18) You live in the New York City
suburbs and you seem to draw much of your inspiration from that part of New
York State. What is it about the city’s suburbs that inspire you to set many of
your thrillers there?
People often move to the suburbs to escape the big, bad city and raise a family
in a place that is—or at least, that they perceive to be—safe. Bad things
aren’t supposed to happen in idyllic towns, so if—when—something goes terribly
wrong, it’s especially terrifying. Picket fences and leafy back yards can hide
some shady characters and deep, dark secrets—and in those towns where no one
ever locks their doors, well…maybe they should!
17) Let’s talk about the other
launch, which will be on December 7th this year, Prose and Cons, the new Lily Dale book. One of your
earlier paranormal series took place in Lily Dale then later in your career,
you started a new series set in it, only about a decade later. What made you
decide to revisit and resurrect the series?
My readers! Truly, I would have continued writing the first series, which was
targeted to young adults and set in the real life town populated by
spiritualists who talk to dead people—or so they claim. Due to the changing
market a decade ago, the publisher opted not to continue it after four books. I
was busy with other things by then and was prepared to let it go, but kept
hearing from readers—adults and teens alike—who wanted to know what happened
next.
The new
series is a spin-off but is a traditional mystery series, not paranormal or
young adult like the first. The heroine, Bella Jordan, is the only skeptic in a
town filled with psychic mediums. She uses logic to solve cases, rather than,
you know, consult with the murder victim’s soul to find the killer. These books
are quirky and populated with eccentric personalities. Some of the well-loved
characters from the first series do appear here, with that teenaged heroine
Calla now a grown woman. PROSE AND CONS is the fourth title, and centers around
a pair of mysterious newcomers and a priceless literary treasure. I’m currently
writing the fifth.
16) Out of all your series, my
favorite is the Mundy’s Landing trilogy. The Sleeping Beauty Murders, which is
central to all three books (especially Blue Moon), was a
fictional series of three murders that took place in the summer of 1916. Yet,
while fictional, it sounded oddly familiar. Were the Sleeping Beauty series of
killings inspired by a real life analog?
First, thank you. I’m so glad you liked that one. I’m partial to it myself. The
inspiration to write about a Victorian-era true crime stemmed from my lifelong
fascination with Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, H.H. Holmes, etc.
In the
brainstorming phase, I just loved the
idea of a town that is notorious for unsolved historical murders--like Fall
River—and how it would draw all sorts of interesting people, from murder buffs
to armchair detectives to—well, no spoilers. That’s how Mundy’s Landing was
born—the town that stimulates the local economy by inviting people to visit and
try to solve the centuries-old crimes each year on the anniversary.
The Sleeping Beauty murders popped into my head one morning when I was going
past my son’s empty bedroom after he was away at college, and for a moment, I
thought I saw someone crumpled in the bed. It made me wonder what would happen
if someone woke up one morning to a corpse tucked into a guest room bed—and had
no idea who it was or how it had gotten there. And then it happened again, in
another house…and again. It was one of the creepiest premises I’ve ever come up
with, and that’s really saying something.
15) Bone White, the
third entry in the Mundy’s Landing series, was underpinned by a tragic turn of
events that took place in the 1660s. How difficult or easy was it for you to do
research into 1666 New York?
I absolutely love to research the past for my work, so the problem wasn’t in
any real difficulty, it was more about the time-consuming aspect of doing it
while under deadline. I have shelves full of books about the era right here at
home, and of course, there’s a trove online. I’d have loved to spend years
delving into 1666 New York, but I had to settle with just enough to make the
period ring true. The hard part was nailing the language for the series of
letters in the book, so I went through countless personal documents that I
found online—letters, diaries, etc.
14) Will there be any future
installments in the Mundy’s Landing series or is it fated to remain a trilogy?
Because you’d seemed to purposely leave quite a few loose threads hanging at
the end of Bone White.
It’s always difficult for
me to say goodbye to characters and a setting I’ve dwelled in for several years
of my life. In this case, the loose threads were setting up my next trilogy,
which again features Detective Stockton Barnes. His storyline is picked up—and
tied up—over the course of LITTLE GIRL LOST, DEAD SILENCE, and THE BUTCHER’S
DAUGHTER. Because parts of those novels are set in the 1960s and the 1980s,
we’ll meet him long before he got to Mundy’s Landing, and learn what happened
after he left.
13) While growing up, what were some
of the authors you’d read who would go on to inspire or at least inform your
own work?
Laura Ingalls Wilder was certainly the first and one of the most important. I
was obsessed with the Little House books long before the television series came
along. Beverly Cleary was another. As a reader, I valued losing myself in a
fictional world—the prairie, or Klickitat Street--with continuing characters
who seemed like old friends. And it was satisfactory that there was always
another book so that I could find out what happened next.
So even then, as a budding writer—the only thing I’d ever wanted to be, from
the time I was 9-- I understood the importance of establishing and expanding
upon a three-dimensional world, and I sensed that being prolific would be the
key to my career.
After Laura came so many others—just off the top of my head, Judy Blume, Lenora
Mattingly Weber, Mary Higgins Clark, Harlan Coben…writers who, when you
discovered them, always had a new book around the corner, preferably at the same
time every year. That’s the kind of author I set out to become—one who builds a
significant body of work and who appreciates and gratifies her readers and who
has a reputation among colleagues as being an accountable professional.
12) Since you’re an author juggling
a dizzying array of series, is there any chance that, say, two cops from two
different series will meet in a crossover?
Oh, it’s happened! NYPD Missing Persons Detective Stockton Barnes first
appeared in my novel THE BLACK WIDOW years ago, and then went on to
the Mundy’s Landing trilogy, and got to “star” my Foundlings trilogy—LITTLE GIRL LOST, DEAD SILENCE, and THE BUTCHER’S DAUGHTER.
11) Yes, let’s talk about the Foundlings trilogy. First of all, what’s a Foundling?
A foundling is an abandoned baby or child who is discovered and raised by
someone other than the birth parents. And until DNA genealogy, there was
virtually no way of uncovering those biological roots.
10) I’d like to think investigative
genealogy is an exciting new crime fighting tool that will be intelligently
dealt with in future crime fiction. So what made you create investigative
genealogist Amelia Crenshaw?
I come from an enormous Italian-American family. My maternal grandmother was
the youngest of thirteen children. Her parents died long before I was born, but
she spoke of them often. I was shocked to learn only after her death in 2014
that her father had been a doorstep foundling back in Sicily in the
mid-nineteenth century.
Around the same time, I had begun tracing our family tree and roots via
Ancestry.com. I submitted my own DNA to their database hoping I might be able
to uncover my great-grandfather’s roots. That has yet to happen, but somewhere
in there, I realized that not everyone searching for their biological past is
going to love what they find. As my editor said, Charles Manson had many
children who were taken away after his arrest and could ostensibly have grown
up not knowing where they came from. That nugget of an idea inspired my
trilogy.
And Amelia Crenshaw—well, I thought it would be interesting if a foundling who
grew up futilely searching for her own parents had a career in which she helps
others do just that. We follow Amelia back and forth in her life from her
abandonment in a Harlem Church in the late 1960s through present day.
9)
Walk us through your typical writing
day. Do you draft exclusively in notebooks/journals or laptops or is it a
mixture of both? Do you set a word goal and, if so, what is it? What’s your
happy place when you’re writing?
I write exclusively on my laptop or desktop. I wish I could write in longhand
because it would certainly be convenient to scribble away at every opportunity!
But for one thing, I’ve got arthritic hands—boo, middle age! For another, even
when I was a kid, I was compelled to use a keyboard—back then, my dad’s vintage
typewriter.
I get up around 4:30 or 5 a.m. and start by revisiting the pages I wrote the
previous day. As I edit those, I invariably springboard into writing new
material, and I’m off.
I’ve learned to be extremely disciplined about my schedule, because I am a
person who would always rather be doing something else. I allow myself breaks
only to do my daily hourlong lap swim (saved me from back surgery so I’m
diligent about it), do household tasks, and get out for an afternoon walk or
hike. I tend to write straight through the day, even while cooking dinner—I’m a
multi-tasker and love to cook. I start prep around 6:00 or 6:30, so it’s my
relaxation and my “commute”—the bridge between work and reentry. I’ll go back
and forth from laptop to kitchen during meal prep and we eat around 8 or 8:30
pm. Usually it’s just me and my husband in front of the TV, and I often nod off
mid-meal/mid-program with my plate in my lap.
I tend to work 7 days a week on this schedule while on deadlines like the ones
2020/2021 forced. I do only one draft, heavily editing as I go so that when
it’s done, it’s done—until my editor’s revision notes, that is.
I’m religious about sticking to a weekly word count quota, which I lay out in
advance according to when the book needs to be in. In the beginning of a book
when it’s slow going as I’m figuring things out, my weekly quota is around
5,000 words. In the end, it’s 10,000 on up, depending on where I am with it and
when it’s due. On an ideal day, I do 2,000 words and get to keep most of them.
I have written books, though, where I had to cut 40,000 to 50,000 words in the
end. As I’m creating a world, characters, a plot, it’s much easier to put it
all in and then lose it later than to have gaps as I go. A lot of information
is essential to me as I work out a crime, but is TMI for the reader. My
longtime editor, Lucia Macro at William Morrow, is fantastic about helping me streamline
it all down to a manageable manuscript.
8) You’re well-known for having
fostered several animal rescue organizations and are the fur mom of three cats.
Is there any chance any will end up in your books or have they already?
Oh, they already have. Our first rescue—whose name happens to be Chance--showed up pregnant and critically ill on our doorstep in 2014.
We wound up rushing her to a vet, paying a small fortune to save her—a
stray!—and her litter of six. My husband and sons are allergic to cats, but we
kept Chance after finding homes for all the kittens. The experience opened my
eyes to the plight of ailing or pregnant strays and we began fostering shelter
animals. Of course it (and the astronomical emergency vet bills that needed to
be paid) inspired me to write my current Lily Dale Mystery series.
In the first book, NINE LIVES, a pregnant stray named Chance shows up at an
opportune moment and is the catalyst that leads Bella Jordan to Lily Dale, and
to solve a mystery. Chance is in every one of my Lily Dale books, and in each
of them (and in some of my other novels), one of my—or my family’s—real life
kitties makes a cameo. Our other cats, Li’l Chap and Sanchez, are series
regulars. My sister’s Scottish Folds, Lady Pippa and Clancy, are in my books,
and my aunt’s late, great Columbus is in the one I’m writing now.
7) You’d begun your publishing
career over 30 years ago, when you were an associate editor at Silhouette
Books. In the last three plus decades, publishing has seen many seismic shifts.
What do you see as being the best and the worst changes?
I think the best and the worst changes have involved technology.
On the
bright side, we no longer have to deal with paper and post offices, or even
checks and bank deposit slips—though these changes are recent. Until a few
years ago, I was doing final edits on hard copy page proofs mailed by the
publisher, and then racing to Fed Ex before they closed to get it overnighted
back in time. It took a global pandemic for me to be able to sign contracts
online and get paid electronically. Which is insane, because authors never even
know whether they’re going to get random backlist royalty checks. As recently
as two years ago, I had one go missing in the mail that I never would have
known existed if I weren’t religious about combing my end of the year
accounting statement from my agent and matching it against checks I deposited.
So, yes, welcome to the electronic age, publishing industry! It’s nice to have
you join us at last.
Social media is, for me personally, the worst of the changes. Publishers
encourage you to establish a presence and regularly connect with readers on at
least one platform. And yes, that’s a wonderful thing--it can be a lifeline in this
solitary, isolating job, especially for a people person like me.
But as I said, I’d always rather be doing something other than writing, so it’s
also a dangerous distraction. I can log onto Facebook and the next thing I
know, I’ve lost an hour or two of my workday. I mean, I truly want to see
photos of people’s kids and know what they had for dinner—and of course, as a
writer, I’m fascinated by the over-sharing of private lives. I see potential
book plots in so many posts.
Publicists have suggested that an author should post something a few times a
day to work the algorithms and keep readers engaged. When I was trying to do
that, I lost far too much writing time to the follow-up interaction and of
course the rabbit hole of obsession with other people’s lives. So now, when I’m
on deadline, I’ve given myself permission to stay away for days at a time. And
when it’s time to go into promo mode with a book release, I remind myself that
social media is a valuable tool and I have to plan to spend considerable time
there.
6) Again, it may be silly to ask the
author of nearly 100 titles. But did you ever suffer from so-called writer’s
block and, if so, how did you deal with it?
I never run out of ideas, and I will never live long enough to turn them all
into books. I find, though, going on thirty years in this career, that there
are many more days when I don’t feel like writing than days when I can’t wait
to jump in. As a self-employed novelist, you can’t allow yourself to turn those
off-days into days off any more than you’d call in sick to a day job every time
you didn’t feel like going in—if you did that, you’d be fired. If you did it as
a novelist, your productivity would spiral. So I force myself into the chair
every morning, and I force myself to write my words every week. They may not be
good words, and they may not stay, but I can fix everything later, when the
story is told. The important part is to stick to a schedule and be accountable
to myself and my publisher.
5) At least one of your books, Hello, It’s Me, was turned into a movie. But out of all
your scores of titles, which one would you like most to see turned into a
movie?
I have a few books/series that are actively in play right now for television
series, miniseries, or movies, so I’ll keep those to myself until I have news
and continue to pray that they make it to the small screen. I’ve learned never
to count on Hollywood after getting my hopes up many times early in my career.
And then, of course, it paid off unexpectedly when HELLO IT’S ME went into
production almost overnight after stalling for years. Ultimately, I think
television is a natural for me because I have written so many trilogies and
series—world building as opposed to a one-off feature. I do believe that my
novels LIVE TO TELL and DEAD BEFORE DARK are self-contained enough to
work very well as suspense films.
4) In several of your novels, such
as Blue Moon, Bone White and Little Girl Lost, you’d set parts of your novels in
historical time periods and had made a pretty good account of yourself. Have
you ever had the urge to write an entire standalone or series in a purely
historical setting such as Caleb Carr’s Alienist series?
Absolutely. Always. I’m a history buff and I love nothing more than to lose
myself in researching another era.
3) Plotter, pantser or plantser?
Pantser, all the way!
2) If there’s one theme that unites
many of your thrillers, it’s the relentless, almost circular nature of evil. As
someone who enjoys a thankfully staid suburban lifestyle, where do you get the
ideas for such a canon?
Sheer terror. I’m a big
chicken with a wild imagination. And of course, if you write about things, they
can’t happen to you in real life, right?
1) So, what’s next for Wendy Corsi
Staub?
Work, work, and more work! Look, I use the words “grateful” and “gratitude” a
lot with regard to my career, and I know that this career is never something to
be taken for granted. I’ve been through a dizzying three decades of highs and
lows—with many of the highs coming relatively early on, and some unexpected
lows in recent years. But having been both an editor and a bookseller in the
past, I’ve learned that the one thing that I, as an author, can control is my
own performance. The minute I stop working so hard and sit back and think I’ve
succeeded, the dominoes will start to topple.
So I will continue to sit down every morning and write my novels. As I said, I
have four coming out in the near future. Two are complete and have release
dates as follows: PROSE AND CONS (Severn House, Lily Dale Mysteries Book 4,
September in UK, December in US); THE OTHER FAMILY (William Morrow,
Psychological Suspense, January). Two are under contract and these titles are
tentative: THE STRANGER VANISHES (Severn House, Lily Dale Mysteries Book 5,
2022) and WINDFALL (William Morrow, Psychological Suspense, Pub Date late 2022
or early 2023).
If you’re interested in learning more about Ms. Corsi Staub’s work, please make
use of the handy links provided below:
WEBSITE
