Writer's Voices

In regards to which character is based on Lubin, Thiele explained that both women had characteristics that embodied the famous singer. “…I realized pretty quickly that [Lubin] would not make a very good novel character because she never expressed any remorse for her behavior during the war… and so she had no character growth. She just said, ‘I wanted to sing, I needed to sing, singing is my talent,’ and that was obviously not going to be a very sympathetic character in a novel, and so what I decided to do is to split some of her attributes between Yvonne and Madeleine. So Madeleine got the famous part of Germaine Lubin, super diva singing Wagner, being very well established, very successful, and Yvonne got the… singing for the Nazis, associating with the Nazis…”

It’s a unique art form… no other musician has to sing to a huge crowd without a microphone. It’s pretty much an Olympic sport when you think about it.”

Those of us who have never experienced our lives invaded by a war where we live are extremely fortunate.”

For Abel, one of the things she learned from taking care of Milo was to ask for and accept help. His great size, initial aggression, and strength made it difficult for her to handle him alone. She remarked, “I had been taught as a child not to ask for help, that I was a burden enough, but for Milo’s sake, I had to ask for help. I learned that there are people out there, lots of people out there, that want to help you, want to help Milo, and it meant a lot to me. It taught me to be more comfortable reaching out and asking for help.”

Storytelling, it was a huge factor in my emergence here as a writer and as a person… in the community of storytellers in Chicago, it was wonderful.”

Regarding the setting of her novel, King explained why she decided to choose the Sacro Bosco as the location for her story. “So, the Sacro Bosco, which means the sacred wood, is a real place in Bomarzo, Italy… and there’s a garden in the valley… the garden was created in the late 1500’s by this man, Vicino Orsini, and it’s a manor-esque garden, but it’s a garden unlike any that you’ve ever seen before. There are statues of monsters carved out of stone, the stones that are already in place in the garden. There is a Mouth of Hell which is featured, actually, on the cover of my book. It’s an ogre, or an open-mouthed monster, with big wide eyes…” She went on to say that during the pandemic, she was struggling to sell a book that she had written at the time, but was unable to due to the state of publishing then. A friend suggested that she write a gothic novel because they were quite popular with readers during that time. She said, “…I immediately thought of this garden, and then when I started revisiting the garden and realizing, ‘oh, the statues in the garden that I saw have a lot to do with the myth of Hades and Persephone,’ and that was it. Then, I discovered in my research of the garden, that Salvadore Dalí went there in 1948…and I thought, ‘this is interesting,’ and then Dalí suddenly appeared in the story.”

The moment I set foot in Rome I was like, ‘This is it. This is where I need to be. This is where I belong.'”

Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.”

While Aimee’s character is questionable throughout the story, Macallister found her to be interesting and actually loved several things about her. “She made a lot of terrible decisions, but don’t we all? …I think particularly for the time in which she had what we would consider a pretty modern outlook about international travel and other cultures. She would travel to these places and she had that, sort of… ‘I don’t want to be tourist. I want to go live among the people and do what they do and understand them better because I am trying to be one of them,’ with the understanding you never can truly, but you learn more about other cultures by immersing yourself and not just going and pointing at the tallest mountain in Japan, so I loved that about her… I think she could’ve been a little bit smarter about her love affairs, and particularly the way that she tells things in her memoir, And I’d Do It Again . She was just falling left and right for, like, a whole bunch of terrible men, whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. Whether that’s part of the legend that she wanted to do, but if I had been her friend I would have definitely had some advice to give her…”

If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”

Regarding the complexity of the novel, Ellis includes the plot twists in his stories as they come to him during the writing process. “I knew what the final twist was. That was one of the animating plot points of the book was the final twist, and that’s not uncommon for writers to think of what the big surprise is going to be. I knew that I wanted twists throughout the book, but I wasn’t entirely sure what they were going to be. I will tell you that I wish I could do that… if I could outline the entire book before I started, I could write a lot faster. I write with some ideas of what I want to do and then usually as I get into it, the plot twist comes to me, and sometimes they’ll come to me and it will require me to go back and change some of the stuff I’ve already done, and so that’s very inefficient… but that’s how I seem to do it.” While the unexpected twists are intriguing and thrilling, Ellis said that surprising his readers at the end is not his main goal in writing. “Every one of these kinds of books is going to surprise you at the end if they’re doing their job, but what I really want to do is I want to make the ride just as fun…”

I want you to be living inside these characters and feeling what they’re feeling, and smelling what they’re smelling, and thinking what they’re thinking. First person is my favorite way to write.”

Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but finding out the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong.”

While her novel includes a love story, LaBarbera also explores other relationships within the book, including the sibling relationship between Kai and her twin brother, Kade. “I was very close with my brother and sister, and I really wanted to delve into… different types of relationships, but the sibling relationship was really important to me… and I think twins have this kind of thing of even more so, this more of a connection and yet you are these two different people, and Kai and Kade have different struggles… and they have different relationships with their parents that make things very complicated, particularly for Kade… He’s depressed, and so I wanted to also show how that impacts him and also how it impacts Kai and the rest of the family… I work with a lot of depressed teens, but I also work with a lot of kids and adults that have family members going through struggles like that, and so I wanted to represent their perspectives, both of those perspectives.”

For LaBarbera, writing the first draft of All I Want only took 6 months to complete, but editing and revising the entire story took about 2-3 years. With the demands of her day job, she found it difficult to carve out small amounts of time each day to work on her writing. Instead, she chose to work on it in large portions at a time. She remarked, “I want to spend a whole weekend just writing nonstop or revising or editing… I need big chunks of time and so I’ve done that. I’ll block out a weekend and then I’m working on it all that weekend. Doing the whole half-hour a day or an hour a day thing doesn’t really work. It’s hard for me to transition from my clients, and my private practice, and my teaching, and that kind of thing, and my family, and then transition to the book and then transition out of it, so it works better for me to set aside a clump of time and do it then, and so that’s kind of how I work with it.”

I have playlists for all my books. I’ll often listen to those songs when I’m driving to work or when I’m taking a walk just to kind of keep me in the zone when I can’t actually be writing. That’s the time when I’m writing in my head.”

It’s really hard coming of age in today’s society, where society wants you to make the decision of what you want to do with your life by the time you’re 16 years old. Most kids don’t know what they want to do. How could they? They haven’t lived in the real world yet.”

Concerning the argument that books in the romance genre are deemed frivolous and silly, James remarked, “I just think that whatever the genre is, and literature is a genre like anything else, you’re going to have books that are extremely well written… and you’re going to have books that are not… So, I think it’s exactly the same in whatever genre it is. Mysteries, there are brilliant mysteries and there are some that are so tedious that you cannot even make it through to find out who did it… Romance in particular is, I think, more challenging to write actually than most other genres because the reader already knows the end… it takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of editing, it takes a lot of rewriting, and takes a lot of thought, in my opinion. We have brilliant romances being written all over the place and not just in historical… Like Ali Hazelwood, who was a physicist professor who now writes romance, but a lot of her books deal with unfairness in STEM and unfairness in the science profession… but it’s in such an amusing and wonderful way, it’s just so much fun to read. So rather than some polemical article, you actually read a story that ends beautifully, that is fun, and I think that’s one of the gifts of genre fiction.”

So when you’re writing historical romance, you’re looking for things that speak to the present that were happening in the past, and you find a plot twist there and build it out of that.”

Writing romance is the intersection between craft and heart. You can’t have one without the other.”

Regarding his characters, Wroblewski explains that all of them, in some way, were inspired by real people. “There’s no one-to-one match… My job is to steal moments and attributes of people and remix them into different combinations that suit my purposes. I cannot point to one person and say, ‘that’s this person…’ I know is not true, but on the other hand, I have had the great good luck of working with a number of brilliant, brilliant people that I find personally inspiring. They’ve been examples to me of integrity… executing on the idea of crafstmanship, of having very dimensional lives. Some of them are very funny, some of them are extremely creative and I put all that together, and probably chief among those people is Kimberly McClintock who I find inspiring as a partner, and as a friend, and a playmate, and those all went into the bucket, and I pulled qualities out and remixed them as I saw fit.” For Wroblewski, the character he thinks is most like him is the protagonist, John. “I share John’s optimism and as the book went along, I think he became more and more like me. He’s not like me in a number of ways, but I have to admit that there’s some pretty significant overlap between us.”

An idea that had always been in my mind was that you can retell old stories, and it’s not [a] copy. It’s an interpretation of something that is deeper than that story.”

A dog is a bond between strangers.”

The Untold Story of Books is divided into three separate businesses of books related to the technology of printing, a concept original to Castleman. He explained, “As printing evolved, changes in authors’ relationships to printers, and later publishers, basically define the business, and the three epics are: from Gutenberg to the end of the 19th century was the first book business, and in the first book business there were no publishers… authors paid printers to print their books… but what happened over this period… was that printing itself evolved and changed and got a lot faster. By the end of the 19th century, high-speed industrial presses could turn out so many books, so quickly, that the model flipped and all of a sudden publishers began paying authors for manuscripts, and then turning around and hiring printers to print them… and that lasted 80 years from 1920 to about 2000… After 2000, when digital publishing happened, then you could print so many books so quickly… so, again, the model has flipped… and so we’re now in the third book business, which is a high-tech return to the first book business where the vast majority of people pay to publish.”

According to Castleman, nowadays, books don’t make a lot of money unless you’re a consistent, bestselling author. However, there is hope for those aspiring to become published authors, especially if they specialize in certain genres targeted towards women. Romance novels, along with mystery thrillers, are an exception with romance books often topping the fiction category. “Women love romance fiction, and women are the readers, and women buy three-quarters of all books and read two-thirds of all books. So the book publishing industry is really aimed at women. You’d never know it, but that’s actually the case.”

Elvis Costello has this song called “Red Shoes” and it opens up with a line, “Oh, I used to be disgusted and now I try to be amused.”

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”

While Toscanini had an illustrious career in music, Samuel Antek was also celebrated for his musical talents. “He was a violinist, certainly at that point, and his dream had been to conduct and he pursued that dream and he was rewarded for that dream while he maintained his position as first violinist of the NBC Symphony through the whole span of time until 1954 when Toscanini retired at the age of 87. He began his own conducting career with the support and enthusiasm of the maestro. So, he had two parallel musical careers, and… [in] 1947, he was named musical director/conductor of the New Jersey Symphony, and in that tenure he created a format for children’s concerts which had not been done before in this way… [he] even was invited by Toscanini to guest conduct the NBC Symphony on a few occasions, so he was a rising star until he died very young.”

For readers, the hardcover edition and audiobook of This Was Toscanini complement one another and can be enjoyed together. The audiobook can be found on various platforms including Audible, Spotify, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Google Play, and Chirp.

Great art is timeless and this is about process. This is a behind-the-scenes peek at something through a musician’s eyes. How do I bring this back to appeal to new generations?