Tell us the story behind the story. How did LEAVES ON FROZEN GROUND come to be?

I’m not sure when I first got the idea for the story. But it presented itself to me as stories for four previous, and heretofore unpublished, novels often have: as a fully realized ending with a lot of white space in the preceding narrative. In other words, I knew how I wanted to end the book, but had no idea how I was going to get there. Writing the first draft, a course that took roughly 18 months, was essentially a process of discovering the story on a daily basis and putting it into words.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing LEAVES ON FROZEN GROUND?

Virtually every obstacle I encountered outside the actual writing was difficult, discouraging, and endlessly frustrating. After I completed the first draft, I submitted it to my agent at the time, who read it and rejected it. I had set the original book during the 1930’s depression, and she suggested, with good reason, that books set during the depression had about run their course in American literature. Since my agent had always given me good advice, I decided to rewrite the book per her suggestions: moving the setting to a more current period, and making slight changes in the characters’ makeups. The result took another 18 months or so, and what I thought would be minor tweaking evolved into an entirely new novel. No matter; I submitted the new book to my agent and she rejected it again. At that point I decided that, despite my sincere respect for her opinion, I would try to find a publisher on my own. After months of trying and dozens of rejections, the book finally landed on Michael Mirolla’s desk at Guernica Editions in Toronto, Canada, who to may utter astonishment liked it enough to take it on.   

What is the message you want readers to take away from your book?

I’m not a believer in “message” books, so there are no subliminal messages in this one beyond what readers might like to infer on their own. But I believe it is possible to rise above adversity and I believe in the triumph of the human spirit. I would be greatly flattered if even a few of my readers took those sentiments away from this book.

Describe your background. Did your background play a part in your book?

Yes and no. I spent 30 years writing for magazines, largely, although not entirely, in the so-called hook and bullet press. When I started writing fiction about 25 years ago, the last thing I wanted to do was write hook and bullet novels. But I’ve spent my life outdoors – in the woods, the prairies, the mountains — and have lived with animals all my life: bird dogs, cats, and peripherally, horses. In my late teens and twenties, I worked a numbing succession of low-paying jobs before I became a fulltime writer. All those experiences undoubtedly figured into the tone and setting of this book.

Describe your writing schedule. Do you outline? Any habits? 

I am very disciplined, which I have had frequently pointed out to me, not exclusively in tones of awestruck admiration, by those among my friends who know me best. I awaken early – depending upon the season, between five and six-thirty in the morning, then spend an hour or so drinking coffee, studying notes I’ve written to myself on index cards, watching the sun come up, and finally, meditating. Then I have a quick breakfast and write until noon. In the afternoon, I catch up on whatever else I’ve scheduled for the day. As for outlining, no. Been there and done that. Once I’ve scribbled out a brief storyline for a book, I sketch out a few high points in the narrative and then get after it, figuring out the thrust of the next chapter after I’ve written the last.

What books are on your nightstand? What are you currently reading?

I had to check. Here’s an abbreviated list: Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor E. Frankl; The Book Of Hours by Ranier Maria Rilke, and The Prosody Handbook, A Guide To Poetic Form, by Robert Beum and Karl Shapiro. There are others. This list might seem to imply that I’m an avid reader of poetry, but I am not. I would like to become an avid reader of poetry and am taking small steps in that direction. Mostly I read good novels recommended by friends and non-fiction books on a variety of subjects.

Which authors do you admire?

John Steinbeck, first and foremost. I have long thought that the Grapes of Wrath is a singular example of the Great American Novel. There were so many great writers from that era, Hemingway and Faulkner and Herman Wouk among them, but Steinway seemed the writer who, to me, wrote most often from a very deep place. Contemporary writers I’ve read and tremendously admire are Kent Haruf, Cormac McCarthy, TC Boyle, Jim Harrison, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Patchett, Annie Proulx…to name just a few of the great writers I’ve read in the last ten years or so.  

What have you learned from this experience?

That craftsmanship and beautiful writing and clever word play are all fine and good, but great stories are finer and gooder. So there.  

What is the best piece of advice you have ever received?

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unimagined in common hours.” That’s Thoreau, from Walden. I can’t improve on it.    

What is one piece of advice you would give your younger self?

Marry rich. Saves about 30 years of writing for magazines.

What are you working on now?

I’m halfway through a novel set in the Shields River valley, which is about an hour’s drive east of my home in southwestern Montana. It’s been tremendously enjoyable so far – I can’t wait to get to work each morning.

• Tell us the story behind the story. How did BLUEFALL come to be?

Years ago, when I was working as a professional actor with time on my hands in-between the hectic, but often sporadic, schedule of auditions and filming on set, I filled up virtually all my free time gaming in virtual worlds; this was a habit I picked up from my older brother when I was very young, often gaming with him and his friends over our computers. One day, I decided to use my credit card to purchase a virtual item in the game DOTA 2 – this item was purely cosmetic. It made my character look different but offered me no advantage in the game. The item’s cost at that time was the equivalent of $8, and I bought it because I wanted to stand out – to have some level of status in this game. A small part of me felt ridiculous spending money on a video game, but that didn’t stop me. Some years on, the developers of DOTA 2 issued a patch to the game that made this particular item no longer “droppable,” meaning that no new copies of the item would ever be found in the game. The supply growth was immediately cut to zero. Forever.

Immediately, the effect of this imposed rarity caused the item’s real-money value to sky-rocket to over $1500. The effective return on my initial $8 investment of a staggering 18750%, over a period of just four to five years, would have caused any stock-market trader or investment enthusiast to get excited by the possibility of immense gains. So, I made some money with my first ever virtual purchase – completely by accident. But what if I had foreseen this rise coming, and had pre-emptively purchased 10 of the item? Or 100? Or 1,000? It was this notion that sparked the idea for the story that would eventually become Bluefall.

Real-money involvement in virtual worlds is not a new thing. Back since the early days of the massively popular World of Warcraft, Chinese companies were hiring workers at pittance wages to “gold-farm”. Basically, they would find the most efficient process to gain virtual capital in the game, and then repeat that process over and over for 24 hours a day. The practice was against the game’s terms of conditions, but that didn’t stop the gold-farmers. These companies were obviously making enough money to justify their operation. World of Warcraft attempted to stop users from purchasing in-game capital for real money, but the sellers just went to platforms like eBay and conducted the transaction there.

Eventually, as it stands today, the World of Warcraft developers ceased trying to prevent these transactions and instead adopted their own “official” means of injecting real-money into the game. Users can now purchase “subscription time” – 1 month’s access to the game – and sell that to other players for a certain amount of gold. Thus, a functioning and official Economy and currency exchange was born. The same process has been repeated in various other games across the MMORPG genre. In every game, you can find someone willing to pay real money to look better, be stronger, stand out, and gain status – I myself was one of those people. And wherever you find money and a lack of strict regulation, you find sharks and opportunists ready to swoop in and exploit the market in order to get rich.

Bluefall, in a sense, is already happening. From that understanding, I only needed a model to progress with for the story, and I found a perfect framework in replicating/breaking down the causes and timelines of a real Economic crash that occurred in 1990’s Korea with the chaebols – Samsung, Hyundai, LG, etc. Add in my passion for sci-fi, a touch of detective noir, and the building blocks for the story were in place. That was over two years ago.

• What was the most challenging aspect of writing BLUEFALL?

I first approached the idea 4-5 years ago, but grew frustrated and never finished it. Once I felt ready to revisit the subject, there was nothing remotely challenging about writing Bluefall at all — it was a sheer pleasure. But it wasn’t until I was able to approach the story with a fresh perspective that everything finally opened up for me. So I guess I’ll say the most difficult part was that initial ‘failure’, but I see now that it was a necessary part of the process and I look back on even that part of the journey as part of the greater joy of writing Bluefall.

• What is the message you want readers to take away from your book?

There’s a couple of layers to this, but I think the most important message (to me personally, at least) in Bluefall is that we cannot hide from who we are — not even in a virtual world. Not through wealth, not through escapism, not through addiction, not through obsession, not even through the lies we tell ourselves and the ones we love in our desperation to dull the pain of reality. Until we can face ourselves as we are, we will always be unhappy.

• Tell us a little bit about your background and how it helped inspire your work.

I’m a gamer who has over a year’s worth of playing time on WoW and another year spread out among a couple other MMOs since back in the days of the original Everquest, so I’ve always been interested in virtual worlds and fascinated by them. I studied Economics in college before I went into writing, so this concept is really just a direct blend of those two different parts of my past.

• Describe your writing schedule. Do you outline? Any habits?

I come up with an idea that I think is cool and I try to hold onto that initial feeling of excitement for as long as I can. When it’s gone, I try to remember what I loved about it and that sometimes helps me get back on track. I write when I feel like it and sometimes that means staying up all night. Other times it means I won’t write for weeks.

I start with a cool idea, then form it into a story, then create a world for that story, then I populate that world with people. From the characters comes everything else. The specifics are different every time, but most of the things I’ve written (that were actually finished or turned out any good) have come about in that general way.

As to keeping everything organized when creating a vast world, I know there are other writers who about worldbuilding in a different way, but I don’t feel as if you need to meticulously plan out every single detail of a Universe to create one. You start with the big blocks and fill in some little ones, and when you’re confronted with making a choice you decide what works or makes sense with what you already have. It’s a strange kind of cause and effect process, i.e. you make X decision, so the next decision must be Y, and because you chose Y then the next decision must be Z. You can ask yourself any possible question about a Universe and answer it with some variation of that same process. There will always be inconsistencies at first, but rarely will you be presented with a situation where those disconnects can’t be resolved, so if you’re paying attention and aren’t afraid to make adjustments or rethink details when necessary, it doesn’t all feel so overwhelming. Everything starts with a single decision and from there blossoms into a living Universe, much like life came from single-celled organisms and adapted, by necessity, into complex, rational beings.

• What books are on your nightstand? What are you currently reading?

I just finished the Mistborn series and have returned to rereading Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. What can I say? I’m a huge fantasy nerd.

• Which authors do you admire?

Brandon Sanderson, for his work ethic; Sam Shepherd, for his artistic versatility; and Stan Lee, for his magical ability to turn stories and characters into modern mythology.

• What have you learned from this experience?

Don’t be afraid to dive into the unknown – whether that is a genre you are uncomfortable with or a format you’ve never tried before. (Bluefall was my first graphic novel, after all.) But just as important as the fearlessness in an artist is the humility; asking for help and trusting those you choose to collaborate with is an absolutely necessary – and hopefully, enjoyable! – part of growing as an artist. Writing can often be a very solitary profession by nature, but I’ve recently come to realize that most of my favorite professional experiences were those rare opportunities to work with other creatives and watch them lend their own unique artistic vision to my work. Inevitably, the story becomes better for it.

• What is the best piece of advice you have ever received? What is one piece of advice you would give your younger self?

“Write what you know” – or, even better, “Write what makes you come alive.” I wasted so much time in my formative writing years trying to figure out what people wanted to read. It was agonizing! This revelation has become a cliché by now, but everything became so much easier and more enjoyable for me when I focused on trying to write the type of stories that I wanted to read instead.

• What are you working on now?

Bluefall: Vol. 2!

{Photo by Nicole Honeywill on Unsplash}

I was recently asked by an author what the difference was between an agent and a publicist and which was more important to a successful writing career. The old adage of comparing apples and oranges is very fitting. Both are fruits, part of the same world, but within that world, they couldn’t be more different.

In a nutshell, agents shop material to editors and publishers in the hopes of securing a lucrative deal for their clients. Agents make money from a percentage of any sales to publishers/production companies/etc.

Tip: It is strongly advised not to move forward with an agent who requires or requests money upfront. There are even states with regulations against such business practices.

Publicists work on either an hourly rate or for a specified amount (often called a retainer). Publicists are responsible for getting material (in this case books and authors) media coverage and placement. They send out pitches and press releases alerting the media to the existence of the book and why it is “newsworthy,” and would make a good fit with their audience. When you see an author interviewed in a magazine or on a television news program, that is the work of a publicist (either in-house or independently hired).

Agents and publicists are both extremely helpful in building an author’s career. They can both help to create and facilitate an author’s brand and platform.

Tell us the story behind the story. How did MUSING MEDITERRANEAN come to be?

When I first traveled to the Mediterranean in 2012, I had been freelance writing for regional magazines in my area for about five years. I had written many articles and columns, but began wanting something more. I tossed book ideas around in my head, but never landed on that one concept that seemed right. Fiction writing didn’t call out to me and children’s or young adult books didn’t light a spark either. My trip to the Mediterranean had been a lifetime in the making. I was excited to see my ancestral countries (Greece and Italy) for the first time and took along a travel journal to chronicle as much of what we did and saw as possible.  I began writing in it at the end of each day and about half way through the trip it was nearly full. It dawned on me that, with so much material already, this was my book.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing MUSING MEDITERRANEAN?

For me, the most challenging part of writing this book was determining what aspects of my travel experience were story-worthy and what needed to hit the cutting room floor. I wanted to give enough detail to capture the reader’s interest and keep the story moving forward, but not so much that the reader would become lost in minutiae.  It can be a fine balance between too much information and not enough.

What is the message you want readers to take away from your book?

I would like readers to come away from my book with the feeling that travel is full of possibilities. If they are planning a trip to the Mediterranean, I want them to read MUSING MEDITERRANEAN as a resource. To say, that sounds so interesting, I want to do or see that too. If a reader may never have the chance to visit Greece, Italy or Turkey, I want them to come away from MUSING MEDITERRANEANfeeling like they have. I want this book to be an escape just like a good vacation should be.

Describe your background.

I come from a marketing background having earned my undergraduate degree and MBA both with concentrations in marketing. I went on to work in the financial services and online consumer goods industries in various marketing capacities. Eventually, I left the corporate world to raise a family. I began freelance writing as a way to keep my head in the game beyond my role as mom. Writing and developing promotional content had always been my favorite part of my marketing jobs. The official decision to begin writing came when I binge-watched Sex and the Cityabout ten years after it first aired. I fixated on Carrie Bradshaw as a columnist and writer and declared, “I could do that.” So, I did. I had my first article published in Northshore Magazinein October 2008 and I’ve been writing ever since. I have written a movie and film column and had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing celebrities including Mark Wahlberg, Mike O’Malley and Scott Grimes. I also wrote a lifestyle column called Matters of Life and Beth and was the editor of a regional home publication which secured my current obsession with all things interior design and home décor.

Describe your writing schedule. Do you outline? Any habits?

Whether I’m writing a column, a magazine article or a book, my process is the same. I begin with a brain dump so that any and all of my thoughts, notes, interview quotes or research are together in one place. This often results in a ridiculously long version of whatever the end result is supposed to be. From here I begin my first round of edits, cutting anything that is superfluous. As I near a word count that is appropriate, I move into the next phase which is finessing each sentence – finding just the right words to express what I want to say and impart emotion through the words I choose. Next, I carefully run through what remains to fact check, spell check and proof to the very best of my ability. Finally, I read through for flow, reorganize content and ensure that my final version is as close to my version of perfect as I can get it.

I write best when I am alone without any distraction. I have a home office that I’ve turned into a little writing haven. Some of my favorite published pieces are framed and hanging on the wall and little mementos or quotes surround me for those moments when I need inspiration.

What books are on your nightstand? What are you currently reading?

I keep some of my favorite books on my nightstand including The Language of Flowersby Vanessa Diffenbaugh. Not only did I find that story and its romance captivating, but the education of Victorian age floriography was so interesting to me. After reading the book, I wrote a short article featuring it and I began bringing flowers into my own home that expressed whatever particular emotion or feeling I wanted in my life at that time. The romance, beauty and meaning of flowers is appealing on so many levels. Other books I have read and enjoyed that sit on my nightstand are Traveling with Pomegranatesby Sue Monk Kidd and Anne Kidd Taylor, A Man Called Oveby Frederik Backman andUnder the Tuscan Sunby Frances Mayes.

My book club just finished reading Little Fires Everywhereby Celeste Ng and before that Goodnight Nobodyby Jennifer Weiner. Up next we are reading Americanahby Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Which authors inspire you?

I do enjoy the relatable and straightforward writing style of Elin Hilderbrand. She has an ease about her words that is perfect for the kind of summer reads she’s known for. When charged with reading the first book in her Winter Streetseries for book club, I ended up reading all four. They’re just interesting and effortless reads.

I am also inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert author of Eat Pray Love. I like to say that MUSING MEDITERRANEAN is Eat Pray Love meets My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I liken my transformation working through travel anxiety to Gilbert’s personal journey overcoming her own demons. Experiencing and appreciating other countries, cultures and lifestyles throughout the process allowed me to feel a connection with Gilbert and her travel experience. I also enjoy her very honest and thoughtful approach to writing. I hope that I am able to achieve a similarly authentic voice.

What have you learned from this experience?

I have learned that, like with most things in life, you can’t do it alone. Sure, you can put words to a page without help, but I believe, whenever possible, publishing a book is best done when you involve professionals who can take your work to the next level. Working with seasoned editors, publishers, and promoters has given me the satisfaction and peace of mind of knowing that I have given my book its best chance at success. The support has given me confidence.

What is your advice for aspiring writers?

My advice to aspiring writers is to commit. Commit to who you are as a writer, commit to your story, your writing style and your voice. You will have people tell you to change and you might be compelled to give them what they say “sells,” but if you have a story you believe in and can share it in an authentic voice, it is worth telling your way. Take pride in your work and do whatever it takes to make it the best it can be. If you can, work with a writing coach, hire an editor and do your research.

Above all, commit to getting it done. It’s easy to take on a big project like a book and set it aside for a time when you feel there’s more time. Life is busy, that may never happen, so make the time and tell your story now.

What are you working on now?

I continue to freelance and post regularly on my lifestyle blog, 3 Olives & A Twist. I am also planning a follow up to MUSING MEDITERRANEAN. The same cast of characters will be taking Hawaii by storm in 2019…working title, HELLO HAWAII. I would love to chronicle my time there in a similar way and update readers on how things are going with my travel anxiety.

Following a fabulous trip in 2014 to Los Angeles for the MTV Music Awards with a girlfriend, I thought my travel anxiety was a thing of the past. Unfortunately, it reared its ugly head again in 2016 when, two weeks prior to another European vacation, I put my foot down and insisted we cancel. After learning that one of our destinations, Nice, France, had been the target of a terror attack involving a cargo truck driven into a crowd killing 86 people, I simply could not muster the courage to go.

However now, with enough time passed, I am trying again with Hawaii and would love to share my experience there.

We can’t wait to hear more from Beth Daigle. Pick up a copy of MUSING MEDITERRANEAN and start planning your next trip!