Ask the Author: Chelsey Cosh
Answered Questions (3)
Chelsey Cosh
My summer reading list is vastly different this year because this year has been anything but ordinary. Where the Crawdads Sing is high up there because it has been headlining book clubs for weeks on end. That will be my fiction pick for the season. Tressie McMillan Cottom's Thick is my summer essay collection, again high up on the ladder in reading clubs and gaining momentum in light of the movement for BIPOC equality with day-to-day travesties finally getting attention. My non-fiction pick is Chuck Klosterman's But What If We're Wrong?, not as topical as some of my other choices, but still relevant. Finally, in the vein of self-help, I am going to give Girl, Wash Your Face a try, considering the release of Rachel Hollis's follow-up book, Girl, Stop Apologizing. Hopefully, I'll be able to get through all of this and get a little time in the sun, as well!
Chelsey Cosh
Everyone has family secrets, so I took some of my family's deepest and darkest from the generations past (and passed). Using those true elements, I wrote a tale featuring fictionalized versions of people I know -- this person's eyes, that person's tone of voice, the slang from him, the tenacity of her. I combine them to make the characters I see in my mind's eye and then I place them in a situation that I find interesting. What would happen if suddenly she were to go missing? Would anyone care? Would everyone care? What about someone else? Would that change the dynamic? I throw them into the corn-maze. Then I let them work themselves out. Given their standing in life, given what they have, what they know, and where they're from, how would they deal with what is handed to them? Would they thrash through the field? Would they systematically map it out as they go? Or would they burn it all to the ground? In the end, it's not the idea that matters; it's the dynamics of the people. I try to make my characters people, not flat objects on a page. So my idea for my upcoming book comes from the people I've known, the people in my family, the community that surrounds me. This applies to all my novels, really.
Chelsey Cosh
I am currently working on a novel that combines elements of a missing persons mystery with a pseudo-historical romance. (Are the seventies historical yet?)
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