Melanie Conklin

Melanie Conklin grew up in North Carolina and worked as a product designer for ten years before she began her writing career. Her debut middle grade novel, Counting Thyme, is a Bank Street Best Children’s Book, winner of the International Literacy Association Teacher’s Choice Award, and nominated to four state reading lists.

Her new novel for young readers is Every Missing Piece.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I’m a fan of titles that have thematic relevance. I tend to settle on a title very early on in drafting, in fact well before I begin to draft at all. The original title for Every Missing Piece was All the Missing Pieces…we had to change the title because it was too similar to another book coming out in the same season, but even though that was a relatively small change, it took me a while to wrap my brain around it. That’s how central titles are to my work. I also title my chapters. Sometimes it’s just a word I want to explore. Other times, there’s a theme I want to infuse into the scenes. Sometimes I’m not right and I have to change the title, but in the end, the title needs to connect with the story both literally and thematically for me to be happy with it. Every Missing Piece is about a girl who’s trying to solve the mystery of a missing child while piecing her own life back together after some big changes. In that way, the title speaks to the themes in the story on multiple levels, which is what I enjoy.

What's in a name?

The main character in Every Missing Piece is an eleven-year-old girl named Maddy. Her full name is Madison Gaines, which sounds like a pretty straight-forward name, but there is some conflict in it. Following the death of Maddy’s father several years prior, Maddy’s mother has recently remarried. Maddy’s step-father is named Stan Wachowski. At the opening of the story, Maddy tells us that she hasn’t changed her last name, and she doesn’t think she will, because she and Stan have not “clicked.” A major part of the story is Maddy’s journey into her new life, and whether or not she can find a way to connect with her stepfather.

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

If I could go back in time and tell my teenage self about the books I’ve written, I don’t think she would be surprised that I was published, but she would be surprised that it wasn’t sci-fi or fantasy! I read so much science fiction and fantasy as a young person, and I still do today. I find that visiting other worlds helps me make sense of our world. Plus, there’s magic and dragons and supernatural human beings, all of which fascinated me then and now.

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

When I begin drafting a story, I already know how my story will start and end. The trouble is the middle. How do they get to that ending? I often have no idea, but the one thing I know is that I don’t want to be bored as a reader. I like stories that make me turn their pages. I like short chapters and short books, and I’m forever trying to write shorter stories. I also revise a lot. I’m a fan of letting my subconscious take me where it wants to go, which means that sometimes it takes several iterations to get to the next version of my story.

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

My characters always seem to represent different parts of me, though they also resemble people I’ve known in my life. I think that authors use character study to make sense of the real world, so in this way we are always analyzing and recreating scenarios from life in order to process them. Sometimes I also just borrow from a funny friend, especially my kids. They crack me up, and I’m a firm believer that there should always be jokes in middle grade books.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I was a designer before I became a writer. For ten years, I designed every kind of consumer good, from baking pans to ballpoint pens to eyewash stations for factories. Design taught me how to solve problems. Needless to say, I use those skills every day in writing. I also use about a million Post-It notes, which I recommend to anyone who’s trying to solve any kind of problem!

Visit Melanie Conklin's website and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: Counting Thyme.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lindsay Wong

Lindsay Wong is the author of the bestselling, award-winning memoir The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug-Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family. She has a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University, and she is now based in Vancouver, Canada.

My Summer of Love and Misfortune is Wong's first YA novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My Summer of Love and Misfortune is a fantastic title that Jennifer Ung and the team at Simon Pulse came up with for the manuscript. It’s lively and fun and immediately captures what the book is about--a light-hearted escapist summer beach read about a girl who has horrible luck with falling for bad boys and general misfortune because of her terrible life choices. The previous title was The Summer I Learned Chinese, which is also great, but the team agreed that it was a title for a quieter book.

My Summer of Love and Misfortune essentially portrays the time-period in almost every young person’s life, where they go through a period of change and growth, and learn a little something about themselves and whether the relationships in their lives benefit or hurt them. Iris gets cheated on, dumped, and finds out her best friend is not really her best friend, but she learns to stop hating herself in the process.

What's in a name?

The book was a collaboration and Iris Wang was the name given to me by my editor, and I think it’s perfect. Iris is also the name of a flower, and like her perennial namesake, Iris is flower-hearted, which means in Chinese culture, she’s always falling in love. She’s someone who follows her emotions, which makes her impulsive, reckless, and selfish at times. She wants to do well by others, but she doesn’t really know how or have the right influences in her life to help her. So what ensues for Iris, is making a lot of humiliating mistakes and feeling deep shame for who she is as a failure of a person. This is why she shops nonstop and has difficulty facing the consequences of her actions.

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

My teenage self would be proud and stunned that I had managed to write a book. Teenage Lindsay was a very serious, very angry person who didn’t think that she could be successful at anything, let alone living. There were several moments that I wanted to drop out of high school and I found academics to be very hard. I think my teen reader self would be shocked that this novel is light-hearted and entertaining. True story: when I took a career test in tenth grade, I scored Mortician as one of my top three choices for post-graduation life. That’s how fun I was in high school.

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

I must be a weird one, since I actually enjoy writing beginnings and endings. It’s the middle that terrifies me the most because you have to do so much more work. I usually know where a story is going to end up when I start writing it, but I find that the middle is like trying to stuff a Thanksgiving turkey and trying to figure out where everything goes. It just doesn’t always work for me, and it sometimes comes out raw and undercooked. But that’s okay. I am still learning from every book as a writer, and I’m grateful to be able to experiment. I kind of wish someone would write the middle of my book for me!

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

In many ways, Iris Wang and I are both absurd characters. We’re both imperfect, very flawed individuals, and bad drivers. I did crash my parents’ new car through the garage door once and knocked off the side mirrors and it was such an expensive mistake. Iris certainly shops more than me (I’m a broke millennial) but I did spend money a little recklessly when I was a teenager and had my parents’ credit cards. Iris and I both own a lot of clothes and makeup that we haven’t worn, and we don’t always trust in our own abilities.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Food definitely inspires and influences me. Whenever I’m at a restaurant or cafe, I always think about what each character would order and what their particular choice says about them. Do they want an extra large taro bubble tea with cream cheese frosting and a tray of decadent New York cheesecake or do they order a small unsweetened organic green tea? Food really tells me about who a person is, and what their personality is like. Rare steak or iceberg salad with no dressing? Second and third and possibly fourth helpings? Or does a character not like food in general? I love reading restaurant menus.

Visit Lindsay Wong's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Mosier

Paul Mosier began writing novels in 2011 but has written in some fashion his entire life. He is married and the father to two daughters, one of whom has passed to the next dimension. He lives near his place of birth in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. He loves listening to baseball on the radio, eating vegetarian food, drinking coffee, and talking nonstop. He has written three critically acclaimed books for middle grade readers: Train I Ride, Echo’s Sister, and Summer and July.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Summer and July hints at both the time the story takes place––the month of July in the season of Summer––and also the two characters, the narrator Juillet (the French word for July, though she isn't French) and Summer (born on the solstice). I think the title evokes the setting, and the fact that it is a Summer story, without describing the plot. Summer and July began as a placeholder title, and ended up seeming appropriate!

What's in a name?

I do like to create unusual character names, as I have for my children. I want my characters to be as distinctive as Holden Caulfield or Scout. This is less the case with Summer and Juillet, though taken together they feel distinctive and evocative of the sort of story they inhabit. The Big Kahuna certainly suggests the most esteemed dude on the beach, and Otis I think fits for a good natured, fun loving, ice cream scooping young surfer. Fern––Juillet's mall friend back home––felt like a good choice for someone who lived under fluorescent lights. I cringe when authors choose names from the most popular name lists of the year. Names are an essential, poetic part of writing prose.

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

I might be surprised that I was alive to write it, the way I conducted myself in my youth. But given that there were not stories widely available featuring a crush between two adolescent girls in the early 1980's, that would be the most surprising element. And that nobody looks askance at same sex love in the story. Of course people do still look askance at same sex love, but the Big 5 world of Middle Grade novels generally has adopted the view that they will not dignify opposition to such love with space on the page.

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

I feel like I'm pretty good at both, but I am better at endings, and much less likely to change them. An ending usually comes to me by halfway through writing the novel, and then writing the path to that ending with good pacing becomes the challenge, and showing everything that needs to be told. I often will examine novels by looking at the last line. The first line needs to pull the reader in, but the last line is like the note that stays in your ear when the album is done. You cannot botch the last line or the reader will feel betrayed.

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

Some characters are more like me than others. In Summer and July, I am more like Juillet than Summer. I was the kid with more fear, and I love and admire Summer for her sense of adventure. I tend to inflict small things on my characters, like my vegetarianism––just because I can't serve meat to the people I love––and my taste in music. Adults often do not realize how some young people have vast breadth in their musical tastes and exposure, more than we could have imagined as kids.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I think that stories are brought to me by the muse, and they take the shape of who I am, of my voice, and the air that I breathe as they are told. I am a leftist, a romantic, and when I write I tend to find the good in humanity. I don't write stories with guns. I think that every story is a love story, and it is just a question of what is it a love of. But I believe the muse brings the idea, the assignment, and my job is to try to tell it well.

Follow Paul Mosier on Twitter and visit his blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wesley King

Wesley King is the author of the Edgar Award–winning OCDaniel, which Booklist praised as “complex and satisfying” in a starred review. It was also named a Bank Street Best Book of the Year and received Canada’s Silver Birch Award. King’s first middle grade novel, The Incredible Space Raiders from Space!, was called “a well-drafted coming-of-age story” by Publishers Weekly. King is also the author of The Vindico and its sequel, The Feros, which were both Junior Library Guild selections, and Kobe Bryant’s New York Times bestselling Wizenard series.

King's new novel is Sara and the Search for Normal.

My Q&A with the author:

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

In this case, a great deal. The title Sara and the Search for Normal is very much a description of the central concept in this story, which is how we can define our own versions of normal. As a young girl suffering with a multitude of mental disorders, Sara is obsessed with becoming normal...that is, more like her peers. She has a list of rules to follow toward the end, but she can never quite manage it. This story is about how she learns self-acceptance, and therein, finds her own version of normal.

What's in a name?

As a prequel, Sara was of course first introduced in OCDaniel. So there was perhaps less attention paid to her name than his at the time (his came to me very quickly as a tie-in to OCD), but it also arrived immediately: I described her approach in the hallway, and I knew this was Sara Malvern. I am very much a 'feel' writer: if something feels right, don't overthink it. And Sara Malvern went on to become an exceedingly popular character for readers, enough to get her own story, of course, and for me she just represents eccentric brilliance and self-assurance.

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

Stunned. I spent much of my life hiding my history of mental illness, and to now be writing a second book outlining those experiences would be beyond belief. As I wrote in the author's note of this book, I think my younger self would be deeply moved, and realize that there was a reason for all that suffering...to share it.

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

Generally beginnings, but for this novel, it was definitely the ending. We went through many different revisions to get the climactic moment right. But I did write a particular passage, the very last one, on the first draft, and it remained throughout. It's a message of hope that I really love.

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

So much connection. The experiences of mental disorders are grounded in my own life, and they are very authentic looks into what OCD, anxiety, and depression can feel like. I wanted young readers to know what it's life, and I wanted those dealing with these issues to see themselves in this book and know they are not alone.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I think a general interest in people. I travel extensively (I am working on a solo circumnavigation of the world by sailboat) and am constantly inspired by the many cultures, personalities, and stories I come across on a day-by-day basis. People are fascinating, and they help drive my characters and the types of stories that I create.

Visit Wesley King's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Pepper

David Pepper is the author of The People’s House, The Wingman, and the newly released The Voter File, all which feature Jack Sharpe. Pepper earned his B.A. from Yale University and his J.D. from Yale Law School. He has clerked for a judge on the United States Court of Appeals, served in local elected office in Ohio, worked for major law firms, and taught election and voting rights law. Prior to law school, he worked in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Pepper serves as Chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, after being elected in December 2014 and reelected to a second term in 2018.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My hope is that the title The Voter File walks the reader right into the story. To political watchers or insiders who understand what “the voter file” is, they’ll instantly surmise that something is happening at the very heart of a political campaign, or campaigns. And that the stakes are high. And their assumption will quickly be proven right.

To those who haven’t heard of the term, my hope is that in this age of technology, where data is king—so valuable, and so in need of security—the notion of a large “file" or database of voters instantly strikes the reader as both intriguing and unsettling. Enough to get them started. And by the time the prologue is over, they’re in.

What's in a name?

Lots and lots of brainstorming. I generally seek short, punchy names—ones you’ll remember after hearing them once. And in a story of multiple characters, ones you’ll keep straight in your head.

If they can carry additional meaning, without overdoing it, even better: Jack Sharpe. Tori Justice. Amity Jones. Kasabian (“the butcher,” in Armenian).

Some names derive directly from the necessities of plot. As readers of The Voter File will see, only a few first names would’ve worked for one of my central characters, Katrina Rivers.

I now find myself to be a “collector” of names. If I spot a good one as I go about my daily life, I’ll jot it down to use in a future story.

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

By the underlying subject matter and themes of the book? (Politics, journalism, with some foreign intrigue thrown in). Not at all.

By the fact that it’s fiction? Stunned.

I was a student journalist in high school and college, writing hundreds of articles and opinion pieces. In my academic courses, and as a history and international studies major, I wrote long, serious papers. Well-researched. Sober. Policy oriented. On the Vietnam war and war crimes. On Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier. On Russian-American diplomatic history, and modern-day imperatives as the Cold War ended. In law school, I went on to publish articles on campaign finance reform and various elements of legal history.

But none of that writing involved fiction. Nor could I have taken that on.

Unlike my writing back then, where interviews or hours in the library provided the background material for my writing, the essential research for my fiction writing is a lifetime of observation and experience. I draw from travels I’ve been fortunate enough to make, unique positions I’ve held, ups and downs I’ve lived and learned from, and countless lives and developments I’ve watched up close. From all those lived experiences come the nuggets of detail and emotion and intuition that comprise the heart of The Voter File and my other novels. The teenage me would wonder where all that came from.

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

Neither is harder or easier. But they are entirely different. As a process, the inverse of one another.

The beginning? You've stewed with a plot or characters for a short time, or maybe just a concept—so at first, getting that opening chapter on paper is your way of getting going. Not just the book’s beginning, but your own beginning—of the work, of getting the creative juices flowing. You want to make it strong from the outset, because it anchors everything that follows. And as you labor through the first draft, the opening needs to be bold enough that it motivates you every time you see it—"yes, this story is going to work!” But you’re writing freely that first time, just getting it down so you’ve got your start. No need to be a perfectionist about it. Just complete it so you’ve taken the first step of a long journey.

And then you revise it hundreds of times. As you add each chapter—more characters, more character nuance, more twists in the plot—paragraphs and individual words in the opening chapter come and go. Slight hints at things to come, slices of character you hadn’t thought of when you started, details that now matter when they didn’t at first. As a practical matter, you also end up re-reading that opening chapter almost every time you re-open your book file, nit-picking every word or phrase before delving to the latest chapter you’re working on. Then when you finish the entire book, you go back to the beginning once more—sweating over every word because you want it to be the perfect opening for everything that follows, especially now that you know where it all leads.

The ending? If the book is coming together the way it should, the ending spills out more seamlessly, needing far less pruning. But it is also more constrained. Think of flying a plane—you’ve spent 300 pages taking off, flying at cruising altitude, navigating clouds and bumps, then you descend. With a few pages to go, you should be at 500 feet, the runway right in front of you. Just stick the landing. (And if you find yourself still at 20,000 feet or stuck in the clouds, you’ve got some work to do before even trying).

To describe it differently, I am well into writing my books before I know exactly how they will end. But I stew about that ending and how to get there all the way through: all the directions the plot might lead. Which make sense, logically. What the cast of characters I’ve created would naturally do. How to satisfy myself and the reader with a conclusion that draws things to a worthwhile close, but also not one so perfect that it feels too tidy. I always want a twist—some unanticipated imperfection that jolts the reader into rethinking all that they’ve read, along with wanting more (perhaps in the next book).

So I work on the ending for months (in my mind, at least) and build every chapter towards it. If I’ve done it right, when I ultimately get to writing it, I know almost exactly what it will say.

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

Naturally, many of my characters reflect observations and insights from my own lived experience. And some of the drama my characters endure reflect my own unique experiences.

The most compelling writing is not simply having readers see and hear an experience; but feeling the deeper emotion of that experience. That’s where drawing from your own life and personality can create the most powerful writing.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

People. In politics, you get to meet and get to know legions of interesting, authentic people. And if you listen closely, they all have stories, and histories, as riveting as any novel. Listening to and understanding those stories leads to so much material for my writing.

Places. In my day job, I drive hundreds of miles a week. Big cities, small towns…highways and backroads. Past lakes and rivers and fields. Taking extra time to explore the nooks and crannies of place that people too often drive right by opens up so many ideas as I write.

Visit David Pepper's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Carr

Matthew Carr is a novelist, journalist, blogger, and lifelong Hispanophile. He has written for various publications including the New York Times, the Observer, and the Guardian. His nonfiction is published by The New Press: Fortress Europe; Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War; and The Savage Frontier.

Carr's first novel, the acclaimed The Devils of Cardona (Riverhead), was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

His new novel is Black Sun Rising.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Black Sun Rising is a suitably ominous and mysterious title, and it also references certain symbols and expectations at the heart of the novel that students familiar with the history of Nazism and pre-Nazi movements will recognise. The original working title, which was at the forefront of my mind while writing the book, was Degeneration – a reference to the nineteenth century social critic Max Nordau’s book with the same title.

The concept of degeneration – cultural, physical political, national, social - was a recurring obsession in Belle Epoque Europe, and it’s a key theme in the novel, whether it refers to Harry Lawton’s ongoing struggle with epilepsy, the racist paranoia of Randolph Foulkes and his circle, or the violent insurrection known as Tragic Week.

That said, I think Black Sun Rising is a more appealing and inviting title, and by the time readers reach the final page its real meaning will have become very clear.

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

Given what I was reading and watching at the time, my teenage reader self would think that I haven’t advanced very far! I grew up on a diet of Hammer horror films, superhero comics and westerns, on Roger Corman, Hitchcock, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Raymond Chandler. Dracula, Frankenstein, the ape/murderer in the Rue Morgue, the Hound of the Baskervilles, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde – all these monsters populated my adolescent imagination and my teenage reader self would recognise and enjoy the references to them in Black Sun Rising.

My teenage self was also very conscious of the legacies of Nazism, apartheid, and colonialism, and often pondered over the ideas, forces, and motivations that had ‘driven a culture mad’, as Auden put it. Once again these themes are all present in my novel, and my teenage reader self would be pleased to find that I have still not entirely outgrown my youthful fascination with anarchism.

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

I don’t find either beginnings or endings especially difficult. For me the difficulty lies in constructing a plausible and coherent chain of events that connects one to the other. When I first began to write fiction many years ago, I rarely plotted in advance. I just set off from the first page and allowed the story to take me wherever it felt like going. Sometimes it didn’t take me very far!

Nowadays I plot very carefully before actually starting out, so that I know where I’m going, and how I might disguise where I’m going from the reader, and what kind of characters will take the story forward. This can be quite an arid and tedious process, but once I have that clarity I can really feel that I’m ‘telling the story’ rather than finding out what the story is.

This was the process I followed with Black Sun Rising, and once I had that overall shape and structure, the actual writing flowed relatively quickly.

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

Always an interesting question! The answer is both. As someone coming from a fairly tormented family background, and with a long history of depression, it was not such a stretch for me to imagine Harry Lawton – the epileptic ex-detective who lives in a constant state of dread at the prospect of his own disintegration.

To some extent the anarchist teacher Esperanza Claramunt represents my youthful, more idealistic self, with all the naivete and fervor that implies, whereas the more jaded and circumspect poet-journalist Bernat Mata says and thinks things that once upon a time I would have found much more difficult to imagine.

So all these characters might contain potentialities and contradictions that I recognise in myself, but I hope I’ve given them sufficient independent existence so that they think, feel, and talk in their own right.

Other characters, such as Randolph Foulkes, the psychotic Klarsfeld, and Doctor Weygrand are thankfully a world apart, otherwise I would probably have ended up behind bars a long time ago.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Both my fiction and non-fiction have always been heavily influenced by history and politics. I’m always writing with one eye to the present and another to the past. I’m interested in how things came to be the way they are; in warnings, precedents, and missed opportunities that can shed light on where we might be going.

That applies whether I’m writing about terrorism, immigration, Sherman’s march through Georgia, the destruction of Islamic Spain, or Barcelona’s Tragic Week. Even in this age of information overload, I continue to see books as essential tools for combating injustice, prejudice, and the abuse of power, that can help us think and imagine our way towards a better future and a better understanding of the human predicament.

I don’t consider these aspirations incompatible with entertainment. On the contrary, I like to tell stories and spin yarns, and I always try to treat the readers who come to my books with the respect they deserve, but I don’t ever want to make them feel comfortable with the world as it is, because that world needs changing.

Visit Matthew Carr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laird Barron

Laird Barron, an expat Alaskan, is the author of several books, including The Imago Sequence and Other Stories; Swift to Chase; and Blood Standard. Currently, Barron lives in the Rondout Valley of New York State and is at work on tales about the evil that men do.

His new novel is Worse Angels.

My Q&A with the author:

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

So much depends upon the title; it’s a load-bearing structure. I’ve always thought so, probably because I concentrated upon poetry early in my development as a writer.

I provided the publisher with a list of alternatives to the working title; I won’t tell you what it was because writers are magpies. Worse Angels is the one the Putnam team chose. It does the job—protagonist Isaiah Coleridge has a dark past as an enforcer for the Chicago Outfit. Now he’s out and carving his own destiny. A man of contradictions, in no small part due to the fact various powers vie to influence, if not outright control him. He’s constantly pulled in one direction or another. Seeking a more righteous path, he endeavors to heed his better angels. In this instance, looking into the suspicious death of a young security officer at a stalled supercollider site. The problem is, as sinister forces impede the investigation, his darker angels have their own ideas about the manner and methods with which he should conduct himself. After all, what are our worse angels but demons?

What's in a name?

I collect names. I snatch them from movie credits and album jackets, and the masts of magazines. They go into a little folder on my computer alongside a collection of titles neck-high to a giraffe. I try to deploy them in unexpected and/or subtle ways. Sometimes it’s just a matter of enjoying the sound one makes rolling off the tongue; on other occasions, the name might imply a deeper meaning or be intended to excite a particular response in the reader. Occasionally, I lend a striking name to a relatively minor character. Why? Because I’m belligerent.

Worse Angels is chapter three in the saga of Isaiah Coleridge, which means I’ve had well over a quarter million words to develop a narrative worthy of the name. The initial process cost me a few sleepless nights and plenty of second-guessing. I wanted a strong, potent name; it also needed to derive believably from what his parents might’ve chosen. Isaiah is ancient and evocative of religious imagery. He’s not a prophet, yet occasionally experiences visions and dreams that flirt with precognition. The Coleridge surname is suggestive of the earth and also bursting from the earth due to tectonic pressure. The name is inextricably bound to the legendary poet and his Rime of the Ancient Mariner—a poem illustrative of evils both mundane and supernatural, and of curses, and comeuppance. Precisely the ingredients I wished to add to the mix of noir and mystery.

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

He’d be taken aback that his future self isn’t writing epic fantasy or baroque space opera. That kid loved crime and thrillers. He devoured westerns and pulp adventure fiction. Teenage Laird would marvel at old man Laird’s restraint in regard to vocabulary and outré elements. But he’d understand, on some level, what a long, tortuous, often thankless, path he was rooted to. He’d look back at the three novels and the hundreds of thousands of words he’d already crammed into a mountain of college-ruled notebooks, and spit a curse. How am I supposed to get there? Are my fingers going to fall off? Then he’d keep moving. All I can say is, I’m sorry, kid.

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

One thing I’ve learned after twenty years, if you’re doing it correctly it’s all of a piece and that includes the degree of difficulty. It’s almost always the same process for me—a big, convoluted Gordian knot that I chop away at until it becomes manageable or I give up.

The beginning and the end of Worse Angels came to me in dreams and at moments of sinking into sleep. The opening was a bit more fully formed. I clearly saw Coleridge and his pal Lionel in the woods with the moon shining bright as a crimson glitter ball and them digging a hole while Johnny Cash sang on the radio of Lionel’s Monte Carlo. Burying something or somebody. I was fortunate that the ending suggested itself before I got there. It coalesced as a logical conclusion to the chain of events, not only in this novel, but the two previous.

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

Coleridge and I share a few superficial characteristics because I thought it would make him easier to manage at the outset. The less heavy lifting required of my imagination, the better. So, we’re from Alaska, we enjoy boxing and the classics, and we moved to the Mid-Hudson and live near the Catskills. We share an affinity for dogs. I’ve never worked for the Chicago Outfit. I’d make a lousy private eye; the minute people started shooting at me to warn me off a case, I’d probably take the hint.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

As it happens, the majority of my inspiration, the grist for the mill, derives from music, art, and non-fiction. I write to music—in 2020 I’m still listening to 1980s pop rock, such as Blue Oyster Cult, The Police, Men at Work, and so on. I also love contemporary, trippy stuff like Lustmord, Blind Lake, and Vitskär Süden.

Watching artists paint or sculpt provides a cross-disciplinary sustenance. Same idea with listening to musicians and producers describe how they craft albums. It’s not always directly applicable to my own method of building a novel or a collection, and yet there’s always something to be gleaned.

Visit Laird Barron's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

T.R. Ragan

T.R. Ragan (Theresa Ragan) is a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. Her exciting Lizzy Gardner series: Abducted, Dead Weight, A Dark Mind, Obsessed, Almost Dead, and Evil Never Dies, has received tremendous praise. In August 2015 Evil Never Dies hit #7 on the Wall Street Journal bestselling list. Since publishing in 2011, she has sold over three million books and has been mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, PC Magazine, Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly.

Ragan grew up in a family of five girls in Lafayette, California. An avid traveler, her wanderings have carried her to Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, China, Thailand, and Nepal, where she narrowly survived being chased by a killer elephant.

Her new novel is Don't Make a Sound.

My Q&A with the author:

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

High Anxiety was the original title for Don’t Make a Sound, but it didn’t make the cut. This was one of the few times I’ve had a difficult time coming up with an alternative title. In the end, Don’t Make a Sound worked well since it has as much meaning for the protagonist as it does the antagonist.

What's in a name?

I find it difficult to come up with just the right name for each of my protagonists. The name must represent strength and warmth in equal measure. The name must roll easily off my tongue. A well-chosen name can help make a character come alive as I write.

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

My teenage self would be shocked to see that my future self wrote a novel. My teenage self was shy and quiet and did everything possible to not stand out. She wanted to be invisible because the world was a scary place. I would hope that the novels would inspire and empower that person to become stronger sooner.

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

Endings are much easier for me to write, whether it’s the last chapter in a novel or the last book in a series. By the end of a novel, not only do I know my characters inside and out, I know my plot. More often than not, I know how my story will end before I start writing. Once or twice I wrote the ending before I started writing Chapter One.

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

Every protagonist I write has a piece of me in him or her. I want fairness and justice in the world, and my characters want that too. Within the pages I write, I get justice. As I mentioned before, I was quite shy growing up, which I believe made me an easy target for predators. My shyness led to fear, and later, to anger. It wasn’t until my early thirties that I found a way to let go of my anger and fear, not only through the books I read, but through the books I wrote. My characters could say and do things that I could not. With every book I wrote, I grew stronger. I no longer live in fear. Just like my characters, I can do anything I set my mind to.

Visit T.R. Ragan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eve Yohalem

After training as an opera singer, Eve Yohalem moved into the literary world first as an editorial assistant, then as the publisher of a website, then as an author of two books for young readers. She lives in New York with her husband, their two children, and pets.

Her new novel is The Truth According to Blue.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title is catchy, but the picture on the book jacket tells the story: two girls and a dog on a dock, scanning the water, a sunken ship beneath them. Summer fun! Adventure! Mystery! Well, yes, that’s all in the book (or at least I hope so). But Blue has type 1 diabetes, and Otis is a service dog as well as a beloved pet. If you look closely, you’ll see Otis is bowing down, which is how he alerts Blue that her blood sugar is low. He isn’t playing; he’s telling her she needs to stop whatever she’s doing and deal with it. As Blue says, Otis saves her life every day.

What's in a name?

Blue’s full name is Bluebell. I picked the name because it’s memorable and unusual and because it conveys backstory—Blue’s mother is a gardener. I also picked the name because it allowed me to write the line, “My mom named me Bluebell for her favorite flower. Since I’m not a dairy cow, I go by Blue.”

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

My teenage self would be very surprised by my novel since my teenage self wanted to be an opera singer. But teenage me wouldn’t be surprised by the characters in my novel. My sister was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was thirteen and I was eight, so I don’t remember a time when the disease wasn’t part of my life. Also, I’ve always loved dogs, especially German shepherds.

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

I usually find beginnings harder to write than endings, because by the time I get to the end, I’ve usually figured out where the story is headed. But with Blue, I knew the opening right away. From the moment I got the idea for the novel, I heard Blue’s voice saying “True Fact: Hundreds of years ago, a wooden ship with square sails and a cargo of gold sank near a tiny island off New York. It’s still there today.”

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 wrote my first novel, my sister said the protagonist sounded exactly like thirteen-year-old me. With Blue, my best friend said she sounds just like my daughter. That feels like progress to me!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My sister, for diabetes. My friends’ dogs since I can’t have one of my own (my husband is allergic). The movie Parent Trap, for the growing friendship between two kids who initially hate each other. The Master and Commander series by Patrick O’Brian for all things seafaring.

Visit Eve Yohalem's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Debra Bokur

Debra Bokur is an author, journalist, editor, screenwriter, and illustrator. Her work has appeared in a variety of domestic and international media outlets, including National Geographic Traveler, Islands, Spa Magazine, Experience Life Magazine, Natural Home, Yoga Journal, Global Traveler, and Women’s Adventure. She is a recipient of the 2015 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award.

Bokur's new novel is The Fire Thief.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Titles are often why I purchase a book (and usually a guarantee of why I’ll choose an ice cream flavor). I wanted my book title to convey a sense of darkness and mystery. I think The Fire Thief suggests both those things, while hopefully offering an intriguing hook—how does someone steal fire? My working title had been Stealing Fire, but that became refined during the process of writing.

What's in a name?

Names! I go down rabbit holes when it comes to naming characters. Choosing a name for my Hawaiian detective, who also happens to be a kahu, or spiritual leader, was a struggle. I finally settled on Kali, but only after much deliberation. In the end, it was because the commonly accepted Hawaiian definition of the name is “someone who hesitates,” while in Hindu legend, the name refers to a powerful, dark goddess. There’s also a Greek translation, where the name means “rosebud.” I liked this weird mix of meanings, because she’s complicated and layered, and all of those qualities can be found in her personality, from the gentleness of a rosebud and the ferocity of an angry goddess to the simple human quality of hesitating.

When I settled on the surname for her uncle, Police Captain Walter Alaka’i, it was because Alaka’i translates to “leader.” He’s an older family member with many more years of experience as a policeman than Kali has as a detective, and it seemed fitting; particularly given that elder members of traditional Hawaiian families are treated with respect. His first name, Walter, is the result of having known several Walters during my life; all of them were strong, trustworthy, reliable people.

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

My teenage self would hardly be surprised that I’d written a mystery novel, but maybe disappointed that it didn’t feature horses, crumbling mansions or an English village. I love those types of mysteries, but I think maybe writing them would spoil some of the pleasure and escapism for me as a reader and fan of that particular niche.

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

Writing the beginnings and endings are the easiest part of the process for me, perhaps because I start with a one-sentence thought in my head: Because X happens, it will ultimately result in Y taking place. I want to both set a mood very quickly, and drive toward a final thought. It’s all that stuff in the middle that’s the challenge.

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

Well, it’s yes and no when it comes to similarities. My lead detective practices yoga, has long hair, and shares her world with a large, part-Weimaraner dog, all of which apply to me, but that’s pretty much it. I don’t run (she does), drink coffee (never! I’m a tea addict), or have any tattoos. And physically, we’re nothing alike—I’m a short brunette with green eyes. Unlike Kali, I’m pretty disciplined about my eating habits (organic, mostly vegetarian foods), so our shopping lists would have nothing in common. I did have a Jeep with a persnickety transmission once upon a time, however, and I do prefer solitary endeavors to group pursuits. Like Kali, nature is a huge component of my life. I’ve lived in plenty of cities, including New York, Washington DC, and Edinburgh, and it doesn’t suit me—much like my detective, I need forests and wild pathways to feel whole and happy.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’d say travel and music have been the most important non-literary influences in my work. I use music to put myself into a particular mental space. For The Fire Thief, it was Hawaiian music and nature sounds; for poetry and magical realism, it’s often classical music or a total immersion into Sigur Ros’s body of work. I believe that rhythm is an essential component of good writing, and music teaches this, along with how to organize many parts into a cohesive whole. I think that may happen naturally and subconsciously if music is playing in the background while writing.

Also, I’ve traveled for my day job as a magazine editor and journalist for over thirty years, with periods that have required up to three international trips in a single month. That’s provided me with a truly wonderful opportunity to see the world, and to be exposed to a huge variety of cultures, traditions, foods, architecture and styles. It’s also been great for allowing me to indulge in two of my favorite creative pursuits: filling notebooks by hand while on trains and planes, and observing people. I have a favorite pastime whenever I’m on assignment: I make it a point to start the day early in a café local to the destination. Armed with a pot of tea, a plate of croissants, and my notebook, I watch how people interact, how they dress and move, how they commute, what they order off the menu. This habit helps, I believe, in creating fictional characters who feel authentic and individual.

Visit Debra Bokur's website.

--Marshal Zeringue