What's the story behind your latest book?
My wife and I got engaged while taking a road trip around the U.S., staying in national parks. One of the parks we passed through was Craters of the Moon in Idaho, which really stuck with me. It's just black volcanic soil, rock formations that lead to nowhere. It's desolate and it's beautiful. It's a completely different world. Years later, when I realized I was writing a novel set in that pocket of the country, my wife and I returned there to live out of a campervan for a week. On average, we saw four shooting stars a night. We heard silence. Dahlia Cassandra is rooted in the details of that world. The novel never would have happened without that initial glimpse.
What is your writing process?
I'm pretty analog, I still have a flip phone. To that effect, I write everything by hand first in a notebook -- or occasionally on a ripped-up paper bag. Then I transcribe everything into a word doc, revising as I go without necessarily thinking about it. Then I'll print out the pages, read them over, cross out huge sections and write them by hand again. I'll go through that cycle over and over again until the rhythms start to feel right and I stop changing words. If I start obsessing over a comma, I know I'm done. At a low estimate, I'd guess that every sentence in Dahlia Cassandra was written by hand at least four times.
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