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An Interview with Authors Sandi Hoover & Jim Tritten

Sandi Hoover and Jim Tritten began their separate writing careers penning nonfiction. Both members of SouthWest Writers and Corrales Writing Group, Sandi and Jim published their first collaborative short story in the 2018 anthology Love, Sweet to Spicy. The novella Panama’s Gold: A Tale of Greed (Red Penguin Books, 2021) is the writing team’s sixth collaboration. Visit Sandi on Facebook and Amazon, and Jim on Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. You’ll find them both on the Corrales Writing Group Facebook page.


What is your elevator pitch for Panama’s Gold?
Lanny Mitchell, a youthfully-retired environmental lawyer, and amateur birder, revisits Panama to test her idea of becoming an ex-pat. Chen Zhou represents his company and a Chinese gang whose objective is to secure an economic advantage for his country with raw materials critical in manufacturing smartphones, digital cameras, computer parts, and technology for renewable energy. Lanny unexpectedly encounters ecological issues and the activities of the gang. A dormant volcano leaks gases that kill local birds and threaten humans. The finding of Spanish gold and artifacts are linked to events before the Panama Canal was excavated, but also hint that perhaps governments hid deaths, using Yellow Fever as the cause of mortality. The Chinese gang-master does not tolerate failure and Chen Zhou is the target of his wrath after Chinese attempts to corner the world rare-earth market are thwarted by Lanny and local Panamanians. Finding the answer to environmental and economic concerns and helping friends who want the ownership to stay in Panama’s hands, drive the action to a satisfying conclusion.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
Using a setting as a character in the book was a first for Sandi, but having fallen in love with Panama, it was a wonderful reason to mentally revisit the country. Jim was charged with making sure that male dialogue was accurate. We challenged his writing about flying with the helicopter crash; it needed to be realistic and yet understandable by every reader.

Tell us how the book came together.
The idea started with Sandi’s excitement over her lengthy trip to Panama and how we could use it for a story. Jim created a basic outline and Sandi wrote to fill it in. Jim created more detail and we just batted it back and forth until we decided to forge ahead. All the chapters were sent to the members of the Corrales Writing Group for critiques and then more rewriting.

Who are your main protagonists and why will readers connect with them?
The protagonist who drives the story is Chen Zhou, although the reader and the characters in the book do not realize that at first. Readers are likely to be surprised at the Chinese presence in Panama and will more likely connect with the book’s antagonist and main Character Lanny Mitchell. This would be similar to the James Bond novels and films where Bond is always the antagonist against the latest evil person in that one story. We think the ending will satisfy the reader when Chen Zhou gets his just reward.

What is the main setting, and how does it impact the story and the characters?
Panama’s location, its landscapes, forests, and volcanos let us create scenes that couldn’t be done elsewhere. This story wouldn’t happen without this setting. It would also not have happened without the assistance of our favorite SWW Panamanian ex-pat, Brinn Colenda. Living in Panama, Brinn was able to research and report on many critical details in the book. He is our unindicted co-conspirator.

Is there a scene in your book you’d love to see play out in a movie?
The first helicopter flight with Lanny and Jorge. It could be dramatic and beautiful and teasing with low level flight to show off the forest and the pilot’s skill.

Was there anything surprising you discovered while doing research for the book?
Who knew there were so many attempts to create a way for trade to cross the isthmus. The Spanish, of course, crossed and left a hint of a trail behind. Didn’t know at all about Stevens’ attempt at a railroad in the mid 1800s. Then the French tried and gave up, and finally the American effort succeeded with a high cost of lives lost.

What was your favorite part of putting this project together?
Working with a publisher and learning from each other.


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy posts to a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




Author Update: Michael Backus

Michael Backus is a fiction and nonfiction author who teaches online writing courses for Zoetrope Fiction and Gotham Writers. His newest release, The Vanishing Point (Cactus Moon Publications, 2021), has been called “lyrical and stunning…readable and relatable. Subtly masterful without showing off…Utterly absorbing, it works along that interesting line that marries plot and artistry.” You’ll find Mike on his website MichaelJBackus.com and on Facebook and Twitter. For more about his work, read SWW’s 2017 interview and watch a book reading from The Vanishing Point.


What would you like readers to know about the story you tell in The Vanishing Point?
In the most basic way, it’s a book about trauma; about how a 10-year-old boy went through a tragic event that splintered and destroyed his family and how he as an adult visited this trauma on his own child, though in a much different way (he essentially abandons his daughter when she’s two). But it’s also about how easy it is for someone to drift away from all human contact (hence the title, The Vanishing Point, referring to that dynamic when some people seem to just disappear from everyone and everything they know) and how difficult it can be to come back from that. I think of my main character Henry as a moral character who in his 40s has found himself stranded in a New Hampshire town where he knows no one and he seems content to essentially find a corner of the world and wait to die.

Then through a series of circumstances, he finds himself in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he abandoned his child Cadence eight years before and slowly and haltingly, he gets to know her. So it’s also a redemption story of sorts and not just with his daughter but with his mother, who is a sad, alcoholic geriatric still living in the town where Henry grew up.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
At one point, this book was over 700 polished pages long! It was ridiculous. I always remember showing it to an agent in NYC and she liked the writing but said “it just keeps going on and on.” So my own verbosity was something of a challenge. But I also ended up with a lot of plotting problems. I’ve been teaching creative writing (at the college level and for a place called Gotham Writer’s Workshop out of NYC) for over 20 years, and I’ve often talked about the idea of “writing as an act of discovery.” That you figure out who your characters are and where the story is going AS you write. And I wrote this book that way, but when I finally reduced it to more or less its current length, I hit a lot of plotting problems with two timeline narratives (a past narrative with Henry as a child and the present narrative with Henry as a lost 40 year old) because I never planned for that past/present back and forth. I spent so much time making sure the chapters fit together and that a past chapter flowed into a present chapter and the juxtaposition of past and present carried some meaning of its own. This was not easy. On a practical level, I simply didn’t have enough “past” material to balance out the “present.” This caused me a lot of grief and, if I’m honest, I still don’t think it’s as good as it could have been had I planned the structure of the novel a bit more beforehand. My larger point is when you’re writing a novel, I think it makes some sense to figure out who your characters are as you write, but it can be helpful to have a little clearer, more laid out sense of the book’s plot.

How did the book come together?
Originally, I had this (quite possibly idiotic) idea of writing a story about a man who has abandoned his child, ends up meeting her and makes a moral decision not to be part of her life, a decision the readers would ultimately agree with. That went away once I started writing from 10-year-old Cadence’s POV. She was such a lively child (I felt freed up writing from a child’s POV) that halfway in, I realized there was no way I could have Henry just take off again. So the book became about something different, about a grown man pushing aside his own past and finding a way to be there for his daughter and also, by the end, his mother.

It took me maybe two years to write this, edit it, cut it in half, etc., but for ten years, I struggled to do anything with it. I have a lot of minor connections in the literary world and got this to a number of high-powered agents, all of whom turned it down. I had an agent for a micro-second after the short story magazine One Story published something of mine, but he never loved the book or the life and he quit the agency and while he passed the book onto his boss, the boss was not interested. So for years, I just let it be until I found Cactus Moon, a small publisher out of Arizona, willing to publish it.

Tell us about your main protagonists. Did they surprise you as you wrote their story?
Like I said, I knew I wanted to get Henry and his daughter together at some point, but I was surprised at how well Cadence came out as a character once I decided to write from her POV and once I’d started writing her chapters, I knew there was no way I could have Henry take off and leave her a second time. Cadence was just too lively to abandon a second time. Oddly, a lot of Cadence came indirectly from my mother. I have this photo of my mother when she’s 12 (she looks ferocious, determined, and sad) and by then, both her parents had died (in rural Kentucky in the 30s) and she was cast adrift into a world of despotic foster families and periodic stays in an orphanage. And in her diaries, she wrote about meeting her bus driver as an adult who said her and her sister were “the two fighting-est kids he ever met.” So I took that photo and that memory and fashioned a far less traumatic backstory for Cadence, but her general prickliness remained and that’s how Cadence’s character developed.

I also wrote a short story around the same time imagining the night my mother’s mother died from TB and there’s a lot of Cadence in that character. This story was published as a stand-alone chapbook, Coney on the Moon, a few years ago. (**See note on this at the end of the interview.)

While writing, I realized I needed to add something for Henry. This is a guy who had a bad relationship with his wife (Cadence’s mother, who is long out of the picture — Cadence is being raised by her maternal grandparents in Eldorado outside Santa Fe) and had abandoned his own child. I needed there to be some hiccup in the process of getting to know his daughter, something that hints at a personality able to do what he did. So I added an old friend of Henry’s who has a wife and Henry kind of pursues her romantically for a while as a way to not have to deal with his daughter This added a lot to the story and is something I only realized I needed after the early drafts were done.

One last thing. At one time, I called this book Double. Henry’s central trauma is he was a twin who lost his beloved brother to a freak accident when he was 10. That’s the incident that splintered the family. So in revision, I developed this idea that Henry as a young man was obsessed with reincarnation and decided he’d just wait until his brother is reborn somewhere in the world. But by the time the book begins, he hasn’t thought about his brother or reincarnation in decades. At some point in getting to know Cadence, he gets an idea and, as he puts it, you can’t “unthink a thought” once you’ve had it, that thought being that Cadence might be the reincarnated soul of his long-dead brother. The book never takes a position on this, it remains in Henry’s head (which is why I quit using that title, it’s not a major part of the book, more a character shading) but it adds nuance to Henry’s character.

How did you know you had taken the manuscript as far as it could go, that it was finished and ready for publishing?
At some point, I just had to admit, this is as good as I’m capable of doing at this time. When Cactus Moon accepted the book, I did a tightening revision where I lost seven whole pages simply by excising unnecessary words and phrases. I didn’t change anything fundamental about the story but I made it tighter. That was gratifying. That said, since I’ve published this, I’ve had to do a number of readings and I wish I’d been more ruthless in cutting. This is still a wordy book and even when I’m happy about the music of the writing, I see places all the time I wish I’d cut back.

What was your favorite part of putting this project together?
Besides the writing, I really enjoyed working on the cover. I wasn’t that happy with what Cactus Moon suggested for covers so I got an idea, hired an artist, and along with my literary brain trust (essentially my sister and her partner, both writers and excellent editors), shepherded the creation of the cover. I was thrilled with how it came out.

Is there something that always inspires you or triggers your creativity?
Reading. Here’s an article I published in The Writer magazine many years ago about what reading the right thing can do for your writing. There’s nothing like a book or story that wows me to get me wanting to write and often it’s not the entire story, but a scene or moment that depicts something I recognize (an emotional dynamic for example) but have never seen described that way before. I go into that specifically in the article “The Trick of Reading the Right Thing While Writing.”

Do you prefer the creating or editing aspect of writing?
I’m a firm believer that the art of a story or a novel comes in revision. This is NOT how everyone works or should work (I always remember going to a reading by Joy Williams, who is an amazing writer, in the early 90s and she claimed she doesn’t revise at all. That she thinks about a story constantly for about a month and then writes it and when she’s done, it’s done.), but it is how a lot of us work. Get a first draft down any way you can by pushing through it and not stopping, THEN step back, see what you have and start adding details and nuance in the revision phase, which lasts much longer than the first draft phase.

What writing projects are you working on now?
A couple of years ago, I finished a book-length memoir about living in NYC’s Lower East Side in the early 80s in general (a time when the city was vibrant, full of art and artists, and much much scarier than it is now) and working in the Gansevoort Meatpacking district specifically. In the early 80s, New York City’s Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting the S&M clubs The Mineshaft and The Anvil, transgendered prostitutes, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. It was a lively, insane world so long gone, it’s hard to believe it ever existed. The Meatpacking district in Manhattan today is a landscape of high end restaurants, shops, the new Whitney Museum, and the High Line elevated park. I’ve sent this book to a lot of people, both agents and publishers, and it remains stubbornly unrepresented and unpublished, though I feel it has some of my best writing.

I’ve started a new novel, but it seems way too early to talk about it, otherwise I’m like that person at a party going on about a book (or screenplay) they want to write but have barely started. No one wants to hear about that.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
**Earlier in this interview when I wrote about publishing a story with Redbird Chapbooks, I mentioned a note. This is it. When I first sent that story to Redbird (it’s called “Coney on the Moon”), I entered it in an Excel spreadsheet I’ve kept for 20 years detailing everything I’ve submitted and when I went to type in “Redbird” it filled in! So I looked and sure enough, I’d sent this exact story to Redbird a year before and had been rejected. I contacted the editor right away and apologized and said I’d withdraw it. She wrote back and said did I want to withdraw it? This was a different editor and I could just leave it, so I did. And they took it! The moral of the story is acceptance of publication is often a matter of timing and chance. The same story was rejected by the same publication but then a different editor took it. Good to keep this in mind when submitting.


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




Author Update 2022: Neill McKee

Creative nonfiction author Neill McKee is a retired teacher, international filmmaker, and multi-media producer. In 2021 he published Kid on the Go!, his third memoir, that follows his early life in Ontario, Canada. You’ll find Neill on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as on NeillMckeeAuthor.com. To learn about his first two memoirs, read his 2019 and 2021 SWW interviews.


Kid on the Go! is a prequel to your first memoir, Finding Myself in Borneo. What do you want readers to know about this newest release?
It is what I would call a stand-alone prequel. There’s no need to read this one before my Borneo memoir. Kid on the Go! is all about the experiences that led me to an international career. It’s a journey through my childhood, adolescence, and teenage years from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, in the small (then industrially-polluted) town of Elmira, Ontario, Canada—one of the centers of production for Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. I describe ordinary experiences in a humorous way: learning to play and work, fish and hunt, avoid dangers, cope with death in the family, deal with bullies, and build or restore “escape” vehicles. I describe my exploding hormones, attraction to girls, rebellion against authority, and survival of 1960s’ rock ‘n’ roll culture and how I emerged on the other side as a youth leader. Many readers tell me they relate to parts of my experiences. My writing brings up many memories of their own, and that’s what I was aiming for.

Tell us how the book came together.
I started to write draft stories for this book when I retired from my main career in 2013. I wrote my three memoirs—Kid on the Go!, Finding Myself in Borneo, and Guns and Gods in My Genes—simultaneously, but I published this one last. After the latter book was released in December 2020, I got down to finishing the prequel. My editor, Pamela Yenser, had already completed one revision and I had feedback from about ten reviewers, so it was a matter of refining the text and sending it back to Pamela for a second look before my final edits and review by my proofreader. I probably went through 50 drafts before publishing.

My design company came up with about four cover concepts but I favored the one I designed myself—an illustration I did of me flying over my polluted hometown on a motorized scooter I made in the 1950s. My designers were skeptical, but I did a little pretest by sending about seven possible covers to 50 people for their opinions. My design concept won, hands-down, although I made a change to the subtitle so that potential readers would not think it’s a children’s book.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
Actually, it was the easiest of my three memoirs to write. Except for the postscript, which contains a brief analysis of the chemical pollution in my town, this book did not require a lot of research.

Kid on the Go! is based on my own memories and some of my brother’s recollections. I’m lucky to have such a clear memory of my childhood and youth. I just had to put it all into words that would have a somewhat universal appeal, at least for memoir readers who like to explore past eras. I decided to make the book different by adding over 50 illustrations. My artist wife, and an illustrator I tried to hire, convinced me to do the illustrations myself, since they would be more authentic. That took many hours of work.

Do you have a quote from Kid on the Go! that you’d like to share?
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 3:

During the summers, we explored and fished in the creek downstream from the chemical factory, where DDT, 2,4-D, and 2,4,5-T were in full production. There, we came upon acidic festering pools and creepy things, such as frogs with two heads and fish with only one eye. We didn’t try very hard to catch these fish, but if we happened to hook one, we’d throw it back in. They looked too spooky, almost ghost-like, and Mom never liked fish, anyway.

At suppertime, if we tried to tell Mom and Dad about these weird creatures of the Canagagigue Creek, Dad would chuckle and Mom would say something like, “You’re lucky to have meat and potatoes, unlike the children in Africa, so eat up all that’s on your plate.”

Any great revelations about your younger self or your upbringing while writing the book?
I think I was surprised to find how much mentors changed my life. As I grew older, I became an increasingly rebellious youth, especially in the rock ‘n’ roll 1960s when being a “hard rock” was cool—a term used for guys who slicked back their hair like Elvis Presley, wore leather jackets, drifted through school, fixed up and raced old cars and motorcycles, and chased girls.

But in Grade 12, then the second-last year of high school in Ontario, on a cold and rainy night, I saw lights on in our family’s church, which I had stopped attending. I parked my car and entered an ongoing Young People’s meeting where what I considered to be straitlaced girls gasped at the sight of me. There I met my first mentor, a student minister by the name of Bob who was studying theology and philosophy at university. We quickly became friends and I started to read books he suggested, such as Paul Tillich’s The Eternal Now, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison, and Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Bob preferred questions rather than answers to stimulate deep discussions. I’d never experienced this approach before. When I returned the next week, I was elected Vice President and then President in Grade 13, although by then I was more interested in Zen Buddhism than Christianity. Through discussion groups, debates, music and dances, I doubled attendance.

Much changed for me in school as well, where I was encouraged by my English teacher, Mr. Exley, a man only five years my senior. He was an unusual character who taught literature with dramatic gestures. He coached me on my terrible poetry and marked my essays thoroughly with a fine red pen. He also privately lent me his copy of Bob Dylan’s album The Times They Are A-Changin’ and recommended J.D. Salinger’s obscenity-filled The Catcher in the Rye (not on the curriculum, for sure!). And when I entered university, I forged friendships with people from different cultures—graduate students from Southern Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) and Egypt. The influence of these last two mentors steered me in an international direction.

What was your favorite part of putting this project together?
I believe it was rediscovering how much each childhood and youth experience determined my ultimate direction in life. It’s not that I, nor anyone else, could have predicted it from any trend in my behavior. It’s the collective experience that counted. For instance, I write about how, very early in my life, I dreamed of living in some far away exotic and verdant land and believed the shapes on a distant hill beyond the chemical factory were African animals. I ended up living in, and working in, Borneo and Africa.

I was never much of a reader as a child. As soon as my parents bought a television set in 1953, I became glued to it. I visualized everything and I’m sure it had a lot of influence on me becoming a filmmaker. Also, as a young kid, I had little fear of venturing into dangerous places like polluted creeks where I saw those creepy, transformed fish and frogs. That probably led me to take chances in life and work in places where many people would not want to venture.

What is the greatest challenge of writing for the memoir market?
So many bestselling childhood memoirs are by people who struggled against physical or mental abuse, poverty, racial or cultural discrimination, or dogmatic parents and guardians, but somehow overcame such oppression to get a good education and succeed in life. It is a challenge to write and sell books in such a market since I experienced none of those conditions. So what could I write about that would tell an entertaining, captivating story? I had to have something to struggle against to add conflict and drama to the narrative. In my case, it was the industrial and environmental pollution I experienced in my hometown. The odors from chemical and fertilizer factories, the slaughter house, and unpleasant manure smells radiating from Old Order Mennonite farmers’ fields provide the setting for the overall theme of escape.

So far, your focus has been on nonfiction. Have you ever wanted to write fiction?
I haven’t ventured into fiction writing because I seldom read fiction. I watch movies for relaxation in the evening, while sipping some wine. I have always wanted to seek new facts and discover things about the real world in my filmmaking and writing. That’s challenging enough for one life, I feel.

After writing three books about your life, what is the most important lesson you’ve learned about publishing?
The most important lesson is that writing and publishing is only half of the task. I chose to self-publish through Ingram Spark because, at my age, I could not wait for the time it would take to find a suitable publisher. I had a couple of offers from publishers for my Borneo book, but they were not willing to put any serious amount of resources into marketing—I’d have to do that myself while they took most of the royalties. So, that’s what occupies the other half of my time. I’m told there are about 1,000 new titles published everyday in North America’s English market in all genres. A book marketing specialist said I was doing everything right: a good website with a blog and event page, interviews, a blog and review tour for each book, special publication reviews, sending out many updates to a large email list, and some social media posts. The latter is the hardest thing for me to find the motivation to do because I am not sure it sells books. I just keep trying.

What writing projects are you working on now?
I have completed over half of the first draft of my next manuscript on my career as an international filmmaker and multimedia producer working for two Canadian development agencies, UNICEF, Johns Hopkins University, and an agency called FHI360 in Washington, D.C., where I was director of a communication project with 150 staff and a large budget. During my career, I lived for four years in Malaysia, four years in Bangladesh, seven years in Kenya and Uganda (East Africa), and my last overseas posting was in Moscow during 2004-2007. Besides that, I traveled to about 80 countries on short-term assignments. All this has given me significant experience in learning about issues within so many fields of endeavor to improve human life in the developing world. My challenge is to write about my career creatively and coherently in a way that will entertain and educate—that is, make readers smile, wonder, and think about the present state of our planet. I am also including thoughts on what was and wasn’t achieved in the projects I documented or created, my advancement in skills, personal development, marriage and family life, and memories of many of the people I met in my travels and those who influenced me and propelled my way forward. I hope to complete this book by the end of 2022. I’ve set up a website on my main projects, including most of the videos, comic books, and other media products I have retrieved so far:  https://www.neillmckeevideos.com/.


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




An Interview with Author Kirt Hickman

Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned award-winning fiction/nonfiction author. His works include two speculative fiction series (the science fiction thrillers of Worlds Asunder and the Age of Prophecy fantasy novels) and the how-to writer’s guide Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness. Kirt’s latest release is Assassins’ Prey (February 2021), the second novel in the Age of Prophecy series. You’ll find him on his Amazon Author page.


What would you like readers to know about the story you tell in Assassins’ Prey?
Assassins’ Prey is the second book of the Age of Prophecy fantasy trilogy, which tells the story of a young farmer who sets out amid deception and betrayal to stop the fulfillment of a prophecy that promises to plunge all of the Civilized Lands into an age of darkness. Readers should read Book I, Fabler’s Legend, before reading Assassins’ Prey.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
The Age of Prophecy trilogy is the product of a fantasy roll-playing campaign. All of the main characters were created and played by real people. This takes the control of the storyline out of the hands of the author and puts it into the hands of the players. As a result, the story is more rich and intricate than it might have been otherwise, but developing a story that will sell as a series of fiction novels in this manner requires a lot of trimming and shaping of the plot after the gaming campaign is over.

From an awards standpoint, Assassins’ Prey is the middle book of a trilogy, so contest judges have neither the beginning nor the end of the story. That makes it more difficult for me to win an award for the book. Nevertheless, Assassins’ Prey was a finalist in the 2021 NM/AZ Book Awards.

Who are your main characters, and why will readers connect with them?
My main characters (largely an ensemble cast) include a young farmer, a former constable, a handicapped half-elf, an ice wizard, a demon-hunting priest, and a half-demon monk. As extraordinary as some of these characters are, my readers will relate to them because they (like, we) struggle to overcome their own unique fears and weaknesses, priorities and moral sensibilities, and personality conflicts while pursuing their common goal.

How did the book come together?
The inspiration for this project was the fantasy series written by RA Salvatore, which takes place in a world that he shares with the Forgotten Realms fantasy game series. The books read as though they were developed as part of a roll-playing campaign (though I don’t think any of them were actually created in that way). From his inspiration, however, I decided to create a unique world of my own and host a game campaign to develop the storyline for the trilogy.

It took about a year and a half of roll playing to play out the story in each of the three books (so four and a half years total). Then I spent another two years banging the first book into shape. So Fabler’s Legend took over six years to write. Assassins’ Prey has been a long time coming because my life was interrupted by a couple of crises that kept me away from my writing for a few years after the release of Fabler’s Legend.

What was the most difficult aspect of world building for this book?
The physical world (i.e. the geography) was pretty easy to build. I knew what elements I wanted the world to have, but I didn’t want to generate an entire world map detail by detail, so I used a computer gaming program to generate the map randomly. I thought I would need to generate many random maps before I got one with all of the elements that I was looking for, but a suitable world popped out on the first go-round.

From there I had to develop the structure of each of my kingdoms (race, politics, economy, etc.). This was probably the most difficult part, because I wanted several diverse kingdoms. But even these were largely determined by the geography of each region. The area with the densest mountains went to the dwarves, the large green swath went to the elves, fertile regions for kingdoms with agricultural economies, etc.

When did you know you had taken the manuscript as far as it could go, and when did you know it was ready for publishing?
My writers’ guide, Revising Fiction, describes my writing process. I follow it exactly, step by step. One of the advantages of Revising Fiction, and the writing process that it describes, is that it has an end. When I reached the end of the process, I knew the manuscript was as good as it could be. I could have continued tinkering with it, I suppose, but any improvements at that point would have been marginal at best.

What was your favorite part of putting this project together?
Playing the game was a lot of fun. As far as the writing process goes, I always enjoy the editing more than I enjoy writing first draft. My first drafts are always pretty atrocious. Editing, on the other hand, provides instant gratification—I can watch the book improve, right before my eyes.

Of all the books you’ve written — Worlds Asunder sci-fi series, Age of Prophecy fantasy series, the nonfiction how-to Revising Fiction, and several children’s books — which one was the most challenging, and which was the easiest (or most enjoyable) to write?
Each series has its own challenges. Revising Fiction was the easiest to get onto paper. I already had the writing process figured out. It took me only nineteen days to put it onto paper in book form. Then I just had to scour my writing sources for examples to illustrate each point. The Worlds Asunder series has been the biggest challenge, I guess, because I’ve had to come up with six novel-length fiction stories from scratch, some of which aren’t actually written yet.

What do many beginning writers misunderstand about telling a story?
I see the same types of problems over and over again in novels that I critique for beginning writers. These problems fall into two categories: the story and the writing, both of which are critical to a book’s success.

The story must make sense, particularly the actions of the characters and the motivations that drive those actions. The story must be clear, consistent, and cohesive.

Writing is a craft that must be developed. You can’t just type words that describe the events and expect the narrative to be engaging. I get a lot of manuscripts that are rife with passive voice, emotions that are told rather than shown, characters and settings that lack detail and specificity, and large informational sidebars just dumped onto the page. Writing must be polished to be engaging.

If the stars aligned, what past or present television or movie series would you love to write for (or be involved with in any capacity)?
In terms of TV shows and movies, I certainly have my favorites (among them are Star Trek and just about anything produced by Joss Whedon), but I don’t really have much of an interest in working in film. The workload and pace of such projects requires far more time and commitment than I’m willing to give at this point in my life—it would take the fun out of it. Of course, if someone wanted to produce a series or feature film from my own novels, I might be persuaded to reconsider. J

You have years of experience as a technical writer. How has that experience benefited your fiction writing?
My years in engineering enabled me to develop the start-to-finish process that I now use for everything I write. Without that, I’d still be staring at the first draft of my initial manuscript, wondering what to do with it.

Looking back to the beginning of your writing/publishing career, what do you know now that you wish you’d known then?
I wish I’d had a better understanding of the time commitment required for the marketing aspects of the job. If you want your book to be successful, you have to take the time to market it. This is true whether you’re traditionally published or self-published.

What are the key issues in writing a series to keep readers coming back for more?
Tell a good story through the eyes of unique, interesting, and believable characters.

What writing projects are you working on now?
Host of Evil, the final book of the Age of Prophecy series.


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy posts to a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




An Interview with Author Valerie Baeza

Valerie Baeza is a poet and author who writes upmarket fiction centered around interpersonal relationships with a unique sense of empathy for the human condition. A former feature writer for New Mexico Film News, she spent over three years writing and editing her debut novel, Story of My Life (October 2021). You’ll find Valerie on her website ValerieBaezaAuthor.com and on Facebook and Instagram.


What is your elevator pitch for Story of My Life?
Story of My Life is an intense page-turner about one man’s journey through love, grief, and discovering hope within the bundles of handwritten letters he exchanged with two women.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
The hardest part about writing this novel was one scene at the end. This book is about a man who wants to commit suicide. Saying more would ruin the story for readers, so you’ll just have to pick up a copy. But that scene at the end was the hardest aspect of the entire novel.

Who are your main characters, and why will readers connect with them?
There are three main characters in Story of My Life: Garence Leitner, Sabina Mondragon, and Chalise Bonner. Garence is a travel writer from Britain, so readers would appreciate his lifestyle. The second connection would be with Sabina and the hardships she experienced throughout her life. The life events between these two, all three characters actually, are relatable. Falling in love, marriage, death, depression, friendship, and discovering hope.

How does the setting impact the story and the characters?
The novel is set in Bourton-on-the-Water, England, a quintessential cottage community to represent love and romance, but England gets gloomy so it also corresponds well with the darker moments in the novel.

Tell us how the book came together.
It all started with a scene in my mind’s eye. There was a man walking up a hill toward a park at midnight. I didn’t see his face or hear his voice. All I knew was that he wanted to kill himself. I was curious as to why he wanted to take his life. I enjoy love stories, so I incorporated a woman, someone of color, then I made her Spanish.

The first draft took me a little over one year to write. I completed my own editing the following year and had beta readers provide their feedback, but it wasn’t until the third year when the story really kicked off. I hired a developmental editor, Kyra Nelson, and it was one of the best decisions I made. I thought I knew everything about the story and the characters, but Kyra revealed a slew of opportunities for improvement and she offered me the tools to really get to the heart of the novel.

Why does the book fit into the category of upmarket fiction?
Story of My Life is the perfect balance between internal conflict (literary fiction) and external conflict (commercial fiction). There are a lot of intense emotions and life events intersecting to form an intense read.

What was the most rewarding aspect of writing Story of My Life?
There were many rewarding aspects of writing this novel. Organizing the storyline was one. I am a pantser, so organizing every nonlinear scene written into its now complex linear timeline, dual timelines at that, was like working a puzzle and fun.The developmental edit was awesome. Truly awesome. I can’t say enough about that experience and Kyra. The book cover design. Domini Dragoone presented me with eight options and I loved the one that you see now. The circles were an awesome way to depict the various stories in the novel. Circles are symbolic as is the full moon in the book, and having them in front of a garden gate is intriguing as well.

Do you have a message or a theme that recurs in your writing?
I predominantly write about love and the dynamics between individuals. I am fascinated by people’s stories, how they’ve coped with their trauma and how it affects other people. So, having the opportunity to create my own web of intrigue is a joy.

What are you most happy with, and what do you struggle with most, in your writing?
I struggle with my own pace. I am thoughtful and over analytical, so writing is a long process. The upside is I actually feel more strongly about what is written.

What is the best encouragement or advice you’ve received in your writing journey?
The best advice I can offer is to follow your own path. Listen to the characters as they tell you their story. Don’t force yourself to write or work on a particular scene or chapter. Let it go and inspiration will come when it’s meant to.

What writing projects are you working on now?
I am going to pick up on a book I started writing last year in between edits. It is a change of pace from Story of My Life for sure. It is still within the upmarket fiction genre, but it’ll be a welcomed shift and set in Albuquerque!

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
I appreciate the opportunity to share Story of My Life with you all.


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy posts to a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




An Interview with Author Marcia Meier

Marcia Meier is an author and a poet, a developmental book editor and writing coach, and the publisher of Weeping Willow Books. She spent nearly twenty years as a newspaper journalist and has authored six books and numerous freelance articles and poetry. Her latest nonfiction release, Face: A Memoir (Saddle Road Press, January 2021), has been described as “a gut-wrenching and brave plumbing into a girl’s heart and soul, and a triumph of guts and the human spirit.” You’ll find Marcia on her website MarciaMeier.com and her Amazon author page.


What would you like readers to know about Face?
I wrote the book to process the trauma I experienced after I was hit by a car at the age of five and dragged down the street, losing my left cheek and eyelid. I subsequently had twenty surgeries over the next fifteen years, and struggled with disfigurement throughout most of my childhood. My hope is that people who read my story may be better able to confront and process any trauma they may have experienced.

What prompted the push to begin the project?
A midlife crisis, really. My life was falling apart: My marriage was crumbling, my business was faltering, and my mother, who lived with us, was struggling with health issues. After marriage counseling with my husband failed, I decided to continue therapy, which started an eight-year journey of going back in time to come to terms with, and heal from, the trauma I experienced.

Was there anything surprising or unexpected that happened as a result of writing the book?
Yes, I have been surprised and delighted by the book’s reception and the feedback I’ve received from so many readers who tell me it resonated with them in many ways. For that I am grateful. I have also been really surprised to feel re-traumatized by the publication, when I thought I had processed and healed from it all.

How did Face come together?
I started to write Face in 2005, when I first started therapy. But I had a hard time getting purchase on the story. So in 2010 I decided to go back to school to get my master of fine arts in creative writing. I had been a journalist in an earlier life, and knew that having a deadline to complete the project (my MFA thesis) would be the impetus I needed to finish a first draft. And it worked, but then I spent eight more years revising it (and two agent’s efforts to sell the book). Saddle Road Press Editor and Publisher Ruth Thompson offered a contract in early 2020, another gift for which I am eternally grateful.

During the process of writing your memoir, it must have been difficult to re-live your experiences. How did you work through those feelings and continue on?
As I mentioned earlier, I was very surprised at my emotional response to the book’s publication. I had read the first chapter many times before several audiences and was able to do so without feeling the deep emotions that arose. But when the book came out and I started to do readings of other parts of the book and discuss its implications with Zoom participants, I started to feel a little emotionally unsafe. I’ve had to do some deep soul searching about this, and I’m not sure I’m completely resolved even today.

Do you have a favorite quote from the book you’d like to share?
“What does it mean to find oneself? For me, it has meant pulling all my splintered pieces together and understanding how that splintering affected me. It feels like the end of a very long, difficult journey. But who can know what life will bring? Being aware means I can make different choices. Choices based on what’s in front of me and not on what happened five decades ago. I can choose to follow my own heart and not be swayed by what others might think of me.”

In a memoir based on memories of incidents that occurred in decades past, where does a writer’s responsibility lie: with the truth of the facts or with her perception/feelings about what occurred?
Both. Memoir is an accounting of what happened to you and how that experience changed or affected you. Essentially your reflection and perception of your emotional response to the tangible facts. Readers want to know what happened, yes, but also how you grew or managed to overcome the trauma. That’s when experience can be translated into universal understanding.

Besides being an author, you’re also an editor and a writing coach. What do beginning writers misunderstand about storytelling?
It’s not just about you, it’s about your readers and their experience in the reading of the story.

What does a typical writing session look like for you?
I don’t have any pat routine, mostly because my days are often dictated by client projects and deadlines. But one of my favorite things to do when time allows is to go to a local coffee shop and write in longhand. I find writing with pen and paper in an environment away from my work space is the most conducive to creative output.

What writing projects are you working on now?
I’m working on two projects right now: a novel I’ve been doodling with for years, and a book of prayers, poetry, and short essays entitled A Writer’s Book of Prayers, Inspiration for Scribes and Other Creatives. I’m anxious to finish the book of prayers; it’s almost there.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
Thank you!


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy posts to a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




An Interview with Author Jeffrey Candelaria

Author Jeffrey Candelaria drew inspiration for his first novel, TORO: The Naked Bull, from childhood and teenage experiences. He began the book in 2008 and persisted another thirteen years until its publication in 2021. Jeffrey is currently the host of the radio show “Straight Talk with Jeffrey Candelaria” on KIVA 1600 AM, Saturdays from 1:00-2:00 pm. You’ll find him on RMKPublications.com, on Facebook, and his SouthWest Writers author page.


What would you like people to know about the story you tell in TORO?
First, TORO: The Naked Bull is a reminder that the lust for glory, self-aggrandizement and fortune seeking, when unbridled, can result in the destruction of the individual and the people they love. TORO is such a tale.

When readers turn the last page in the book, what do you hope they’ll take away from it?
That love, loyalty, and courage are bigger than secular accomplishments. And that readers want a TORO II.

What challenges did this work pose for you?
The story and plot were not an issue as much as the editing and formatting. The logistics of the book were challenging more so than storytelling and content.

Tell us how the book came together.
I visited Mexico City as a child. While there, my grandfather took me to a bullfight. I fell in love with the pageantry, protocols, and juxtaposition of man against beast. Again, TORO is not about bullfighting per se, rather it is the stage for the story of four brothers and their struggles to find themselves as individuals, independent of “The Family Montoya Legacy.” The book took thirteen years to complete. I worked on it every Christmas season during vacation from work. I completed the book during the heights of the recent pandemic.

What is the main setting?
The setting varies: The Montoya Ranch, ongoing confrontations with toros (bulls), and various situations which evoke behavioral manifestations and strife amongst the four brothers. TORO: The Naked Bull could easily be told in almost any place or time. It is a story as old as time: the lust for power, the jealousy amongst family members, and the discovery of one’s nature. Bullfighting and the trappings surrounding the pursuits of becoming a famous matador are the catalyst for the development of characters and circumstances which reveal unvarnished motivations and the brothers’ temperament.

Was there anything surprising you discovered while doing research for the book?
Perhaps the staging of the corrida, or bullfight, itself. The bullfight is a choreographed event with numerous protocols and very particular ways of presenting the “Dance with Death.”

What was the most rewarding aspect of writing TORO?
When completed, TORO was an exercise in catharsis for me. Additionally, it was a tribute to my late grandfather who raised me. (He is a character in the book.) I also learned a great deal about the human condition.

Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently if you started your writing/publishing career today?
Nothing. I enjoyed the process or writing, construction of plot and the overall journey.

What book has had a strong influence on you or your writing?
1984 by George Orwell.

What is the best encouragement or advice you’ve received in your writing journey?
Rose Kern’s advice about style. I have a background in journalism and I was writing in that stark style. For TORO, I shifted my style from that of a journalist to more of a storyteller.

What writing projects are you working on now?
OPEDs.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
Please order my book on AmazonTORO: The Naked Bull.


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy posts to a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




An Interview with Author Marty Eberhardt

Marty Eberhardt is a former director of botanical gardens whose poetry and short prose can be found in nearly a dozen publications. In October 2021, Artemesia Publishing released Death in a Desert Garden, Marty’s debut novel and the first of her Bea Rivers cozy mysteries. You’ll find her on her website MartyEberhardt.com and on Facebook and LinkedIn.


What is your elevator pitch for Death in a Desert Garden?
Bea Rivers’ euphoria over her new job at Shandley Gardens is shattered by the death of the Gardens’ founder. When the police determine the death was a murder, Bea is drawn into the investigation, while trying desperately to maintain the life of a committed single parent dating a struggling writer. Every one of the members of the Gardens’ small staff and board are murder suspects. Through the sizzling and beautiful days of a Sonoran Desert summer, someone keeps dropping odd botanical clues. As Bea’s family’s safety is threatened, she discovers just how tangled the relationships at the Gardens really are.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
While I am familiar with the inner workings of public gardens, I haven’t had much to do with the police. I was fortunate to have a few friends in law enforcement who answered questions, and one read the book through.

Tell us how the book came together.
I’m not sure where the story idea came from, but first I imagined the place and the protagonist. The rest of the characters arrived in my brain and decided to do what they wanted to do. I picked a mythical botanical garden in Tucson, because I’m familiar with both public gardens and Tucson. I picked a harried single mother because I well-remember what that felt like, and I think many parents know this stress (even if they’re not single). Work/parenting challenges are front and center during this pandemic!

Who are your protagonists, and what do they have to overcome in the story? Will those who know you recognize you in any of your characters?
Many will see part of me in Bea Rivers. I was a single mom working in a botanical garden. Those in the know will also see the late Tony Edland in the character of Angus. Both of them are lovely guys. As for what Bea has to overcome, she has to be a good parent and a good employee simultaneously. As if that weren’t enough, she needs to solve a murder, because people she cares about are in danger of being accused.

Why did you choose the book’s main setting?
The setting is Shandley Gardens, a public garden in the Rincon Mountains east of Tucson. Using the Rincon foothills location gave me the opportunity to write about the beauty of the Sonoran Desert, which I love deeply. Also, there is no public garden in this location, in case anyone is looking for close comparisons.

What makes Death in a Desert Garden unique in the cozy mystery market?
There are several unique, or nearly unique, parts: the setting in a botanical garden, the Sonoran Desert natural history, and the single parent protagonist.

What was your favorite part of putting this project together?
I’ve heard many authors say this, but it was the way the characters took on a life of their own. I didn’t know until I got to the computer what they were going to say or do. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did plot things out, but how each character reacted to their circumstances was part of the mystery of the mystery.

You also write poems and short prose. Is there one form you’re drawn to the most when you write or read?
My primary reading interest is literary fiction. I also read a bit of nonfiction, especially if it relates to something I’m writing, and I read poetry. But I punctuate the serious stuff with mysteries. I relax with them, and so I tried to write one that would have what I want out of a mystery: a tough puzzle, some quirky characters, and a strong sense of place.

What writing projects are you working on now?
I’m writing a sequel to Death in a Desert Garden tentatively titled Bones in the Back Forty. A forty-year old skeleton takes a murder investigation from Shandley Gardens to a small town in southern New Mexico, where there’s a history of archaeological looting. I’ve also written an entirely different kind of book, a period piece set in early 1960s Saigon. It’s the story of how family members’ lives are changed by living in South Vietnam during the Diem regime, at the time of Buddhist burnings and multiple coups d’états. It’s tentatively titled American Innocents.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
We humans must all nourish ourselves with what gives us joy, so that we have the strength to do the work of caring for each other and the planet. Much of my joy comes from immersion in the natural world. I try to communicate that in everything I write.


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy posts to a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




An Interview with Author Barb Simmons

Author Barb Simmons writes contemporary and paranormal romance. She also writes erotica under the pen name Belle Sloane. Her most recent contemporary release is The War Within (February 2021), the first in her Wounded Warrior Romance series. You’ll find Barb on BelleSloane.com and her two Facebook pages: BarbSimmons and BelleSloaneBooks.


What would you like people to know about The War Within?
That it was the most fun I ever had writing a book, and I think it really shows in the story.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
That people with disabilities can and do enjoy all the same things in life as people without disabilities. Sometimes they just need to get a little creative about things.

Who are your main characters?
Mike Ramos is a former Marine Raider who lost his leg in battle. He also struggles with the fallout from his experiences in Afghanistan. He knows he’s struggling and avoids getting the help he needs to move on. He finally sees the light about that. Vivian March is an Ortho nurse and fitness fan like Mike is. She overcomes issues with military vets and family history.

What makes the setting important to the telling of the story?
For me the setting is often like another character in the story. Setting lends tons of texture and strengthens the reality of the story.

What sparked the idea for the book?
The idea for The War Within came to me when I was on the leg press at the gym. And bam, I was on it. I usually mull a while before getting going with a story. But this one was one of those wonderful times where the bulk of the story came faster than I could type when I sat down to work.

What challenges did this work pose for you?
I did what I usually do—researched stuff I’m not familiar with and armed myself with a host of technical advisors.

Any “Oh, wow!” moments when doing research for The War Within?
Just that the story flowed so nicely as I went along. That doesn’t happen too often.

Tell us about your writing process. Are you a pantser or a plotter?
When I first started writing (1992), I was a pantser from the word go, but over the years I’ve developed into a hybrid of sorts. I do use a white board to give me a visual of where I’ve been and where I’m going. I tend to write the first three chapters of a story and then settle into a deal where I plot the next one to three chapters, then write then plot the next one to three.

Do you have a message or a theme that recurs in your work?
I seem to have a penchant for redemption stories.

What typically comes first for you: a character? An era? A story idea?
Usually what comes to me first is the main character in a particular setting, where something happens to them that takes them forever out of their normal world.

What writing projects are you working on now?
The War Within is the first in my three-book series of Wounded Warrior romances. I’m currently working on the second book, which is Trevor’s story. He was the mentor in the first book. This will be my first romance featuring an older hero and heroine. Trevor is a Vietnam veteran.


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy posts to a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




An Interview with Author Jodi Lea Stewart

Jodi Lea Stewart is the author of three historical fiction novels for adults as well as a contemporary young adult trilogy (Silki, the Girl of Many Scarves). TRIUMPH: A Novel of the Human Spirit (September 2020) is her newest historical fiction release. You’ll find Jodi Lea on JodiLeaStewart.com, on her Facebook pages at jodi.lea.stewart and AuthorJodiLeaStewart, and on Twitter. Visit her Amazon author page for all her titles.


What would you like readers to know about Triumph?
People read novels for entertainment, escape, or education. If I am being bold, I might dare to believe TRIUMPH, a Novel of the Human Spirit hits all three categories. Let me explain.

Entertainment when reading a novel comes from a compelling and sensible plot with colorful characters the reader comes to greatly care about. With every page and chapter written for TRIUMPH, my desire was for the story to stay exciting enough to compel the reader to eagerly turn the page. My background in journalism aids me endlessly in striving to achieve that goal, and whether I succeeded or not is up to my readers to decide.

Escapism takes many forms in novel writing. One form is transporting the reader to exotic locations. Spanning from 1903 to 1968, the settings for TRIUMPH include a spooky Louisiana swamp at night, a Texas ranch, New Orleans, and a bustling St. Louis in the 1950s—a city that, after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, became a frontline city ending segregation in public schools.

Educationally, the story spins on the theme that regardless of our socioeconomic level, our race, age, or creed, we all have merit. We all desire to be appreciated and accepted. By my readers getting to know and care about the characters in TRIUMPH, I hoped they and I could use them as models of how we can all transcend prejudices and limits that keep us stagnated in preconceived ideas.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
Celebrating our human differences is exhilarating. What a boring world it would be if we were all alike. Further, no matter where you come from or where you are going, regardless of how much money you have or don’t have, no matter your color…you have merit.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
TRIUMPH is my first novel with different points of view and different timelines. I like to metaphorically say that during the writing process, I became a mad scientist in a white coat, coke-bottle glasses, beakers bubbling behind me on the Bunsen burners. I was mixing formulas, testing data, researching, and spilling my concoctions all over the Louisiana wetlands and beyond. I was also juggling timelines, points of view, four strong storylines, dialects, and accents. Also, I constantly, had to be an introspective analyzer of my own filters and stay aware of any possible prejudices that I might not know I had. I found the process beautifully exhausting!

Who are your main characters?
ANNIE is from what many people call a broken home. In other words, her momma is divorced and works herself to exhaustion but is barely able to support her four kids. Annie’s grammar is backwoods, to say the least. Mercy’s correction of Annie’s poor grammar amazes her, but Mercy is a beautiful fascination to Annie from the moment they meet on the schoolyard the first day of fifth grade. Annie allows Mercy to lead her, correct her, and reshape her in every possible way.

MERCY is from an affluent Black family living in the Ville, an upper crust section of St. Louis. Already sophisticated beyond her age, she finds Annie’s invisible blond eyelashes and eyebrows intriguing. The girls feel a strong bond the first time they meet. Together, they secretly explore St. Louis via bus and streetcar, encountering cultural prejudices at every turn—including from within Annie’s own family. The turbulent times and the Civil Rights Movement will test the girls’ loyalty and affect their choices on the way to adulthood.

WILLIE is a young boy stolen by a Vodou priestess when he is five. In an attempt to save him, he is stolen again by ISABELLE, who takes them on a hair-raising trek through the swamps at night and over the terrifying Suicide Bridge. One day, Willie will fight bloody battles in France, come face-to-face with the horrors of Vodou, and seek the answers to his mysterious life.

In bustling New Orleans, 1903, JACK, a former Texas Ranger, has an encounter with a young beauty, SELENE, hiding in his hotel room. What she wants and needs will change both of their lives forever and set in motion a dynasty that remains sealed until the end of the story.

You use several settings/time periods in the book. What makes them important to the telling of the story?
I wanted my readers to experience the journey of several key characters, whether through their heritage or their personal lives, as they live inside the mores of the early twentieth century, past the mid-century mark, and into the 1960s. The sweeping differences in our culture during that time period in this country, and how those differences permeated and affected individuals and society as a whole, provides an intricate and colorful backdrop to highlight changes in the characters’ personal prejudices as they become enlightened to the dignity and spark of life in every individual.

How did the book came together?
I wrote TRIUMPH in less than a year, and the editing process took a few months to complete. The hardest part for me is setting up the launch for any novel. It can get quite exhausting, and the one for TRIUMPH actually gave me my first case of writer’s block for a few months. I shifted my energy from creativity and editing to getting my latest creation “out there” and it changed my brain for a little while. Strange but true, but I overcame it and wrote another novel right away. The story for TRIUMPH began with my sitting down at the computer one day, and out of the blue, I wrote a scene of a Vodou priestess stealing a child. My husband said, “Oh, this sounds evil,” when he read it. I said, “Yeah, it does, and I’m going to write a whole book starting with that scene,” and I did.

Some of my own background fueled aspects of this novel because my mother had us briefly in St. Louis when I was very young. Single and with three children, she worked three waitress jobs for fifty cents an hour and managed to keep us all afloat. I had my first experience with prejudice there, and it vividly imprinted on my mind as unfair. It seems all my friends in the schoolyard were mostly African American, and I didn’t even realize it until the principal called my mother to “tell on me.” I think that experience created in me a fierce loyalty to all races from that time forward.

What was the most rewarding aspect of writing Triumph?
The most rewarding aspect was getting to share my heart on the issues of prejudice in whatever form they take.

What are the challenges of writing for the historical fiction market?
Accuracy is the biggest challenge in writing historical fiction. The research is exhaustive, as it must be, to dare place a story and characters inside a time period in which the author has not personally lived. I suggest books, interviews, and family stories to add authenticity. Check your facts many, many times.

Which do you prefer: the creating, editing or researching aspect of a writing project?
I struggle as most writers do through the first pass when I am creating something from nothing and making all the plot points meet and work. That’s when I do ninety percent of my research, but I actually research and double check throughout the entire process. After the first completed pass, I sail a zillion times through the rereads, rewrites, and edits as happy as an oyster with a new pearl.

Do you have a message or a theme that recurs in your work?
The message that recurs in all my novels is triumph over adversity. I didn’t realize it until an online writing coach said everyone should name all of our favorite movies from the beginning of time to find what their life theme is. My favorites were Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera, and Secretariat. Those choices showed me the theme of my life also runs through my written work. Overcoming adversity and good over evil prevail in my novels no matter what story, adventure, or mystery I wrap them in. How ironic that I named my most recently published work TRIUMPH, a Novel of the Human Spirit before I came to this conclusion.

What writing projects are you working on now?
My newest historical fiction novel, which I can’t share the title of yet, was completed in nine months and is my first international novel. Right now, I’m working on sending the foreign words/phrases to my word advisors for accuracy. I don’t speak all those languages in this novel (Spanish, Chinese, Italian, and Croatian), but I sprinkle words and sentences in for authenticity and spice. This latest work is about a clandestine international agency that rescues lost people, most of them children. It features three strong women, and has, like TRIUMPH, different timelines and different points of view. It begins in Texas for all the main characters, but PINKIE winds up in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. BABE is born in Texas and is taken to China and then Hong Kong. The background features the invasion of China in 1937 and their ensuing civil war, and also takes place during World War II. The timespan is 1937 to 1959. Honestly, I’m very excited about this novel. Look for it in mid-2022.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
TRIUMPH is an adult book, 18+ target age, mostly because there are descriptions of long-ago Vodou ceremonies that are quite fearsome. It is for readers who enjoy high-concept historical fiction written with a literary pen, unfolding inside an interwoven plot. It should appeal to readers who enjoy a Southern theme with racial issues shown in a positive light. Though it sounds a bit supercilious of me to say, I truly believe the same audience that loved To Kill a Mockingbird would love this novel.

There is a bit of a Huckleberry Finn (without the racial slurs and terminology, of course) feel to TRIUMPH. It is slightly reminiscent of the vintage movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, played out by two girls of different races who merely want to be best friends. I think anyone who enjoyed the novels Where the Crawdads Sing and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café would enjoy the heck out of TRIUMPH.


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy posts to a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




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