Last
week my dear friend, the fabulous writer Janet Brown, asked me to participate
in a blog hop … one writer after another passing a baton consisting of four
questions about the writing life. Janet hopped from Susan Blumberg-Kason’s blog
to mine, and I am hopping from hers to Diane Vallere’s.
The
author of Tone Deaf in Bangkok, Almost Home and the forthcoming Light and Silence (all from ThingsAsian
Press), Janet is one of my favorite essayists of all times. I call her that,
rather than a travel writer, because her writing is so much more fluid and
perceptive than what often passes for travel writing today. She is a master of
observation and deserves a place on your shelf with your travel classics.
In
a completely different realm, Diane is a master of fashion and humor, which she
combines to create her fabulous mystery series—Style and Error and Mad for
Mod, the latter series paying tribute to Doris Day. Diane’s books are
light-hearted fun … well, except for all the dead bodies piling up along
the way!
With
that, I will now answer the four questions:
What am I working on?
I’ve
never been a writer to work on only one book at a time. I like to write in
concentrated bursts, then take a break. A big break. But I still want to keep
writing, so during the break I’ll work on something else, going back and forth
until I have leapfrogged my way to finished novels.
Right
now, I am leap-frogging with a historical/domestic/political suspense (how’s
that for a genre?!) novel set in Vietnam from 1937 to 1975 and a mystery novel
(hopefully the start of a series) set in L.A. in 1971. I’m in the first draft
stages of both and moving along as fast as I can while also conducting massive
research for both projects.
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| The Hollywood sign in 1971 - it looks as if a giant rat has been nibbling on it |
How does my work differ from
others in its genre?
While
my books contain mysteries and (hopefully) suspense, they are not fast-paced. I
like stories that build, and lately I have been reading a lot of mysteries
written by women in the 1950s and 1960s. In these books, careful pacing carries
the plot, and psychology, rather than action, drives the suspense. As for the historical
genre, the main difference is that with my debut novel, The Map of Lost Memories, I wrote about a place that has little, if
any, fiction written about it in English—1920s Indochina.
Why do I write what I do?
Setting
inspires me. I am inspired by places that fascinate me—Vietnam and Los Angeles
being at the top of the list. I am fascinated by the way setting shapes
character. I love learning more about a place, and writing a novel about it is the
perfect way to immerse myself in it, especially in that place during different
periods in time.
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| Searching for settings in Vietnam - a bedroom in a house overlooking the Saigon River |
How does your writing
process work?
I am The Queen of layering. I can’t say that I outline, but
I do sketch out my novels before I start. Then I sketch a chapter, but before I
move on to the next, I will rewrite it one, two, maybe three more times,
drawing a new layer over it each time. This is not a revision process. That
will come later. The initial layering is all very much first draft from-the-gut
writing. As for the revising, I am without a doubt at least a three draft
writer, if not more. And when I say draft, I mean full revision. I’m trying to
change that with my new mystery novel by doing more work in advance—character development,
plot points, etc. I’m curious to see if that will help. So far, so good!
