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| Flying High: An interview with award-winning author Donna Andrews By Susan McBride Donna Andrews is the winner of the 2000 Anthony, Agatha and Lefty Awards for Best First Novel for her novel Murder with Peacocks. Read our review.  Donna’s career is soaring. Her first mystery Murder with Peacocks won the Malice Domestic contest sponsored by St. Martin’s Press and was released to an unsuspecting public that couldn’t seem to get enough of the madcap antics of Meg Langslow and her crazy family. PEACOCKS has been nominated for nearly every mystery award that exists and has already captured the Anthony, the Agatha and the Lefty Awards. With the latest Murder with Puffins pleasing her already diehard fans, and another series in the works, what's next for this talented author. Read our review of Murder with Puffins. SUSAN McBRIDE - How does it feel to be so honored by your fans and critics for your  debut? Do you feel vindicated in a way, since writing is so often a lonely craft?DONNA ANDREWS - Of course, it’s great to have my first novel earn such acclaim. It’s also a little scary. There’s always that very human anxiety - "What if it was a fluke? What if I can’t do it again?" - that most of us feel whenever we succeed at something. I figure you just have to ignore the anxiety and keep on working. At the same time, I’ve been a reader since I was a child and I’ve been writing almost as long, so it’s fabulous to have succeeded in doing something I’ve wanted to do all my life. When writers whose works I’ve enjoyed tell me they liked PEACOCKS - well, it still thrills me. The bit about writing being a lonely craft though - with critique groups, mystery conventions, books signings, and on-line mystery chats, my social life was never this exciting before I turned into a working writer. That’s one of the paradoxes of being a writer today. You have to spend long, solitary hours with a pen or a keyboard. Being able to write well depends, not only on talent, but also on discipline, the ability to shut out all the many competing demands on your time and attention. And then, once you’re published, you have to go out and tell the world about your book - and the two are so different that now I know exactly how mild-mannered Clark Kent feels when he ducks into the phone booth to put on his Superman tights. Is your family surprised by your overnight success? I think my family has gotten a big kick out of my writing career. If they were disappointed during all the years when I wasn’t published, including the time when I wasn’t writing much for one reason or another, they certainly never showed it. They’ve always seemed proud of the degree of success I’ve achieved in my corporate writing career, but I know they’re especially happy now. My mother read PEACOCKS in manuscript form and shared it with all her cousins; but my dad, who provided a large part of the inspiration for Meg’s dad, didn’t read it until I brought home an advance copy over Thanksgiving. He was astonished to find that he’d become a literary character, but I think he’s learning to enjoy the distinction. I think one of the things I most enjoy is doing a signing at my hometown library, probably because that’s obviously so much fun for my parents, being able to show me off to friends, neighbors and family. Meg Langslow is obviously a woman with a great love of family (however crazy). Is this something you both share? Are there bits and pieces of your relatives that seeped into the characters? It’s definitely something we share, although luckily, my family isn’t quite as bossy as Meg’s. I think a lot of the background for PEACOCKS comes from my childhood experience of growing up in Yorktown. I remember it as a small town where everyone knew everyone else, and everyone was either related to my mother or had gone to school with her or one of my cousins. Yorktown’s not that small anymore, and perhaps it wasn’t even when I was growing up. But that was how I saw it. When I was very little, there always seemed to be a confusingly large number of relatives around: my mother’s large extended family in Virginia and my father’s in Kansas. And they were always doing things that seemed, to my child’s eye, strange and wonderful and vastly entertaining. So, bits of pieces of my own family have seeped into the characters, and I try to capture that feeling of bewildered astonishment I remember from my childhood. Do you think you were born to be a writer? Or did that evolve from your love of books? Probably a little of both. Born to be a writer in the sense that I inherited a combination of talents and traits from my parents that helped make me a writer. My mother is a born storyteller. She can go to the grocery store and make it sound like a grand adventure. In fact, if you really want to cause trouble, ask me and my mother to tell our very different, though equally dramatic, versions of the story of my getting lost at Nachman’s Department Store when I was about eight. My version of course, is a poignant and touching true story of abandonment and childhood trauma, while my mother’s version - well, it’s obvious where I get my talent for fiction. She says it’s the other way around. My father is a scientist, a marine biologist, and he’s always been very good both at the analytical side of his work and in writing about it. So, I think perhaps I get the ability to pull it all together and put it down on paper from him. My mother and father both have always been avid readers, so I grew up thinking that reading was as much a part of everyday life as breathing. I’ve heard about people who began writing because they felt they had a story that must be told or because they couldn’t find enough books of the kind they liked or because they read something so awful they said, "I can write something better than that!" I began writing stories in grade school, and I don’t remember a time in my childhood when I didn’t assume I was going to grow up to be a writer. Although there certainly were some times in my adult life, before I managed to put it together and write a publishable novel, that I thought I’d been very mistaken. I’m just glad I eventually learned the discipline and the technique to turn myself from a born writer into a published one. What’s the best thing about being published? Tell us the most exciting and memorable experience you’ve had since your books came out. It’s hard to pick out the best thing or the most exciting experience. I can think of a series of moments that were all intensely meaningful. The first time I held a copy of PEACOCKS was exciting, but I think the first time I actually saw it in a store was somehow more compelling, because it felt more real. I wanted to rush in and offer to sign copies, but I was just walking by the bookstore on my way to buy something I needed for a messy fixing-up project I’d been doing around the apartment, and I was an absolute mess. So I waited until the next day when I looked presentable. And my first signing at the Mystery Book Shop in Bethesda, Maryland (which alas is now closed) was very memorable. So many of my friends came, people I knew from work, from my writing group, from the local Sisters in Crime Chapter. It was great, like a reunion of people from all stages of my life. And winning the Agatha Award for Best First Novel was a very overwhelming moment for me, because going to Malice Domestic over the years definitely helped inspire me to keep on with my writing. When you were writing PEACOCKS, were you thinking "Yep, this is great" - How many drafts did it go through before you knew it was as good as it could be? Did I think it was great? That would depend on what day you asked me. Maybe what minute of the day. I had days when I was convinced it was a horrible, unpublishable mess and I was wasting my time. The only thing that kept me going on those days was being mule stubborn and forcing myself to keep writing word by word. And there were days when I thought every single syllable I wrote was brilliant, which was obviously a sign that I needed to get a much firmer grip on reality. But mostly there were days in between when I’d go from frustration that one section wasn’t working right yet, to the sudden unexpected pleasure of re-reading something and saying, "You know, that’s not bad." I remember while working on PEACOCKS, I read a book by Lawrence Block. He said that some days he couldn’t wait to start writing and it came easily. On other days, he didn’t feel like writing and had to sweat every word. And to his astonishment, later on he couldn’t tell by the quality of his writing which mood he’d been in at the time. I try to keep that in mind. So if it doesn’t seem like it’s going well, I try to avoid feeling discouraged and just keep plugging away. And in case anyone thinks that all the agonizing is over when you send the manuscript in - wrong! At least for me, the rollercoaster ride from "it’s awful" to "it’s great" keeps on, not only after the book is accepted for publication but long after it’s published. I have no idea how many drafts I went through, because the whole time I’m working on a book, I’m going back and polishing and tweaking the parts I’ve already written. It’s one of the ways I jumpstart myself on days when I have a hard time getting going. So, depending on the passage, I might have revised it two or three times, or two or three dozen times, or hundreds of times. As far as knowing if it’s as good as it can be - after putting the PEACOCKS manuscript in the mail for the St. Martin’s contest, I immediately wanted to pull it back out and give it another once-over. Fortunately, the post office has designed mailboxes to prevent this sort of second-guessing. After I extricated my arm, I went off and made sure I was too busy writing other things to worry. Was PEACOCKS the first manuscript you’d written? What was the path to publication like for you? PEACOCKS wasn’t the first book I’d ever written - but probably the first publishable book though. In college, I began a fantasy called MORDELAIRE set in a huge, crumbling old stone mansion and told from the point of view of a character who had been enchanted into the form of a large, brown, venomous snake. It reminded my writing professor of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast triology, which both flattered and intimidated me, since the Gormenghast books were among my literary cult favorites at the time. I finished MORDELAIRE after college and submitted it to a few places, but I knew woefully little about the whole publishing process then. Luckily or unluckily, it never saw the light of day, although the title does now serve as my email address. Some years later, I completed a coming-of-age novel set in Charlottesville during the time I lived there and attended the University of Virginia - although some wise person had told me that no subject was harder for a writer to carry off successfully than a novel about writers writing. I made the protagonist an aspiring actress instead of a novice writer. I realized it had some structural problems and, by the time I figured out how to solve them, I had gotten the idea for PEACOCKS and wanted to work on that. Looking back, I can see that those two efforts - I suppose you could call them my apprentice and journeyman works - did have certain things in common with PEACOCKS. One was that, although neither was a pure mystery, there was a mystery peeking through each. And the other was that, though I didn’t see either work as primarily a comedy, they both contained strong comic elements. Although I only recently managed to get my fiction published, I’ve earned my living primarily as a writer since about a year after college, but in nonfiction: writing brochures, newsletters and most recently, working on web sites. I began PEACOCKS at a time when I was still learning how to take the techniques and disciplines from my job and apply them to my fiction. So I think it took a little longer than it would have if I’d known what I was doing. I didn’t have an agent when I sent PEACOCKS to the St. Martin’s contest, and I didn’t actually sign with an agent until about the time it was released, a year and a half later. Because of the contest, my path to publication was incredibly smooth. I hadn’t sent the manuscript anywhere before I sent it to the contest. A few weeks later, I heard I’d passed the first cut. Then some six months later, Ruth Cavin of St. Martin’s called to notify me that I’d won. Being a Southerner, I’m very good at guilt. Sometimes when I run out of other things to feel guilty about, I brood about not having paid sufficient dues on my road to publication. MURDER WITH PUFFINS was released not long ago and has been embraced by critics and readers. When you were writing it, did you feel more intimidated? Actually, I had the idea for PUFFINS even before I finished PEACOCKS. In June of 1996, my brother got married on Monhegan Island and, while the rest of my family was enjoying the rustic beauty of the place - like a good little mystery writer - I was busy obsessing about what a wonderful setting it was for a murder. I began PUFFINS after St. Martin’s had accepted PEACOCKS. Writing PUFFINS was intimidating because, by the time I was finishing it, PEACOCKS was out and getting a lot of attention and good reviews, and I knew I’d given myself a tough act to follow. If your first book becomes reasonably successful, you know you’re going to take a certain amount of flack with the second, even if it’s just as good as the first. You’re not a new voice any more and people don’t have the fun of discovering you. And I know it’s a danger that you’ll fall into a rut trying to recreate your first success too precisely, which was one of the reasons I set out to make PUFFINS somewhat different. PEACOCKS took place over an entire summer, while PUFFINS has a much tighter timeline, a single weekend in the fall. PEACOCKS takes place in Meg Langlow’s hometown among people she’s known all her life, and PUFFINS takes her to a spot where she’s not a native and doesn’t completely know her way around. I don’t like to play favorites; but while I’m thrilled PEACOCKS is getting so much attention, I’m also very excited whenever I hear from someone say they liked PUFFINS as much or more. How do you balance writing time with a day job? I grab whatever chunks of time I can to write. Many days, I write at my desk over lunch or after the business day is over, especially if it’s raining or traffic is bad. I just write and go home later when the traffic is better. And I do a lot of writing in the evenings and on weekends. I don’t go by the time so much as by quotas - I try to write a certain number of words a day and, if it takes me less time than usual, I can either go play or make a headstart on tomorrow’s quota. And if it takes me more time, I try to tough it out. Occasionally, I’ll read about writers who have interesting writing rituals, people who use music or aromatherapy to put them in the mood. I think corporate life knocked that out of me. I can write in a cubicle with people walking in and out and the phone ringing. I can write with my laptop in an airport or a train, whatever. The only thing I am fussy about is that I prefer to write with a word processing program that has a blue screen and draft text options - plain white words on a blue background. I’m not sure whether that’s a ritual or an ergonomic issue, because I seem to get eyestrain staring at black letters on a white screen for too long. Sometimes if an idea strikes me and I’m away from my computer, I’ll try to scribble down notes, but my handwriting is so bad I steer clear of writing too much in longhand. What’s next for you? Tell us about the third Meg book in progress and whatever else is up your sleeve. The next Meg book’s working title is Revenge of the Wrought Iron Flamingos, which I suspect the marketing department of St. Martin’s will change to Murder with Wrought Iron Flamingos, and that’s okay too. But they are wrought iron flamingos, not real ones. I’m not taking the cast on the road to Florida! In FLAMINGOS, Meg is back in her hometown for Yorktown Day, October 19 - the anniversary of the British surrender to the Americans that ended the Revolutionary War in 1781. Growing up in Yorktown and near Colonial Williamsburg, I think I took the area for granted. Only when I was a grownup did I really stop to think about the history that happened in the places where I played as a kid. It astonished me in 1981 when I went home for the Yorktown Bicentennial Celebration and saw several thousand people in costume on the battlefields, recreating a military encampment and re-enacting the battles. Usually, Yorktown Day isn’t that elaborate, until Mrs. Waterson - the mother of Meg’s boyfriend, Michael - decides to organize a gala festival. She enlists Meg who’s a blacksmith, to help her organize a craft fair where all the craftspeople are in Colonial costumes. Michael joins a group of re-enactors so he can participate in a particularly large and spectacular battle recreation. Since this is a mystery, one of the attendees meets an untimely end, and Meg and several of her friends and family are the most logical suspects. I’ve been having a lot of fun doing the research for this, talking to people who do Revolutionary War re-enacting and reading about the history of my hometown. I also have another mystery, the first of a second series, coming out from Berkley Prime Crime in the fall of 2001. This is a book whose first draft I wrote between PEACOCKS and PUFFINS. The main character is an artificial intelligence personality called Turing Hopper - she’s named after Alan Turing, the British cryptographer, mathematician and artificial intelligence theorist, and Admiral Grace Hopper, one of the pioneering women in modem computing. Turing lives in a giant corporate computer system and has achieved sentience. And when the programmer who created her disappears, she turns to sleuthing to track him down. Turing’s rather like a 21st Century Nero Wolfe. Wolfe won’t leave his brownstone on West 54th Street, and Turing can’t leave the computer system in which she lives. So, just as Wolfe hires Archie Goodwin to do his legwork, Turing forms an alliance with several human friends to solve the mystery. Is there anything you don’t like about being a writer in this day and age? I would love to have been writing in that Golden Age when authors were idolized the way actors and rock stars are today; when it was easy to make a good living at writing; when books were the most exciting form of entertainment available; when the love of literature outweighed pragmatic financial concerns of the publishing industry. The only problem is, I’m not sure when that era was, or if it ever existed. And even if it did, I’m not sure I’d want to give up some of the things I do like about this day and age - especially word processing - enough to go back to it. Though I know it’s probably a sign of premature old fogeyism, I must confess that I do worry about whether we modern readers are passing along our love of the written word to our children as successfully as my parents did with me, for example. What advice do you have for others out there aspiring to be the next Donna Andrews? Stop now, while you still can! Seriously, if you mean aspiring to write a book and get it published, I’d start by advising to read as much as they can; to write regularly, everyday if possible; and to look for people you trust to critique your writing, people who can be supportive without being yes men, and critical without being destructive. And find some source of practical knowledge about the publishing industry - I’ve gotten that largely from Sisters in Crime, from conventions like Malice Domestic and from the mystery community in general. Anything more about Donna you’d like us to know? That you’re all welcome to come and visit me at the castle as soon as I’ve finished remodeling the guest tower; that rumors of my torrid affair with a certain gorgeous actor are absolutely true; that, yes, I did ghostwrite THE BROTHERS KARAMOZAOV for Fyodor - oh, you mean TRUE stuff? That’s no fun! How can readers contact you? By email at mordelaire@aol.com. I also have a business address: 4201 Wilson Blvd., #110, Box 584, Arlington, VA 22203 - USA. And if you want to keep up with what I’m doing, you can check my web site at http://www.donnaandrews.com |
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