I’m afraid to say it because it might sound cheesy, but … every dang person I’ve met and experience I’ve had has been an influence. Who or what has influenced your writing, and in what way? Combine the fear and blustering of Cold War Los Alamos with the fear and blustering of high school in general … It’s the way some parts of our world feel to me today. The other hops twelve hundred years to the Cold War and is set in the town where I went to high school, which happened to be the place the Atomic Bomb was invented. It has a dragon who’s a big part of the plot. One is set in the Dark Ages, which is new territory for me-though it takes place in a town where I lived for a year. Thank you for giving me a chance to talk about it!Īnd I’m working on a couple of new novels. Well, I do have this new book out, which is pretty important in my mind. Suspected witches, particularly the wealthy woman who is the heroine’s beloved. But it was inspired by much the same feeling in my life-and it also has witches. Heroes, naturally.Īs to my first published novel, Mirabilis, that came much later. Then sometimes they asked to be characters in the story. And that inky notebook now drips with irony, not least because the bullies in my junior high saw me with it and picked on me for both thinking about witches and thinking I could actually write a novel. The story is 183 pages long and has a complete plot-which is amazing to me because a streamlined plot is very hard for me.

I think it’s easy to deduce my inspiration. It was about three girls in junior high who make a deal with the devil to become popular. I was thirteen, and I wrote the ominously titled THE COVEN in a spiral notebook, sometimes while riding the bus to school and in between classes. My very first was written so long ago that I literally did pen it. What inspired you to pen your first novel?

Mermaid moon susann cokal