Episode 87: *Special Episode* Exciting 2022 Debuts!
A special episode featuring six exciting women’s fiction debuts from the first half of 2022!
Each of our six authors shares a little about their novel, their inspiration, and their best writing advice.
Maggie Giles author of The Things We Lost (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com)
Melanie Mitzner author of Slow Reveal (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com)
J. Marie Rundquist author of All I'm Asking (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com)
Shauna Robinson author of Must Love Books (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com)
Lisa Roe author of Welcome to the Neighborhood (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com)
Sandra L. Young author of Divine Vintage (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com)
Connect with the authors:
Maggie Giles — Website / Instagram
Melanie Mitzner — Website / Instagram
J. Marie Rundquist — Website / Instagram
Shauna Robinson — Website / Instagram
Transcript:
** Transcript created using AI (so please forgive the typos!) **
Lainey 0:00
Hi, this is Lainey Cameron and I am here today with Ashley. Hey Ashley. Hi
Ashley Hasty 0:05
Hi everyone! Hi.
Lainey 0:07
So Ashley and I are going to tag team this wonderful episode and we are so dang jazzed about this. Let me just show you who we are going to have six folks like I said her joining us, Maggie Giles, the author of The Things We Lost. We have Melanie Mitzner, who is going to talk about Slow Reveal. We have J Marie Rundquist who's going to talk about All I'm asking, Shauna Robinson is going to talk about Must Love Books, Lisa Roe, Welcome To The Neighborhood. And Sandra LYoung, Divine Vintage, and what a lineup! It just spans genres. Well, they're all women's fiction, but span types of women's fiction within that so I'm so dang excited. And our first section here is going to be with three awesome authors Melanie Mitzner, J. Marie Rundquist, Maggie Giles. So let's start with Maggie. I would love to hear a little bit more about The Things We Lost for those who haven't had a chance to read it yet. Tell us more about your debut novel.
Maggie Giles 1:14
I would love to thank you so much for having me. So, The Things We Lost follows Maddie Butler, a 36 year old mother of two and a lonely marriage. She's been haunted by guilt for 14 years ever since the mysterious death of a university friend named Gina while drowning in her own unhappiness and guilt Maddie actually enters a foolish affair that she immediately regret. So when she decides to come clean that night, her distant husband unfortunately does not return home and when she goes to bed, she asked herself a careless question of what if I had never met him. The next morning she wakes up 26 years old again in a completely different past. Her best friend hates her her close relationship with her brother is strained. Her husband and children are nowhere to be found. And strangest of all, Gina is still alive for years after when her funeral should have been as Maddie navigates this new world she realizes she is the product of her own and happiness, and begins to wonder if this new doo doo over is exactly what she needs, even if it means never seeing her daughter's again.
Lainey 2:12
And I had a chance to read this one. And it's a page turner. Like this thing had me hooked from the very beginning. I love the idea of like sliding doors, right? Like the idea of like, what if we woke up one day and our reality just wasn't the one we were in yesterday. I thought it was such an interesting premise. And you did submit so much with it really interesting thing. It's great book. So lets ask Melanie - and there are so many things about this book that I am fascinated by. I haven't yet had a chance to read this one. But I want to because it sounds so interesting. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about it, Melanie
Melanie Mitzner 2:45
Well, it's actually on preorder. It's not really launching until May 3. It's a novel that's set in 1990s, New York, and it's about a family of artists who question the arbiters of culture and defy social norms. In an open marriage. Catherine, a film editor meets Naomi, a lesbian poet, and a decade into their on off affair Catherine struggling to maintain maintain both relationships. So despite her husband's struggle with sobriety and abandoning his art career for advertising, she decides to try and reconcile her marriage even though her love for the poet prevail then and unexpected tragedy strikes and their lives are up end.
Lainey 3:27
And one of the things that got me particularly interested in this book is it's from in I'm not going to say the publisher right? I say Inanna. Is that how I pronounce it Nana, which is the same publisher that published Lisa Braxton's debut as a fabulous debut. And so I know they publish really great quality books. And so I'm excited to read yours as well. And third of ours. Let's pass it off to Jay Murray Rehnquist, to tell us about another one. It's a fun read all I'm asking.
J Marie Rundquist 3:54
Thanks for having me. Also, All I'm Asking is a story about a friendship between two women, Naomi and Jasmine. Naomi is an online teacher who lives in Minnesota. And she works with kids, high school students who are in an alternative setting, which means their students who have not necessarily had a lot of success in the traditional classroom, and her friend Jessamine, who is living in Washington States, and she is a department store manager. And because of that distance between them and the time difference, that's actually why they communicate mostly through email and texts. So the story is actually in a in what we call an epistolary format, which means it's narrated and the series of emails, tax forum posts and similar media, but because also that it's a friendship story, you can probably guess there's a rift that happens between the two of them. Part of those stressors are that Jess and her friend in Washington, her wife trips and falls and breaks her arm and it seems like a straightforward injury, but it's not as lenient to some symptoms that doctors cannot diagnose what's going on with her and That's pretty long strain on her relationship. And with her little family unit because they have two young children. Naomi is super hyper involved with her students. And it gets to the point where she is just so wrapped up with them. And she even takes one and who is pregnant teens and thinks went into her home. And she's sort of missing some other signals going on within our own family with our friends. And so our story is trying to figure out, you know, what is it that truly causes them to break apart in a friendship? And what is it that's going to test? Get that bond back together again,
Lainey 5:31
I also had a chance to read this one. And what's so interesting to me is this epistolary How do you say epistolary format? All communications. So it's a new version of it, right? Because it's all emails and online forums, etc. But you did it so well, it's very hard to pull off right to get someone pulled into the characters and totally engaged the characters. It's really difficult. And so for a debut novelist, to take that on, bravo, it is not easy to do that. And you did it so well. And I was totally into the characters and rooting for them and wanted it to work out the right way. And I also particularly love the theme of kind of the main character, overextending herself, like, I can kind of relate to that taking on a little too much. And then the other people in your life start to suffer because you're kind of taking on more than you're capable. Yeah, exactly. And so I thought you did it really well. So let's move to one of my favorite questions, the inspiration behind novels, you've got three very different books here. And I am interested in that little gem of like, what started you done this path? And let's go back to Maggie, like, goodness, what give you this idea of sliding doors? Alternate Reality? Where did all this come from?
Maggie Giles 6:38
My own life? To be totally honest, I had just gotten out of a very long term relationship that had really defined my early 20s. And I found myself very lost and confused and, and was having my own what if questions, and where would I be if I made another choice? Or, you know, who would I be a completely different person. So I actually started writing this novel as a bit of a therapeutic project that ended up morphing into this kind of relatable story about this character who gets to see her own. What if play out.
Lainey 7:08
What a cool concept, I really, I really enjoyed the concept of like, what if and I love the fact that it begins with this affair, right? Because if ever, there's a moment that makes you say, what if right? What if I hadn't done that? That's a perfect thing to pick because I imagine everybody after an affair is like, what if I hadn't done that? How would life be different? So okay, let's pass it off to Melanie. And I am interested, this is such an art centric book, right? There's a lot of like, artistic elements to it. So like is that coming from your own life tell us more about that art art angle and kind of where the inspiration came from.
Melanie Mitzner 7:42
Um, it is actually from my own life, and my partner's a visual artist, and, and I'm a writer. So that's, that's very much a part of our lives, you know, a couple of things. I'm very fascinated by family dynamics. And pretty much everything I've ever written has to do with that. So it's, I find that very complex, there's hierarchies within families, there are certain situations, you know, there's there's relational situations that people play out, and their other relationships throughout their life. And so that that's a part of it. But what the artistic part is, I really wanted to draw a parallel between building intimacy and trust in relationships and embarking on the artistic process, because both are very risky, messy and unpredictable. And I feel it felt that there was very much relationship between the two. So that's why I chose to make them artists and to explore there's very much about the artistic process in this. It's not just about artists, I compounded that by the fact that you can't dictate who you fall in love with. In this case, it was probably a good thing that she had the affair of maybe it's reckless and crazy, but you know, and and the other aspect is I lived in New York, from the 80s through the 90s, through the middle of the 90s. And in the East Village and try Baca, and it left a permanent imprint on me. So I wanted to reflect on this and capture the zeitgeist of, of New York in the in the early 90s.
Lainey 9:13
Sounds fabulous. And Janet, I'm intrigued, I get to kind of give you a two parter on this one, the inspiration for this novel, but also this really unusual choice to do it all through communications. I'm really interested in like what led to that as part of your inspiration for the book.
J Marie Rundquist 9:29
Well, it comes actually a little bit from real life. I have a really good friend of mine. We actually became friends online, and started as we got to know each other. We just we pass and then we still do this we pass each other. It's kind of informed me told them our lives through emails, we have these long emails, and they'll reply and to all the different parts, and it kept going back and forth. And I kind of kept all those and threw them into a folder and I call it the friendship files. And because I thought because eventually I thought, you know what if I took there's some kind of story in here. And whereas the two women in my book Naomi just are definitely not us. I mean, a little bit of me if Naomi because I, I do teach, and I have I did used to teach online. So a lot of my stories about my students are coming from that. But I guess I also I thought, well, you know, because we that's how we communicated, it seems like, that'd be kind of a fun way to tell the story. And then a part of me was thinking, Well, okay, what if I did everything and that there was no pullback into just regular prose narrative prose, can I actually convey a story in characterization, doing all these different things. And so I really had to think about different ways to pull some of that in. So we have forum posts, because he's part of an online book club. And so we have some of that kind of stuff going on. There are some interspersed text messages. And there's stuff behind the scenes that we don't actually see going on, that kind of come through in those messages. But maybe we don't see everything. And that's can be a challenge, too. But I think that's kind of realistic, we don't need to see everything that goes on.
Lainey 11:14
Yeah. And I've heard it said that by giving yourself a constraint, I don't think I've ever seen these creative constraints, where they ask you to do something like write a paragraph that only has words with the letter S, or write six paragraphs in a row that start with the letter S, or T or whatever. But by setting ourselves constraints, it can actually spark more creativity is the theory. And so I find this fascinating, I'm in awe of what you did, portraying an entire novel that way, it's hard, and you did it really well. So congratulations.
J Marie Rundquist 11:41
It's also really fun. I mean, making up news articles is a blast, you know, student responses to essay questions and things like that. Very, very fun.
Lainey 11:54
And there's a book a book club in there, right with online discussion of different books at various points. So let's transition to I know, it's one of the favorite questions from our listeners is writing advice. And you've all made it to the point where you've got these great debuts coming out. And so I'm interested in what you would share with other people who perhaps aren't there yet, perhaps want to have a debut novel come out, I'll switch it up. And I'll go to Melanie first this time, let's do that.
Melanie Mitzner 12:19
You know, I know this is gonna sound really simple. And it's something you can do without an advanced degree without a mentor without a lot of training. And that's just show up, you really have to put in the time and energy and do it consistently. And you're going to see your work improve vastly. If you do that. That way, I it sort of loosens me up. And then you know, as far as a novel or short fiction, I write freely until a character's situation compels me. And then I do bios several generations back of the main characters, so that I can construct a history that really helps me shape the story. And it informs how it evolves. I'm very character driven, as you might have. And the main thing that I tried to do is give my characters enough latitude to come alive and speak to me rather than me dictate who they are what they want. Because if you can manage that, it's much more authentic.
Lainey 13:15
That's great, great advice. And I'm gonna pass it off to Janet, next, what do you have to say to the next generation of folks who want to do this?
J Marie Rundquist 13:23
Wow, I mean, I like the whole to show up. Because, I mean, as a teacher, in my past, one of the things I used to teach was English. And I always used to talk about writing the guest writing rating against better reading. So the more you write, the better you're gonna get at it. But my first thing of advice is really the reading parts, I think you need to be a reader. In order to be able to tell a story, you need to know how stories are told, sometimes I run into people say, Well, I don't really read when they're trying to write a novel. And I'm thinking, that's I'm not saying it's not possible. But I just, I think, if you want to, you know, get the best possible chance of having a story that's going to work, need to have that breadth of reasoning. But the other little thing I'm going to say too, is there's just no one way to write a book. There's so there's so much advice out there such a plethora of things. And so you need to find those things that work for you in order to do that. So just kind of remember that you can choose the way that works best for you.
Lainey 14:24
I agree. I'm a big believer in like, don't get so wound up in the roles that you can't use your creativity and create something and, you know, roles are sometimes helpful, but sometimes the opposite of helpful when you're trying to be creative, right? Okay, Maggie, what about you? What do you have to say to us,
Maggie Giles 14:41
So I totally love both of those answers. Studying your craft I think is huge. The people that succeed in this industry do so by perseverance. My other piece of advice is find your community that can support you on your down days help you navigate those plot holes and commiserate on those rejections. Guns are a solitary hobby, this community makes a big difference. It's a lot of how you're going to learn. And it's a lot of where your support is going to come as you navigate this treacherous industry that we've all joined.
Lainey 15:12
Isn't that the truth? Just a reminder that we put all of the links to everybody's books on the webpage. So you'll find the links to all of these authors, their social media and their books at WWW dot best of women's fiction.com. And this is a good moment for me to pass it off and invite Ashley, Ashley, why don't you take it from here?
Ashley Hasty 15:31
Thanks, Lainey. I am so excited to introduce you to our next three guests. We have Lisa Roe, author of Welcome To The Neighborhood, Shauna Robinson, author of Must Love Books, and Sandra L. Young author of Divine Vintage. So thank you all for joining me.
Sandra L Young 15:51
Thank you, Ashley.
Lisa Roe 15:52
Thank you for having us, too.
Ashley Hasty 15:53
Of course, the main purpose of this podcast is to let our listeners know about the best of women's fiction. So let's start by each of you telling us about your debut novel. Lisa, we'll start with you.
Unknown Speaker 16:06
Sure. My book is called Welcome To The Neighborhood. It's a story of a woman named Ginny Miller, who is a struggling artist and a single mom living in Queens with her 11 year old daughter, who finds out that a second chance at love also brings her an opportunity to maybe give her daughter everything that she never could, you know, kind of struggling and working in Queens. So what happens is she meets a really sweet guy named Jeff. And Jeff asks her if she will move into the house that he lives in, in an upscale neighborhood in New Jersey. And while she normally doesn't really care about, you know, upscale things or material things, you know, she does think it's a great school system. There's a lot of kids on the street, and it'll be good able to give her everything she never could. And then she meets the neighbors. And she is suddenly thrown into this mix of CEO PTA moms and Real Housewife wannabes and Mean Girls, and she can Harry find that they have to sort of battle them all in order to sort of maintain their own identity and their own authentic, authentic authenticity, and to see really, if they're going to fit in on the street, or or not. And that's kind of the story.
Ashley Hasty 17:21
Thank you, Lisa. Sandra, will you tell us about your book?
Sandra L Young 17:24
Well, thank you. It's a mixed genre book. And it's got elements of women's fiction as well as social justice issues. And when Tess Burton relocates she's risking her inheritance to open the divine vintage boutique to so gown she channels a century old crime of passion. Now she sees it differently than history is passed on. So she has to convince the skeptical yet handsome descendant of the accused murderer to help her try to untangle the mystery. They use the catalyst of vintage clothing and the murdered woman's diaries to see back into the past. And they discover that pursuing love in 1913 was just as thorny as modern day. And as the list of murder suspects rises. They are their own emotions are tangled up with those of the past and it may just tear them apart.
Ashley Hasty 18:18
Thank you, Sandra. And Shauna, tell us about your book.
Shauna Robinson 18:21
Sure, I'd love to. So my novel must love books is a contemporary women's fiction novel about an editorial assistant named Nora who has been working at the same publishing company for the last five years in the same role. And in that time, she's realized that dream jobs are a lie. She, you know, can went into publishing as a book lover, and she thought that she would be going out to lunch with her favorite authors and working on the next great American novel, and that really have nothing to do with her. And all her favorite co workers keep getting laid off or leaving, and her mental health just keeps getting worse. So when Nora salary is cut by 15%, when she can barely afford to pay rent as it is she secretly takes a second job with a competing publisher. And as she's balancing these two jobs and trying to keep either of her bosses from finding out and really just looking for a light at the end of the tunnel because she wants to leave publishing and doesn't know what to do with her life. But now she has two publishing jobs, she ends up falling for Andrew Santos who's a best selling author that either publisher would be eager to sign in. So that sends Nora into quite a moral quandary, as she really struggles with her mental health and is still trying to figure out what to do with her life as she's in her 20s and just really feeling lost.
Ashley Hasty 19:41
I always find it fascinating to hear about the initial spark of inspiration the authors get that ultimately leads them to write a book so I want to know what inspired each of your novels Sandra, can we start with you?
Sandra L Young 19:55
Oh, absolutely. Of course vintage clothing as you can tell behind me is A large focus because I have a huge collection, it fills a small bedroom. And I gather that over several decades of performing and community theater, the love of vintage clothing grew. But I've also realized that the book is really to gratitude for the county I live in, I based it in the largest city here in Northwest Indiana. And that's where I really found my niche and performing. And also I was able, as a nonprofit manager to work with a lot of great people to improve our quality of life. So all of that is rolled into this book. And thankfully, readers, uh, we did very long ago. Absolutely, we are finished in Easter. So that's exciting. You can tell yes, I wear vintage a lot, especially in my persona with the divine vintage release.
Ashley Hasty 20:49
I love that.
Lisa, will you tell us the inspiration behind your novel?
Lisa Roe 20:53
Sure. So my novel was inspired by the fact that I moved around a lot when I was a kid, and even in, you know, a lot of my adult life, and I kept having to start over and move into these sort of pre existing social circles, and kind of wedge sometimes wedge my way in and sometimes put, you know, put myself into a place where I might not really have belonged. And so I wanted to take the concept of starting over and a new beginning, and flip it on its head a little bit and kind of look at it with what if you moved into a place that was completely going on without you, and wanted you to fit into it exactly as they had always, you know, been? And and how does that affect you? You know, do you change yourself? If you change the way you dress to the what change where your talk? Do you change your values to fit in with the people that you're now with? Or do you stand up for yourself? And you do stand up for your, your authenticity? And what are you know, what are the consequences of that. So in my story, it is about both a mom and her daughter who are both fitting into or trying to fit into these social circles that may not be the right place for them. And that is the decision that you know, this the mom in particular because the daughter is Young is going to have to make as the book progresses, and you'll find out whether she did or she didn't as it goes on. And Sandra, I just want to say that my book does have a bit of vintage clothing in it because my character spends a lot of time in thrift stores. So it's not exactly vintage. So that kind of interests me. So I will definitely be reading your book. I love that concept of the vintage.
Sandra L Young 22:39
Well. Thank you yours is on my TBR too and Shawna as well.
Ashley Hasty 22:43
And Shauna, will you tell us the inspiration behind your novel?
Shauna Robinson 22:46
Yeah, in a biographical facts that are shorter will surprise no one I used to work in publishing. And as someone who you know, grew up loving books, and majored in English and figured, okay, well, I'm working in publishing, and this is what I will do for the rest of my life. It was a startling discovery to get there and realize that it wasn't really what I expected, and also to go through a lot of layoffs that took all my favorite people away for me. And so when I came up with the idea for most love books, I was just feeling really lost in my career. And I kind of wanted an imaginary friend, I wanted to read a book about someone who felt as lost as I did. So I really wanted muscle books to send her on this character of Nora and her exploration as she tries to achieve, you know, come to terms with the fact that this career she's been working towards isn't for her, and then tries to figure out what her next steps are, and tries to figure out what her next dream job is, because I was something I was still struggling with. And so I wanted a friend, in my struggle.
Ashley Hasty 23:53
Gosh, I absolutely love that I can completely relate. I'm sort of between careers as well, which is a great transition to my next question. Since I am an author who's not yet published. I'm always eager to hear the advice that other writers have to give. And as debut authors, you have such a unique perspective, you author those of us who are not yet published inspiration that we may get there too. So I want to hear the advice that you have for other authors who want to be where you are now. So Shauna, can we start with you?
Shauna Robinson 24:25
Absolutely. For me, I think the biggest thing is consistency. Because when I was writing less love books, it took me years, because I kept putting it down because I didn't think anything would ever amount to it. And it wasn't until I think one month when I decided to try to participate in NaNoWriMo or you try to write 50,000 words in the month of November, but I wrote half the book, and then in which is that act of writing every single day at a set time and logging my word count really helped to I would track it in an excel spread. She and there was a lot of motivation in seeing those numbers climb every single day. Even if you feel like you're not going anywhere, you still have something that can track progress. And that can be an Excel sheet or can be stickers and a planner, anything that you can do to track your consistency and just keep at it even when you feel like you don't know what you're doing will get you to the finish line.
Ashley Hasty 25:21
Oh my gosh, I think that feeling of nothing will come up. This is so relatable, I experienced that multiple times a day. Probably. I kind of go up and down all the time. So that is excellent advice. Thank you, Sandra. Let's go to your next.
Sandra L Young 25:37
Well, I would say and actually you've got a great start on this already have that presence already established on social media, that you're out there, you're connecting with people, you are building real relationships, not only with local friends and acquaintances, but also with the Bookstagram community on on Instagram, and I was behind the curve because like Shauna, this book, you know, was around for quite a few years being worked on and kind of took me by surprise when when it came out. So I had to scramble and in less than a year put together a website around vintage clothing and got on Instagram really beefed up my even Facebook presence and some Twitter too, because I just didn't have that. I realized that if I had been building those relationships, the connections is are everything. women's fiction writers has been wonderful already had those connections beginning and so we've tapped in into the 22 debuts we help and support each other conviction that you will make it and that you're ready when your book is hitting the launch.
Ashley Hasty 26:44
Of course as a book blogger books to grammar now book podcaster I adamantly send out advice. Thank you, please. So what about you? What advice do you have for writers?
Lisa Roe 26:56
Okay, so my advice is gonna sound a little bit like a bumper sticker. But bear with me. My advice is to be brave. And what I mean by that is that every step along the way that we write, there is an opportunity to let fear get you to let to let self doubt get you and to let you know, the sort of outside world get to you. I mean, from the day you write something down on your first piece of paper, you have to be brave in order to be to get that honest, you know, even if it's funny, it's still honest, and you know, or, or emotional thing down to let somebody read your story is hard and, and scary to let someone give you back. Feedback is scary. And so my advice to everybody is, every time along the way, when you feel like I just don't want to do this, or I just can't do it, or I can't do it anymore. Just do it. Just take the one step. Just as Susan Jeffrey says, which I love, just love this, feel the fear and just do it anyway. Because it's only going to hurt for a second to just make that one extra effort and put yourself out there again, write that next page, finish that story, send your book to someone and hear their hear their criticism or their critique. And it happens to us all along the way. I mean, you know, we are very close, you guys. The other authors have their books on a shelf, but I'm very close to having my book on a shelf and still, every day, you know, there are things that I'm really afraid to do. This podcast was one of them. So, you know, just step past your feeling. Be brave, and just do it. That's my advice and bumper sticker.
Ashley Hasty 28:42
Lisa, if you have those bumper sticker made, I will be the first one to sign up for hurdles. And thank you thank you to all of the authors who joined us for this special episode featuring debut authors. I appreciate you and as a reminder, we put all of the links to everyone's books on the web page. You can find their websites and social media links there too. So visit us at www.bestofwomensfiction.com