One of my former students reached out to me requesting an interview for one of her university classes. I’m always happy to answer questions! Here’s a copy of that interview.

1. Your novel Persephone is a retelling of an Ancient Greek myth. How did you find the balance between preserving the original storyline and creating something new and original for readers like me to enjoy? 

Lots and lots of research. Any myth as old as Persephone is really thousands of myths told across different times and cultures. The pieces that have stuck around consistently since Ancient Minoan times are the pieces that absolutely must be kept. It’s like Cinderella. There’s a version everywhere, but they all share a shoe. The materials of the shoe change, but the fact that a shoe is involved is an absolutely essential element for Cinderella to be Cinderella. 

With Persephone, the essential pieces were a young, innocent girl being stolen away, an overprotective mother who wants her to return, and some kind of  trick to keep her to wherever she’s been spirited away to for a portion of the year, resulting in winter. How each of those pieces come into play and what they look like in the story are fair game,but without at least a nod to those pieces, it’s no longer Persephone. 

2. How do you balance your career as a teacher, your work as an author, and still find time for yourself? What are your best tips for juggling the three without suffering from severe burnout? 

I don’t think any of those things can ever truly be balanced, but if you find the answer, let me know! To prevent burn out, the biggest tip I can give you is to be understanding with yourself, and to realize that everything in your life is going to have a season. I had way more time to write when my daughter was an infant then I did once she started being able to walk around that decreased every year until she learned to drive herself to her own demanding schedule. 

Until my daughter was in middle school, I only worked part time or on a super flexible schedule, but post-covid, that job vanished, so now I’m a full time school librarian. Sometimes that job leaves me time to write, sometimes it  swallows me whole, especially when it involves the same creative stores writing comes from. Having patience with yourself and being able to recognize when writing can’t be a priority. 

3. Do you consider yourself more of a Hemingway or a Tolkien? That is, do you prefer short, precise sentences or lengthier descriptions?

I actually have to work really hard to put descriptions in my books at all. I’m not a very visual person, so I don’t have much of a mental image of anything I write about. Usually draft one is almost all action and dialogue, and each draft after that is me being really, really intentional about weaving in descriptions of people and places. I literally have “if this scene were set on the moon, would my reader even notice” pass, then a read through for each character. 

4. What is the most difficult part of writing a novel for you? For example, do you struggle more with word-building, plot, or something else?

Description is my kryptonite. 

5. How do you overcome these difficulties?

Revision. I cannot stress enough the importance of revision. Draft one is like pulling blood from a stone, but revision is where all the magic of the story happens. 

6. What is your method for developing three-dimensional characters whom the reader will empathize with?

To paraphrase Vonnegut, every character has a goal, even if it’s just a glass of water. Readers can get behind a goal, even if it’s one that they aren’t particularly interested in because wanting, striving, and failing until you don’t  are universal experiences. So my first priority is making sure my character wants something. Beyond that, tricks like reading the dialogue out loud or telling a scene from their perspective are really helpful in keeping each character distinct-feeling. 

7. Which do you find more difficult, the creative part of writing or the semantics such as grammar and word choice?

That depends on the draft. For draft one, it’s definitely the creative parts of writing. When I get stuck revising the same sentence eighteen times because it’s easier to tweak the grammar than it is to figure out what happens next, I know I’m in trouble. But once revisions are flowing, those little tiny nitpicks drive me nuts. 

8. Where do you draw your inspiration from, aside from mythology?

Movie trailers. Done well, they tell this tantalizingly unfinished story that my mind will start filling in details for. When the real movie doesn’t go in the direction I was thinking or if they “leave out” something I think was particularly cool, that’s when I’ll start playing around with it as an actual story. Most the time, by the time the whole book is written and revised, it doesn’t even resemble the original premise. Persephone’s movie trailer inspiration was the “new” Clash of the Titans movie back in the early 2000’s. My most overt example is Blood and Other Matter coming from the trailer to Meagan’s Body. 

9. What books, documentaries, etc., do you recommend for budding authors?

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamont and the podcast Writing Excuses, huge fan of both.  

10. Do you believe in working symbols into every aspect of your writing, such as names or colors? Why or why not?

With the Daughters of Zeus series, I was a bit more intentional (read ham-handed)  because there are a lot of symbols tied to the gods and myths, and keeping them matters to the integrity of the story, but in my other work, I almost never work symbols in intentionally. It’s more like I discover them in revisions and bring them out. The neat thing about symbols is that growing up in a culture as saturated by visual story telling  like ours is that a lot of symbols plant themselves into stories unintentionally. We grow up seeing gloves on certain characters in every single cartoon show and major television show, and without even necessarily studying symbols and learning that gloves mean a character is keeping secrets, the character with something to hide in your own story will be wearing gloves. In writing, economy of language is key. Every word you’ve chosen to use has to have more than one job. They have to be chosen with intention. So the things you decide to describe that survive revisions tend to be heavy in symbolic meaning about the character whether you realize it or not. 

11. Tropes are easily overused, but not necessarily something to be completely avoided. How do you find that balance?

Tropes are a lot like symbols. We absorb them as products of a story-rich environment. You’ll find yourself using them whether or not you intended to do so, so for me, it’s safest, at least in the early drafts, not to use them intentionally. Whatever survives edits is there because I made the conscious decision that this scene told in this way is crucial to the plot. If I go in with “Okay, I want to make sure to include this trope and to reverse that trope, and to do a whole different twist on this trope,” it’ll come off forced. 

12. What was your first novel, published or otherwise? What were your favorite and least favorite parts of that first draft?

My very first novel is a trunk novel called Keeper of Time. I worked on it nonstop from age twelve to seventeen. It had three sets of twins, all of whom were point of view characters, all with different powers, and a fractured timeline plot set across two realities, and the whole thing was a complete mess.

My favorite part of that first draft is the dialogue. I will never sound more like an authentic teenager then I did back when I was writing this as a teen. My least favorite part is how you could tell exactly what book, movie, or tv show I was really into when I wrote each scene. Most of this book will never see the light of day, but I’ve definitely pulled pieces of it into my other stories. 

13. Which authors do you look up to as inspiration?

Brandon Sanderson. He’s amazing. In addition to being a huge fan of his work, I really appreciate the way he gives back to writers by sharing every single aspect of his success. 

14. If you could only take three books with you to a deserted island, which three would you choose?

That changes based on the week, but I’ll give it a try. Dungeon Crawler Carl book 10, because no way am I missing that series finale just because I was stranded on an island. Ella Enchanted, because it’s my favorite childhood book and the magic still holds up, and Mistborn because it’s amazing.  

15. What is one story you’ve always wanted to write but haven’t yet?

I really want to do a Shakesphere high school series where all the students are just the cast lists from the play, and all their plots are all intertwined and playing out across the school. Kind of like Fool by Christopher Moore’s world, but young adult.