Jennifer K. Morita

Jennifer K. Morita is a former reporter for the Sacramento Bee and is a writer for University Communications at Sacramento State. She is a fourth-generation Asian American who lived in Hawaii as a child. Morita is an active member of Mystery Writers of America and the current president of her local chapter of Sisters in Crime. She was a finalist for the 2022 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award.

Ghosts of Waikīkī is Morita's first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Two lessons I learned early on in my publication journey:

You can judge a book by its cover, and

A rose by any other name, does not smell as sweet.

In other words, the title and cover of your book matter a lot, particularly for debut authors such as myself, who have to hook new readers with two or three words that convey the book’s plot, theme, and vibe.

And I thought Tweets were bad.

Ghosts of Waikīkī is a tongue-and-cheek reference to Maya Wong, an out-of-work newspaper reporter who reluctantly returns home to Hawaiʻi to take a ghostwriting gig for a rich, controversial developer whose family paved over much of O‘ahu. Although she was born and raised on the islands (not Native Hawaiian), Maya has been away for a long time. When a man dies under suspicious circumstances her first day on the job, she searches for the truth about an enigmatic stranger in the middle of a murder investigation while trying to reconnect with her family and friends.

What's in a name?

I named Maya Wong, the protagonist in Ghosts of Waikīkī, when I was pregnant with my first daughter. I’d always loved the name Maya, but my husband, a middle school teacher at the time who had upwards of a hundred students a year, shot it down. “There’s a Maya in every single one of my classes,” he said.

I was tempted to dig in my heels, even go as far as filling out the birth certificate when his back was turned. Until I realized Maya was the main character for the mystery series I’d been thinking about writing.

Our daughter was a teenager by the time I actually started writing the manuscript, and Maya still didn’t have a surname. I was experimenting with a variety of Japanese and Chinese last names, not able to move forward with plotting until I knew who my character was, when my cousin Christina - a Wong - texted to wish me a happy birthday.

And that is how Maya Wong got her name.

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

My teenage self would be shocked.

For one, the thought of being a real author seemed like a crazy pipe dream. I always wanted to be a writer. I would doodle silly stories in spiral notebooks (before my family had a computer) and never finish them. The blank pages were too daunting. The idea that I would write an entire novel, let alone get someone to publish it, seemed as attainable as becoming the Queen of England.

But more importantly, there weren’t a lot of mystery novels written by and about Asian American women when I was a teenager, certainly not when I was devouring Nancy Drews as a kid.

Today, the middle grade, YA, and adult fiction landscape is changing and becoming more reflective of the world we live in. But make no mistake, we still have a long way to go. Diversity in fiction, particularly genre fiction, is necessary to show the true breadth and richness of the people who make up this country’s culture. There’s nothing better than to walk into a shop and see a display of books with characters who look like you and your kids.

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

Beginnings. I lost track of how many times I wrote and rewrote the beginning of Ghosts of Waikīkī. Sometimes, I still have to think about which version I eventually settled on. For me the beginning is a lot like writing a lede for a newspaper article — I know a good one when it comes to me, but it may take a lot of massaging to make it work.

I was probably halfway through plotting the manuscript when I got the idea of how it should end, so I jumped ahead and jotted it down. The last line may be the only sentence in the entire book that never changed.

Visit Jennifer K. Morita's website.

--Marshal Zeringue