Ask the Author: Kim Wright
Answered Questions (9)
Kim Wright
For The Canterbury Sisters I hired a guide and we walked the trail from London to Canterbury. It would have been very tricky to do without a guide or as part of a tour since the trail has been broken by highways and private land throughout the years and the trail markers are very subtle. If I hadn't been with someone who knew what she was doing I'd still we wandering around a hops field somewhere in England. For Last Ride to Graceland, I drove the route from Beaufort, SC to Memphis with my dog Thad! It was fun in a whole different sort of way!
Kim Wright
The most important advice I would give to beginning writers is to get to know other writers. A sense of community is so important at every stage of your career. You will need other writers to serve as sounding boards and critique partners and just as sources of support as you move through the process - because writing and publishing are both difficult objectives and people outside the world of publishing often don't understand what writers go through. One of my good writer friends - who I met at a conference long before either of us were anywhere close to being published - call it "pulling each other back in the boat."
Kim Wright
Thanks, Martie! You're so kind. The other mainstream women's novels have been out for a while and thus are no longer on Net Galley but they're all on Amazon. Other than Last Ride to Graceland, they're also all contemporary. If you like historical fiction, you might be especially interested in my series, City of Mystery, which explores the adventures of the first forensics unit in Scotland Yard. It's set in Victorian times and there are 5 books and novella in my series. All of my books - both the contemporary and the historical - are listed on my author dashboard here on Goodreads with links to Amazon so you can peruse them at your leisure, Thanks so much for writing and I hope you like the next book you sample as well!
Kim Wright
Sometimes when I'm on panels people ask this question and the truth is I get my best ideas for writing, while I'm writing. Writers aren't always in a lather of inspiration when they cut on their computers - or at least I'm not! But I tell myself I need to produce 1000 new words first thing every morning, no matter what. Sometimes they're 1000 good words, sometimes 1000 not so good words and most days, it's somewhere in between. The important thing is that I do them.
And there are plenty of days when suddenly, while I'm writing, I feel the flow starting. It's like a buzz of energy and you lose all track of time and that's when you know you're in the zone. The interesting thing is that it's not like you get inspired and then you write, which I think a lot of people assume. It's more frequently the case that you start writing and then you get inspired.
And there are plenty of days when suddenly, while I'm writing, I feel the flow starting. It's like a buzz of energy and you lose all track of time and that's when you know you're in the zone. The interesting thing is that it's not like you get inspired and then you write, which I think a lot of people assume. It's more frequently the case that you start writing and then you get inspired.
Kim Wright
Did it end up working out, Donna?
Kim Wright
Each of my books comes to me a different way. Some of them are slowly and painfully assembled in pieces, sort of like a mosaic, while others arrive in the world quickly, with the idea fully formed. My latest novel, Last Ride to Graceland was one of the easy births.
It started on a rainy Sunday morning when I was lying in bed flipping through my hometown paper, The Charlotte Observer and a headline in the local section popped out at me: Last Ride to Graceland. Yep. I stole the title then and there. The article was about how Graceland had kept a Stutz Blackhawk, the big black hideously expensive muscle car that Elvis Presley drove on the last day of his life, wrapped up for over 35 years. Then they finally, to celebrate the expansion of the car exhibit in the Graceland museum, decided to pull it out and add it to the collection.
The reason all this was in my local paper was that the car was being pulled on a flatbed from Memphis to Charlotte so that it could be restored at the NASCAR museum. Legend was that the car had been Elvis's favorite and he never let anyone else drive it, so the flatbed was necessary to keep the legend intact. The authenticator said that when he pulled back the wrap which had encased the car for years, it was "like opening a time capsule."
Like opening a time capsule. Those are the kinds of words that get a writer's imagination fired up.
By the time I got out of bed that Sunday afternoon I'd sketched out the whole concept for Last Ride to Graceland. I imagined that the car was found not at Graceland, but rather in an abandoned fishing shed in South Carolina and that the discoverer was a down-on-her-luck blues singer named Cory Beth Ainsworth. Cory Beth's recently deceased mother, Honey, had briefly been a back-up singer for Elvis in her youth but had always refused to talk about her single year at Graceland - including why she had abruptly fled Memphis in the summer of 1977 and returned home to marry her high school sweetheart. Cory Beth was born seven months later and because of the timing, coupled with the gospel grit of her voice, she has always fantasized that she's the illegitimate daughter of the King himself. Cory decides to dig out the car and return it to Graceland, hoping to gather some long-awaited answers along the way.
The premise came to me fast, but in order to make the details work I decided to drive to Graceland myself, taking the same wandering route through the deep south as my heroine. Cory Beth was traveling in a muscle car with a coon hound, while I was driving in a Prius with a terrier, but the spirit was the same.
It started on a rainy Sunday morning when I was lying in bed flipping through my hometown paper, The Charlotte Observer and a headline in the local section popped out at me: Last Ride to Graceland. Yep. I stole the title then and there. The article was about how Graceland had kept a Stutz Blackhawk, the big black hideously expensive muscle car that Elvis Presley drove on the last day of his life, wrapped up for over 35 years. Then they finally, to celebrate the expansion of the car exhibit in the Graceland museum, decided to pull it out and add it to the collection.
The reason all this was in my local paper was that the car was being pulled on a flatbed from Memphis to Charlotte so that it could be restored at the NASCAR museum. Legend was that the car had been Elvis's favorite and he never let anyone else drive it, so the flatbed was necessary to keep the legend intact. The authenticator said that when he pulled back the wrap which had encased the car for years, it was "like opening a time capsule."
Like opening a time capsule. Those are the kinds of words that get a writer's imagination fired up.
By the time I got out of bed that Sunday afternoon I'd sketched out the whole concept for Last Ride to Graceland. I imagined that the car was found not at Graceland, but rather in an abandoned fishing shed in South Carolina and that the discoverer was a down-on-her-luck blues singer named Cory Beth Ainsworth. Cory Beth's recently deceased mother, Honey, had briefly been a back-up singer for Elvis in her youth but had always refused to talk about her single year at Graceland - including why she had abruptly fled Memphis in the summer of 1977 and returned home to marry her high school sweetheart. Cory Beth was born seven months later and because of the timing, coupled with the gospel grit of her voice, she has always fantasized that she's the illegitimate daughter of the King himself. Cory decides to dig out the car and return it to Graceland, hoping to gather some long-awaited answers along the way.
The premise came to me fast, but in order to make the details work I decided to drive to Graceland myself, taking the same wandering route through the deep south as my heroine. Cory Beth was traveling in a muscle car with a coon hound, while I was driving in a Prius with a terrier, but the spirit was the same.
Kim Wright
Thank you so much, Barbara! That was the most fun book to research ever! England is great!
Kim Wright
Since it's Saturday, my publicist won't be in the office until Monday and I don't have a finished ebook copy on my own computer to send. But I've sent her your email and she can get it out to you first thing next week. You'll have it for the flight home. Thanks, and I hope you like it and will review it anywhere you see fit. That helps us SO much...
Kim Wright
Donna, do you have a Kindle? If so, we can send an ecopy. We are out of ARCs right now but haven't yet received our paperback copies so we are kind of in a gap with that format. But if you don't have a Kindle and want a paperback for review they should be ready within two weeks.
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Jul 25, 2016 04:33AM · flag
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