Alie Dumas-Heidt

Alie Dumas-Heidt lives in the Puget Sound with her husband, adult kids, and two Goldendoodles – Astrid and Torvi. Growing up she wanted to be a detective and a writer and spent a few years working as a police dispatcher. Now, working is writing in her home office with the dogs at her feet. When she’s not writing she enjoys being in the forest, creating glass art, yarn crafts, and watching baseball.

Dumas-Heidt's new novel is The Myth Maker.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I think my title, The Myth Maker, is intriguing enough to catch readers attention, but does it completely spell out that this is a story about a detective on the hunt for a serial killer? I say no, but, funny enough, my agent wasn’t sure we’d be able to keep it because she did worry it gave too much away. I have old outlines and early chapters all with the title The Myth Maker and it was hard for me to consider it being called anything else. We played around with a few other titles, different ideas pulling from bits of what the killer was doing, but nothing stuck. I had an easier time changing the name of my lead character! I was thankful that a new title wasn’t part of the To Do list from my publisher during final edits.

What's in a name?

I am a little bit of a name nerd in real life. I’m that annoying friend that will gladly put lists together for anyone naming a baby, puppy, or kitten. With The Myth Maker, my lead character went through a name change between pitching to my agent and us pitching to publishers. I started to realize how many other characters in all media formats were variations of Kat and I wanted to make sure my Kathryn stood out in that crowded space instead of blending in. She went through a metamorphosis and became Cassidy Cantwell, Cas to friends, and Cassi to only one person.

I was surprised by how much I struggled to adapt to her being Cas instead of Kat, and it actually took me changing a few other things about her past and her character to make the new name stick. The other characters have names you’d run into in real life, because that’s how I wanted it to feel. I did apologize to a friend though after I realized I’d used both her name and her sister’s name as victim names. Whoopsie.

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

I was an insatiable reader as a kid and by the time I was eleven I was stealing my mom’s books off the bookshelf to fill in between trips to the library and school book orders. My mom read a lot of true crime, and I have always been interested in detective work, so those were the books I started stealing most. By seventh grade, I was alternating between things like The Outsiders, to Ann Rule, then Anne Rice. I don’t think teenage me would be surprised to know that we grew up and wrote a detective story. I was barely out of my teenage years when I started writing The Myth Maker, and I think she’d be proud to know I made this dream of being a writer a reality for us.

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

Endings! Finding the exact right moment to declare things done isn’t always as easy as I want it to be, and there were a few different endings written for this project, can’t deny that. I honestly find it easiest to write the middle when I’m starting a new story. I’ve completed two novels, and both started with middle scenes. With The Myth Maker, I wrote one of the high climax scenes first before I even knew why Cassidy and Bryan were where they were. It became a target to write the events to get Cas to that moment and figuring out what obstacles would be in her way. It’s a lot of answering the question, “Why?”

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

I tried to separate myself from Cassidy, starting with the physical traits. She’s taller than me, skinnier than me, has a different hair color. I gave her a big family, and an unsteady relationship, all different from mine, but I think every writer, subconsciously or not, ends up injecting a bit of their own personality into their characters. One area that is similar, and intentionally so, is the car Cassidy drives. We both drive Mini Coopers, although she has a Justa and I drive a Clubbie. All of that makes sense to Mini drivers, and she actually had hers first because I’ve been in love with them forever. No matter what happens in Cassidy’s future, she will keep driving her Mini.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’ve been influenced by a lot of things with my writing - other writers, TV characters - but my childhood dream of being a police detective definitely inspired my subject matter the most with The Myth Maker. I started writing the story when it was just an idea in the mind of a 21 year old, while I was working as a 911 operator/police dispatcher. That work, and the people I met while doing it, definitely inspired the characters and even some of the interactions. While all of the story and characters are fictional, there were moments of my time as a dispatcher, small interactions between myself and the cops I worked with, that I reworked and worked into the story to create interactions from real life. They’re some of my favorite small moments, and most of them made final cuts.

Visit Alie Dumas-Heidt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue