.

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

Honestly? Not too surprised. I was introduced to Measure for Measure as a teenager when I attended the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery. I was captivated by Isabella and her plight. I even had her first speech on mercy memorized, but please don’t ask me to recite it today!

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

In general, I find endings more difficult to write. With a mystery, I want all the pieces to click together, and sometimes those pieces are misshapen or broken on a first—or fifth—draft. For this book, though, I wrote and rewrote and rewrote the first chapter. The final version of Hollow Bones is only 70,000 words but I wrote at least 100,000 during the drafting process.

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

Like Essa, I grew up in small town, and while most aspects of my childhood were happy ones, I longed for privacy. I never had any important secrets to hide from my neighbors, but I never liked them knowing even my unimportant ones. Essa wants to start over somewhere where she won’t be known as “the serpent orphan,” and who could blame her? Personality-wise, we’re worlds apart. I like to think that we could be friends, though.

Visit Erica Wright's website.

My Book, The Movie: Famous in Cedarville.

The Page 99 Test: Snake.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Bass Parman

Elizabeth Bass Parman grew up entranced by family stories, such as the time her grandmother woke to find Eleanor Roosevelt making breakfast in her kitchen. She worked for many years as a reading specialist for a non-profit and spends her summers in a cottage by a Canadian lake. She has two grown daughters and lives outside her native Nashville with her husband and maybe-Maltipoo, Pippin.

Parman's debut novel is The Empress of Cooke County.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My story is dual-POV and has two main characters, Posey Jarvis and her daughter, Callie Jane. The title applies to them both. Posey claims to be the Empress of Cooke County, and everything she does in the book can be traced back to her feelings of entitlement, but, in my mind, Callie Jane is the real empress. The cover art is of Posey at the Curly Q beauty shop, and Posey is very vocal about her rightful position as an empress, so it’s easy to interpret the title as applying only to Posey, but I hope readers read more closely and realize how Callie Jane is transforming.

What's in a name?

Posey’s name is obvious—she is a poser, and Callie Jane’s name relates to something very specific in the book I can’t name without giving a spoiler. The Humboldt family got their name from the town of Humboldt, Tennessee, which I would pass when I’d drive to Memphis to see my daughter. Vern’s name was harder to come up with. I wanted something plain but dignified, a “salt of the earth” name. I went through several options before choosing Vern. I asked the woman who inspired the character of Evangeline to name Evangeline’s dog and she chose Muse. Evangeline means “good news,” and every Callie Jane in the world needs an Evangeline to help her see clearly.

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

Not a bit. She would say, “It’s about time!” I first announced I wanted to be a writer when I turned four. I asked my mother where books came from, and when she told me people wrote them, I could not imagine anything better than being an author. It took over 50 years from that announcement for me to be published, but better late than never.

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

Definitely the beginning. I always know the ending of a story before I write the first word, but knowing where to start the story is hard for me. I rewrote that first chapter probably a dozen times. I compare that first paragraph to a double Dutch jump rope game— you have to time your entry into the action perfectly or everything falls apart.

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

I take bits and pieces of my own personality and give them to characters, but they are mostly from my imagination. Callie Jane has trouble speaking up for herself, which I struggled with when I was younger, and she has no sense of direction, which I suffer from. Some of the sweet things Vern does for Callie Jane came from my father, like teaching me to ride a bike.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am an active observer when I am out and about. Inspiration can come from anywhere, and I am always watching and listening. I keep a notebook where I write down tidbits I hear or see, and it is amazing how often I can use those notes in a story. For example, I misread the name of a church we whizzed by on the interstate and will be using that wrong name in a future book. During a recent trip, I spotted a woman carrying an unusual purse, and I am pretty sure that will pop up in the next one, too.

I will talk to anyone and love striking up conversations with strangers while in line or waiting for a take-out order. Stories are about people, and talking with new people gives me new ideas. That being said, if I’m behind you in a slow grocery line, be careful what you say!

Visit Elizabeth Bass Parman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue