WBBT: The Shelf Elf Interview

I mentioned earlier this week that I had been granted a privileged place in the Winter Blog Blast Tour—an interview with Shelf Elf. I invite you to join us for a conversation that ranges from the perils and pleasures of not writing by-the-numbers books to the "truths" I seek to convey in my work to advice I would give to the characters I write to my trip to Anapra to Dangerous Neighbors, my historical novel due out next fall.

Here's a brief excerpt:

When I’m finished reading your books, I keep thinking about the main characters. They stay with me. I feel like your characters are going places in their lives, going to be change-makers and risk-takers and people who live life with everything they’ve got. Do you imagine your characters’ futures? If yes, where do you see Katie and Georgia and Riley down the road?

My main characters are always in large part rustled up from parts of me, so that I know them well. I knew Elisa, that young, struggling poet of Undercover. I knew Rosie, desperate to do right by her dying grandfather in House of Dance. I knew Katie of Ghosts and I am so very like Georgia of Heart. They live with me, these characters. I know who they were, and I know who they’ve become. They’ve become a woman who feels blessed, every day, to be alive. A woman who struggles, every day, to be a better person. A woman who wishes, every day, that she could seize the world with words and photographs—hold it, own it, yield it back to others.