Ask the Author: Lydia Fazio Theys
Answered Questions (4)
Lydia Fazio Theys
My next book is going to involve one of America's most beloved writers. This person will appear as a character in the first part of the book, and then we will meet some fictional people who accidentally become embroiled in the remnants of a real-life mystery from the writer's life. Not a whodunnit kind of mystery, but a more subtle one. Sounds vague, I know, but I don't want to say too much more and jinx it!
The research for this has been great fun and has taken me down some surprising roads. I've learned a lot about this writer and I'm looking forward to sharing what I know along with my new take on what really might have happened.
The research for this has been great fun and has taken me down some surprising roads. I've learned a lot about this writer and I'm looking forward to sharing what I know along with my new take on what really might have happened.
Lydia Fazio Theys
Everywhere I go, I see things that make me ask "what if?" I can go to a museum with my husband and he's off looking at all sorts of things and I'm stuck at the music box near the entryway. Thinking "what if?" What if someone came here and every time he walked by, the music started playing? What if only he could hear it? Wait, what if everyone could hear it? What if it were in a shop that repaired mechanical things? What if a shop ike that appeared one day out of nowhere in some little town? So, none of those questions are particularly great ones, but once in a while, a really good one comes to you.
I particularly like to visit weird houses. You know, the kinds of houses people with a lot of money have built as their own private castles, often looking very much like actual castles. They are almost always filled with many, many things the owners collected. Amazing things. I guess that's what inspires me--dreaming up a what-if and feeling potentially amazed a little bit by the answer.
I particularly like to visit weird houses. You know, the kinds of houses people with a lot of money have built as their own private castles, often looking very much like actual castles. They are almost always filled with many, many things the owners collected. Amazing things. I guess that's what inspires me--dreaming up a what-if and feeling potentially amazed a little bit by the answer.
Lydia Fazio Theys
Well, first, there are cookies. Or little chocolate candies. I can feed myself little chocolate candies as a reward to keep going--like training a seal only without the fish. But that only goes so far. Generally, if the time of year is right, I get up from the desk and work in my garden. There's nothing like getting down on the ground and digging around in the soil to get my mind freed up and happy.
When the weather is uncooperative, as in spring, winter and fall in New England, or even sometimes in summer, I listen to a binaural-beats meditation-type app for creativity. If you are not familiar with what this is, you need earbuds or headphones, and you hear a specific sound frequency in one ear and a slightly different one in the other. You can choose to play soft music with it and the theory is these frequencies are selected to facilitate certain things such as becoming calm, dreaming or being creative. They seem to work for me. It may all be in my head. If you know that to be true, please don't tell me!
When the weather is uncooperative, as in spring, winter and fall in New England, or even sometimes in summer, I listen to a binaural-beats meditation-type app for creativity. If you are not familiar with what this is, you need earbuds or headphones, and you hear a specific sound frequency in one ear and a slightly different one in the other. You can choose to play soft music with it and the theory is these frequencies are selected to facilitate certain things such as becoming calm, dreaming or being creative. They seem to work for me. It may all be in my head. If you know that to be true, please don't tell me!
Lydia Fazio Theys
Several years ago, Amazon Day One published a longish short story of mine called Elena's Seclusion. Following that, I was chatting with my editor and she raised some interesting thoughts in my mind about doing something longer form.
I left for a vacation with my family in Sicily and wow, was that a great and beautiful place for inspiration! We were wandering around, poking into places, often with no one else there. That offered me the luxury of looking at things, sometimes small things, and thinking about them quietly. Making connections. Asking myself "what if?" I did a lot of that and eventually, my brain was--at least temporarily--full and I was forced to devote the rest of my time there to studying the caffe, the pasta and the pastry.
But I arrived home with a hatchling of an idea, which, of course, changed several times along the way. Some new parts surprised even me as they elbowed their way in at toward the end. The setting--its geography and its history--forms an important part of Children of the Salt Road, although I took some magical realist liberties with it. I hope you'll find it makes for a story you really like!
I left for a vacation with my family in Sicily and wow, was that a great and beautiful place for inspiration! We were wandering around, poking into places, often with no one else there. That offered me the luxury of looking at things, sometimes small things, and thinking about them quietly. Making connections. Asking myself "what if?" I did a lot of that and eventually, my brain was--at least temporarily--full and I was forced to devote the rest of my time there to studying the caffe, the pasta and the pastry.
But I arrived home with a hatchling of an idea, which, of course, changed several times along the way. Some new parts surprised even me as they elbowed their way in at toward the end. The setting--its geography and its history--forms an important part of Children of the Salt Road, although I took some magical realist liberties with it. I hope you'll find it makes for a story you really like!
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