Barbara O'Neal

Barbara O’Neal is the author of more than a dozen award-winning, bestselling novels, including the runaway bestseller, When We Believed in Mermaids, which has been published in 21 countries and spent many months on both the most sold and most read Amazon Charts, as well as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller lists. O’Neal is an avid traveler and passionate cook, and discovered the Oregon coast on a pandemic-era trip with her husband. She now lives on that rocky, moody coast in a quirky beach house and writes her books from a room overlooking the sea. She lives with her British husband, who has promised to never lose his accent, and their cats and dogs.

O’Neal's new novel is A Thousand Painted Hours.

My Q&A with the author:

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

It's certainly not direct, as some of my titles have been. This one is more lyrical, speaking to time and hope and place.

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

I love this question!!! My teenage self would be thrilled by this novel--it's the kind of big, sweeping book that qualified as The Real Thing when I was that age. Teenage me was already writing novels, so to find out we actually did it, and did it for an entire career, would be major. I think she'd cry tears of joy.

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

Oh, beginnings are much, much harder. Beginnings are like searching for the hidden path to a magic city, and I take a lot of wrong turns before I finally find the right opening. By the time I get to the end of a book, know where I'm going, what issues need to be resolved and who has to change, so driving toward that satisfying end is often a hectic, heated sprint. Sometimes, I leave the very last scene to write the day before I mail it, when I've gone through the manuscript one more time and can clearly see everything it had to say and where the grace note might be. A great grace note is what lingers with readers for a long time.

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 there's a lot of us in most of the characters we produce. Elsie is an artist, and hungry to serve that work at a fairly high cost. She's adventurous and passionate and yet she also really loves the people in her world. I think I am all of those things, and I also am a most passionate letter-writer!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Everything! Everything! The weather and clouds, the forces of history, repeating and repeating, deep conversations, stumbling over strange facts, and travel for sure. I didn't realize how much I relied on travel for inspiration and keeping my mind fresh until I couldn't go anywhere during the pandemic. It's was illuminating, and I let myself claim it as something that's as much a part of me as the work itself. I will also say that movies influence me heavily. I love them and watch them, some ten times or more. (The English Patient probably planted a few seeds for this book.)

Visit Barbara O'Neal's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Thousand Painted Hours.

The Page 69 Test: A Thousand Painted Hours.

Writers Read: Barbara O'Neal.

--Marshal Zeringue