Ask the Author: Mary Feliz

“Ask me a question.” Mary Feliz

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Mary Feliz When I was in junior high school, an high school student was found dead in a shallow grave in a wooded area near our house. Blood on the swings at a nearby park suggested the victem and murderer walked right by our house.

The murder was never solved, partly because students who knew what had happened would not talk to police.

The high school paper staff launched its own investigation and broke the case wide open, but police bungled the collection of evidence, and were jnable to legally prove that the most likely suspect had committed the crime.

It upended all feelings of safety in town for many years. It happened right before Halloween. Not wanting to cancek Halloween, the police and parent presence was massive, looking after trick or treaters. I remember every home having someone sweeping the sidewalks or doing other outdoor choes in the dark while they kept an eye on us.
Mary Feliz This is a tricky question to answer, because ideas tend to bubble up over time after "cooking" for so long I've forgotten where the idea originally came from. I wanted to write "Address to Die For" and the Maggie McDonald for several reasons. First, I thought that while news stories, movies, and books offered a decent portrayal of a portion of life in Silicon Valley, they tended to focus on the whiz kids like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. I thought they were missing a portrait of the day to day life of ordinary people in a world where there is enormous diversity among the population in terms of nationalities, cultures, religions, languages, and incomes. Navigating in that world can be tricky because what is a normal cultural response to one person might offend another. Silicon Valley, although crowded and busy, is also situated in an area of incredible natural beauty and opportunities to explore. I wanted to portray that part of living here, too. In addition, people here are passionate about even the most minute details of community life. Our schools and towns can spend decades debating the use of land and public buildings. Tensions can run high. I wanted to imagine what might happen if those tensions built to a ridiculous extreme in people who would truly stop at nothing to achieve their goals.
Mary Feliz Inspiration follows action, I think. I find that even on the days that I feel most uninspired, and think even cleaning grout or sorting laundry sounds more interesting, if I sit at the keyboard and start typing, something editable will emerge. And that's the key: getting something editable. Writing is mostly editing. But editing feels easier than writing. A blank screen or white page can be very scary. Throw a few words on them, even terrible, dreadful, no-good words that don't seem to go together. More often than not, those words will become a story. Perhaps not the story you outlined or first imagined, but a story none-the-less.

Another technique I use is to immerse myself in the characters, figuring out their likes and dislikes, the quotations and philosophies that appeal to them, how they feel about parties and party clothes, and what they do when no one is looking. Once I know the characters better than I know myself or any of my friends, it's easy to know how they would react in any situation. (Of course, like most of us, they spend a lot of their time doing uninteresting things, which is why we writers have to torture our poor characters by throwing them into dreadful situations over and over and over again. It's a wonder they are willing to spend any time with us at all!)
Mary Feliz I'm currently writing the third book in the Maggie McDonald series. Topics for new series and additional Maggie books keep knocking on the door, but I'm trying to ignore them until the third book is finished!
Mary Feliz Keep working at it. That goes for those of us who are published and those who are unpublished. We can all get better and we can all continue to challenge ourselves. Nearly everyone I know who is now published spent at least ten years working seriously toward their goal before they began to get attention for their fiction. So, if you're looking for instant gratification, this isn't the career for you. But if you enjoy writing, are having fun more than you aren't, and are willing to keep at it, you will succeed.
Mary Feliz Most writers I know look at the world a little askew. And I think that's one of the most fun things about it. We're self-entertaining! Whether looking at the world askew makes inclined to write, or writing makes you look at the world askew, I don't know. But I'm always thinking up quirky explanations for the behavior of strangers.
Mary Feliz Writer's block generally isn't a problem. Too many ideas all fluttering around at once demanding my attention is a frequent affliction, however. As is needing a machete to carve out time to write. The answer to all three problems is generally easier to recommend than to do: just sit in the chair and apply fingers to computer keys!

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