Holly Miller

Holly Miller works as a copywriter and lives in Norfolk, England.

The Sight of You is her American debut.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My title The Sight Of You actually took quite a while to come up with. My working title for the book was As Long As It’s Love, but the publishers felt that might make the book sound more light-hearted than it actually is. (It’s not what I’d call a ‘heavy’ read – I’d say it’s actually quite uplifting – but there are parts where you might need some tissues handy, and it was felt the original title didn’t quite reflect that.) But The Sight Of You feels perfect, because the book is all about what Joel sees when he dreams, and the moment when he first sees Callie – as well as moments after that when seeing her becomes heart-rending and significant.

What's in a name?

I find it quite tricky to name characters – the ones that spring to mind always seem to belong to people I know! – but for Joel and Callie I definitely wanted names that, although they aren’t exactly unusual, would stick in the reader’s mind. I spend a long time when I’m naming all the different characters in a book making sure they all start with as many different letters as possible, and contain varying numbers of syllables – it’s quite time-consuming!

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

I’ve dreamed of being a writer since I was tiny – so I think my teenage reader self would be beside herself with joy! I don’t think she’d be surprised by the fact I’ve written a love story – they were always the books I was drawn to when I was younger, and are still the books I turn to now by default. Although my tastes have widened as I’ve got older, love stories are my mainstay!

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

I’d say beginnings are tougher. I generally find the ending comes naturally, as after tens of thousands of words I’m so familiar with my characters and the journey they’re on. Although a beginning is normally not too hard to draft, it’s the refining and perfecting that I find challenging, as I’m so conscious that these will be the first words a reader flips through in a bookshop or previews on Amazon, and for that reason I want them to be exactly right. I agonize over every single word.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Films and TV, without a doubt. I find an engaging script as exciting as any book – and I hope that being an avid film and TV fan has helped to hone my ear for dialogue over the years. Strong characterisation and a pithy script win me over every time – the genre doesn’t really matter (although I do confess I steer clear of horror and gore). I also find watching TV and films helps me to relax after a hard day’s writing – but I like to think I’m absorbing all the great dialogue, plots and premises while I’ve got my feet up!

Visit Holly Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mamta Chaudhry

Mamta Chaudhry lives with her husband in Coral Gables, Florida, and they spend part of each year in India and in France. Much of her professional career was in television and classical radio at stations in Calcutta, Gainesville, Dallas, and Miami. Chaudry has studied with Marilynne Robinson and has also taught literature and creative writing at the University of Miami. Her early fiction, poetry, and feature articles have been published in newspapers and magazines in the States and in India. She is currently working on a second novel.

My Q&A with the author about her debut novel, Haunting Paris:

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

Of all the thousands of words I wrote and rewrote, the only two that survived the long publishing journey intact were the words Haunting Paris. I think it’s because everyone (including my editor, the legendary Nan Talese) felt that the title perfectly evoked both the subject and the atmosphere of the novel.

Paris is not just the setting, but also very much a character in the story; the City of Light is at once hauntingly beautiful and haunted by the ghosts of the past. One of the ghosts is the narrator, who returns to the place he called home, summoned by the woman he loved and by unfinished business while he was alive.

What's in a name?

That’s another thing that didn't change along the way—the names of the main characters: Julien and the women he loved: Clara, Isabelle, and Sylvie. I wanted names that were very French, yet had a slightly old-world flavor.

Julien’s name has a particular resonance: a substantial portion of the book’s drafts dealt with the Roman occupation of Paris, when Julianus was crowned emperor. That whole part of the story was completely excised from the finished version; all that remains, like a shard of pottery from an archeological dig, is the name.

As for Isabelle and Sylvie, I thought I picked the names for the sound, but a Frenchwoman pointed out that they were a perfect marker of their different classes as well, so that was probably there in my subconscious, where we make so many of our important writerly choices.

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

Oh, definitely beginnings. I wish I were the kind of writer who has the whole story outlined from the first line to the last. I set out on a journey of discovery with no roadmap in hand, and only a few flares set off in the dark. But however many detours and digressions the path takes, I see when I reach the end that it has been leading me ineluctably to this destination.

When Sylvie accidentally dislodges a hidden letter from Julien’s desk and sets out on a quest to discover the secrets of his past, I am writing to find out what she discovers. If I knew all along, I don’t think I would be as impelled to write the story.

And then, looking back, I can see exactly how the book should begin, in order to end where it does. It’s not the most efficient way of writing, but for me it’s part of the excitement of telling the story.

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

Well, unlike my narrator, I’m not French, not Jewish, neither man nor ghost. So it would seem that he and I are worlds apart in every possible way. But writing is such an act of imaginative empathy that you not only see yourself in the character, you become the character. I could hear Julien's voice so clearly in my head, it was as if I myself were speaking when I wrote his words on the page. That is the best kind of haunting, a literary haunting.

I love all the characters I create, whether it is Sylvie, whom it is easy to ignore until she reveals herself through her music, or Isabelle, whom it is easy to admire, but hard to like.

There are stray fragments of myself dispersed across all the characters—a love of music, a love of Shakespeare, the sense of being an outsider—but not one of them is autobiographical in any meaningful way. Except in that most meaningful of ways, that we all partake of love, loss, and yearning. It is our essential human condition.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Without question, music. More specifically, classical music. I used to be an announcer and music director at various classical music stations and if I had a shred of musical talent, I would have wanted to be a concert pianist. But I don’t. So instead, I have a main character who is a gifted pianist and music permeates the book, creating a soundtrack for the city of Paris.

My instrument is language, so I am very attentive to rhythm and tone and cadence. I want to tell a compelling story, but I want to tell it in a way that continues to resonate for readers long after they have finished the book.

Visit Mamta Chaudhry's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Philip Mullins

David Philip Mullins is the author of The Brightest Place in the World, a novel, and Greetings from Below, a story collection that won both the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the International Walter Scott Prize for Short Stories.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I believe a good title grabs a reader’s attention without being too directive. I.e., I want a title to be interesting, compelling, poetic, maybe even a little flashy, and I want it to point to something in the novel. I want it to have subtext—layers and depth. But I don’t want the title to give away the story, or anything about it. A title that’s too on-the-nose is a bad title, no matter how poetic and interesting it may be. The Brightest Place in the World is a bit of a triple entendre, and it has that flashiness I referred to, or I hope it does. It points to the chemical-plant explosion that opens the narrative, but also to the city of Las Vegas—where most of the novel is set—which is in fact the brightest place in the world, from space, at night. The title also points to the ending of the novel, which I intended to be hopeful: bright.

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

My teenage reader self wouldn’t be very surprised by The Brightest Place in the World, I don’t imagine. The novel is based, very loosely, on the PEPCON explosions of May 4th, 1988. PEPCON was a plant in the Nevada desert that manufactured ammonium perchlorate for the Space Shuttle program and the military, and my father was an engineer there in the 1980s. He was at the plant when it exploded—when it was leveled. Luckily, he escaped. I was in eighth grade at the time. The experience had a profound, lasting impact on me, and I wanted to write about it for many, many years—especially when I began writing, at the age of seventeen.

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

I find it much harder to write endings. Beginnings almost always, for both novels and short stories, come easily for me, and they’re fun to write—like starting a race. Endings are tough, like the final half-mile of a 10K. You’re beat, you’re exhausted. You’re out of juice. But somehow you have to cross the finish line. While my beginnings don’t change much, not often, my endings usually change over and over and over, until they’re just right. I throw them away, one after another, whereas beginnings I tend to only tinker with over 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 see a little of myself in nearly all of my characters—and of course some characters contain much more of me than others. I don’t consciously infuse my characters with aspects of my life or my personality; it happens invariably. I doubt it can be avoided. I think most fiction writers would agree, if they’re being honest. This composite approach to building characters is what gives a work of fiction its soul, I believe. It’s what gives the work its stamp, if you will, its trademark. It’s what makes a story personal and meaningful to the author. Otherwise, the story risks being nothing more—for its creator, at least—than an assemblage of words.

Visit David Philip Mullins's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Brightest Place in the World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Colin Cotterill

Colin Cotterill, author of the Dr. Siri Paiboun series, lives in Chumphon, Thailand, with his wife. His books have been Book Sense Picks, and he won the Dilys Award for Thirty-Three Teeth as well as a Crime Writers’ Association Library Dagger.

Cotterill's new novel is The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I always started with a title. In fact, I couldn’t start writing the story until I visualized the front cover of the book. This was one of the puzzles I set myself: no matter how ridiculous my title I enjoyed the task of making it fit. The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot came to me early in the series and it was quite a while before I typed it onto the first empty page of my last novel. Your title is the red light in front of the bordello. There are a lot of bordellos offering pretty much the same service, so your light has to be the brightest with a bit of a flash.

What's in a name? (Why did you decide to name your main character Siri?)

Well, firstly, I have to point out that I had Siri in print before he joined the corporate world with Apple. It was the name of a good friend in Laos who experienced one or two catastrophic domestic disasters during my stay in Vientiane. Naming the character after him was a gesture of support and thanks for his kindness to me. I’d like to think the newfound fame in the IT world contributed to a sales bump but it doesn’t look like it did.

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

My teenage reader self wouldn’t have read the book in the first place. He was too busy playing sports and chasing girls to waste time in lockdown with a book. If we’d sat down a slightly older Colin and ordered him to at least take a stab at the latest novel, I think we might have drawn him into the plot because he was a sucker for adventure and solving mysteries and The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot is awash with thrills and secrets and hidden clues. There’s that, plus the fact he’d learn some things about the second world war that few people knew. It wasn’t a well-known fact that Japan occupied Laos for example. And young Colin liked war stories. Would he be surprised about anything? Perhaps by the fact that he became a writer. It had never been on his bucket list.

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

Beginnings tended to arrive as soon as I sat down with my pen and my glass of red. Endings were sometimes there waiting for me after juggling plotlines and fixing missteps for a month. If I’d been clever enough to tie up all the loose ends by the last chapter I’d charge ahead into the epilogue. If not, I’d turn around and try to find the places in the text that had tripped me up and didn’t make sense. Once they were fixed, I’d take a second or third run at the finale. You can feel it, that smooth drive to the end when all the traffic lights are green.

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

I’ve told people that Dr. Siri was the person I’d hope to become when I reached my seventies. He isn’t afraid to complain or criticize, not traits that sit well in a socialist state. He’s ornery and cantankerous but generous to a fault and, despite all the hardships, he’s maintained his sense of humour. He’s open about love and relationships. I’m 67 so I haven’t got much time to iron out the faults before I become Dr. Siri.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’ve always been a cartoonist/illustrator rather than a writer. I grew up with Mad Magazine and comics so my version of the world was always visual. I saw scenes. I moved on to cinema which served to hone my visual senses. So, when I started writing I was aided by the fact that I could see the stories on the wide screen of my imagination before I started to write them down. All I had to do was sit back and describe what I was witnessing. Not sure if that’s cheating or not.

Learn more about the book and author at Colin Cotterill's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot.

--Marshal Zeringue

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