Sejal Badani

Sejal Badani is the Amazon Charts, USA Today, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Storyteller’s Secret and Trail of Broken Wings. She is also a Goodreads Best Fiction award and ABC/Disney Writing Fellowship finalist whose work has been published in over fifteen languages. When not writing, she loves reading and traveling. Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, and Ed Sheeran are always playing in the background.

Badani's new novel is The Sun's Shadow.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Quite a bit. In The Sun’s Shadow, the title symbolizes two key ideas: first, that even in moments of light and joy, shadows can loom over lives; and second, that one of the boys—a son—would cast a shadow over all their lives while also being a source of light and healing. Similarly, in The Storyteller’s Secret, the title reflects the layers of hidden truths. While the protagonist is a storyteller with a significant secret, it is the former servant, recounting the tale to the granddaughter, whose secret ultimately changes the course of all their lives, giving deeper meaning to the title.

What's in a name?

I love naming characters. I have a passion for exploring the meanings behind names, hoping to craft a connection between the name and the character’s essence. For instance, Felicity, which means "intense happiness," felt perfect for the character in The Sun’s Shadow. Her journey of searching for happiness, only to discover it was within her all along, mirrored a personal journey I’ve experienced myself. It’s these subtle layers of meaning that make naming characters so special to me.

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

My teenage self would be shocked I’m a writer at all. I was supposed to be a lawyer.

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

Beginnings. I usually have the ending in mind when I start a story. I change the beginning countless times but I have yet to change an ending.

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

I see so much of myself reflected in many of the main female characters I write. My first two novels, Trail of Broken Wings and The Storyteller’s Secret, were deeply personal, inspired by real events from my own life. This made it natural to weave elements of myself into the storylines. In The Sun’s Shadow, the two protagonists are women who fiercely protect their children while juggling careers and personal lives—a dynamic I can completely relate to.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Travel is a huge source of inspiration for me. Experiencing different cultures and connecting with people from around the world is truly incredible, and I feel deeply grateful every time I have the opportunity to explore new places. My family is another profound influence in my life. I’ve always wanted my children to understand the importance of chasing their dreams and believing in themselves, no matter how challenging the journey may seem.

Visit Sejal Badani's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Sejal Badani & Skyler.

My Book, The Movie: The Storyteller's Secret.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kemper Donovan

Kemper Donovan is an acclaimed author and host of the “All About Agatha” podcast. A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, he worked at the literary management company Circle of Confusion for a decade before transitioning to writing full-time. He is a member of the New York Bar Association, PEN America, and Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his husband and daughters in Los Angeles.

Donovan's new novel is Loose Lips.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Quite a lot, I hope! My title, Loose Lips, is the first part of a common phrase: “Loose lips sink ships.” To make certain that this word association occurs in the mind of a would-be reader, I made sure to include a picture of a sinking ship on the cover of the book. The idea is to convey: 1) the action of the story takes place entirely on a boat, and 2) matters on this boat go seriously awry. There is also a subtitle, A Ghostwriter Mystery, which clarifies that this book is a mystery, one in a series, and furthermore, that it does not matter where the book falls within that series, since any one of the Ghostwriter Mysteries can be read on its own. The Ghostwriter in question is the narrator of each book, and in this outing, she reluctantly joins a literary-themed cruise as a lecturer, along with a handful of writer colleagues and a few hundred paying passengers. Would you be surprised to learn that secrets and intrigue abound aboard this ship, and that someone ends up murdered?

What's in a name?

Ah, well, this opens up a can of worms, I’m afraid. Loose Lips is the second Ghostwriter Mystery. In the first book in the series, The Busy Body, my Ghostwriter character did not have a name. That’s right: she went nameless for the entire book. I was partly inspired here by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which famously features a nameless first-person female narrator, but I also felt that my enigmatic, withholding Ghostwriter character did not want to be named. (She is a ghostwriter, after all.) In my second book in the series, I decided that this character finally needed a name, if only for ease of reference. And so, she goes by “Belle Currer” in this book, which is the pseudonym she used when she “wrote” The Busy Body. (Just as Watson writes his chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, my first-person narrator writes the stories that she tells.) This name is a cheeky inversion of “Currer Bell,” the pseudonym Charlotte Brontë used when first publishing Jane Eyre—a novel both the Ghostwriter and I happen to love very much.

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

I think it would make perfect sense to my teenaged self that I write mysteries. I was always a mystery fanatic—in particular, a devotee of Agatha Christie, both on the page and screen. (I particularly loved the David Suchet series, Agatha Christie’s Poirot.) For the past eight years, I’ve vented my love of Christie by way of a podcast that I host called All About Agatha. (For the first five years I co-hosted the show with a dear friend of mine, Catherine Brobeck, but she passed away. I’ve continued the project solo.) Sooner or later, I was going to have to start writing mysteries of my own. It was only a matter of time….

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

I’ve found that when I’m writing a mystery, the beginning is much harder than the ending, due to the type of mystery that I write. My mysteries are “puzzle” or “fair play” mysteries, also known as “whodunits,” which feature clues that the reader can ferret out in the text at the same time the fictional investigators do. This means there is a pre-arranged solution at the end of the novel, which has to be carefully built into the text. (Agatha Christie was an expert at these sorts of mysteries, as were many of her contemporaries in the so-called “Golden Age of Detective Fiction.”) For this reason, by the time I’ve reached the ending of one of my mysteries, I’ve got everything worked out, and the going is much smoother than at the beginning, when I’m still experimenting and figuring out exactly what I want to do. There is no question that the beginnings undergo significantly more changes!

Visit Kemper Donovan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samrat Upadhyay

Samrat Upadhyay was born and raised in Nepal. He is author of the novels The City Son, The Guru of Love (a New York Times Notable Book), and Buddha’s Orphans, as well as the story collections Mad Country, The Royal Ghosts, and Arresting God in Kathmandu. His work has received the Whiting Award and the Asian American Literary Award and been shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. He has written for The New York Times and has appeared on BBC Radio and National Public Radio. Upadhyay is Distinguished Professor of English and Martha C. Kraft Professor of Humanities at Indiana University.

His new novel Darkmotherland.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I settled on the title Darkmotherland fairly early in the process, and the title didn’t change even though the novel went through numerous drafts.

This is not my standard writing process. Normally, I have a working title that changes later when I have a firmer sense of what the novel is about. But in Darkmotherland, the name of this dystopia came to me early on, and it felt very right. It’s a combination of Darkmother, a prophetic figure in the novel, and Motherland, which evokes old-timey patriotism and nationalism.

Darkmotherland is not only a place but also a character, a mythical reverse-Shangrila. It holds the major characters in a grip they cannot escape.

What's in a name?

Character names are important to me either in their symbolism or the physical image they conjure for me as I’m writing—sometimes they are a mixture of both. One of my main characters, Kranti, for example, means “revolution,” but she dislikes her name because she has an antagonistic relationship with her mother, a dissident-activist who gave her that name. The mother herself has earned the nickname Madam Mao, undeservedly, for her communist leanings. The irony of the two names hover over their contentious exchanges throughout the novel.

Interestingly, the naming of places and temples became important to me in the novel. I found myself translating Nepali street names into English, so much so that they became, at times, awkward and convoluted, which then provided another texture to Darkmotherland as a land of dissonance and dislocation. So, Battispulati became Thirty Two Butterflies Street, Ghantaghar clocktower became Home of the Bell, and so on.

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

My teenage self would be quite surprised by my new novel. I was a serious teenager, and as a young man I wrote about serious things. So the dark comedy in Darkmotherland would be a surprise to my younger self. But on second thought, maybe not so surprising. As a teenager some of my favorite books were Catch-22, The World According to Garp, and Cat’s Cradle.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My interest in “translations” of culture and language is at a heightened display in Darkmotherland. I’m interested in how global English has become, and how it transforms and is transformed by other cultures and countries.

I’m generally interested in politics, especially in politics that impacts our daily living, and it was interesting to explore this in the novel with an all-consuming authoritarian figure who inspires fear. I’m also fascinated by how American politics dominates the globe, and I had fun imagining this influence in the emotional landscape of Darkmotherland.

Visit Samrat Upadhyay's website.

Writers Read: Samrat Upadhyay (August 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Buddha’s Orphans.

The Page 69 Test: Darkmotherland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heather O'Neill

Heather O’Neill is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her work includes When We Lost Our Heads, a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal, The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, and Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. O’Neill has also won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award.

The Capital of Dreams is O’Neill's most recent novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My novel is about a fictional country that gets its borders after World War 1. They invest in the arts, and hold it above everything else. They believe they don’t need to invest in an army. They will be protected by the West should they be attacked. And then at the height of their golden era, the Enemy comes to wipe them off the face of the earth.

The Capital of the country is so important in the novel. Sofia, a fourteen-year-old girl, is entrusted with getting her mother’s manuscript out of the country, so the culture can be saved.

I liked the idea of having a sophisticated girl from the cultural elite, having to make her way through the war-torn countryside. I wanted to see how the philosophy of The Capital made sense to her once she was out of it. Can a clarinet tune stop a war? Can a poem save a people? I have always believed in the power of art.

I wanted to show why artists and children are targeted by genocidal invaders. And how they are at the heart of a country’s identity.  

What's in a name?

I decided to name the children in the novel names that sounded as though they might all come from varying countries. I wanted them to have names that made them sound as though they were each from a different sort of children’s book from a different culture. They were all from the land of childhood which has different borders than adults.

I named the main character Sofia, because it means knowledge, and she is a philosopher of the children’s condition and the particular existential questions children have, and particularly the ways in which children make sense of trauma.  

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

Very delighted probably. Most of the novels I write are based on idea I had as a young girl. I would plan out the novels that I wanted to write when I was older and figured out how to write a novel. Capital of Dreams was a novel based on stories I had heard about my dad and uncles going to war as teenagers. I would be so surprised my future self listened to me. And that I was in possession of real ideas for novels. I think children have incredible ideas.

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

I almost always write the ending first. So I know where the characters are heading towards. The beginning always changes. Because you don’t begin a book with the beginning. You begin a book with an arresting moment, a sort of photograph, a little dance, to trick the reader into reading the whole book.

At the start, I dress my characters up and say, “Your job is to make the reader enchanted by you. Do anything, something lovely, something bizarre.”

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 was creating the character of Clara Bottom, a renown philosopher, I went to great efforts to make her a narcissist and bombastic. I wanted her to be so openly full of herself and not humble. It was such a fun way to portray a middle-aged woman.

When I was finished the novel, everyone I knew said Clara Bottom resembled me very much. Which I found shocking and hilarious.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

This book was very influenced by the news of the world. I describe an occupied country being subjected to a genocide. What was happening in the Ukraine and Gaza greatly affected the politics of the novel.  

But also photographs. Fashion magazines. Traveling. I collect notes about people doing and saying strange things to me on the subway.

I was influenced by the way children play instruments. My daughter went to a Performing Arts school. There was something so magical about the sound of children making their way through a piano tune. The notes would tumble out into the corridor. I loved the awkward pacing and imperfection. I wanted some of that spirit in the language of this novel.

Follow Heather O’Neill on Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellie Brannigan

Ellie Brannigan has lived in South Florida for the last twenty years. She loves the ocean and any food dish with shrimp. When she’s not creating new fictional worlds, she reads, and travels…and eats.

Brannigan's new novel is Death at an Irish Wedding.

My Q&A with the author:

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

For Death at an Irish Wedding, I was asked to come up with several titles. In fact, this was the third title selected, and I wrote the book under a completely different title and saved my word doc that way. When I went to look for my story later, I couldn’t find the manuscript. Any author might imagine my immediate reaction of holy smokes, my work has all disappeared: belly tightening, sweaty palms, slightly sick…but then I went to my saved emails and found the email stream with my editor. Crisis averted, but it was an awful ten minutes of panic.

This is the Irish Castle series, and at the end of the first book there was the question of ghosts in the castle. I liked Haunting in an Irish Castle, but my publisher wasn’t sold. Once the story progressed, I realized it was more about the super-secret Hollywood wedding of Rayne’s rich American client and her actor boyfriend than ghosts. We came up with alternates and Death at an Irish Wedding stuck. It was a lot of fun to bring in Irish wedding traditions to the getaway weekend to fit the title.

Through each story, the struggle for Rayne and Ciara to save Grathton Village is paramount and it is unfortunate that people keep kicking the bucket—which is why I’ve included more of the villagers in book three, Death at an Irish Village, available in August 2025. The title completely matches the story.

What's in a name?

I think names for characters are hugely important and I spend a lot of time researching what might be appropriate for the area and time period. Let’s unpack Rayne Claire McGrath, my protagonist for the Irish Castle series.

Rayne—a fun play off of ‘rain’ that her Irish father, with a poet’s soul, gave as an ode to his birthplace. Ireland is known for gray rainy days.

Claire. This is a family name, and she is named after her poor dead aunt who died as a child.

McGrath. This is a popular Irish surname that has been around for centuries.

Ciara Smith. Her name also tells a story…though Nevin McGrath was her father, she didn’t know it until her mother got sick with cancer and introduced them before she died. This gives Ciara all kinds of baggage with claiming her stake at McGrath Castle, and Grathton Village. She feels she has to prove herself doubly hard.

Blarney, the Irish setter. Just saying the dog’s name makes me smile. He’s his own character and attached to Rayne. He’s supposed to be a bird dog but doesn’t have the hunter’s instinct.

Maeve, Aine, and Cormac Lloyd—the live-in staff at the castle, all have classic Irish names. They are part of setting the scene.

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

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I wrote angsty poetry and children’s stories as well as novels that rightfully never saw the light of day. If my teenage self knew about Death at an Irish Wedding, I’d like to think she’d be pumping her fist and doing the pogo.

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

I love a plot board. I love lists. I have an addiction to notebooks and go through a dozen at least a year. As I sit down to write, I have the reader in mind, wanting to entice and entertain. I have been known to take the ending I’ve imagined beforehand and throw it out the imaginary window if I feel it is predictable. My biggest thrill is when I’m reading reviews, and the killer has remained masked until the end. As a voracious reader, which I am, I want to be fair and lay out clues, and then mix everything up.

Visit Ellie Brannigan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Colin Mills

Colin Mills graduated from the University of Queensland in 1987 with a BA in arts, majoring in Japanese language and literature. He spent most of the next eighteen years in Japan, where, after a brief career as a wire service reporter, he spent ten years in investment banking in Tokyo and a further decade in the portfolio management industry. He left the financial services industry in 2008 and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the Queensland University of Technology.

Mills's debut novel is Bitter Passage, a work of historical fiction.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I hope it doesn’t pull any punches. It’s true what they say: coming up with a title was the hardest part of writing the book. I won’t share the original title if you don’t mind, but my publisher—quite correctly, I think—suggested it include the word ‘Passage’, alluding to the Northwest Passage. I thought long and hard about how to succinctly describe the Royal Navy’s nineteenth-century search for the Passage, and ‘Bitter’ was the most appropriate adjective. The British wanted to find the Passage, thought they needed to find it, but the search was arduous and dangerous. Men died trying to find it, even before Franklin’s expedition. For all that, the search for the Passage became almost like a kind of unpleasant medicine the Royal Navy felt it needed to consume. Why? Bitter Passage tries to explore some of the answers.

What's in a name?

The two main characters, Robinson and Adams, are loosely based on real men with the same names who searched for Franklin in 1849, but are fictionalized versions of those men. Historical fiction requires a delicate balance between fact and imagination. As I’ve noted in the Author’s Note to the novel, I’ve taken creative liberties to develop these characters and tell a story. I’ve done so to try and imagine the human side of an event the historical record leaves incomplete, while also trying to spark curiosity about the Franklin tragedy. They say fiction writing begins with a simple question: what if? In this case, I knew the real Lieutenant Robinson led a sledge mission to Fury Beach but returned having found nothing. I thought, what if he kept going south? What might have happened, and what might have been the emotional and psychological complexities of that experience? I wanted to know—or at least imagine—so I started writing. Then I kept writing because I wanted to know what was going to happen.

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

I grew up in a house with books in it (thanks, Mom and Dad), but always thought novelists were some special sub-set of unusually cerebral humans, a category that excluded me. So I think my teenage self would be most surprised by the notion that I, too, could write a story that (hopefully) both entertains and explores some aspect of the human condition. I hope my young self would realize that I could also ask, what might that have been like? What might I have done in that situation? Hey, you know what? There’s nothing stopping me from writing a story and figuring out the answers that way.

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

For Bitter Passage, the beginning was harder. My first draft was 120,000 words long and took a few years to write. Muddled and unsure what to do with the mess I had created, I hired my first editor. He helped me realize who the key characters should be. More importantly, the story actually started halfway through the draft, so I cut the first 60,000 words. After that, I felt more confident about where the story would go.

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

None of the characters in Bitter Passage are me, but of course they have certain traits I relate to, while others I need to try harder to imagine. More than anything, I am fascinated by what feeds our sense of self-worth, because when we talk about a character’s motive, that’s what is at the heart of it. We can talk about a character’s motivation as being money, love, or status, for example, but I want to know why that is the motivation. It’s all about what fills our souls. In Bitter Passage, for example, I can relate to Robinson’s self-doubt and perfectionism. On the other hand, I found the depiction of Adams’ piety more challenging, as I do not share the character’s religious faith.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Because I have written a work of historical fiction, I would have to say I’m heavily influenced by what we know of the historical record, and how we’re able to keep interrogating it. I’m fascinated by historical events that are imperfectly understood or chronicled, because it gives the fiction writer room to make stuff up and imagine new stories. In addition to non-fiction history books, I love documentaries and podcasts about history, archaeology, and philosophy. I never cease to be amazed by the extent to which we’re able to reassess what we thought we knew about ourselves. What have we learned? Have we evolved? If so, in what way? And what are we still missing?

Visit Colin Mills's website.

My Book, The Movie: Bitter Passage.

The Page 69 Test: Bitter Passage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Isa Arsén

Isa Arsén is a certified bleeding heart based in South Texas, where she lives with her spouse and a comically small dog.

Her work has been featured in Stone of Madness Press, The McNeese Review, and several independent anthologies and audiovisual projects. Her novels include Shoot the Moon (2023), and the forthcoming midcentury drama The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf.

My Q&A with the author:

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

This title reveals the entire conflict to the reader, if they know where to look. Unbecoming is lifted directly from a line of dialogue in Macbeth, a Shakespeare play with themes & character relationships woven into this novel. It comes from a scene in which Lady Macbeth is convincing a dinner crowd that her husband is fine, actually, despite his mental turmoil over the choices she has pushed him to make; holding up decorum, desperate to come across as normal. Margaret Wolf is our protagonist's name, and fitting to feature up front since the reader spends the entire book placed directly in her internal monologue. As a whole, the title speaks to strange, uncouth change -- when something is "unbecoming" it may be unsightly, disgusting, or unfit for civility. It's a book about rebirth through complete dissolution, and I think the title evokes that sense of urgency well.

What's in a name?

Since a major element of this story is identity, I wanted to pick names that behaved like the characters wearing them. Margaret is a name with many different nickname forms: Margot, Margie, Maggie, Peggy, Marge, etc. This points to Margaret's unsettled sense of self, wearing a different version of her name depending on her environment. As a child of the early 1990s, I spent a lot of time obsessed with the movie The Princess Bride, and as such one of the most heroic, romantic names in my memory is Wesley. It's a very sturdy name, with only a nickname or two if you get creative. Since they are both two-syllable names (depending on how one pronounces Margaret), they stand well next to one another as a pair: Margaret & Wesley, Wesley & Margaret. The rhythm works. It's also serendipitous that M and W are inversions of each other, for a pair of soulmates.

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

Very!! But, I think, in a good way. It's an unapologetic work, and I was very afraid of presenting myself authentically in fiction for a very long time. The themes of love and self-actualization would be familiar to my younger self, so I would have absolutely picked this up off the shelf and devoured it. Most of what I write fulfills in at least some small part a creative wish of my younger self, so young-me has certainly already had input.

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

This is a great question -- it depends on the story. The ending for this one ended up as a coda of sorts, as the initial draft ended near the 3/4 mark of what made it to print. I changed the starting point several times throughout revisions but always had it starting at the same point in Margaret's life, so I think I will have to say the ending for this one.

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

I try not to make my fictional characters 1:1 copies of any living person, because that removes for me the fun of building a unique personality on the page. There are plenty of parts of me that I put into these characters as a starting point for the rest of their idiosyncrasies -- Wesley's discomfort with absolute silence and Margaret's general obsession with control are pried directly from my own ribs -- but no character is 100% based on anyone, no.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My professional background is in writing and performing contemporary music, so music is a major engine for me. I make a playlist and a Pinterest board before I even start drafting a novel, so my sense of mood and tone stay clear throughout the project's lifetime. I'm also hugely invigorated by theater in general: stagecraft, cinema, film of all stripes -- a good combination of image, sound, and story will never cease to amaze me, and awe is my favorite source of inspiration. It makes for more impressive risks taken to reach a new height.

Visit Isa Arsén's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Orlando Murrin

Orlando Murrin is the debut author of Knife Skills For Beginners, a murder mystery set in a posh London cookery school. Having started out as a magazine sub-editor, he won through to the semi-final of the BBC MasterChef programme and found himself hurled into the world of food writing. He was editor of the UK’s bestselling food magazine, BBC Good Food, for six years before taking off to rural France to create a gastronomic guesthouse. He has written six cookbooks, including A Table in the Tarn (Stewart, Tabori and Chang), which describes his French adventure, and Two’s Company (Ryland Peters & Small), devoted to the art of cooking for couples, friends and room-mates.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I come up with dozens and dozens of titles in order to find the best. It isn’t always obvious – you have to live with them for a while, go away and come back, change your mind.

Eventually we settled on Knife Skills For Beginners because it takes you straight in – it’s a story set in an upmarket cookery school. The only doubt was that some readers might mistake it for an instruction manual for wannabe chefs. Indeed, I’ve been to a few literary events where those attending have been expecting an actual cookery demonstration, and are bemused to find me talking instead about a sophisticated murder mystery, albeit with culinary flourishes.

What's in a name?

Equally, I spend hours dreaming up (and changing) the names of my characters. They’re specially important in a plot-driven whodunit with lots of suspects, to help readers remember and differentiate between characters.

When it came to naming the hero of Knife Skills For Beginners, I chose Paul simply because I like the name and all the Pauls I’ve known have been honest, decent people. (Thinking about it now, Paul in the Bible had something of a past, which he put behind him, and the same could be said for Paul Delamare.)

I chose the surname Delamare firstly because it’s a poetic-sounding name, and my character Paul is in some ways a bit of dreamer. It also provides a running gag because no one is sure how to pronounce it, and it is constantly spelt wrong - which infuriates Paul.

My editor said to me, are you sure we want a hero with a name no one can pronounce or spell? I promised him it would be fun – and memorable in itself.

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

I find beginnings very hard, and they get drastically changed, rewritten, then changed and rewritten again.

Endings, however, are my thing. I can’t resist a big finale – I always have the last scene clear in my head, usually involving a lot of theatrics.

Knowing that I’m working towards something exciting also helps me as I labour my way through the text, weaving in clues and red herrings and misdirection as I go. When I finally get to write it, the ending feels like a reward, a delicious chocolate truffle that arrives with the coffee.

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

I promise it wasn’t deliberate, but there is a lot of me in Paul Delamare. He’s a food writer/chef – which was my previous profession – and both of us have been described as 'somewhat waspish'. We also share being gay, and have lost partners, though in my case it was some years ago.

On the other hand, he’s a far more accomplished chef than I ever was and is endlessly curious – knowledgeable about everything from antiques to ornithology. I’ve also made him aged 42 and extremely attractive – not that he realises it – so there the resemblance ends.

I also have lots in common with Paul’s best friend Julie. Like her, I worked in magazines for many years, and her editor is a real-life portrait of someone I used to work for. Other characters often have characteristics of people I've known or encountered; I tend to write about rich people and I've known quite a few in my life.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I play the piano – for many years I used to moonlight in bars and restaurants, but now it’s mainly classical. Mastering a difficult piece takes infinite patience and practice, but it’s such a privilege to be able to enter a composer’s head, marvel at the imagination and attention to detail that they poured into the music, feel it in your hands and fingers.

I would never compare my writing to Bach or Chopin – obviously! – but they do remind me of the superhuman effort that it takes to produce something worthwhile. Every note, every phrase, every indication matters in a piece of music. So does every sentence, word, comma, in a piece of writing. There’s no such thing as ‘good enough’ – it has to be as good as you can make it.

Visit Orlando Murrin's website.

The Page 69 Test: Knife Skills for Beginners.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kristi Jones

Kristi Jones grew up in the military and has lived in Germany, England, Turkey, and many places throughout the U.S. She attended a German high school that left her with a lifelong love of languages. She holds a degree in history and is a member of Sisters in Crime and The Writer’s League of Texas. In her free time, Jones loves to paint, travel, explore historical sites and comb through old bookstores and museums for obscure nuggets of historical details to add to her stories. She lives in the Houston area with her husband and two rescue pups.

Jones's new novel is Murder in the Ranks.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I think Murder in the Ranks immediately tells the reader my book is a mystery and there is some military element to the story. Dottie Lincoln, my book’s sleuth, is a member of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in WWII. The word ‘ranks’ does some heavy lifting here to show that these pioneering women, serving in the first American women’s expeditionary force, were indeed soldiers. I hope the title brings up the question, who would want to kill one of these soldiers? And why?

What's in a name?

I wanted Dottie Lincoln’s name to be as American as apple pie. I wanted her to be relatable. At the same time, her name is a choice she’s made. Her full name is Dorothea Lincoln von Raven. Her father was in the army and married a French woman while stationed in Germany after the Great War. Dottie’s chosen name hides a somewhat checkered past and puts her in danger. It is also part of her attempt to redefine herself - as a woman, as an American and as a soldier.

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

I don’t expect my teenage self would be too surprised by Murder in the Ranks. In many ways, this book reflects a lot of my own childhood experiences. I grew up as an Air Force brat, surrounded by military men and women. I was always fascinated with women in uniform. My Dad was a fighter pilot and at one point, he was stationed at a German Air Force base. The nearest American base was almost five hours away and we were the only Americans in town. I went to the local school and learned German. Dottie’s childhood experiences are similar to my own. She is the daughter of a military man, who was stationed in occupied Germany after the Great War.

I’ve also always had a fascination with history, especially military history. When we lived in England, my parents would take me to the local pub and I’d listen to all the stories of the old-timers who’d survived the Blitz and Dunkirk and many other battles. In Germany, my best friend’s Dad had served in both World War I and World War II. I majored in history and German in college. A few years ago, I discovered the 149th Post Headquarters Company, the first American women soldiers to serve in a combat theater, and I knew I had to write about them. I’ve also been a fan of mysteries since I was a kid. It started with Nancy Drew mysteries and Agatha Christie. Again, being stationed in England when I was in elementary school, I was fascinated with mysteries and touring castles and some of the great houses only fueled that obsession. So, yes, in many ways, Murder in the Ranks was inevitable!

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

Beginnings are always harder! When I start writing, I’m writing to explore. To suss out the story buried in a bunch of facts and random ideas. It’s only when I come to the end of the book that I really know how the story should start. It’s only at the end of the story that I truly know who my main character is. Dottie Lincoln starts Murder in the Ranks as an insecure, somewhat weak person, who shields herself from rel connections with the soldiers in her company. By the end of the story, she is coming out of her shell. She learns to stand up and fight for what’s right. During the process of investigating the murder of her fellow soldier, Ruth Wentz, Dottie steps into a fuller version of herself. But to show that progression, I had to start Dottie off on a mission destined for failure.

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

Every character in my book has a connection to my personality. Even the killer! I don’t know how to write characters completely alien from myself. I’m not sure that’s possible. One thing I enjoy about writing is having the opportunity to explore multiple facets of personality and choice. Our choices are what define us. Writing and reading stories allow us to explore multiple avenues of decision making and multiple versions of ourselves.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My biggest inspiration is always the research. After I discovered the 149th Post Headquarters Company, I was granted permission to do research at the U.S. Army Women’s Museum. Nothing inspired me more to write Murder in the Ranks than reading the personal accounts of the women who served under General Eisenhower in Algiers, North Africa. One WAAC in particular did an oral interview, and she talked about how her husband told her after the war not to tell anyone she’d served in the military because it wasn’t ladylike. She also suffered PTSD from the bombardments in early 1943. Whenever the work got hard, I thought of this WAAC and pressed on. These women were true pioneers, and they paved the way for women to serve in combat today. Nothing inspires me more than these brave women soldiers.

Visit Kristi Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Midge Raymond

Midge Raymond is the author of the novels Floreana and My Last Continent, the short-story collection Forgetting English, and, with coauthor John Yunker, the mystery novel Devils Island. Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Times magazine, Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, and many other publications. She has taught at Boston University, Boston’s Grub Street Writers, Seattle’s Hugo House, and San Diego Writers, Ink. Raymond lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she is co-founder of the boutique publisher Ashland Creek Press.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I hope it pulls readers right in! This was a tough book to title because Floreana has two narrators—women who, a century apart, struggle with love, family, and buried secrets—and it’s set in two eras on one island that has changed remarkably in the past hundred years. It was challenging to find a title that would incorporate a real-life, unsolved murder mystery, penguin conservation, and two women who seem very different but whose struggles are very similar despite the years between them. In the end, my hope is that the title Floreana offers a sense of place and of intrigue to readers.

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

She would probably be quite surprised by the setting. As a younger person, I was interested in cities, not remote places. Now I’d much prefer to travel to the middle of nowhere than to a city—I’m not sure my teenage self would appreciate that. On the other hand, I think Teen Midge might recognize the struggles of the women in the story—the challenges of trying to find yourself by living life a certain way, and then wondering what you might’ve done differently.

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

The blank page is the hardest for me; I always love to have an idea of where my story is headed when I get started. But if I waited for an easy beginning or to know where things would end up, I’d never write a thing! So I just have to dive in, and this is why my early drafts are a mess. I would say I rewrite beginnings and endings an equal number of countless times.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Animals and scientists—especially endangered species and humans in conservation work. In the contemporary narrative of Floreana, Mallory is returning to the task of building nests to give Galápagos penguins safe places to raise their chicks, and her fictional work is based on real work being done by the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels at the University of Washington, in collaboration with the Galápagos National Park. The humans who devote their lives to saving and protecting animals—whether endangered species or stray cats or abused farm animals—are my heroes.

Learn more about the author and her work at Midge Raymond's website.

The Page 69 Test: My Last Continent.

Writers Read: Midge Raymond (June 2016).

The Page 69 Test: Floreana.

--Marshal Zeringue