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We first connected with Mazey Eddings for her debut novel’s publication and featured her in our March/April 2022 Issue‘s Breaking In column. Now that her next publication hit shelves yesterday, we’re reconnecting with her for a quick Q&A.

What was the time frame for writing this latest book?

Time is such a blur, and publishing time is a different beast entirely, so I’m not 100 percent sure! I know the first hints of Well, Actually came to me in September 2022 as I was heading on tour for my sophomore novel Lizzie Blake’s Best Mistake. I jotted down a bunch of ideas about this second chance romance that starts with a viral callout, and then didn’t touch it again for quite some time until it was sold on proposal in August 2023. Because publishing contracts are weird, and my situation was somewhat unique in having multi-book contracts I was navigating plus severe writer’s block on one that was due, Well, Actually was supposed to be my eighth published book and come out in 2026/27. But my main characters, Eva and Rylie, were so loud and rompy and irreverent, and I wouldn’t let me work on anything else, and I got the greenlight to bump their story up in the cue, and I turned in the initial draft in April 2024, and it is my sixth published book.

Has your perspective on the publication process changed since your debut was published?

So much. I think I’ve come more to terms with how little is in my control when it comes to publishing. I’ve spent the last five years since my debut got picked up by my publisher, pushing and grinding and saying yes to anything and everything that came my way and spending so much time strategizing and agonizing on what I could do to make a book “successful” or a “break-out.” The reality is there is nothing I alone can do to really change the trajectory of one of my books. All I can focus on is creating a story that I genuinely love and hoping that it finds the readers that will love it too. Being hungry and pushing and asking for things in publishing is good and important, but I’ve learned not to feel so much despair when that pushing doesn’t yield the results I would hope for.

What was the biggest surprise while getting this book ready for publication?

How much more excited readers seem for it! As I’ve mentioned, this is my sixth book, so none of this process is new to me, but early readers seem to be responding differently to Well, Actually compared to my past books. I have no idea why things seem to be different this time around, though!

What do you feel you did really well with this novel?

I honored my characters’ voices, particularly my heroine. Eva is an extremely prickly and irreverent female main character, and her sass and crass are a protection mechanism, but I knew while drafting that she would be deemed “unlikeable” by many readers. I decided early on that if Eva didn’t care how she was perceived, then I wouldn’t be the one to water her down! My characters feel very real to me—and Eva is a particularly precious one—and I had so much fun discovering what she would do next, and I like to think that by being true to her character, she’ll feel real to readers as well.

Anything you would have done differently?

With this book? Not at the moment. The more time and space I get from each novel, the more I realize what I could have changed or tried, but I also am a firm believer that once a book is done, it’s important to allow it to just be. I think of my books as little time capsules for where I was as an author at different stages. There are things I would change and edit down or fine-tune if I were writing past stories now with more words under my belt (fingers?), but who am I to edit the purple prose of 25-year-old me? She needed to be gratuitous and sweeping and play with words as she did. 

Would you like to share some advice for our readers?

I think this is advice I shared with WD readers in the past, but protect your joy of writing at all costs. This job is brutal, creating art is brutal, so it is imperative that you fiercely defend and safeguard the joy it brings you.

What’s next for you?

I’m not sure how much I can say at this point, so I’ll leave it at an angsty, sapphic romance dedicated to Stevie Knicks and inspired by her singing “Silver Springs” at Lindsey Buckingham live in 1997. It releases August 2026.

Where can our audience find you online?

Newsletter: Mazey.substack.com
Instagram: Instagram.com/mazeyeddings
Threads: Threads.com/@mazeyeddings

The post Breaking Out: Mazey Eddings appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Rebellion 1776 tells the story of Elsbeth Culpepper, a 13-year-old girl working in a Loyalist judge’s house when Patriot cannon fire marks the start of the Siege of Boston. When Elsbeth’s only living relative, her father (her mother and siblings died in an earlier smallpox epidemic), goes missing and the judge is banished from Massachusetts with other Loyalists, Elsbeth has to figure out how to survive on her own. To avoid the orphanage, Elsbeth finds work as a maid for a wealthy family, though things take a turn for the worse when smallpox finds its way into Boston and debate rages about the risks and benefits of inoculation. 

After the conversation with Dlouhy, Anderson spent much of the five intervening years intensely researching the lives of people living in Boston in 1776, a great deal of which made it into the novel. “When I was trying to figure out what furniture would be in the house that’s a central setting in the book, I went to the probates, meaning the inventories made of a dead person’s estate of wealthy Bostonians so that I could see the kind of furniture they [had],” Anderson told WD. “But I was also interested in trying to find out about the lives of ordinary people. I spent months learning about the Almshouse in Boston. How did the town take care of people when the breadwinner of the family was dead or very ill and the children had to be fed? What kind of choices did families have or didn’t have when it came to the care of their kids during this sort of crisis?”  

Anderson doesn’t just write picture books or deeply researched middle-grade historical fiction. She’s well-known for her contemporary YA novels, including National Book Award finalist Speak, ALA Best Book for Young Adults and New York Times bestseller Twisted, and Amazon’s Best Young Adult Book of 2019, the nine-time star-reviewed memoir in verse, Shout. 

Regardless of which sub-genre she’s writing (“I just write what’s consuming me,” Anderson says with a laugh), her stories depict children and teens trying to make the most of their lives often during extraordinary or challenging times. Because living during uncertain times is a recurring theme in her books, we pick up our conversation talking about writing about an epidemic while living during a pandemic. 

You’ve written about an epidemic before (Fever 1793), but in this case, you had, like the rest of us, the unfortunate experience of living through a pandemic. How did that impact your writing compared to writing that earlier book? 

Where I was living at that point, in early 2020, was just on the border of Philadelphia, and we were pretty close to a hospital. I will never lose the memory of the—because it’s a very densely populated area—ambulance sirens that were 24 hours a day. It was just constant. Desperately sick people being taken to the hospital that was very soon overwhelmed. That’s such a strong sense memory in me.  

But also, at the same time, those of us in children’s literature were trying to figure out what role can we play in our community to support American families or families around the world in this hard time? A number of families had reached out to me to tell me that, as a family, they were reading Fever 1793, and I wound up doing a read-aloud for a couple of chapters of the book and putting it somewhere online. I had some emails from parents who really appreciated having a book that, because it’s set in history, it’s touching on the same themes of fears and concerns and this disease coming out of nowhere.  

But my books end in hope, and it gave families a much-needed tool. There’s a bunch of other books I’m sure they were using too, not just mine, but the families were using literature as a way to help their kids process what they were going through, what we were going through as a country at that point. That really stuck with me as I started to narrow my research a little bit with the idea that I’m going to write a middle-grade novel about this and what kind of information is going to be, first of all, fun and interesting for my readers, but also give them a few things that they can take away from the story.  

What kind of research did you do for this book, and generally speaking, where does research fit into your writing process? Is it before you draft or as you hit upon a question? 

No, the research usually takes a couple of years before I even start writing the book, and that’s why people sometimes give me a hard time, because I don’t write books very quickly. But some people don’t take the research thing as seriously as I do. I just feel so strongly, especially when you’re talking about the founding of America, we have seen a lot of information be manipulated. It’s very important for those of us who work with kids to try to find an appropriate, a sensitive way—because we’re talking about children here—but also an accurate depiction of what was going on in those years of the American Revolution. So, for me, research is first and foremost what I have to do. 

My job as a fiction writer is to deeply ground myself in the facts of the situation. Using, for example, government documents from the Boston town meetings. They had to discuss not only the stuff going on with the war, but [also] the smallpox epidemic that raged across America. For all the years of that war, smallpox epidemics were popping up all over the country, which caused real problems for the military as well. So, town records, newspapers, journals, letters, probates. … 

There was just so much. Caitlyn had to push hard to get me to actually turn the book in because I could have worked on it for another 20 years. 

You do quite a bit of research for your contemporary novels too. Does the research or your process differ based on whether you’re writing historical fiction or contemporary fiction? 

So far, it’s been dramatically different, which is why I think I’ve enjoyed going back and forth between the two subgenres, because I get bored kind of easily. When I’m writing for today’s teenagers, I don’t have to worry about the details of the time and place. I can make certain assumptions about what my readers already know about the world, and my readers for my YAs are older too, so that is also different.  

My historical fiction starts in setting, in terms of time period and place, and I have to understand what really happened. Then I have to figure out a plot that will somehow mesh well with that. I begin slowly as I—it feels like if you can imagine a statue rising from the middle of the ocean—as I’m doing this research and trying to hold all these threads in my head about what happened, what I think I want to write about a character begins to emerge. Then I have to figure out the external life of that character in terms of how that person interacts with the plot, as well as all the internal life. What is it about this character that makes them the right person to tell the story about?  

My YA fiction always starts with character. Always starts with character. It starts because there’s something I’ve found in our culture or the world where teenagers are being really disrespected, or something about teen life that is poo-pooed by the adults in the world. That really makes me angry, and I write really well from anger. So, I start thinking about the kind of character that whatever, fill in the blank, for any one of my YAs. Then I have to structure a plot. 

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One of the things I loved about Elsbeth was her inner monologue and reading what she wanted to say compared to what she actually said and how she reigned it in. How did you develop her as a character and her voice? 

One of the challenges of writing a different time period for children of today is language and voice. I try really hard not to put in anachronistic language—language from the wrong time period. Shout out there to the online dictionaries that help me make those choices! But I also have to remember that in some cases, these books are read by 9- and 10-year-olds. I can’t get bogged down in the way we think people might have spoken because of the language we read in letters that were written by one rich person to another rich person. So, I do take some liberties with voice and not necessarily with—I don’t have my teenage character chewing bubble gum and saying words that we use today. 

But she does have a pretty fresh attitude, you know? She’s like every 13-year-old I’ve ever met in my whole life. I don’t think 13-year-olds change that much from century to century. I wanted to get inside of her because I kept thinking, we’ve been through this pandemic, we’ve been through some real political divides, and here I was writing about a character who was living not only during the smallpox epidemic, but also during a time of real political divides trying to figure out, how am I going to eat today? One of the incredible strengths I see in children and teenagers of all generations is that the world is affecting them, but they’re also trying to grow up in this world. So, they still are being fresh and frustrated and sometimes naïvely hopeful.  

How do you know when a story idea has legs, when it’s going to turn into something that you can continue with?  

That’s a great question because, thinking back, I started writing in the early ’90s and it probably took 15 years, almost 20 years maybe, for me to understand that some things are just a good idea, and some things could become a book. There was a time when I was starting a lot of books, and then I just dropped them, because I had that initial flame, but without fuel, it doesn’t go anywhere. And again, everyone’s process is different—but maybe that’s why I think about a book for a long time before I start writing it. When we’re talking about the world of historical fiction, I’m doing a lot of that early research, and I’m thinking particularly about Rebellion 1776, I couldn’t wait to get out of bed in the morning to learn more about this time and place: Boston, ’75 through ’77. I couldn’t wait. I skipped so many lunches because I was so deeply into wanting to learn about this experience.  

Then, when I started writing, I missed a lot of lunches the last five years, because I was just dialed into this character. There’s this intensity of the connection with characters and the story that for me, lets me know this is the book I’m supposed to be working on. If it feels like I’m painting by numbers, then I should probably look for a new project. 

I saw on your website that you have done a lot of school visits. Do you still do them? 

No, mostly because of book banning. 

That was going to be my next question: How have the school visits changed in the face of book bans and censorship? 

What worries me the most is, just before the pandemic hit, in children’s literature, we had finally begun to open the doors to all kinds of stories. We were finally—the people who held power were recognizing that there’s a lot of different stories about and for children, especially in America where we have people coming from so many different backgrounds and different cultures. It’s a ginormous country, so a story for a kid in one part of the country is different for another. Lots of different faiths, lots of different understandings of gender identity and sexuality, and the way families are structured. Kids’ publishing was just beginning to embrace all that with amazing results. Authors like Angie Thomas and Nic Stone and Jason Reynolds, and just incredible, talented people. 

Then we had the one-two punch of lockdown and book banning. What I worry, really deeply worry about, is that the people who are the generation younger than me, a lot of them are these new authors that we’ve recently seen published in children’s publishing, they don’t have the ability to do school visits the way that my generation did. It’s very hard to make a living as an author and in children’s publishing. Anybody who made a living as an author—who didn’t write a fantasy novel and made a fortune—usually a part of their income stream was visiting schools, which is a win-win for everybody. The staff in the building and the students get to listen to an author talk about writing and learn about writing and keep kids really jazzed about books. And it also provided a more or less reliable income for the author. There were years when my kids were young, I could budget the family budget on the school visit income, and then if royalties came in, well that was just bonus.  

So, what happens to our pool of writers and illustrators and children’s literature, if they don’t have that option of school visits supplementing their book income? What happens is they have to go back to their day job,s and that means we’re not going to get the books. Maybe they’ll write a book every five years, every 10 years, but they’re not going to be able to do a book every year or every other year the way they could have if they’d been able to do school visits.  

And then you have the book bans themselves that are removing so many books. I’m just one of thousands of books that have been removed from great swaths of the country. … 

There was a point when I was traveling 150–170 days a year—now that includes travel time to get to back and forth—and last year I had two school visits. 

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When you were doing the school visits, I can only imagine the impact of talking to those young readers, what that did for you as a person, but also for your writing. What was that like? 

I loved doing school visits. I mean, the school visits I would do for—for a long time I was writing picture books too—elementary and middle schools are very different than what I was doing at the high school level. When I would go to a high school, I would always have the administrators sign off on what books I could talk about because those are issues that in some school districts people were not comfortable with. But with the younger kids, middle school and younger, oh my gosh, just that amazing energy and joy and those kids!  

I was there to talk about the writing process obviously, and research. Usually, if I was talking about my historicals, I’d be talking to kids between fourth and eighth grades. And if you think about it, somebody writing historical fiction for kids, basically I get to be a fifth grader every single day. A fifth grader with an assignment: Study this thing and then write about it. And the kind of frustrations that kids have in terms of that sort of assignment from school, it’s exactly what writers deal with. You procrastinate. You don’t want to revise. You just want everybody to tell you it’s awesome. And you still have to do the hard work. Then when you finish it and you wake up the next morning, you have to do it again. I think we have a lot of things in common.  

It was really moving sometimes to hear from my readers of historical fiction, how my books affected them. I had one young girl, I was at a school visit in New Jersey, I think around 2003. She was a sixth grader, and she had read Fever 1793. She told me the reason she liked that book is that the main character goes through really hard things, and she liked the emotions. Her father had been in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Thankfully he survived, but it was a very traumatic experience for their family that was still echoing two years later. She said that was the first character whose inner life was something that that girl identified with because she had also been through hard times.  

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What additional advice do you have for readers of WD? 

Very early on, I can remember—and this has all changed so much, so it’ll sound like I’m talking about a different planet—but back then you would send, for children’s literature, you would either send the entire picture book manuscript or opening chapters in a novel through the mail because we didn’t have email yet. Usually, they would come flying back with a standard rejection letter. But every once in a while, I would get a personalized rejection letter—got those for several books—and I felt like somebody had turned up with a cheerleading squad to cheer me on. Even though it was a rejection, it was a quality rejection. I kept them taped on my wall. One of the hardest lessons that took me a long time to learn was to not take those kinds of rejections personally, and to recognize that sometimes it was that I had sent the wrong story to the wrong editor. Because you have to learn about the business as well as learning about the craft. But also learning that because somebody rejected my work, sometimes it meant that it really sucked. Sometimes it meant that it wasn’t ready.  

The most important lesson of all was, I had no control over if my work got accepted. I had complete control over the quality of work that I sent in. It’s sometimes very tempting to spend all your time studying the editors or worrying about your platform or those sort of things—it’s a game I think we play with ourselves as authors when writing feels hard.  

Here’s what I want all writers to do: I want all writers to find a photograph of themselves when they were 4 or 5 years old, and I want them to put that photograph close to where they write, either a physical space or a space on their desktop. Every time they start to hear the negative self-talk in their head, I suck, I’m wasting my time, all those terrible things we tell ourselves when we get down, I want you to look at that little kid. Would you say those words to a child that age? No. No human with a heart would say that.  

To be your best writer self means being gentle with yourself sometimes, especially when you’re creating something. Creation is best done with an open heart and a gentle spirit. Sometimes you’re going to write crap, but that’s OK because then you can fix it and make it better. That’s what you would tell a 5-year-old: “I’m so proud of you for finishing that draft. That was a really hard thing. Have a cookie and then tomorrow we can start revising it and make it better.” 

I started to talk about people who spend a lot of time on their platforms. I think that kind of work, for many, is a sign that there’s something they’re not feeling cool about in their manuscript. You should want to be with your manuscript all the time. That’s where your energy needs to be, is the quality of your work. Be gentle with yourself.

The post The WD Interview: Laurie Halse Anderson appeared first on Writer's Digest.

They say you should never meet your heroes. But speaking with Stephen Graham Jones is a lot like speaking with your local theater nerd about the history of Broadway, except with a lot more goosebumps and nightmares. 

Known for his horror writing, Jones has won or been nominated for over 20 awards, including the Bram Stoker Award, Shirley Jackson Award, British Fantasy Awards, and Locus Awards. He has published more than 30 books and hundreds of short stories, in genres ranging from horror to science fiction to absurdist. You can find his work in well-known publications like Clarkesworld and Nightmare Magazine. On top of his writing career, Graham Jones is also the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English and a Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado Boulder. But while some writers might let those accolades feed their egos, Jones is just like the rest of us—plagued with pre-publication anxiety. 

“I’m still in that stage where it could be a total flop and a failure and nobody’s going like it, you know?” he said, laughing, as we sat down to discuss his upcoming release, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. “Like, you and three other people have read it, so I’m scared. But you’re supposed to be scared, I think, too.” 

I assure you; he has nothing to be scared about. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a historical horror novel about a professor, Etsy, who, in the midst of a career crisis in 2012, is transcribing her great-great grandfather’s diary. Through entries from 1912, we learn that Arthur Beaucarne, a pastor, heard several confessionals by a Blackfeet man named Good Stab. These transcribed confessionals leave blood in their wake.  

We began our conversation by discussing the technicality behind this latest release. 

I would consider The Buffalo Hunter Hunter to be a story within a story within a story, but all three of those stories are told through first-person narration. Was it difficult to keep all of those voices distinct? 

I did have to keep all three of those voices, those narrators, distinct. I mean, they distinguish themselves a little bit just because they’re in different contexts and they have different histories, but that’s not quite enough, for me to do it, anyway. What I ended up having to do was give each of them different rules to follow that they didn’t know they were following. 

The outside narration, the frame—Etsy—she has access to anything she wants. She’s got semicolons. She could have footnotes if she wanted. It wouldn’t matter. She’s got everything. Arthur Beaucarne, he has those big old long dashes, and he’ll use however as a coordinating conjunction. And then when you get to the center of the nested narratives to Good Stab, he doesn’t have any dashes at all. And no semicolons, either. … I have somewhere a list of rules [that] each character will always default to using this when possible, and that when possible.  

And I wish I could say that that happened organically the first time through, but really, it just kind of expressed itself through their own voices. And then I had to codify it and go back through a few times and comb all the things that didn’t fit out of each character’s voice and sections. I made that little list of rules specifically for my editors and copy editors so they could help keep me on track. 

In 2011, you wrote an article for our blog in which you said, “If you keep having to dip into the story’s past to explain the present, then there’s a good chance your real story’s in the past, and you’re using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.” Did tackling the storylines in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter complicate that for you? 

I did say that in 2011. I’ve been saying it since, like, 2000. I still subscribe to that completely. I think a lot of stories and novels and novellas and stuff I read, the past is simply there as a slippery ramp you fall down to get to 1942 or whatever. And I think, Why don’t we just go to 1942 and tell the story from there? But yes, this story is probably showcasing my infatuation with Philip K. Dick and how he always nests his narratives inside like Russian nesting dolls, you know? The trick is there are causal implications between each layer of those nests. And I really, really love that kind of narrative. I don’t know if I call it a framework, but I just love that delivery method. 

So, yeah, I wanted to try it this time. I’ve done it once before in a novel called Ledfeather that came out in ’07 or ’08. It goes back and forth between 1884 and a century later. And that was me testing myself, how would I handle delivering the past? And turns out epistolary was the trick I used in that novel. … 

But this did complicate it. And I think the way that I handled it—in my head anyway, maybe on the page—is I made Etsy be that outside frame of the past. 1912 was, of course, the past … and then Good Stab’s story from 1833 up to 1884 is even the deeper past. I did end up saying that this story happens in the past. I don’t think it actually happens in Good Stab’s past. I think it happens in 1912 … But I did want to have stairsteps to get there. I felt like I would’ve been losing some context had I just dropped us into Beaucarne’s Sunday sermon.  

This is not the first time you’ve played with multiple points of view. Even though Mongrels has a first-person narrator, some parts of the book are told from a third-person perspective. At what point in your writing or drafting process do you decide to include these layered points of view? 

With Mongrels specifically, I wasn’t even writing the novel. I had two weeks off, so I thought I would write a bunch of stories right fast, and then I decided, What if I name the characters the same and put them in the same world, and it can be a novel? But what I found out with Mongrels was if the first-person chapters touched each other, then the reader instantly was triggered to ask, “How did we get from here to here?” I realized I had to pad it with these little third-person interstitials …  

As for The Buffalo Hunter Hunter … I had just taught a vampire graduate course. I just had vampires all in my head. And a couple weeks before the course was over, I started writing The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. I just couldn’t help it, ’cause I had so many fangs in my dreams and everything. So, I sat down to start it, and I thought, Well, here we go. We’re dropping back into some past. Then Etsy just kind of raised her hand and said, “Wait, wait, I gotta go first.” It wasn’t anything strategic, and I didn’t plan it out. It’s just that I couldn’t figure out how to get back 100 years or so without some sort of person to hold [the reader’s] hand back to there. Then the person who was best at holding their hand I thought might be a professor. And then I had to ask myself, “What kind of crisis is that professor in?” She’s in a tenure crisis, a career crisis.  

To me, that’s just how novels develop. It’s all like mechanical problems that you provide a solution for, but then those solutions bloom out and become the story.  

With your Indian Lake Trilogy, you were exploring the expectations around the slasher subgenre and then how easily those expectations can be subverted. What were you exploring with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter? 

You know, I told myself I would never write a vampire novel until I could do it the same way I did the werewolves in Mongrels, which is to say, until I could put a creature on the page with a biology and a culture that felt real to me. I had tried to write werewolf novels twice before Mongrels, and both of them failed because I was just looking at pretty werewolves. [Laughs] Basically, I didn’t have a story. So, I knew not to just look at pretty vampires with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, but also, I had to do a lot of swapping out of characteristics and traits to make the vampire something I could believe in.  

In a lot of vampire stories, the vampire will just up and fly across the town. And I’m like, “What in the world, is that Vampire Superman? I don’t understand this. How are they not beholden to gravity? How are they propelling themselves?” … There are a lot of things with the vampire that I think are story expediencies that have kind of accreted onto the vampire through so many [adaptations] of telling over the centuries … and then they become part of the code for vampires, and they don’t get interrogated quite enough, I don’t think.  

With The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, I wanted to interrogate all those. And what I want is for the vampire to keep on going. I don’t want it to fizzle out. I don’t want sparkly vampires to kill the vampire. [Laughs] For me to help the vampire thrive, I feel like it’s incumbent that I kind of burn off the fat, if that makes sense. So it can be a leaner … organism … I asked myself, “If somebody was infected with something that made them have to subsist on human blood, how would that function? And what are the ramifications?”  

You have tackled everything from short stories to novellas to full novels to graphic novels. When you sit down to write a story, do you have the length and format already in mind? Or do you figure that out once you’ve begun the project? 

You know, for a story, I generally have the length down. Like, an editor will call me and say, “I need something from you. I’m paying $.10/a word, up to 7,000 words. After that, you don’t get any money.” And I’m like, “Well, a 7,000-word story, then.” [Laughs] I can usually hit that, more or less.  

Flash fiction always stays flash fiction. Flash fiction never opens up to a story for me—so far, anyways. Only once have I had a novella open up to a novel, and that was Only Good Indians. Well, now I’m lying. I tried to write The Only Good Indians three times; the third time, I finally did it, but the first two also became novels—The Babysitter Lives and Killer on the Road. So, I screw up sometimes. I just misjudge the scope, you know? 

People always ask why I write and read so much horror when the real world is horrifying enough. Have people asked similar things about your work?  

Yeah, they do. I think that the response to the world being a dumpster fire is either to look deeper into the flames or to find a cute kitten to look at. Those are the two responses. [Laughs] Both are legitimate! Neither is better than the other. … But I think what gazing at the flames of the fire can do is when we engage horror media, whatever kind, we’re seeing characters struggling through a dark, violent, terrible, scary tunnel, the same way we are. The difference is those characters on screen, on the page … they get to the end. And that gives us here in the real world, in our own dark tunnels, hope that there is going to be an end to this horror story.  

I mean, there is a sense in which horror media is a funhouse mirror that distorts our current anxieties and fears and issues and all that stuff. … But really, I think the reason so many of us are watching, reading, engaging with horror lately is that it has an end. Stories have ends, whether they’re good or bad, and we want an end to this horror story we’re in. 

There seems to be this perpetuating idea that publishing is having a horror renaissance. Do you feel that that’s accurate? 

I do think that since probably Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom … the world has finally woken up and realized that we’re in dialogue with what’s happening. I think until then, people always thought, like, there’s a carnival, but we’re this far-out tent just doing blood gags for each other, putting on masks for each other and laughing and dancing around. But I think Get Out and Victor’s book both signaled to the world that, “Hey, we’re talking about things that matter.” And ever since then, horror has had a different velocity or momentum or something. It just feels more vital, I think. It’s got its finger on some sort of pulse for the moment. 

I do sometimes hesitate to say that horror is having a renaissance, or it’s a current fad, but the only reason for that is self-protection. It’s because fads go away, renaissances [blow] over, you know? I’d much rather horror just continue to be part of the conversation. However, my concern is that horror, we’ve gotten so much of our identity from the solidarity of being outsiders with each other. And so now that we’re in the big tent, now that we’re not outsiders, I wonder how that’s going to change the fabric of horror. 

It’ll be interesting to see. It’s one of those waiting games. 

Yeah. I totally agree. I’m excited, too. Because if horror had stayed the same, then it would die. Things can’t stay the same. They’ve got to keep adapting.  

I know quite a few people who would be upset if I invited them over to watch a monster movie and then put on John Carpenter’s Halloween. So, I want to ask you: Do you consider slashers to be monsters? 

I do. I’m teaching a monster lecture course in the spring here to, like, 250 sophomores. One of the monsters we process through is going to be the Jason Voorhees of the world, the Michael Myers of the world. My definition of monster is that which we have to use unconventional weapons to dispense with, like silver bullets or daylight and or headshots with the slasher, the unconventional weapon that gets used against it. [The slasher’s] silver bullet, its Achilles’ heel is the final girl, you know? … I think Jason Voorhees is as much a monster as Godzilla is. 

In your opinion, what makes a good monster? 

They have some sort of Achilles’ heel. That there’s something we can use our clever monkey brains to figure out and weaponize against them such that we can put them down. Because realistically, how can we ever stop Jason Voorhees or a werewolf? We’ve got to melt down our grandmother’s silver to shoot that werewolf. That kind of stuff. I love that. I think monsters need to be bulletproof, basically. That’s kind of part of the unconventional weapons.  

And monsters can’t be negotiated with. That’s really important as well. If you can ever come to a treaty table under a white tent and say to the monster, “You’ve been doing this a while, and this is really causing us some grief. Let’s see, if we give you this and this, can you stop doing that?” That’s not going to be a fun story. [Laughs] 

This issue of WD is all about pushing boundaries. Who are some authors you admire for how they push boundaries in their work? 

Oh, man. I like the way Jeff VanderMeer is always pushing the boundaries of both delivery and reality. Nicholson Baker, I like the weird stuff he does. … Paul Tremblay is pushing boundaries with form in a lot of his books. He’s always doing stuff in the margins, or he’ll pit two or three narratives against each other in his story, such that you kind of lose the thread of truth or trust.  

I love to read writers who are tinkering like that, because like with music, garage bands are what keep music vital. It’s not The Rolling Stones, you know, it’s not the monster bands. It’s the ones who are coming up with new sounds in the privacy of their garage. And we need people doing that. 

How do you think you push boundaries? 

I like to experiment—you know, actually maybe experiment’s the wrong verb. Brian Evenson, when people try to label him an experimental writer, he’s like, “I’m not experimenting, I’m innovating.” Because he’s not just pouring random test tubes into other test tubes and waiting to see what happens. He needs to get from here to there, and he comes up with a new way to get from here to there. And innovation is wonderful. I think random experimentation doesn’t always feel authentic or doesn’t come from an authentic place.  

But myself, if I am contributing anything in that regard, it’s that I only write novels that I think are bad ideas. Like, any novel I ever have that I think, Oh, I can do that, then I don’t write that novel. That is just super boring to me. I can’t imagine writing a novel that I think is going to work. I only want to write novels that are broken at the level of conception, that feel like bad ideas, because then I have to become a better writer and get extremely lucky to make it work. And when I get extremely lucky, and I somehow become a better writer, I feel like I went somewhere. I did something. … I like to write myself into a corner over and over, such that I have to become a better writer to get out. 

We would be remiss not to discuss that you are a distinguished professor. Do you feel that your approach to writing has changed at all since you began teaching writing? 

I signed on as a visiting assistant professor in 1999. My first novel came out in 2000. So, it’s really hard for me to disentangle those two. I feel like my professor career and my career as a novelist were birthed at the same moment.  

But I do think that being a professor helps me a whole lot with being a writer, because every day, like here in an hour and a half, I’m going to teach a workshop, and I’ll be telling the students things, techniques, precepts. What I’m trying to do is instill in them a sense of narrative ethics, basically. I want them to care about story in a new way, in a good way, in a responsible way. I hear myself telling them those things, and then, later on in the afternoon, I’ll be writing, and I’m like, “Oh man, I told them this. I’ve got to be better. I’ve got to adhere to that myself. I’ve got to set a good model.” I can’t just say it. I’ve got to live it.  

And so, saying these things to all these generations of students that I’ve been doing for 25 years now, it’s kept me on the straight and narrow. I mean, I’ve written stories about working the window at a drive-through urinal. I’ve written about giant time-traveling caterpillars. But to me, that’s all the straight and narrow in that I’m adhering really strictly to a sense of narrative ethics to something that I think actually matters.  

You know, content never matters, but how you care about the story and care about the story’s impact on the world, I think that that matters a lot. 

What words of advice do you have for our readers? 

I would say everyone has their chosen genre they like to write in—I’m a horror writer. I think of all the genres as different five-acre fields spread along a creek. They all have fences around them, sometimes really tall fences. But I think it’s really important to, when nobody’s looking, step across the fence into romance or into space opera or into paleoanthropology or into botany. There are endless fields to step in, endless bookshelves, and I walk around those wonderful fields. And then when the sun goes down, I come back to my own fence, I step over it, I get back into horror, and I stand there. What’s happened when I’ve been swishing through those other fields is that burrs have stuck to my pants legs. And then they fall off in the horror field, and their seeds, they grow up into strange plants. That’s how we keep a genre vital: We transpose different DNA into it, strange alien DNA. And I think that’s the most important [thing]. That’s a way to keep your genre active instead of just using your genre. 

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We first connected with Adam Oyebanji during his debut novel’s publication and featured him in our March/April 2024′s Breaking In column. Now that his next publication is hitting the shelves today, we’re reconnecting with him.

What was the time frame for writing this latest book?

Although this is my fourth book to be published since I “broke in” (Braking Day was followed by A Quiet Teacher and Two Times Murder, both mysteries), Esperance was actually written third. I’m trying to alternate between SF and Crime, although Esperance mixes both! To get back to your question, though, it was written in 2022-23 and has been waiting to be born ever since.

Has your perspective on the publication process changed since your debut was published?

I still feel very grateful to be here, and I think it’s important not to lose sight of that. I’m lucky to be able to write, luckier to have an agent and publishers, and luckiest of all to have readers who seem to like my books. These are things to remember whenever the enthusiasm levels drop.

In terms of what’s changed, I think the process as a whole is simply less mysterious, so I’m less hesitant about speaking up if I feel something isn’t quite right. Plus, I sometimes get invited to parties and book festivals!

What was the biggest surprise while getting this book ready for publication?

Editors. The publishing houses, like many businesses, have been going through a lot of changes recently, mostly driven by a desire to keep costs down and profits up, which is what businesses do, after all. In consequence, a lot of editors have been laid off and/or moved on, which meant that Esperance has had more editors than I would have expected. On the plus side, though, they’ve all been great to work with. I love working with people who love books!

What do you feel you did really well with this novel?

Everything, of course! More seriously, I’m proud of being able to talk about a dark subject through the light and pacy lens of a speculative crime thriller. Library Journal describes Esperance as “recommended for readers who love intricately blended genre stories that ask big questions,” and I couldn’t ask for better than that. I hope people will see Esperance as a fun read that sometimes makes you think. Then, on a more granular level, I feel I’ve done a pretty good job with the dialog. I like to think I’m good at the back-and-forth that keeps people engaged with the characters while the story rattles along underneath.

Anything you would have done differently?

Absolutely! Every time I write a novel, I learn something along the way about how to write a novel. Reading Esperance now, I keep thinking why did I use that word and not this, this motivation and not that. I suspect a lot of writers feel this way. Left to ourselves, we’d tweak forever and nothing would ever get published!

Would you like to share some advice for our readers?

Persevere. All you can do is write. You have no control over anything else, so concentrate on that. Write because it gives you joy or because you find it meaningful in some other sense. If the “other” stuff happens, great! But you can’t really write for that, and I would suggest you don’t try. It either happens, or it doesn’t. No good can come from worrying about it.

What’s next for you?

I’m returning to the universe of Braking Day: a murder mystery (sort of) in space! There’s a supporting character in Braking Day that I really enjoyed writing. This new novel is set twenty years earlier than Braking Day and is told from that character’s point of view. After that, I’d quite like to write the follow-up to Two Times Murder, but one thing at a time!

Where can our audience find you online?

Website: AdamOyebanji.com

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We first connected with Neely Tubati Alexander during her debut novel’s publication and featured her in our May/June 2023 Issue‘s Breaking In column. Now that her next publication is hitting the shelves today, we’re reconnecting with her for a quick Q&A.

What was the time frame for writing this latest book?

I’ve kept a book a year pace since my debut Love Buzz came out in 2023, which means a lot of writing in the “in between.” This pace means I’ve had my hand in three books at once in some capacity—final touches on covers and formatting while planning marketing on one, going through developmental edits and/or attempting to sell the next, while drafting yet another! It can be exhausting, but this promise of something new perpetually on the horizon keeps me from getting too wrapped up in the things I can’t control surrounding publishing a book, of which there are many.

Has your perspective on the publication process changed since your debut was published?

Yes! So much. I think when I debuted, I had this “I’m just happy to be here” mentality, and I still very much do. But as I’ve progressed, I’ve learned more about the industry and business. Sticking creatives into a business model like traditional publishing can very much be a square peg, round hole situation at times. I’ve come to rely heavily on author friends to share intel and knowledge. This transparency helps us authors advocate effectively for ourselves. I also appreciate how much of a collaboration it truly is.

What was the biggest surprise while getting this book ready for publication?

How each process can feel unique and new. Granted, this is only my third book so perhaps this outlook will change, but each book has the opportunity to bring something new, whether it be introduction to a new subset of readers, a fun or unexpected blurb, an exciting partnership…the opportunities are truly endless and each new book feels like an exciting fresh start with a world of possibilities.

What do you feel you did really well with this novel?

This being my third book, I feel like I am really coming into my specific style and voice, and I think this book highlights my genre-blending style. Every book I write, I feel like I get better as a writer and am more capable than with the last. Perhaps it’s confidence, perhaps it’s intuition, perhaps it’s skill building … I tend to think it’s a combination of all three.

Anything you would have done differently?

There are always things after a book comes out that I wonder about. Every once in a while, a reader will say, “I thought such and such was going to happen,” and I’ll think, well that would have been a better ending! Authors love to tinker, and I think that process would be never-ending if we allowed it to be. I try to block out the noise and just go where the story takes me. Trust the process, as they say, which really just means to trust yourself.

Would you like to share some advice for our readers?

Comparison is indeed the thief of not only joy, but motivation and creativity. I’ve seen so many debut authors get bogged down by comparing themselves to more seasoned authors or even other debuts, being so focused on what someone else is getting and thus losing much of the joy of that special time. And it’s definitely not just debuts. We all do it. But if your goal is to make a career out of writing, put your head down for the marathon instead of trying to keep up with the mass sprint. My goals used to be centered around accolades. Now, they are built around longevity.

What’s next for you?

I am shifting to women’s fiction! While my next book has some romantic elements, it shifts out of romance and solidly into the women’s fiction space. I am excited to take this new leap and potentially connect with new readers while also (hopefully) keeping my current ones. I hope to see this book on shelves in 2026!

Where can our audience find you online?

Instagram: @neelyalexanderwrites
Website: NeelyTubatiAlexander.com

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We first connected with Lauren J. A. Bear during her debut novel’s publication and featured her in our July/August 2023‘s Breaking In column. Now that her next publication has hit shelves, we’re reconnecting with her for a quick Q&A.

What was the time frame for writing this latest book?

Though it felt like ten minutes, it was actually two years. I began work on Mother of Rome in the fall of 2022, before Medusa’s Sisters was published, and finished the last round of edits in the summer of 2024. This was my first time working on an official timeline with official deadlines, and it was a completely different experience. I wasn’t writing on an island anymore! There’s a time crunch, of course, but also a greater fear of disappointment. Not only did I want to please my brilliant editor, but I also had access to reader reviews of Medusa’s Sisters. For better or worse, I read them, and I tried to address their opinions in real time as I composed my next book.

Has your perspective on the publication process changed since your debut was published?

It’s almost a cliché answer at this point, but the social media game is a tricky one. As a fairly private person, the pressure to “go viral” can feel daunting. Posting selfies or making videos isn’t natural for me. I’m trying, because I love connecting with readers and other authors, but I also need to protect my mental health and focus on my work. Phones are dangerous for writers. They are black holes for creativity!

What was the biggest surprise while getting this book ready for publication?

Mother of Rome was the first new book on Tuesday of 2025. It’s a quieter time of year, especially compared to the summer release of Medusa’s Sisters—and I have three young children, so my post-holiday/winter break fatigue was real! One great surprise that rekindled my energy and excitement was being selected for Book in a Box, which creates gorgeous special editions for English readers in Denmark. I still pinch myself that they chose Mother of Rome! Truly a dream.

What do you feel you did really well with this novel?

The relationship between/characterization of Rhea and Antho. It can be tricky to write an ancient character in a way that’s compelling to a modern reader and still feels authentic to the setting, but I think Rhea and Antho transcend. I have very little interest in stories where women are pitted against each other. In Mother of Rome, people try to manipulate Antho and Rhea into competition, but they resist; they continue to show up for each other. The strong, essential bonds of female friendship, of shared sisterhood, is a motif I will continue to happily scream from the mountaintops.

Anything you would have done differently?

I would have reminded myself earlier that I was writing a novel, not a thesis on ancient Latium! A project like this requires extensive research, and it can be exciting to share all you learn, but that’s not a story. Research is background. Mother of Rome wasn’t supposed to be a tale of Italian tribal politics, but one of a resilient, resourceful woman who loses control of her own body and fights back. I had to edit out a lot of my historical lecture tangents (particularly the ones about the ancient uses for cabbage).

Would you like to share some advice for our readers?

My reading advice is to be a promiscuous reader! Step outside your comfort zone, read it all. Don’t be intimidated by literary fiction or turned off by genre fiction. There’s something valuable in every art form. My writing advice is to study poetry. The way poets use language with such brevity and clarity, with such sensual resonance, is a masterclass in composition.

What’s next for you?

My third book returns to Greece! Expected publication is summer 2026. And it’s a romance. Prepare to swoon.

Where can our audience find you online?

Instagram: @laurenjabear

Twitter/X and BlueSky: @laurenjabear

You can sign up for my newsletter, These Golden Lines, at LaurenJABear.com.

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Pat Barker is a writer’s writer. Though she’s accumulated numerous accolades over her decades-long career, including a Booker Prize and a Guardian Fiction Prize, and was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for her services to literature, she still concerns herself with things like what it means to write effective dialogue and looking past the bad first draft to see if a story has legs. “The thing about writing is it’s not difficult,” Barker says, now in her early 80s. “The rules of good writing are incredibly simple. It’s just that it takes you 50 years to learn.” 

This sense of humor about her writing life filled our conversation ranging from her opinion on whether a writer’s unfinished work should be published posthumously (“I do actually have a horror of leaving an orphan book where you can imagine your publisher and your executor and your agent say, ‘Oh, well, it’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it? But on the other hand, perhaps we can just about rescue it and push it out.’ I don’t want all that. I want any book that’s published under my name to have been finished”) to what she told herself about winning the Booker prize to be able to keep working (“It’s such a stroke of luck. But that’s all it is. … Julian Barnes said it was ‘posh bingo,’ and I said, when I won it, it was three lemons in a row. And that’s the way to look at it. If you start seriously thinking that you have written the best novel of the year, then you are in trouble. You haven’t. You’ve written the novel that five random people agreed on, on a particular afternoon. That’s what you’ve written.”) 

Joking aside, Barker is best known for her novels set during times of war. Her Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road—which won the Booker in 1995) follows the poet Siegfried Sassoon, psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers, and soldier Billy Prior as they deal with the horrific effects of trench warfare in World War I. Likewise, the Life Class Trilogy (Life Class, Toby’s Room, Noonday) begins with art students Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant, and Kit Neville in 1914 and traces the intertwining of their lives from the earliest days of World War I through the destruction of London during the Blitz of World War II. 

Currently, Barker is in the midst of her Women of Troy series, beginning with The Silence of the Girls. The 2018 novel, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, retells the story of The Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, the Trojan queen who was awarded to Achilles during the Trojan War. Briseis’s story continues in The Women of Troy, as the Greeks’ departure from Troy is delayed due to unfavorable winds, courtesy of the gods they’ve offended during the destruction of the city. The newest book in the series, The Voyage Home, shifts the narrative from Briseis to that of Ritsa, a healer who has been given to Agamemnon’s war prize, the virgin Cassandra, as her slave, as they travel from Troy to Mycenae, where Agamemnon’s wife awaits. 

When asked what appeals to Barker about writing a trilogy or series, she says, “The great thing about writing a trilogy is that you can’t get away with just repeating. You have to have central characters, but you can’t just have them thinking and doing and saying exactly what they did in the previous book, so you are obliged to dig deeper into that person.” Which is exactly what she’s done with the stories of Briseis and now, Ritsa. 

And while Barker is dedicated to completing Briseis’s story in The Women of Troy series, she says she won’t be embarking on a new trilogy or series: “… of course, I am now too old to write another trilogy. So somehow or other, I’ve got to come to my senses and write a single book or books.” 

We began our conversation with what interested Barker about revisiting ancient mythology.

Before I got The Voyage Home, I went back and read your Life Class Trilogy, and there was a line in there about the silence of the girls as Achilles and Agamemnon fought over them. That book was published in 2007, at least in the United States.

You know, I’d forgotten that I wrote that. So, when people ask me when The Silence of the Girls was published, “When did your interest in The Iliad and the women in The Iliad start?” I thought it was comparatively recent. Whereas in fact, it went back quite a way. I’ve forgotten I wrote that about, Elinor Brooke sitting in the Cafe Royal noticing how silent the women have become, and how objectionably loud the men have become.

So, if you didn’t remember you had that interest before, what did spark the idea for this trilogy?

We’ll perhaps call it a series, yes, there will be something next. Certainly, because the character [Briseis] is not finished. 

What did spark it? Well, I suspect an even earlier introduction to The Iliad, because I read it out of general interest. Like lots of young women, my predominant experience was, well, the grandeur of the language, and how almost inconceivably ancient these stories are, some of the earliest stories that we, as human beings ever told each other that took final form, or not final form actually, in The Iliad. But there were these girls, and the girls were saying nothing, and I think quite a lot of men, not all men by any means, would read that, and they wouldn’t hear the silence. But I think almost any woman would hear that silence. So obviously the thing to do if you’re a woman writer is to try to break that silence, to try to express what the women are feeling and not able to say.

Did you know the scope of what these three books would cover before you started writing the first one?

No, and I don’t think I really knew, even at the end of The Silence of the Girls, because I do tend to get very down on myself at the end of the book. When I sent off The Silence of the Girls to my British publisher, Penguin Random House—it’s the same publisher on both sides of the Atlantic now—I thought it was absolute rubbish. I said that in an event at which my editor was present, and he couldn’t believe it. But it was absolutely true, because the book that you actually hand over is never the book that was in your mind when you started to write it. Every book falls short, I think, of what the writer intended. That one fell dramatically short because I was seeing it against the backdrop of The Iliad, which is one of the greatest books ever written.

At what point did you decide to continue the story with the next two books?

It’s always this nagging when a story is finished. And unfortunately, for my sins, I seem to finish a book at the point where it’s the end of a movement, but it’s not the end of the piece. There is something left on set, just like the Regeneration Trilogy, when at the end of Regeneration, Siegfried Sassoon is going back to war, but he’s still not convinced that the war is anything other than a dreadful mistake. Yet he has to go back and face the horrors of that again. No way is that the end of the story. You need to follow this person. You need to bring your central character to a moment of more than momentary peace. And that is the end of the story. I’ve now written three trilogies, and I don’t seem to be very good at ending it at the end of one book.

I wanted to talk about completing the story of a character because with The Voyage Home, you did shift narrators. With the first two, Briseis was the narrator, but in this third book, it’s Ritsa. What challenges did you face writing from this different character? Or did it open things up for you?

I think it opened things up for me, and it also restored me to the earliest voices in my work, which were very much the voices of working-class women in the northeast of England. Very poor women, women who were up against it. And Ritsa, although she’s living in a very different society, her relationship to the other characters in the story is very much that she is the bottom layer. She is the ground feeder if you like. She’s a slave. Before she was enslaved, she was a healer. She was a woman with independence. She was a woman with a professional reputation, a home of her own. So, although she hasn’t fallen from the great heights of Briseis, who was a queen in her previous life and then a slave, she, nevertheless, has suffered a very dramatic loss of status. She has become Cassandra’s slave, at her beck and call 24 hours a day. She doesn’t like it very much. She doesn’t like Cassandra very much. 

Nevertheless, her voice is a very pragmatic voice, a voice which is focused on survival rather than on ideology, if you like. She wants to be alive at the end of the story, and she’s in a better place at the end of the story than she was at the beginning. So, I think from the point of view of the reader who is identifying with Ritsa, this is an awkward trajectory. 

I do think this very simple thing is quite important, that you don’t want to take your reader into a pit and leave them there. Apart from anything else, I think it’s quite immoral to do that. I think you should always offer hope. And it’s honest, because if you are actually despairing, you wouldn’t be writing. The act of writing is itself an affirmation of hope that things can be better.

That’s so interesting considering that you write so much about war.

I do write about a lot of traumatic events. But I also write a lot of recovery stories. And I would say that the survival rate in my books is higher than the survival rate in life. In that sense, I’m a very optimistic writer.

Going back to the narrators, I can guess why you chose to have the few chapters in The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy that are from Achilles’ and Pyrrhus’ perspectives in the third person, since they’re the men and this is about the silence of the girls and giving them a voice. But I was curious about, in this new book, why you chose to give Cassandra’s and Clytemnestra’s perspectives in third person.

Yes, and Ritsa’s in first. But in a way, it’s brutally simple: Ritsa’s alive at the end. You can’t get trapped inside the viewpoint of a woman who is not going to make it all the way through. I mean, I think some books do this, or they flip into the afterlife or something like that. But mainly if the word I is being used, you expect that I not to be in a coffin at the end of the book, because otherwise they’re describing their own death and can’t describe what happens after it. … 

It’s a way of saying, although these characters are very evenly balanced in the call for the reader’s sympathy, nevertheless, the first-person narrator is generally the person the book is about. In my books, the first-person narrator tends to be an honest narrator. They are telling you what they know. They might be misleading you, but if they are misleading you, it’s only because they don’t know the truth themselves. I don’t play games with the reader in that sense.

In another interview, you talked broadly about why retellings of mythology are experiencing a surge these days. But I’m curious, for you personally, what appeals to you about reimagining myths?

It’s that imaginative power of knowing that you are dealing with the story which has been around for at least two and a half thousand years. Because the stories that formed The Iliad, for example, had been around probably a thousand years before it was actually captured in the form that we now know it, and there’s a danger in thinking that capture, The Iliad, is the final form. But of course, it isn’t. The myth can’t be frozen in that way. The myth goes on, so that Shakespeare in 1602 writing about Troilus and Cressida is also telling one of the stories in the myths that made The Iliad, and so on into modern-day retellings. It’s endlessly rich because it delves into some of the deepest emotions and convictions of human life. I think it’s very humbling to be part of a chain of writers telling a particular story. You are a custodian of the story. In the end, it is not about you, and that’s what I like about it.

Have you found any benefits in writing about wars or events that are so far in the past, compared to trying to write about something that is in the relatively recent past?

There’s a great benefit in the sense that if you’re writing about the contemporary scene, the reader already knows what they think about the contemporary scene. The point about writing about myth or writing about the relatively distant past is that the reader doesn’t have the knee-jerk reaction, Oh I know what I think about that. So, you come in under their radar, and you move past the automatic prejudices and get them to look at the basic situation again, and to feel different things about it. For me, that’s the main reason. 

The other thing of course, is this: Even the very distant past, you are still dealing with homo sapiens. The human brain has not evolved during that time. So, as [A. E.] Housman said, the person who’s looking at the storm on Wenlock Hill in Roman times is essentially the same man who’s looking at it now. The trees have changed, but the human brain has not changed. It’s a way of getting down to a deeper level of human complexity.

What comes first for you when you’re starting a new project? The idea for the story or a character’s voice?

I feel that the project doesn’t start until you’ve got the voice. I call it “the breath on the mirror.” If there’s no breath on the mirror, it’s dead. And once the characters are talking to each other, even if there’s no story and I don’t know what it’s about, I stop worrying because once they’re talking to each other and disagreeing with each other about various things, you know you are going to have a story very quickly. 

I wish I could tell people how to hasten that process, but I don’t know how to. It can take ages to get to the point where you are hearing the characters talking, or it can happen almost immediately. I think the only real tip I’ve got is if you’re writing in third person and the characters are not coming to life, switch to first person. Even if you don’t intend to stick with it, at least write something in first person and do the sensory things. …

When you let the characters talk to each other, as you’re figuring out this story—

I can’t stop them. [Laughs] If it’s working, they won’t shut up!

Are you actively writing this down or typing it? Or are you allowing it to happen in your head until you do get that spark of the story?

I allow it to happen in my head, and I’m grateful that it’s happening. Now and then, if I think somebody says something vaguely significant, I will write it down in a notebook and wait for the moment in the story where they’ll reach the point of saying this. But, the first-person narration—and part of the last three books now have been first-person narration—is, in fact, dialogue. It’s a monologue. The person is talking to the reader. So, first person and reliance on dialogue do go very much together. 

I think dialogue is absolutely key to everything, and it’s very difficult because you can read books on characterization, narrative, conflict, and all that. But dialogue is so dependent on the individual ear. You probably could get more from a scriptwriter or somebody teaching theater writing than you could get from somebody teaching a novel on dialogue. 

I actually have quite a bee in my bonnet about dialogue when I think about it, because I think a lot of the things that are said are nonsense. Like “every person has to sound completely different from every other person,” and it’s not the way things are. I mean, if you’ve got five blokes going into the bar of a golf club for their hard-earned pint at the end of the day, you can make them sound completely different because you can say that one is Scottish, one is Welsh, one is Irish, one is a visiting American, and they will sound different. But it misses the point because what they are doing is to make the same sounds about the same subject. What they are saying is, “We belong here.” There’s no actual content in the speech at all. It’s the weather. It’s who was par or whatever—I know nothing about golf on the course—and things like that. It’s just saying: “We belong here, and we don’t threaten you. We are prepared to be friends.” 

It’s exactly the same when the kittiwake lands on the ledge and watches a thousand other kittiwakes. It says, “Kittiwake.” If it says anything else, it’s in trouble. It’s the kittiwake theory of dialogue. It’s the voice of a community, not the individual voices. Just like, for example, as you get in James Baldwin sometimes, where you get people in the religious community and they’re saying things like, “Praise the Lord.” They are saying, “We belong to this community. We share these beliefs.” They’re not saying anything that reveals them as an individual. And obviously, you need dialogue that reveals the individual, but you also need the voice of the community out of which the individual voice emerges. But, you know, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about dialogue. [Laughs]

Do you have a writing routine: time of day that you write or a target word count?

It varies at the moment. I write in the mornings. It’s 1,000-plus words a day, which I’m just starting a new project. All I need it to do at the moment is grow. And I need to stifle the voice in my head saying, This is rubbish. It’s not worth doing. The only way to do that is to plow on day by day because you can’t make any sensible judgments about a project until you’ve got a first draft. I used to have a little thing on the top of my screen: “It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be finished.” And you worry about it being good when it’s there. Until that point, it doesn’t matter really. It just has to be there.

So, you’re not one of those writers who has to revise the previous day’s work before you move on to today’s work?

No, I leave sometimes in the middle of a sentence, deliberately, or in the middle of a word so I can finish the end of the word and the end of the sentence with no thought at all. Then just move on. 

It’s all about conning yourself at the early stages. You’ve got to con yourself into finishing. Because everybody, at some stage, everybody who isn’t a complete—I won’t use four-letter words—thinks their work is rubbish some of time. I would distrust any writer who never thought their work was rubbish. So, it’s a matter of shutting that voice up long enough for you to be able to see what you’ve got.

I talk to writers all the time, but I still find it so reassuring to hear writers of your stature feel the need to con yourself, to make yourself believe that your work can be something good, even if it’s not right now.

You’re only as good as your last paragraph, and if you’re writing a very rough first draft, your last paragraph is always rubbish. If you’ve got a problem, you’ve got a problem of belief, and somehow, you’ve got to find a way to believe, even though your last paragraph was rubbish. Winning prizes and stuff like that, which you might think would help, it doesn’t help in the least.

Is there any advice that you have for the readers of WD that we haven’t talked about?

Keep going, but don’t focus too much on the externals of recognition and publishing. You have to enjoy the journey. 

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We first connected with Sarah Daniels during her debut novel’s publication and featured her in our January/February 2023 issue‘s Breaking In column. Now that her next publication hit shelves, we’re reconnecting with her for a quick Q&A.

What was the time frame for writing this latest book?

This book was so different from book one. The Stranded was written over almost ten years (while I was also doing my PhD and having kids!). It was my first book, so I was very much learning as I went along. The Only Way Out was way faster. I wrote most of it during COVID lockdown, I planned a lot of the story before I wrote it, and I focused on it exclusively for about 8 months. It was a very different experience. 

Has your perspective on the publication process changed since your debut was published?

Absolutely. I’ve learnt so much over the publication of these books, including how long everything takes and just how much time and energy go into getting a book out in the world. It’s a team effort (and not even a small team). Editors, designers, cover artists, proofreaders (multiple), agents, and that’s before you even get to marketing and publicity, which takes another team. When it came to writing the acknowledgements, I was terrified I’d miss someone!

What was the biggest surprise while getting this book ready for publication?

Without doubt, it was the sense of responsibility I felt. My main focus when I’m writing is to produce something entertaining, after all, people are spending both their hard-earned money and their precious and finite time on it. And with book two, this intensified. I was worried about letting down the readers who had stuck with me.

What do you feel you did really well with this novel?

I’m really pleased with the setting of The Only Way Out. In The Stranded, it was quite easy to get this sense of eerie claustrophobia because the characters are literally trapped aboard a derelict cruise ship. It was a very contained, almost pressure-cooker environment, which naturally built tension. It was a little bit more difficult in book two because (spoilers!) they’re no longer on a ship. I needed to find a way to keep the atmosphere of confinement and unease, even though the world had opened up. So, I drew on the time I spent in Sheffield, where there are these massive factories and metalworks, some of which are derelict, while others have been repurposed for people to live in. It gave me exactly the unsettling atmosphere I was looking to create.

Anything you would have done differently?

Outlining. Always. It’s the bane of my writing life. I could halve the editing time if I could just learn how to outline. I’m working on it, but I’ve also made peace with the fact that I’m a messy writer and that messiness is good for my creativity.

Would you like to share some advice for our readers?

Write what you love without worrying too much about whether it’s fashionable. If you enjoy the story, chances are other people will too.

What’s next for you?

Right now, I’m drawing on my roots as an archaeologist, and I’m working on a novel that has to do with skeletons.

Where can our audience find you online?

Instagram: @sarahdanielsbooks

Substack: InPrep.substack.com

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We first connected with Nita Prose during her debut novel’s publication and featured her in our September/October 2022′s Breaking In column. Now that her next publication hits shelves today, we’re reconnecting with her for a quick Q&A.

What was the time frame for writing this latest book?

I wrote The Maid’s Secret in about eight months, but that speed is deceptive and only part of the entire story! It took me a long twenty years as an editor to learn the narrative skills that allow me to pen a first draft relatively quickly. After getting a draft down, there’s lots of editing that happens before the book becomes final. 

Has your perspective on the publication process changed since your debut was published?

It’s been humbling to be on the “other side” of publishing—meaning as a writer rather than as an editor. Working in a publishing house, you’re surrounded by colleagues, and you’re all pushing towards the same end goals and conversing about your books every day. When you’re writing, it’s not like that. Though you have a team and all kinds of people rooting for you (your agent, your publishers, your editors, and more), they’re not in the office with you. And when it comes to the actual task of getting that story onto the scary, white page, it’s all up to you. It’s a lonely, challenging pursuit.

I’ve always been keenly aware of the leap of faith writers take when finding their fiction, but now I’ve experienced the entire emotional rollercoaster personally. I’ve also been lucky to come out the other side greeted by readers who love Molly and feel they know her. This is so gratifying, and it makes the lonely moments worthwhile. 

What was the biggest surprise while getting this book ready for publication?

Gran’s voice was the biggest surprise. This is the first Molly the maid book that features any voice other than Molly’s. In The Maid’s Secret, Gran tells her own story for the first time. It was electrically satisfying to bring Gran to life and to discover all the small ways her experiences dovetail into Molly’s, informing who Molly becomes. We are all the product of those who came before us, and in the case of Gran, Molly comes to appreciate the many sacrifices she made to give Molly a good life. 

What do you feel you did really well with this novel?

I love books that combine genres, that “Frankenstein” two styles together to create something new and different. In this novel, we have a high-stakes art heist in the present-tense mystery, but in the past tense, what unfurls is an epic, star-crossed love story—one that underpins and informs all the other books in the series. Finding that new genre—the epic love story, told across a great expanse of time all inside a racing, pacy mystery—that, I believe, is my greatest accomplishment in this book. 

Anything you would have done differently?

Yes! I would have planned out the Molly the Maid series from the start. When I wrote The Maid, I had enough on my plate thinking of completing just one book. While writing, I never considered the possibility of its success, never mind what might come after it! As it turned out, I was greeted by many pleas and entreaties from my readers and from my publishers to keep the series going.

At first, I was daunted by that possibility. What other stories existed in Molly’s world? Was there really more to say? So grateful was I that people had come to love Molly, I was worried that nothing else I could write would measure up to the first book in the series. In the end, I found my way to other stories that I hope offer as much as The Maid, maybe even more. That being said, I would have spared myself a lot of creative angst if I’d figured out the narrative map from the outset! 

Would you like to share some advice with our readers?

There’s the old adage that writers should “write what they know.” But I think writers often take that too literally. Often, we know so much more than we think we do, and only through the strange pursuit of fiction can we realize it on the page. I’ve always been fascinated with the irony that fiction is all “made up,” and yet when it’s at its best, there is often more truth to fiction than to any hard fact. This perplexing mystery keeps me engaged in the process of writing.

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What’s next for you?

I’m now figuring out my next book and the characters who will live in my noggin for the next few years. I’m excited to explore new characters and a narrative tapestry that’s entirely different from anything I’ve written before. In some ways, I’m throwing off the cozy blanket to embrace a more atmospheric style of mystery that combines propulsive thriller elements. Still, character is the root of everything in my writing, and in my next book, you’ll meet someone who’s forced to confront the legacy of her own secrets as she nears the end of her life. It’s a story that explores the ebb and flow of life’s seasons and that examines how the past can reverberate through time and across generations, delivering closure, but never as expected. 

Where can our audience find you online?

Instagram: @nitaprose
Website: NitaProse.com

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We first connected with Nikki May during her debut novel’s publication and featured her in our January/February 2022 issue‘s Breaking In column. Now that her next publication is hitting the shelves today, we’re reconnecting with her for a quick Q&A.

What was the time frame for writing this latest book?

Forever! At least that’s what it felt like.

I started working on my second book before my debut, Wahala, was published. I rattled through thirty-thousand words in three months but quickly realized I was telling the story the wrong way and abandoned it. Then Wahala came out, and the positive reception gave me “the fear,” I became convinced it was a one-off and that I’d forgotten how to write.

Eventually, I knuckled down and went back to basics: What’s the story? Who’s telling it? Why does it matter? I knew I had the bones of a great book I just needed to work out how to tell it. I had a draft in six months, getting 80,000 words down but stopping short of the denouement because the real work begins in the editing, and it was clear there were loads to unpick at the beginning.

My second edit took three months, and by this stage, my story had shape, my characters felt real, and I knew what I was trying to do.

I did two more sets of structural edits with my editors who had brilliant suggestions on tightening the narrative and focusing the scope. And then it was onto line and copy edits. So, all-in-all, about a year to write it (spread over two years) and six months of editing with my editors.

Has your perspective on the publication process changed since your debut was published?

I guess it’s less mysterious now I’ve seen behind the curtain. This time around I had a clear idea of the process and how long everything takes. I’m now used to the s-l-o-w, s-l-o-w, s-l-o-w followed by the Go! Go! Go! rollercoaster that’s the reality of this industry. And I now have author friends who are a huge help and a welcome reality check. I also feel more confident in my voice now, so there’s slightly less pressure.

What was the biggest surprise while getting this book ready for publication?

How personal it is. People say your debut is autobiographical but there is much more of me in This Motherless Land than in Wahala. I didn’t realize how much until I started prepping for live book events and thinking about what to say. When we meet Funke in 1978, she’s living my life in Lagos! She’s in my house, with my parrot and my green Chopper. She goes to my school and my beach Even her mother is inspired by mine. Writers draw on what they know, I guess!

What do you feel you did really well with this novel?

Characters. I’m very proud of Funke and Liv, it took a lot of work to develop them, and I had to dig deep but it was worth it. I’ve created two fully fleshed three-dimensional characters that readers can believe in and root for. They’re flawed (perfection is mind-numbingly dull) but they are real, and I love them. I’m also thrilled that people are calling it page-turning cinematic. Yes, it covers some meaty themes and touches on serious topics like race, culture, and place—but its main aim is to entertain, and I think I delivered that.

Anything you would have done differently?

As always, I’d procrastinate less and trust myself more. I’m brilliant at finding excuses not to write—some days scrubbing the bathroom is more attractive than staring at a keyboard. If I knuckled down and got on with it (and stayed off social media), I’d be on book five by now!

Would you like to share some advice for our readers?

Persevere. Books are big and unwieldy and the only way to get to the end is to keep going. Finish a draft and then go back to the beginning. And repeat. Again, and again— until you’ve got the right story down. Oh, and read. Read in your genre and out of it, read brilliant books to inspire you and awful books to make you feel good about yourself. Just read.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on my next book. Which translates as—I’m back to procrastinating and spending too much time on social media. But I do have a great idea and I’m falling in love with new characters.

Where can our audience find you online?

X: @NikkiOMay
Instagram: @NikkiMayWriter
Website: Nikki-May.com

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