IWWV easily became one of my new favourite books and I am now writing a book report on it for school, so I would love to know; what influenced you to write If We Were Villains?

M.L. Rio That's a tough question to answer, but the short version is that I'd been writing for a long time and I'd written about five novels but none that I felt were worth a reader's time. It dawned on me that I wasn't writing anything good because I wasn't writing a world I knew. At the time, I was also working on my undergrad thesis, which was an adaptation of all three parts of Henry VI--we had ten actors (including me) playing about 75 roles and performed in the outdoor ampitheatre at my university. I'd been a Shakespearean actor for about ten years at that point, and said to myself, "Wait, why haven't you written about this?" Once I started thinking about how to build a story around Shakespeare's tragic structure, the story sort of wrote itself.

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