[SPEAKER_02]: there and welcome to our show.
[SPEAKER_02]: The shit no one tells you about writing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm best selling author Bianca Marie, and I'm joined by CC Lira of Wendy Sherman Associates and Carly Waters of PS Literary.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi everyone, it's all the interview Thursday and joining us today is an author who has a BA in English Literature and French.
[SPEAKER_02]: She has lived and worked in Paris and New Zealand and now lives at the foot of the South Downs in the UK.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like her protagonist, she also suffers from a hearing impairment and constant tenetus.
[SPEAKER_02]: Lime juice money is her first novel.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's called that in the US, but in the UK it's called the Night Lagoon.
[SPEAKER_02]: Joining us is Joe Mori.
[SPEAKER_02]: come to the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for having me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm delighted to be here.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's wonderful to have you here.
[SPEAKER_02]: So for those of you who are watching on our YouTube channel, I am holding up the American version, the lime juice money one, really stunning art design here for the cover.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we will discuss a little bit later, why the different names and the different covers.
[SPEAKER_02]: But just before we begin for our listeners, I'm going to read you the flat copy.
[SPEAKER_02]: With the salty atmosphere and ratcheting tension of the white lotus, the mosquito coast and nine perfect strangers, lime juice money is an intoxicating sensuous debut that follows a woman trapped in an increasingly volatile relationship by a thousand miles from home in a central American jungle.
[SPEAKER_02]: When disaster strikes, hearing impaired Leyla wild leaves landed with a new partner, Adrian and her young children, hoping for a fresh start in the verdant jungle of Belize.
[SPEAKER_02]: There she can be closer to her botanist father, get away from a sister, and maybe find a way to open the restaurant she's always dreamed of.
[SPEAKER_02]: While the jungle is mesmerisingly beautiful, it is also unforgiving and brutally hot, filled with deadly creatures and sinister magic.
[SPEAKER_02]: Leyla's fragmented recollections of the past are increasingly bewildering,
[SPEAKER_02]: The gunshots she hears at night through her worsening tenetas seem to be getting closer, and she still doesn't understand why her father tried to turn her against aid when they first met.
[SPEAKER_02]: There may be she just miss her.
[SPEAKER_02]: And covering long buried secrets that trick into derail everything, Leyla must somehow find the courage and resilience she needs to survive, where she destined to disappear into the shadows, like the orchard her father named her after.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, so Joe, I love chatting with Davey authors because I love highlighting all the different journeys to publication that they are.
[SPEAKER_02]: So can you please take us through it from starting writing the book, how long they took, how many people you queried and how we got to this point?
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, okay, so it took about two years to write the novel and I had quite a clear strategy to enter some competitions by way of getting a line to write in my query letter that would be hopefully, you know, having been longlisted and top thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I entered competitions when I had written about half of the manuscript.
[SPEAKER_01]: with opening pages and things sort of first pages, competitions, killer Nashville's Claymore Award and the Cheshire Novel Prize in the UK and some others as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't expect you, but I miraculously got longlisted and shortlisted in a few.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I came running up in the Cheshire Novel Prize and won a little literary festival in the UK as well, a prize there, and came running up in another of their prizes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So everything sort of happened at once.
[SPEAKER_01]: and I had interest from one of the judges who was an agent on one of the prizes and they contacted me and wanted a chat.
[SPEAKER_01]: By that point I'd finished the manuscript and I had a conversation but you know finding an agent is a lot like dating and I think you've got to find the right person and that chemistry has to be there and I got on with her but I didn't feel like she had the same vision for the because I did.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I used that momentum to then target agents that I
[SPEAKER_01]: had always had on my wishlist so
[SPEAKER_01]: Even though I maybe wasn't ready, I didn't feel like I would have been ready for another six months or so.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would have kept polishing it and working on the manuscript.
[SPEAKER_01]: I used them momentum to go then, while there was agent interest.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think, by the end of that week, I had about six or seven full requests and three offers by the end of the weekend, which was amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of whom were brilliant agents and I went with Maddie Milburn, who is just fantastic and I'm super excited to be with her.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love so much of that there's a lot to unpack this so one so important to not just go with the first agent to office because we get so excited and it's like oh my god someone's interested in me and a lot of authors will just jump at that and it's good to be strategic and go it's great that they like it but if we don't share a common vision they're not the right person for this project so really smart they in terms of the contests Joe for our listeners who don't know how to enter these contests or what
[SPEAKER_02]: The process is, is it expensive?
[SPEAKER_02]: Do they have registration fees to enter?
[SPEAKER_02]: How does that work?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so there's a real mixture.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of them are quite low entry fee.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you can find things that, you know, sort of, ten dollars, five pound, ten pound to enter.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are others that are, you know, significantly more, but, you know, so I was quite strategic about which ones to enter.
[SPEAKER_01]: I kept an Excel sheet with a list of them on with the price next to each one, the dates and so on and the progress I was making.
[SPEAKER_01]: Short story competitions are also good to enter, you know, they can often be a bit more cost effective as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I did enter some short story competitions with other work as well, just to sort of, you know, again, just have something to write in a query letter and to stand out a bit from the crowd when that time came.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other thing I did that I think is really helpful to think about is I kept an ongoing query letter.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I had listened to all your podcasts religiously from day one and absolutely loved them and I think I sort of assimilated all that information over time and I kept an ongoing query letter that I tweaked with over the course of a year, maybe even a year and a half.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it wasn't just, you know, dashed off in a weekend or over a course of a couple of weeks.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was really a live document that I would return to and add things in as they came to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: So my comps, you know, I didn't even put my comps until right at the last moment because I was changing them all the time and making sure that they were the most effective comps for what I was trying to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and making sure they're relevant, because if you're querying over an extended period, you want to make sure that the cons are constantly relevant as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that you had the spreadsheet for all of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a very organized approach to querying as opposed to, I'm just going to send out as many things as I can and how shit sticks to something.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a much better way of doing it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So something I do want to ask is where you personalizing the queries?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because that's something so many of our listeners go, is it important?
[SPEAKER_02]: Should I be doing it?
[SPEAKER_02]: Should I just put a line in or not?
[SPEAKER_01]: absolutely critical so my backgrounds in head hunting so I spent twenty years helping people get jobs and interviewing and helping with CV writing and cover letters in the last sort of five or six years freelance so I took that insight into querying because it's the same principle really in your query letter you want to be telling the agent
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, making it really easy for them, you know, telling them really succinctly what you are, what your bits about, the cops positioning it for them and just doing the work for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they, you know, they get hundreds of these things every week and you want to stand out and make it clear.
[SPEAKER_01]: So
[SPEAKER_01]: I definitely took that into how I wrote the letter and a big, big part of that is making sure that it's individualized each and every time.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that means doing research, doing homework, going online and looking at that agents, other clients,
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, doing your homework about them, perhaps reading some of those books, but also thinking about where that agent has appeared, if they've been on podcasts, listen to those podcasts.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they've been at events, you know, a couple of agents, I may be caught at events in London or whatever years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I would say that, and you know, that's a way to have an in, if you like, a little comment that's, you know, this is how I know you, and this is why I would love to work with you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and that's just human nature, isn't it?
[SPEAKER_02]: If you get something that just says, dear agents, and it's a standard pitch, a person doesn't feel like they're special or that, you know, you specifically want to work with them.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that's just, you know, that should be common sense, but I know a lot of writers are like, I'm not going to mess around with that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And these tons of agents who don't need it, but I do think just the line or two is really, really helpful.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you've told us, Joe, how you landed your agent.
[SPEAKER_02]: What did it look like after then?
[SPEAKER_02]: Were there revisions?
[SPEAKER_02]: How did it look like when you went out on submission?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I signed with Maddie, I think it was August time a couple of years ago, and then she wanted to take it to the Frankfurt book fair.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we were quite fast at turning around the edits that she's suggested.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're one.
[SPEAKER_01]: hundreds, it was quite a quick process to get it that far.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then in the event, it was preempted by Harper Collins in the US and separately by Harper fiction in the UK.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, you know, that's where the real work began, if you like, there was quite a bit of structural editing.
[SPEAKER_01]: My editors worked brilliantly together, so they were super
[SPEAKER_01]: sort of thoughtful about putting their heads together before they ever came to me with their notes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was one set of notes, one set of thoughts.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we would get on Zoom calls the three of us a few times and just sort of chat about the ideas that we had.
[SPEAKER_01]: But they were really clear that whatever changes that
[SPEAKER_01]: they suggested it was really up to me if I wanted to make them, which that was the first thing they said to me and that was brilliant because it gave me such freedom to feel like what we were doing was just making the manuscript better, making the book better, and so I really appreciated that.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was quite a bit of structural editing in the middle part of the book where one of the character arcs wasn't sort of working as well as it could have done.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I definitely remember spending, I think it was about three or four days in a hotel in Scotland where I printed out that home middle section and
[SPEAKER_01]: put it all over the bed all over the floor, had pretty stick glue and scissors and just cut it to pieces and stuck it back together again so I could see it at what I was changing because when you're doing no structural edits, you know you change one little thing and the repercussions that it has elsewhere in the document can be huge so it was really helpful for me to to restructure it in that way so I could see what I was doing all in one place and I'm quite physical like that I quite like getting
[SPEAKER_01]: down and dirty with the with the document in real life on paper and then it was yeah just lots of copy editing and all the usual stuff but a really enjoyable process so I really enjoyed that and I think just because you know at the end of the day we were all working to make it as good as we could could make it together as a team.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, that's what the whole process is about.
[SPEAKER_02]: And for our listeners who are interested in the editing process, pulling the manuscript apart, putting it back together, you should already be following Courtney Mom on social media.
[SPEAKER_02]: You should already be subscribed to her newsletter.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's really fascinating at the moment to see Courtney really ripping apart her latest manuscript, which has already sold to a publisher, but she's busy turning it around for edits.
[SPEAKER_02]: And she does the same thing as you.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like plastic.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's cutting the thing apart, putting it back together.
[SPEAKER_02]: It kind of looks like a Frankenstein document at this point, but it really works.
[SPEAKER_02]: So follow that as well, guys.
[SPEAKER_02]: So something else I want to ask is the change in the titles.
[SPEAKER_02]: and the change in the covers.
[SPEAKER_02]: So quite often we do see that in the UK it's a different cover to what it is in the US, not as often do we see the title changing.
[SPEAKER_02]: So can you take us through that the intentionality about that?
[SPEAKER_01]: So the original title was always lime juice money and it comes from a little phrase in the novel that the lime juice money set in the Belizean jungle and one of the phrases that comes up that's heard over and over again is champagne dreams with lime juice money and lots of people who've read the novels have said to me, you know, they love the intrigue of it and that's a uniqueness of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: My UK editor came to me fairly late in the day and said, in the UK, they wanted to change the title and how did I feel about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was, you know, open to it, you know, that's her expertise and she had a very clear vision for the UK and the UK market, which is, I believe, increasingly difficult, actually, especially for Davies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she really wanted to lean into the more family saga aspects of the novel.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's dual timeline, part of it's told in the nineteen eighties, where my main character, Lailia's father, Ellis, is an orcodologist, a botanist who goes out into the jungle and finds a jungle lodge, his marriage in England is falling apart and, you know, he falls in love passionately in love with the flowers and other things there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the dual narrative was really important to me and leaning into that family saga aspect was something the UK really wanted to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, sort of really riffing off the paper palace kind of feel about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whereas the US were really keen to go with the original title and lean much more into the sort of suspense crime element of it and pitch it more like a sort of slow burn thriller.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm really happy with both packages.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just different and you know, and that sometimes happened and I think increasingly happens more and more for the different markets.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's really fascinating how the same book, it's the exact same book, how it can be positioned completely different in different markets depending on what selling in those markets, what people like.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know when it comes to aesthetics, you know, there's a certain kind of look that the UK market prefers to the Americans, so that's always really interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: Another question I have for you is you said that the inspiration for this novel started as an image.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm always fascinated by that because often with my own writing, it's the same.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you take us through that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm a very visual writer and I think I see everything that's happening and I feel it then through the different characters.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this novel came to me initially as a visual of a woman
[SPEAKER_01]: sort of trapped in a jungle and she was lonely but not alone and I don't know who she was or why she was there or what was going on and I all I did was write a page or so on a piece of paper just sort of you know thinking about that and I put it to one side and it wasn't until maybe six or seven years later when I went to start writing the novel and I found that piece of paper and it was at the time I had a shed in the garden that I used to work in and it was sun dried you know or sun yellowed and really
[SPEAKER_01]: crumpley and, you know, really old bit of paper now, but there was something in it that sort of had obviously captured my imagination before and I just went with that and sort of carried on exploring who she was and what she was doing there and everything sort of evolved out of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lailia has a hearing impairment in the novel and that very much got fed in later on.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lots of people asked me, you know, was that the initial seed of the novel, but
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a hearing impairment myself and I thought it was a great way to layer in the isolation that she feels and add in a bit more unease and tension into her experience of being in this increasingly volatile relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wanted to play on that as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks so much, Joe.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just before we move on, I have a follow-up question for that, but just a quick word from our sponsors.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, yeah, you know what?
[SPEAKER_02]: In terms of the writing, the hearing loss and the hearing impairment, it was almost like writing a completely different language, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because there were instances where she couldn't hear what people were saying and she was hearing bits and pieces and obviously in really loud settings, in loud restaurants or whatever, made it that much harder for her.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we see her kind of struggling to put two and two together and try and figure out
[SPEAKER_02]: in terms of context what people are saying and something she hears later I don't want to give anything away becomes really important and did she messier that or did she hear it properly?
[SPEAKER_02]: So can we speak a bit about using your own experience to write those sections and pretty much almost create your own language in terms of what gets left out and what syllables she hears as opposed to which one she doesn't hear?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was a really interesting kind of
[SPEAKER_01]: problem to solve really.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have a similar sort of hearing loss.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've worn hearing aids since I was thirty and I've got tenetists and Lailia has a similar hearing loss.
[SPEAKER_01]: She wears hearing aids and she's got the sort of excruciating on going to a screeching in her ears really.
[SPEAKER_01]: What that means is as an experience of interacting with other people is that you have to work harder to decode and to understand, particularly in busy environments, but often just words get missed or syllables get missed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so your brain is working over time to really piece together what's going on, lip reading and filling in the gaps.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wanted to get that across on the page.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I experimented with different ways doing that, but eventually ended up with
[SPEAKER_01]: blanking out certain words and syllables as parts of words which you know I think is people say that's quite effective on the page.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a whole different thing when I got the conversation from the editors about the audio book because obviously that's a different medium to experience the novel through.
[SPEAKER_01]: and they are going for a very different way of doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they're putting in the original word as is and then they're dampening down the sound around it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's sort of muffled or most to make that work more effectively.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that leaning into the senses was really, really important to me from the beginning because, you know, as a suspense novel playing with all the different senses, especially in the jungle where you've got these amazing
[SPEAKER_01]: sounds and colours and sights.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was always going to be really important, but playing with sound and the lack of sound, I think, was the main thing that I wanted to get across.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, there was a part that you mentioned that sound is an important part of experiencing taste, and I was like, I did not know that, so can you tell us a bit about that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so Lily is also a chef, so she's very interested in taste and there's research around the linking of all the senses and how they relate and that and there are restaurants now where you can experience taste differently by sort of muffling your sound out of it and so that's something that she thinks about and discusses through the novel as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, all the senses just
[SPEAKER_01]: Fascinating to be a love.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love really leaning into that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I really tried to do that through the writing.
[SPEAKER_02]: The language is so evocative.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really lush.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I've said before in interviews for my latest book, the most puzzling murder that, you know, a book issues you and invitation.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's almost like a dress code and you need to dress up the writing to match that
[SPEAKER_02]: dress code all the tone.
[SPEAKER_02]: This book is just really lush, really evocative, it appeals to all the senses.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to get Joe to read her prologue so that you can all hear what I'm talking about.
[SPEAKER_02]: But just before we go into that, I was very surprised, Joe, to hear
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, looked at your bio that you were not a botanist.
[SPEAKER_02]: I won hundred percent thought, okay, she is a botanist because the way you write this is so authentic.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was like, there's no way she could write this without being a botanist.
[SPEAKER_02]: So can you take us through that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you, is that a separate sort of part that you've studied?
[SPEAKER_02]: Was it just a ton of research?
[SPEAKER_01]: I have to tell you something so funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: So my parents came over to my house about two weeks ago and they came into my garden to water my flowers for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And because I kill everything, literally kill everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my dad said to me, oh, you need to deadhead those roses there on that bush.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I looked at him and I said, how do I do what do I do?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how to deadhead raises.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he looked at me a guy, and he said, because he had a copy of my novel at that point, he had the priest.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, how have you managed to write another one of the points in it?
[SPEAKER_01]: And you don't even know how to deadhead raises.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's all imagination, it's a lot of research.
[SPEAKER_01]: I loved immersing myself in that sort of academic, auto-new world.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I read a lot of academic papers about orchids, particularly from the nineteen eighties, because Ellis' timeline is set then.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I really wanted to get a handle on what was going on, what was being talked about in academia at that time in terms of the discovery of orchids.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a fascinating subject.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are such an exquisite flower to learn about, you know, they're really, really strong and they're being discovered all the time, but with smugglers, they're often discovered by the smugglers before the academics who are going out trying to find them in the field.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's just a rich and fertile area to explore, but yeah, no, I've got absolutely no.
[SPEAKER_01]: No expertise at all.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fascinating.
[SPEAKER_02]: You did an amazing, amazing job.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I remember years ago, loving the orchid thief and being obsessed with that book and I haven't read anything like that until now.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that was incredible.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Joe will you please read us your, I mean, it's not written, it doesn't say it's a prologue, but it's definitely a prologue.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you can read that for us, of course.
[SPEAKER_01]: awakening.
[SPEAKER_01]: The jungle thrives as it has for millennia in wild shadows, even in the basking light of day, shrouding at secrets in a tangle of leaves and roots and vines.
[SPEAKER_01]: A majesty of Evergreen's cast their shade, overseeing all like wise counsel, chickle trees and cacao trees and sabre, palmetas of silver and cahoon palms, a frenetic trilling of birdsong pulses its backdrop.
[SPEAKER_01]: Frogs croak and bark and groak.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bees hum.
[SPEAKER_01]: A screech-owl drills into the dusk.
[SPEAKER_01]: Gogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogog
[SPEAKER_01]: a bloated invitation under unforgiving suns and a murmuring horn to flies.
[SPEAKER_01]: From the cavities of dead trees, cultures saw their wings spanning like black cloaks, their pupils eagerly searching.
[SPEAKER_01]: They circle on high, sailing the winds, surveying, until they descend into a wake.
[SPEAKER_01]: Smaller raptors scatter, arguing with breathy grunts, birds in bishops clothing,
[SPEAKER_01]: They gather one by one and wait.
[SPEAKER_01]: They start with the eyes.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first slits in with its beak, inaugurating the feast.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second and third join in, remotely ripping, cleaving into skin.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rasp-like tongues tear at tendons, rip flesh from honeycomb bone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Intestines are pulled, like strawberry laces, shared sweet canapace.
[SPEAKER_01]: Grim guests keep on arriving.
[SPEAKER_01]: diving from on high, wing over wing over wing, devouring entrails of a life.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sun bleeds into the sky as the breeze slowly dies.
[SPEAKER_01]: The jungle rouses another octave, chipping, wearing, croaking.
[SPEAKER_01]: A final cleansing, the vultures pissed down their legs before, one by one, they set off, ascending with their secrets back into the sky, back to the hollows of their skeleton trees.
[SPEAKER_01]: the body remains just a carcass.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bones of four fingers are called stiff, clutching at the torn single bloom of an orchid, a bright orange catalyer.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's colour, screaming, brighter than the sun.
[SPEAKER_02]: Amazing, amazing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just so evocative, so many senses are being appealed to in the reader, just incredible.
[SPEAKER_02]: So one was a prologue, always there was something that was added later, take us through that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I had written a similar prologue quite early on, but I didn't include it in my manuscript actually when it was sent out.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's always this debate about prologue, so I know you love the conversation about it on the program.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was hesitant about it, but I kept it in my back pocket and then later on in conversation with my editors, I showed it to them and we talked about it and they
[SPEAKER_01]: basically said they liked it and you know we should lean into that and I wanted to have it there as a way of sort of you know giving that ambience of the the jungle from the beginning because the next scene is contrasting quite specifically with the the paradise of a Caribbean beach and a sort of relaxing holiday scene and so I really wanted to play with that keeping it short but having the intrigue there and the curiosity from the off of you know the body and the orchid in the jungle
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: You immediately intrigued who's the body at creates.
[SPEAKER_02]: It sets the tone, which is so important in a novel like this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Language clearly sets the tone.
[SPEAKER_02]: You use such interesting verbs, Joe, like throughout I was looking at verbs that you would use that would perhaps generally be nouns that you had turned into verbs, which were incredible because it was so interesting and so different.
[SPEAKER_02]: Was there something you set up to do with intentionality or is this just how you play with language?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's quite interesting now, because I'm writing book two at the moment, which is very different and obviously got different voices.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's again, well, Lailia's first person in this, and Ellis's third person, but the first person in the book that I'm writing at the moment is very, very different kind of tone and voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think it is quite distinct to Lailia and her way of thinking, you know, she's quite creative, she's a chef, you know, so it was leaning into that a lot, I think.
[SPEAKER_01]: but I do really love the line level, you know, I really love playing with language and with words.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm always doing that, even if I'm, you know, on a train journey or in a car or something, I'm always sort of writing sentences in my brain because I just love playing with words.
[SPEAKER_01]: So a bit of an Achilles heel actually sometimes in terms of writing the thing because I will get a so stock on a line, you know, making it sound nice before actually just clowning on and getting the words down.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm learning to get a bit better at that with Bic too.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well, we can see that you had a lot of fun with the language that comes through.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what Joe said is so important in terms of when capturing a character's voice, especially in the first person, you really have to think about who that person is, their psychological activity, their life experience,
[SPEAKER_02]: are they creative?
[SPEAKER_02]: Are they not so that you can capture all of that in the language as well?
[SPEAKER_02]: And while this book's really lush in the language, you're so bucketed, this tone may not work with something that's very different.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, so important to play around with all of that as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: Joe, thank you so much for joining us.
[SPEAKER_02]: For our listeners, we are linking to landjuicemenia on our bookshop.org affiliate page.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you get the book there, you support an independent bookstore and the podcast and Joe at the same time.
[SPEAKER_02]: We wish you much success with this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi everyone.
[SPEAKER_02]: I am so excited to have today's author joining us.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've wanted to have on the show for a very, very long time, so I'm bouncing off the walls that it's happened.
[SPEAKER_02]: She is the internationally bestselling author of eight thrillers, including the couple next door, which have all been New York times Sunday times in Globe and Mail bestsellers.
[SPEAKER_02]: Her books have been sold in forty territories around the world.
[SPEAKER_02]: She lives on a farm outside Toronto.
[SPEAKER_02]: She didn't see it coming as her ninth thriller.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, you must see this cover so sparkly, the Indigo exclusive.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's my pleasure to welcome Sherry Lapina.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sherry, welcome to the show.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for being here.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm so excited to have you here.
[SPEAKER_02]: And for our listeners, Sherry and I met at Montreal Mystery a few months ago and it was so awesome to connect with her and to see a few times since and to lure her onto the show.
[SPEAKER_02]: So before we discuss the book, Sherry, I'm just going to read the flat copy, so our listeners know what we're talking about.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, when a beloved wife and mother disappears, a luxurious condo building transforms into a potential crime scene, can the detectives find her before it's too late, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.
[SPEAKER_02]: the perfect life for the perfect couple.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then Sam receives a call at his office, Bryden, working from home that day has failed to pick up their daughter from daycare, arriving home with their little girl he finds his wife's car in the underground garage.
[SPEAKER_02]: Upstairs in their apartment
[SPEAKER_02]: Her laptop is open on the table for cell phone nearby for keys in their usual place in the hall, but Brighton is nowhere to be seen.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's as if she just walked out.
[SPEAKER_02]: How can she have disappeared from her own home and did she even leave the building at all?
[SPEAKER_02]: with every minute that passes and this question swirl around their community, Brighton and Sam's past seems a little less perfect.
[SPEAKER_02]: They condominium, left safe, their friends, neighbors, and relatives no longer quite so reliable.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: So before we dive into the book, Sherry, I want to ask because there's someone who's pivoted quite a bit between genres and interested in authors who've managed to do the same, but who achieved massive success with one of those poets, which I've never quite managed.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you wrote two literary comedies before the couple next door.
[SPEAKER_02]: What made you switch genres?
[SPEAKER_02]: Can we discuss that a little bit?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I started off writing literary comedies because I didn't know what I wanted to write.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I thought if I didn't have any idea of what my plot was going to be, I would just start with characters.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I just sat down one day and I started with this character, Harold, and I just went along every day, seeing what happened to him.
[SPEAKER_03]: And by the end of the year, I had a novel with a plot.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's how I started writing.
[SPEAKER_03]: I started writing just as an experiment, see if I could do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I have always liked thrillers and prime novels but I always thought they had really elaborate thoughts which they do but I thought you had to plan them out and I didn't think I was capable of that and I know I still am not capable of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I didn't try to write a thriller for many, many years and then one day I just thought
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, like, that's what I'd like to write.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I thought I'd just try it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I started with just an idea and no plan.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I wrote it that way.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it turned out that I couldn't fact write the thriller without any plan.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think it was what started me off with just experimentation to see what my voice was.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I do have a pretty good comedic voice, but it's not what I really wanted to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the switch was easy for me in a way, because I think the suspense is one of my natural
[SPEAKER_03]: that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so just discussing that because something I'm hearing more and more is I'm hearing from authors who wrote a first novel that sort of did not do very well or did well in one particular market and then they wrote another novel and the publisher was considering giving them a lot of money for it until they established that they weren't a debut author and then suddenly it's like no we're not offering you anything at all because your crack record isn't good.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know it's terrible because it should be on the merit of the book, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's so hardening.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, even if your fourth book is amazing, it should be okay we're selling on the fourth book.
[SPEAKER_02]: So was it a case that the first two did well enough that it was fine or do you think it was that you changed genres completely that you know, stood you in good stead there because I know you've said in interviews that no good was expecting that book to do as well as it did and that people were just so interested there were so much about
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I think what happened was when I wrote my literary comedies, they were the Canadian Small Press.
[SPEAKER_03]: No one really noticed them.
[SPEAKER_03]: They sold a couple of thousand copies each, which was just a standard first small press literary book.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it was to change in the genres and the change in focus.
[SPEAKER_03]: So with scholars, they're looking for international audience.
[SPEAKER_03]: And my agent didn't even bother with the Canadian publisher.
[SPEAKER_03]: She just went right to New York and sold it there as a New York type thriller.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like a global type of
[SPEAKER_03]: Look, so for me, it was definitely a change in genres that made to difference.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I think it's a shame what's happening with writers where everything's based on your track record and it's what I was told recently, I was just in London and I went to her again a week ago.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the buzz around there is the Davies are struggling now.
[SPEAKER_03]: People are less interested in Davies.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a nice to be.
[SPEAKER_03]: So maybe that will help writers soon have had one book out that didn't do that that well.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because, you know, publishers used to stick with writers to help them build a career.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that doesn't seem to work anymore.
[SPEAKER_03]: They want big fancy Davies that sells a lot of copies.
[SPEAKER_03]: Likewise, the writers don't get too big in advance because if you don't earn it out, you're a pariah afterwards.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't know what's tough right now for sure.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't know about my piece would be just
[SPEAKER_02]: I agree with that in terms of the advance and I've said that to a whole bunch of writers and they look at me like a little bit, you know, cray cray because they're going, no, but the more money they give you the more money they're going to spend on marketing, but I don't see that happening necessarily.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's true that if they put a lot of money into the book, they will spend more in marketing, but if the book comes,
[SPEAKER_03]: then they'll just print your second one because you're under usually in a contract or two, but they're not going to want to keep you up to that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the risk of taking a big advance.
[SPEAKER_03]: So something worse, I think, than having a big advance and having a book flaw.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then what you go from there, the only way around it really is to switch genres or come up with a different name.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then they can sort of pretend to be a debut under another name.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, I have it claimed to be a debut author when I did mine.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was certainly my first thriller, but
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't remember it be on this, but I was taking the killer writer.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think you just write the genre that you most love.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you want to do a switch, a lot of people will change their names.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've seen it quite a bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And some of them will hide their identities as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_03]: And let's assume you have to do that just because you're trying to hide your back list, but it didn't sell that well.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's not like you have some nefarious past, you know, you're just trying to hide your back first.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I mean, even books that did do well, because I think of, I think it was about two years ago, their Terry Macmillan tweeted that she had finally got her first royalty check after selling how Stella got her growth back.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, that book changed so many conversations.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was made into a poem.
[SPEAKER_02]: I considered that book wildly
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, successful, but it took us, I mean, like, twenty years to earn the first royalty payment on that, even with the book that was so, you know, well known, just because her advance was so enormous.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, what if her, though, it's sold and sold and sold, because it didn't, then she'd be doing something else now.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, no, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: Did you get a new agent when you switched genres or did you not have an agent with the indie press?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I'm trying to understand that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so do you have an agent for my comedies?
[SPEAKER_03]: And when I decided to do thrillers, I went somewhere else to someone who just didn't thrillers or specialized in thrillers.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because you can't have a literary agent who doesn't know thrillers trying to sell the thriller.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to go to the agent who's right for the kind of what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just like you have to go to the publisher who's doing the kind of what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And sometimes you need to be cutthroat, you know, because I feel like I'm a very loyal person, which sometimes, you know, will stay in the way of like career aspirations.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a case of, okay, I need to end it with this agent and that's going to be hard because I feel very loyal to them, etc.
[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, you've got to think of your career first.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think it is a business and everyone should understand that you need to do what you need to do for your business.
[SPEAKER_03]: You just be quite a voter.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, voice polite.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because you never know who you're going to vote next, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a small, small industry.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, Sherry, you're a pencil like me, which are absolutely love.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it can mean a lot of slog during edits to bring it all together.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I really want to focus on all the pros and upsides of pencil.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like what are the things about painting that in Honsha work that would never happen if you were a platoff?
[SPEAKER_03]: For me, I can't plan.
[SPEAKER_03]: I just don't have any ideas unless I'm actually working inside the characters to move the story along.
[SPEAKER_03]: For me, I love the first job because it's like, you know, writing a story is just like reading a story.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to know what's going to happen next.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm actually looking forward to writing every day because I want to see where it goes and it's fun and it's fresh and to me, it feels really playful.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if I knew what was going to happen, then I don't think I would, you know, approach it the same sort of belief and energy.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't think I personally would get the same result, which to me, I like to be surprised by my work.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure you're the same as your answer.
[SPEAKER_03]: You'd love to see it take off in different directions.
[SPEAKER_03]: You'd love to get to know people.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're surprised by twists that arise and so on.
[SPEAKER_03]: For me, that's the fun and excitement of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I write to the store.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't want to know what the end is.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: So for me, it's the fun of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the fun of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: The entertainment excitement.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I also think there's something, you know, when you come up with a plot and you use your characters as puppets to go through the obstacle course of the plot.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think you can lose a lot of authenticity in terms of the character actually driving something.
[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas if you create these characters and you just follow them and you're just wanting to see where they go,
[SPEAKER_02]: it allows for these characters to drive a plot very authentically through the stupid decisions they make because let's be honest as writers we create characters and then we throw rocks at them we torture them right
[SPEAKER_03]: I agree, I wouldn't want to say that to a plotter, so I don't want to send anyone.
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I think if you know where it's going, it can feel wooden or feel forced, especially twists that have to feel completely natural and organic to the plot, which, you know, if you're not planning, they are completely natural and organic to the plot.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's so important.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I, yeah, I'm a huge fan of dancing, but I have nothing to say against daughters because if they do it well and they write well enough, everything feels just as alive and, you know, unexpected position.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think a lot of penses feel insecure because they get told so often that they do need to plot.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I'm going to tell them they don't have to because there's lots of people like you and me and Lisa dual and other people who do not plot, and our books turn out just fine because I think we have more fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think I think so too.
[SPEAKER_02]: We do have to reverse a lot of times because we drive down dead ends, I think.
[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, there's fun in accelerating while you're reversing and figuring out how the heck that's going to go so long as you don't hit the wall or a bad reversal like I am.
[SPEAKER_02]: But, yeah, I feel like your process is your process and you need to lean into it and whatever the pros of that are do that, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: I agree.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you're also the queen of dominoes tipping, which is so propulsive in your work.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's so important to have one thing leading to the next thing to the next thing, because we say on the podcast, you don't want satellite plug points.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't want, this is just kind of happening over here, and this is happening over here, but it doesn't affect the plot in any way.
[SPEAKER_02]: It needs to be that this happens, the character makes a bad decision that leads to repercussions, that leads to them becoming desperate, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_02]: So how do you keep the dominoes tipping from one scene
[SPEAKER_02]: To the next, if you aren't a platter, do you sit down as you begin each scene and go, okay, I need to up the tension here, I need to create a red herring or is it just so intuitive at this point that you're able to go, okay, I know what the scene needs in terms of dominance.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I actually don't think in terms of, you know, do I need a red hair in here?
[SPEAKER_03]: Do I need a twist here at all?
[SPEAKER_03]: I just tell the story as it comes to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the red hair is a riser organically, just like the twist, too.
[SPEAKER_03]: I will sometimes think, oh, is this slow?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it getting slow?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it flagging a bit?
[SPEAKER_03]: And my answer to that is always changing point of view.
[SPEAKER_03]: If I'm in a point of view, this is why I love movement so much.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I usually have several different points of view.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if something is slow, then I just like, you know what, I'm going to take this from another person's one of you and get more energy in it because someone might be, it just may not be exciting from their point of view.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think, oh, I think this person's going to really have fun with this little bit of information.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I go into that one of you.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, yeah, if it's getting slow, I will do something to change it up.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I don't actually plan red herrings and things like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I find shifting will point of view every four pages.
[SPEAKER_03]: for pacing, that is I think my secret.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like because if you're in one point of view and nothing to not take it in a way for people to do whole books and a single point of view, but that's a long time being one head.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's full so fun for me and I could to manipulate so much when I take it from different points of view because different people know different things and they're all affected in different ways and I love that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love the authentic intention by getting another people's heads.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's my pacing, I think my most important basis is
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and we'll discuss that more shortly because there's something as well that you do, that very few people can get away with that I do want us to unpack even more.
[SPEAKER_02]: But in terms of, you know, when you change those POVs, the nice thing is one character can do something that can complicate the life of another character.
[SPEAKER_02]: They can say something to the police accidentally, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Which then makes the other characters life difficult.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you seem that in real time as you're going backwards and forwards as well, which means stakes keep getting up to the tension keeps getting up and it creates obstacles because I think especially for Act Two.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I feel like writers are made in act two.
[SPEAKER_02]: People say they made at beginnings and endings, but for me, that, you know, muddling metal is really difficult.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's where you have to keep up in the stakes.
[SPEAKER_02]: New things need to be revealed.
[SPEAKER_02]: Characters need to complicate each others lives, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_02]: So changing the peer view all the time really helps with that.
[SPEAKER_03]: It does.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I have to say, I've never had problems with difficult metals ever.
[SPEAKER_03]: I find with my books,
[SPEAKER_03]: The tension, it starts fairly high when something happens and then the tension gets higher and higher and higher and higher and I've never found my middle slow.
[SPEAKER_03]: I find it's the focus on everything is building.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't know if that's because I don't plan or whether because the function of changing points of view and complicating things more and more for every single person, I don't have a problem with this.
[SPEAKER_03]: If I have trouble with anything, it's what the end, because when I get to the end, it's like, oh, so I've got all these suspects.
[SPEAKER_03]: They could all equally have done it.
[SPEAKER_03]: They all have reasons to do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have to decide which is the most satisfying one, like who really did it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's, yeah, but the little's never given me proof.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that as well in terms of the ending and going, okay, who the heck did it?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why did they do it?
[SPEAKER_02]: How can I complicate this even more?
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you then go back?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I've said you need to use that I reverse engineer.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't plot, but I get to the end and then I figure out who did it and then I've got to go back and plant some curiosity seeds or some clues along the way so that it doesn't feel like it came out of nowhere and yours always feels like they're building very organically to this natural ending.
[SPEAKER_02]: Even though the ending's a wonderful surprise, I never feel like what the hell Sherry, where the hell did that come from.
[SPEAKER_02]: So how do you make it feel like it's been building to that?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, because I do it organically as I go on.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I actually don't have to go back and plant clues because as I'm doing it, I'm assuming all the way through.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ooh, I think this person might have done it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm building it as if that person did it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It will help luck I won't eat a thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, it could be this person.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, no, it's that person.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't have to, I'm, I'm putting clues in all along that they might have done it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I never have to go back and add those clues.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I go back, usually to do is to tighten
[SPEAKER_03]: and strengthen and, you know, build in description and, you know, take the motivations and the characters and that sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the story, the story doesn't really change really.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, with this book, which I've found very interesting is you start with the dramatis persona, which outlines all the characters and kind of like how they fit together.
[SPEAKER_02]: This one is this one's husband.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is this one's life or whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when you do that, you have to be so careful to not give too much away.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm always saying we need to be so intentional with every decision we make for a novel.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when it comes to being intentional with this, what made you include that and how did it come right at the end?
[SPEAKER_02]: Did it come at the beginning as you were like getting to grips with the characters?
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell us more about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the dramatic person I is something that's only available to the Indigo exclusive edition.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's a special feature just for that edition.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it is a really fun feature.
[SPEAKER_03]: Usually, in special editions, you'll get a Q&A or whatever.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I can't remember who suggested doing the tremendous personal.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's a really fun one to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because you can't give anything away.
[SPEAKER_03]: You could say, so it's always, you know, worried about whatever.
[SPEAKER_03]: And a poll that's such and stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's fun because it's like a teaser for every character.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's nice to have that because you can look back and go, oh, so I even enjoyed that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it should be in every book that I'll keep it for being to go special.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it also helped because there's a big cost, you know, we've got quite a few people.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I know at one point I got there and I was like, hold on, who's this person again?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I went back and I was like, oh, okay, this is so and so.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it does help you keep track of all of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it was like a little teaser.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like a mousse bush.
[SPEAKER_02]: and then you can go on from there and I'm kind of sad that it's not in every book but I guess for the Indigo exclusive you have to give exclusive content.
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's come back to writing multiple POVs within the same chapter.
[SPEAKER_02]: As you give us a three sixty as we move through the action of a chapter because so often in these kinds of books we have one POV character to each chapter and like you say you can give us a page and a half and then boom we're in someone else's perspective.
[SPEAKER_02]: And something else you do so brilliantly is that you give us a very limited third person, because every one of your characters has got something to hide.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you can't get us too close to them, because if you get us too close to them, we're going to know all these secrets.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you don't want us to know all these secrets, but you want to hint at these secrets.
[SPEAKER_02]: And just before we had this interview, we actually did a box with hooks on the podcast in which Carly and CC were agents
[SPEAKER_02]: are critiquing query letters and opening pages.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we had a submission in which there was a prologue in which the author was very clearly trying to hide so much of that character.
[SPEAKER_02]: Their identity, their interiority, their emotionality, that we were so distance from the character that we weren't connecting in any way.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the agent, CCC said, in order to connect with the character, you need access to their psyche.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now what you do so brilliantly is you give us a bit of access to the psyche, but not so much that we know what their secrets are, etc.
[SPEAKER_02]: So what is your advice to writers who are trying to do something similar that will make us still connect with the character, but not give so much a way that we can figure out early on who did it and why they did it, etc.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I actually have quite a hot point of view, like a quite a, I get quite into the emotions of the character, but I am not revealing everything.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that is a tricky thing to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a balancing act, you know, but the ways to mislead the reader, one thing I do all the time, and I don't know if people pick up on it is when you're in someone's point of view and you're feeling their emotions and so on.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if they say something in dialogue, the reader will think it's true.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it may not be.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what they say in dialogue.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's what's in their head that's true.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they may not be thinking everything.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you can hide a lot of things and mislead people quite easily by changing these points of view.
[SPEAKER_03]: And to answer your question about how you get deep enough in with them, giving it all away.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't even know how to answer that.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like it's a balancing act.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to get enough into their heads to know what their feelings are.
[SPEAKER_03]: but you can't can whale the thoughts.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I guess that's what it is.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have their feelings, but you don't give all of their thoughts.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you can give them the sleeping thoughts and dialogue.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you do give their thoughts and you give feelings, but the feelings are kind of messy because I feel like you can feel guilty about something, but also justify your shitty behavior.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You can be like, oh, I did this, but you know what it's fine because actually the ends justify the means.
[SPEAKER_02]: and so you can mask the guilt with this kind of indignation or whatever and the same goes for thoughts because you know you can focus on some of their thoughts but not the more guilty thoughts.
[SPEAKER_02]: They can be thinking one thing but not necessarily focusing on the heart topic and something else that you do so well is that you have your characters observing each other and so we get misled by one characters
[SPEAKER_02]: sort of perception of another character.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll see one character crying their eyes out.
[SPEAKER_02]: They are so upset and we lack all their poor women, their poor women.
[SPEAKER_02]: She's clearly not the person, but it's viewed through another character.
[SPEAKER_02]: So can you speak a bit about that as well?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I think we mislead the reader a lot with that as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: we do, we often do.
[SPEAKER_03]: The whole thing about truth is it's based on your perspective.
[SPEAKER_03]: So everyone sees in any given scene, people will be in different ways and see it differently and interpret it differently and why characters do that all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the poor reader is left with many different views of what's happened and they're all true to the person watching, but it's not the objective truth.
[SPEAKER_03]: So this is what's so great about being in different people's heads all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you're going to be difficult to write a book for you in one person's head all the time, you have to sustain that without giving anything away.
[SPEAKER_03]: But if you're moving into different people's heads, with all those different perceptions, it gets so engrossing and you're not sure if what's right, what's true because you're getting a lot of different angles on it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think there is such a thing as objective truth quite honestly because in terms of the psychology of the characters, every person has got their own biases.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you might decide that someone who's really well-dressed is someone who shallow and not very smart and so you don't give a lot of credence
[SPEAKER_02]: to what they say, but you'll give more credence to somebody who's more intellectual, for example, or you could be someone who's misogynistic.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you look at a woman and you're like, well, she's not that smart or, you know, woman or manipulative.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so when we get into each character's psychology and how they perceive other people, that's where it gets so, so interesting.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all good psychology.
[SPEAKER_03]: All of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, the psychology of the characters.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's so fun to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's I think that's why I like writing parenthesis.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I just really enjoy that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody's different.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they all have their little quirks and their things that they're trying to hide.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the characters are what really make the books so interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is what domestic suspense or domestic thrill is also interesting because, you know, as human beings, we can live next door to somebody or we can see people in our family and all we ever have is, you know, what we can see from the outside and this that person confides in us or unless we witness something.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean, I've said before the one thing that really made me realize how much people
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't say lie, but how they misrepresent reality is I had a friend once who on Facebook, it was always my darling, my love, you know, in terms of these paths, how much they love them, how amazing they were, etc.
[SPEAKER_02]: My husband and I were invited to dinner one night and we're always early.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sherry, don't invite me anywhere unless you expect me to be there ten minutes early and I was early and we heard them having the most vicious fight in which they said the most hideous things to each other and we stood outside and I was like
[SPEAKER_02]: And then ten minutes later I knocked and they opened the door and they had their arms around each other and they were like welcome and the whole night it was my darling my love.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you know that is a thing with like domestic suspense because you don't know what's happening behind closed doors.
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you stopped in the book?
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I'm sure.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're a father.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're going to read it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's a great device to use.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, and I think this is why I don't trust people who on social media always like, this is the love of my life, this is how much I love this person.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, what are you hiding?
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, what, you know, when I'm covering up with all of this, then you find out they're getting divorced the next week.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but I mean, this is as the genre because you really get to scratch below the surface and I feel like it's like an excavation.
[SPEAKER_02]: As you write, you look at this perfect couple and then suddenly there's a slight excavation of one layer and then we like, and then you excavate again and then we like until we get to the point where like, oh my god, nothing is as it seems.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, that's what I enjoy about it too.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, before we go, I think our time is almost up.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you speak about prologues?
[SPEAKER_02]: So on the podcast we often saying, try and stay away from prologues because so many emerging writers use them as a band-aid to fix a shitty first chapter.
[SPEAKER_02]: You use your prologue so incredibly well and it goes back three weeks, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So give us an example of when that works so well going back in time as opposed to a flash forward prologue.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, I use ProLabs fairly often.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think I always use them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it has to do with, you know, the publishers, the editors, they want to book to start with the bang.
[SPEAKER_03]: And sometimes, if you have a slimmer and before the body's going to be discovered, you need to have something at the beginning showing just going to be a body that will be discovered.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's really why I do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes, if it's going to be too long, and people aren't going to be invested enough,
[SPEAKER_03]: Then I'll put a prologue in to sort of set things up so that you want to read to see what I have to throw up.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and you don't want to just start with a dead body because they're no one cares about the dead body.
[SPEAKER_02]: They have to know the person to care that they did and to care that somebody's going to figure out what happened to them.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, as long as we still have to have a really good first chapter.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm trying to think, I mean, I certainly shouldn't see it coming.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a prologue.
[SPEAKER_03]: Be sure.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's a prologue.
[SPEAKER_03]: I guess I do prologue quite often.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's because I will often want to show what leads up to something.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I need to have that.
[SPEAKER_03]: little hulk for the people of the beginning.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, there will be the payoffs of the dead body.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, amazing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sherry, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's been as amazing as I knew it would be.
[SPEAKER_02]: For our listeners, we're linking to she didn't see it coming on at bookshop.org affiliate page.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you get it there, you support an independent bookstore and the podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: and Sherry at the same time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you Sherry.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks be and I go that was fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll see you soon.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's it for today's episode.
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope you'll join us for next week's show.
[SPEAKER_02]: In the meantime, keep at it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Remember, it just takes one yes.