WELCOME SARA J. HENRY
SARA J. HENRY
SARA J. HENRY’s first novel, Learning to Swim, won the Anthony, Agatha, and Mary Higgins Clark Awards, was a Target Emerging Author pick, and was named one of Best Books of 2011 by the Boston Globe. Her second novel, A Cold and Lonely Place, was a Reader’s Digest Select Books choice and will be out in paperback from Broadway Books in November 2013. She’s written for Prevention, Adirondack Life, Bicycling, Triathlete, and other magazines, was an editor at Rodale Books and Women’s Sports & Fitness magazine, and was a newspaper and magazine editor. A native of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Sara now lives on a dirt road in southern Vermont with at least one too many dog.
Connect with Sara at these sites:
Q&A with Sara J. Henry
Do you draw from personal experiences and/or current events?
Not really either. An opening scene comes to me – which most often happens while I’m in a car on a long drive – and I spin the story out in my head. I can dream up most of a novel on a full-day drive, as long as traffic is light.
Do you start with the conclusion and plot in reverse or start from the beginning and see where the story line brings you?
I have the story roughed out in my head before I start writing – and I always know how the book is going to end. In fact, I tend to write the ending scene long before I get to it. Things may change slightly by the time I get there – in A Cold and Lonely Place the back-story and motivations of some of the characters changed as the story progressed, so I did alter the ending a bit. But the essence remained the same.
Which brings me to the next point: I like to let the characters develop and plot line change slightly as I go. A good example is in Cold and Lonely when someone knocks on the door of a cabin in the woods – and the person knocking at the door was not the person I’d planned it to be.
Your routine when writing? Any idiosyncrasies?
I have no set routine. If I’m writing new material, i.e, not revising or rewriting, I like to write early in the day or late at night, when the minutia of day-to-day life isn’t filling my head. When something’s going well, I don’t stop. If I’m having trouble with a section or passage, I’ll pull it out of the manuscript and put in a separate file to work on. I’ll print it out in a different font or use the Reading Layout view in Word to see the material differently.
Is writing your full-time job?
Like many other authors, I spend what seems like an enormous amount of time working to promote my books! (I particularly love library visits.) But writing, other than an occasional editing job, is my sole source of income.
Who are some of your favorite authors?
Carol O’Connell, Kate Atkinson, Frances Fyfield, Daniel Woodrell, Tana French, A.S. King, Matthew Dicks
What are you reading now?
An enormous number of books for a contest I’m helping judge. The only non-contest book I’ve read recently is Reality Boy by A.S. King.
Are you working on your next novel? Can you tell us a little about it?
Yes, it’s the third in the series, and many of the familiar characters are back, including Troy’s brother, Simon, and her friend Alyssa from Burlington.
Your novel will be a movie. Who would you cast?
For much the same reason that I don’t give explicit descriptions of most of my characters – I like readers to be able to envision them as they would like – I don’t mentally cast my novels. With that said, when I was struggling with the first novel in this series, Learning to Swim, the character Philippe came alive to me only when I envisioned him as Christian Bale, as the father he played in the 2002 sci-fi movie Equilibrium. Mark Ruffalo (or many other actors) could play Jameson, although it would be lovely to have a Canadian or UK actor. And any versatile actor such as Kristen Stewart or Jennifer Lawrence could portray Troy perfectly.
Manuscript/Notes: hand written or keyboard?
I compose on a computer and do copious revisions by hand, and repeat the process over and over until I’m relatively happy with the manuscript.
Favorite meal?
Anything someone else prepares!
ABOUT THE BOOK
Freelance writer Troy Chance is snapping photos of the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival ice palace when the ice-cutting machine falls silent. Encased in the ice is the shadowy outline of a body–a man she knows.
One of her roommates falls under suspicion, and the media descends. Troy’s assigned to write an in-depth feature on the dead man, who, it turns out, was the privileged son of a wealthy Connecticut family who had been playing at a blue collar life in this Adirondack village. And the deeper Troy digs into his life and mysterious death, the murkier things become. After the victim’s sister comes to town and a string of disturbing incidents unfold, it’s clear someone doesn’t want the investigation to continue, and Troy doesn’t know who to trust.
A Cold and Lonely Place, the sequel to Learning to Swim, follows Troy on a powerful emotional journey as she discovers the damage left by long-hidden secrets and catches a glimpse of what might have been.
BOOK DETAILS:
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Broadway Books
Publication Date: November 5, 2013
ISBN-10: 0307718425
ISBN-13: 978-0307718426PURCHASE LINKS:
THANKS TO JESSICA AT RANDOM HOUSE,
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A Cold and Lonely Place was terrific. waiting on the next one!!