Ep. 49: Interview with Pat Spears

Gina Hogan Edwards interviews Pat Spears, an author of three novels and numerous short stories. Spears discusses her writing journey, influenced by her family’s storytelling tradition and her experiences at Florida State University. She shares insights on her new novel, Hotel Impala, which explores themes of mental illness, homelessness, and the lies people tell themselves. The book, told from multiple perspectives, follows the story of Grace, an 11-year-old girl navigating her mother’s mental health struggles. Spears emphasizes the importance of staying true to one’s story and the challenges of writing and revising.

Hotel Impala was released on September 16, 2024!

Pat’s links:

Promo image for Pat Spear's novel "Hotel Impala"
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Ep. 49: Interview with Pat Spears

Dave Hogan, Gina’s Pop
0:02
Welcome to Around the Writer’s Table, a podcast focusing on the crossroads of creativity, craft, and conscious living for writers of all ages and backgrounds. Your hosts are Gina, Melody, and KimBoo, three close friends and women of a certain age, who bring to the table their eclectic backgrounds and unique perspectives on the trials, tribulations, and the joys of writing. So pull up a chair and get comfortable here around the writer’s table.

Gina Hogan Edwards
0:43
Hello listeners. Welcome back to another episode of Around the Writer’s Table. I’m Gina Hogan Edwards, and I’m here today with a special guest. We’ve talked about doing alternating shows for you guys. You’re going to hear from KimBoo and Melody and I every other episode. And then we’re going to have special guests. We started back a few episodes ago with Rhett DeVane, and then today, I am here with author Pat Spears. Welcome, Pat. Glad to have you here with us.

Pat Spears
1:17
Thank you.

Gina
1:19
So let me tell you a little bit about Pat. I’m fortunate enough to know her here in our local writing community, and know a little bit about the kinds of books that she writes and the themes that she gets into. So let me introduce you to her. She is the author of three novels and many, many short stories. Her second novel, It’s Not Like I Knew Her, received the bronze award for LGBTQ fiction from Foreword Review. 

Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Sinister Wisdom, Appalachian Heritage, Common Lives, Lesbian Lives, and Seven Hills Review and also in anthologies titled Law and Disorder from Main Street Rag, Bridges and Borders from Jane’s Stories Press, Saints and Sinners. New Fiction from the Festival 2012, and Walking the Edge, which is a Southern Gothic anthology from Twisted Road Publications. Her short story “Whelping”—and this is something new that I didn’t know—it was a finalist for the Rash Award, and it appears in the 2014 issue of Broad River Review

She’s a sixth generation Floridian and lives in Tallahassee, Florida, not too far from me, with her partner, two dogs and one rabbit. Welcome, Pat, glad to have you.

Pat
2:45
Thank you, Gina. I’m happy to be here with you and your audience, and I look forward to talking about writing.

Gina
2:54
So we do have a lot to talk about. You know, you get us writers together, and we can go on and on and on, which we’ve had the good fortune to do off camera. Today we’re going to talk about, let’s start out with what got you into writing. When did you start doing it? Just give us a little bit of background about your writing.

Pat
3:15
Okay, let me begin by saying that I grew up with the rich front porch storytelling tradition, and my grandmother and my dad could spin spellbinding tales. At an early age, I remember asking my Granny, if we can use Granny here, after one of her stories, if it was a true story. She laughed and said to me that stories were just lies and more lies, but there was always truth in every lie. And I was 10 years old, and I think I’m just learning to understand what she meant by that. That is, of course, lies are a major portion of the novel that I’ve just written, and maybe it goes back there. 

I also want to say I read my way through my small fiction section of my high school library, and it was not uncommon for my math teachers, especially, to start any class with telling me to put up a book. Maybe that’s why my math skills are not everything you would hope they would be. But my first writing and publications were, of course, for professional journals, state, national. My earliest notion that I might be able to write fiction, or even did I entertain the idea, was when I was writing case studies from primary sources in a textbook that Helen Deans and I were writing at the time. I adapted those primary sources for youngsters who would not probably be persuaded to read the history book, because this was Florida history. So it was several years before I purchased Writing Fiction—I have to read the title—Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, Third Edition by Janet Burroway [Note: hyperlink goes to Tenth Edition].

Gina
Yeah.

Pat
And that’s the classic, comprehensive, even now, guide to writing. And I naively thought, okay, I can teach myself to be a fiction writer. But that was a little like, you know, digging a hole, dropping a plant in, watering it when you remembered it, and deciding that you would become a Master Gardener. It was not long before I decided I need more help, that this wasn’t going to actually work. So the first thing I did, because I was a student at FSU for quite a while, I joined a class by Jerry Stern and and Janet Burroway.

Gina
Yes.

Pat
And I was the oldest person in the class. When Janet took a serious interest in my writing, it gave me enough confidence to go ahead and sign up for a week-long workshop with Connie Mae Fowler and Dorothy Allison. It was after— Yes, that’s where it all started. After that experience, I decided, if I worked really hard and I wrote something every day, that I could become a fiction writer. And that’s really how I got started, but with those two wonderful writers, it was quite a send-off. I remember driving back from Saint Augustine thinking, Oh my gosh, am I glad I did that. And some of the writers in that group, we are still communicating with each other, and I believe that was in 2008, that long ago.

Gina
8:28
I didn’t realize some of the similarities in background that you and I have. The beginnings in sort of the business writing arena, but still being somewhat storytelling oriented. Of course, the Granny on the porch, definitely have the storytellers in my family, who, you know, boy, they can spin a yarn. And going to FSU. I also got to take classes from Janet Burroway, but I got there after Jerry Stern was gone, unfortunately,

Pat
9:04
Yes, Jerry Stern and I were neighbors at that time. 

Gina
9:08
Oh, oh, lucky you. Lucky you. And then, go on a writing workshop with Dorothy Allison. Wow, wow,

Pat
9:19
I know. And I just talked to her yesterday, and she says we are comrades on this journey, and she is wonderful. Connie is as well, but Connie has all of this magnificent work she has going on, and Dorothy’s kind of in a not writing as much as she did for a while. But it’s always good to go back to her.

Gina
9:53
I love the alliances that we form as writers. That’s one of the things I appreciate about our Tallahassee community. I think we have here in the Panhandle such—and I’ve bragged about this so much before—we have such a cohesive, supportive writing community, and there are a lot of writers out there who do not have that privilege, and that was one of the reasons that I created the Women Writing for Change Facebook group and started doing the Zoom sessions that we do, because there are people in very remote areas, or they just don’t have any writers in their lives, and their family thinks they’re crazy because they spin these yarns. 

Pat
10:36
Well, I can tell you a story about my mother, if this fits into the same kind of idea. The first short story I had published, I was really excited about, and I gave it to my mother to read, which was a mistake, because what she said was, “Well, I really wish you’d write about nice people,” and that kind of messed me up. And I said, “Oh, but Mom, I don’t know any.” What she was talking about are the kinds of characters I choose to write about: the ones that so many people would believe they don’t know and don’t wish to know. I want to talk them into liking these people. 

Gina
11:21
Well, that brings us, then to your book, your newest book that’s coming out September 16, I believe it is.

Pat
That is correct. Yeah.

Gina
Hotel Impala, your third novel. Am I right?

Pat
11:36
That is correct? Yes.

Gina
11:37
So give us a brief description of that.

Pat
11:42
All right, the story is told from multiple points of view, which is the first time I’ve attempted that, and it covers roughly over a period of seven years. The voices are principally the mother Leah, her husband Daniel, and their older of the two daughters, Grace. 

Grace is for me, the character that I first fell in love with, which I think is absolutely essential for me to start really caring about this young… when the book starts, she is eleven years old. And I think that was really a start for me, because I felt so connected to her. I think probably the best way to talk about the book is to read the back cover, because it’s the best statement, rather than going into some kind of synopsis.

Gina
12:59
Yes, and we don’t want any spoilers anyway, because we—

Pat
Absolutely not.

Gina
Full disclosure to listeners: I have not been able to read the book yet, and so I’ve heard bits and pieces, I’ve read the synopsis, read some other reviews of the book, and I’m like, I can’t wait. I especially look forward to Grace, because, as you know, Pat, the main character in my novel is a young girl as well. So I’m anxious to meet these characters. So go ahead and read that back cover for us, if you would. 

Pat
13:30
Yeah, okay. I’m not going to read from the book itself. I’m going to read from an insert.

“Leah Killian has long since given up on silencing the noises that reverberate through her mind. Her one comfort comes with knowing she will never be alone in her madness: her twelve-year-old daughter Grace has promised she will never leave her, even as she travels one precarious road after another in search of anything that will lessen her pain.

For Grace, there was once life on a quiet suburban street, where she and her sister Zoey dutifully repeated the family mantra: Our Mom is fine. It’s just that she sometimes lives inside her head. But as Leah becomes increasingly untethered from reality, chasing one grand scheme after another and searching for the magical whooping crane she believes will cure her, Grace finds herself in the worst place yet: Motel Mount Pleasant, with its drugs, hookers, and a pimp plying her little sister with chocolate.

It is here that Grace must finally surrender the hope and denial that have sustained her and make a choice: keep her promise to her mother or keep herself and her little sister safe.”

Gina
15:22
Oh, so there is a lot in that that we’re going to touch on here shortly, but before we do that I’d love to know, are you able to backtrack to, was there one spark of inspiration or something that led you to this story?

Pat
15:44
I have a notion—that’s southern for lots of ways of talking. But decades ago, I was a graduate student and teaching assistant at Florida State University. I drove away from the library late. It was in February, because my birthday was coming up, and as I approached the intersection at Woodward and Tennessee Street, I caught sight of a man and woman my age or slightly older and a child, maybe three or four. They were huddled together beneath the traffic, the street light. The boy sat slumped on what I thought was a cardboard suitcase, and I imagined him both hungry and tired and cold. He leaned against the woman I took to be his mother. And I wondered at the time, what does a mother say to a child that is cold, hungry and tired? 

The light changed and I drove on, but at the time I thought I should stop. But I didn’t know what I could do. At that point, I was in classes where this scene was a concept. It wasn’t real.

Years later, after this image of this child has stayed with me—I can see it clearly even today—when I heard Grace’s voice, then it reminded me of that, and I wondered, and maybe I even believe it was an echo of that little boy to whom I’d failed to respond. I wanted to believe that a random encounter decades earlier had placed a seed, a story seed, an emotional response. And perhaps it is true, for me anyway, that our heart’s hold memories waiting for our conscious minds to catch up. 

Gina
18:40
Oh yes, yes. Oh, thank you for sharing that. That really exemplifies the magical nature of the stories that some sometimes come forth. I wonder as Grace came to you, was it in that moment of her coming to you and you remembering that boy that you realized that he might be the inspiration, or was it only now in reflection, after having written the book, that you can look back and say, Ah, Grace was a, maybe a reflection of that boy, an echo of that boy?

Pat
19:27
Well, in terms of I heard Grace’s voice. I tell people, I hear voices in my head. And it was her dialogue that I heard first, and then I thought back. It was like all of a sudden, I thought back, oh my gosh, and then it filled me with, at first it was sadness, and I don’t want to say, Oh, now I can make up for being unhelpful. But it was important. It was very important because I recognized it. And then I thought, I have to figure out, as a writer, how I answer that question: How would I answer that child? And then it was a story.

Gina
20:35
So from the back cover that you read, it’s apparent that mental illness and homelessness are big parts of Hotel Impala. Also, it’s a story of the lies that people tell themselves. We all have secrets, right? And sometimes we tell those lies to protect ourselves. Sometimes we tell those lies to protect other people in our lives, but we cannot tell lies and have to live those lies without having them affect the choices that we have to make. And so I’d love to hear more from you about how that plays a part in your story and why that was something that was important for you to write about as well.

Pat
21:30
Yeah, I think the epigraph of the novel really says it all. And I read this: “Things come apart so easily when they’re held together with lies.” And that’s from Dorothy Allison and Bastard Out of Carolina. I think that sometimes we as writers want to write safely, and by that I mean we want to anticipate what readers are going to think about what we’re writing. And it kind of ties us up, I think. It has a restriction that we choose to put on ourselves. When I read and talk with Dorothy about this kind of thing, then that is very true, I think, and exactly what was happening in the family where the children were expected to respond in a certain way, even within the family structure, that their mom was fine. She just sometimes slips inside her head. I think also, I had a conversation with a really dear friend writer just last week, and she expressed concern about writing something that family would not understand or want other people to know. And I think that happens to us. Yeah, yeah, and that we try to write as truthfully as we possibly can. And it’s like Granny says, that there’s some truth in every lie, and I think it’s taken me quite a while to understand what that really means, and I’ll have to rediscover it if I choose to write another book, or even write another short story.

Gina
23:59
We have to, we have to remember that every time, right?

Pat
24:04
Every sentence, every sentence, if you want to get that drastic about it. But I can remember being in a workshop group—and I have some point of view about when you can do that too much—and I had a short story, and someone said, “Oh, I hate that mother.” And it was shocking to me and dismissed the entire story. “I hate that mother.” And I took that story—this is on me, 100% on me—I took the story and I put it away. I thought, oh, that must be really awful. 

Then I just came back to that very same—I write short fiction between novels. I pulled that story out, and I thought, what’s the matter with that story? I love that story. And so I worked. I didn’t change anything. And then I submitted it, and it got selected for second place in a contest. And I’m going, I wish I’d have had more confidence in me than to let that bother me. 

So sometimes, it isn’t that the the person in your workshop is trying to help you be a better writer for your story, rather than sitting as a critic. You gotta be real careful with that. There are readers, there were five people who read Hotel Impala for me early on. And the best advice I got was from a fellow writer who simply said, “You know how to move another step in your writing. Journeyman writer to a better writer. Talk about lies.” Oh my Lord. So I went back and there were some pretty substantial revisions, but that was the best piece of advice I got. Another one said for a scene that I had written, “I just don’t buy that,” and I trust that woman, and I went back and made some revisions. So that process is extremely useful, but you gotta have enough confidence, I think, to say, “No, that’s my story. You write your story. I write my story,” and then that sometimes can hurt people’s feelings and stuff gets mixed up.

Gina
26:59
Staying true to the story is, you know, I’ve talked about that a lot, and I think you and I probably share a similar opinion about writing workshops and critique groups and so forth. You have to be careful who you show your early work to, and show it to people who’ve really earned the right to see it, and whose wisdom you respect, but also be able to be discerning about what they say to you, whether it’s right for that story or not. And as far as being concerned about readers, I had an instructor say to me once that what he hopes his stories do is elicit a reaction from the readers, and he cannot control what the reaction is, but he wants a reaction. And I’ve held that.

Pat
27:52
Yeah, well, hold on to that, because this book that I just finished challenged me more than I’ve ever been challenged about that very thing. How do I end this book?

Gina
28:09
I can’t wait to read it, Pat. I really can’t wait to read it.

Pat
28:11
I went around for months telling myself, “No, I do not want to write that”. So I was arguing with myself, not some stranger out here who was telling me something, and then I met a police officer, and we sat together at a Second Harvest event, and we talked, and she made me believe, “No, no. Story doesn’t end that way.” Thank you. Thank you.

Gina
28:55
And we never know when—

Pat
28:57
Now you have to read it to figure out what I’m talking about. 

Gina
29:00
Well, like I said, I can’t wait, but we never know when we’re going to be gifted these moments that have nothing to do with writing, necessarily, but gifted with these moments of exchange with other people that inform where we’re going with the story.

Pat
29:21
Right, right, right, and, of course, her experience was so real. She was out there every day, and I’d never met this person before, but I trusted her judgment. Yeah, awesome. And I’m going, because I needed, you know we talk about it in politics now, I needed permission to write that. And she didn’t say no. She didn’t, she’s not a writer. She didn’t tell me how to write it, but she told, she made me feel that my instincts were good. That thing we call a writer tuition. No, that’s not the word.

Gina
30:02
Intuition.

Pat
30:05
intuition. Thank you for that. Yes. See, I need help all along the way. 

Gina
30:10
We all do, Pat, that’s why we’re here for each other. One question that always comes up among authors, and I always like to ask this question of any writer that I encounter is about their writing process. So I’d love to know more about your process, either specifically on this book or in general. We’re all told, if you’re going to be a real writer, you gotta write every day. And you know that’s not necessarily true. We need to write regularly, but not necessarily every day. So when you’re actively writing, what does that look like for you?

Pat
30:49
I’m not a writer that begins with an outline. No, no way. Tthe process begins when I start to hear voices, and it’s broken dialogue, usually. And that particular thing’s going to show up in the book at one time or another. But then I start to, if it persists, I go, Uh oh. It’s like fishing. I got a nibble. And I think, Okay, who is that? Who is the voice? What are they trying to tell me? And I keep doing that. I don’t really have any idea how the story is going to end. I just trust, I trust the character to start triggering thoughts about that and I start to write scenes around those voices. I hear Grace, and it takes a time before I even know the name and who she is. And I certainly don’t know anything about the relationships of Grace to anyone, but I start to write scenes around her so I can hear her voice, and then that triggers relationships, and I start to build the story. 

But I build stories, oddly enough—and one of my dear friends calls that my back assert way of writing—where I write scenes and then I’ll go over here and write a totally different scene with a different voice, and I keep doing that scene by scene, and I build a complete story, and it’s probably a third of the way before I start to understand, Ah, yes

Then I start saying, “How do I put all these scenes together?” It’s like a puzzle. I have a puzzle out here in pieces, and I start trying to fit it together. And I then start to arrange those scenes in some kind of story, some kind of sequence. There’s a rhythm, and there’s a pacing to all of that. And then I have to write smaller pieces that help put those together. I sometimes imagine it. Did you have Tinkertoys when you were a kid? 

Gina
Yes.

Pat
You know the spool with all the little holes in it? I start. I got this part—folks, better get to the camera—I’ve got the spools, I’ve got the pieces, the scenes. Now I gotta fit them together with the little sticks, remember? Whatever they’re called. And then I start to put the story together. But the good thing for me is that: No, no, it doesn’t go that way, then I can remove the little connectors, which are the transitional pieces, and I can move them around without having to start back over here.

The one thing that I do not want to do when I write is open the story and then proceed to write 20 pages of description of people, what they look like, what their car looks like, or whatever, because somebody somewhere said you gotta write descriptions all the time. 

What bothers me the most is I do not want to have what I call a runway. It’s like you can’t get on the highway. You can’t get to the story. You’re just, you’re pumping out 20 pages, and I guarantee you—no, I can’t say that—I would suggest to you that if you send that out to somebody to read, they’re not going to read your 20 pages of what color lipstick Mary Beth was wearing. You want to start the story, and you want to make the first . . . I never write the first five or 10 pages of a book . . . I would not even begin to imagine a novel where I could write the first 10 pages as the beginning, because I don’t know the story! Now, if you have an outline, you can go zip, zip, zip, right through, I guess. I don’t know. I’ve never been able to do that. So I try to avoid a runway, and I try to start the story as close as I possibly can, so when you’ve read the first five pages, you’re going to have a pretty good idea about this book. Does that make any sense?

Gina
36:15
It all makes sense. Yes.

Pat
36:18
That’s my process. Now my habit is another issue. Initially, I thought I had to write every day. I would get up at 6:30 in the morning and I would start writing, and I would write as long as the juice flowed. And I thought, oh boy, I’m going to be a writer. This is going to work. But now since I have an issue with sitting for any length of time because of major back surgery, I now am a much slower writer. But the problem I have is that I can’t sit for more than an hour and a half at any one time, which breaks my concentration, and so I’m now very much slower writer. But to talk about a process is difficult for me, because I think everybody makes that discovery on their own. In time, what works for you may not even approach what somebody else does. So I don’t really know how useful it is. I try to write. I work on something, whether I spend every day doing that. No, no, there’s reflection time. I walk around the story in my head to the point it’s probably risky, but I don’t write it down. I’ve gotta think it through, and then I go and I write.

Gina
38:02
I think your point is well taken, that we have to discover for ourselves what works, because what works for me, not going to work for you, vice versa. I think it’s useful to hear other people’s process, because sometimes we can get into a rut, or sometimes we can get into just a pattern of thinking that this is the way it works for me, and hearing how other people do it, I think, opens up possibility for something that they might try. You talking about writing the scenes and having the scenes and then interconnecting them is very similar to the way that I write and building those bridges. 

Pat
Thought it was me. 

Gina
No, maybe, maybe we’re weird. Wouldn’t doubt it.

Pat
38:58
I hope so, but . . .

Gina
39:00
But that’s very similar to the way that I write, and then I have to go back and figure out, okay, what is the best sequence of these scenes? Because on the surface, sometimes they can look very unconnected and how do I bridge to make this make sense? 

Pat
39:19
Yeah, and how much do you want the reader to know? You know. I to write it in a way that it becomes a page turner, whatever that truly means, because I give you just enough to make you curious about what happens next. A really good friend of mine told me once that she read Dream Chaser, which was my first book, and she read it, and when her husband would come home, he would say, “Okay, what’d you read today?” And then she’d tell him, and he’d say, “Well, what happened next?” And that’s kind of the way you hope somebody will come to your story, that there’s just always a nugget there that you have to answer later.

Gina
40:20
Yeah, I’ve actually found it a bit of a challenge. It’s like, there’s what the writer knows and there’s what you want the reader to know at a certain time in the story. And so, yeah, playing that balancing act of knowing when to reveal things to the reader that I as the writer already know about the characters in the situation is a real important aspect of the delivery of the story, I think.

Pat
40:54
Yeah, yeah. And another aspect of that is when you write and you think you’ve and then someone reads it, like your editor, and says, “What is this?” And I go into this thing about explaining it, and they’re going, “No, my dear. It is not on the page. It’s still up here.” 

Gina
Uh huh, yes. 

Pat
So those become the missing pieces, you know, it’s like, oh, okay, okay. One of the most difficult things for me is revisions. I know that I’ll never write the perfect story, even with major revisions, but I hold on to certain phrases, certain words, certain explanations, long past they’re really being very useful. And I hate to give up anything. And the worst thing anybody can do to me is to change my words. Tell me what you want to tell me about it, and I’ll listen, because I want to know, but don’t rewrite it for me. I made the mistake very much in the very, very beginning of giving it to someone—a short story—and they immediately took out their pen and started rewriting it for themselves. I mean, like they would write it. I didn’t know how to say, “No, no, no, no. It’s my story. Help me write my story better. 

Gina
42:35
Your story, and how it begins—I can’t wait to read the whole thing—but I’m hoping that maybe you want to share a little bit with us about the beginning of the story. Maybe.

Pat
42:50
Yes, I really would like to read the first page. This is called, it’s not, it’s not an elevator speech, because I don’t know how to do that, but this particular . . . let me read it off of here. Can you give me a time-out here? Sure. Okay, take a bit for me to find it. Oops. Come back. Okay. What I’d like to read, not from the book, but from my iPad. This is page one, and it’s Grace’s voice, and she’s 11 years old, and I had to be careful about telling this complicated story in the voice of a child. So I had to write what it is a child understands about their family and their circumstances, because I don’t know who wants to listen just to an 11 year old child. But this is from Grace:

The school bus pulled away, and Grace glanced back toward home. She sometimes still imagined their mom standing in front of the purple door, waving long after the bus has rounded the corner and then vanished from sight. Zoe dared not as much as a backward glance, but hugged her backpack to her chest as though a substitute for all she needed. [She’s five.] 

“Mom waved, didn’t she?” Zoe’s eyes were focused elsewhere.

“You tell me.” Her sister’s improbable optimism too early wore on Grace’s own resilience.

The glimmer of hope slid from Zoe’s face, replaced by a pinched expression, and she squeezed her backpack even tighter. 

Regretting her harshness, Grace leaned and whispered, “Dad said she’ll soon be well enough to volunteer at the animal shelter again. That’s good, right?” But she knew Dad too often chose hope when there was nothing else to offer. 

Zoe chewed on a bleeding cuticle, and Grace knew only one of her better stories drawn from her earlier memories of their mom and baby Zoe would satisfy her sister. Zoe never stopped begging for more of Grace’s stories peppered with plenty of Grace’s sweetest lies. The worst part of living in stories that were never completely true was Grace’s fear of someday running dry of stories leaving her and Zoe to live fully inside their mother’s tilted realities.

That’s page one.

Gina
46:19
You’ve got me wanting more.

Pat
46:23
I think what I was trying to talk about earlier about what you tell the reader and when you choose to tell it, and you start right in the middle, you start right in with what’s happening. I want to be active, and I want the reader to go, boom, okay,

Gina
46:48
You made a little bit of reference to the point of view. You tell this story from—you don’t stay with Grace for the entire novel, although she’s in the story, But you alternate points of view in the story?

Pat
47:04
Yes, I do. It’s from Leah the mother, Daniel the father, and Grace. Grace is the driving voice. Grace is the perspective that you build in a novel, and it is when Grace responds, when I said earlier, she promised her mother that she’d never leave her and then the story becomes one precarious road after another as Leah loses more and more of her grasp of reality. And in the end, it is that promise that keeps Grace tethered to her mother, and it’s when that is challenged by a character that shows up that I hadn’t expected at all. And I go, wow, that’s the way to do that. 

Let me go back, if I can, and say one thing about the arrival of new characters. And you go, wow. They become magic in terms of connecting all of this. In the end there is a character named Moses who declares that he’s never tried to lead anybody anywhere they didn’t want to go—which is kind of a little smirk for me—and he saves me in the end, and he only appears probably this far in the book. Moses comes on scene, he does his thing that is magical, and walks away.

Gina
49:05
I am excited for September 16. Would you share with our listeners about how they’re going to be able to find Hotel Impala? Where can they get it?

Pat
49:17
Where can they get it? Yes, they can get it directly from the sale page on Twisted Road. They can get it from any other source that they typically go to. It won’t be difficult.

Gina
49:36
Is it Twisted Road Publications.com, or Twistedroad.com? Do you know the web address? We will put that in our show notes. So if you don’t know that, okay.

Pat
I can get that information for you. 

Gina
I’ll make sure that we get that in the show notes.

Pat
49:50
Yeah, yeah, that would be to clear it and the most correct way to go about it, because I don’t pay a lot of attention to that sort of thing. I should, I guess, but I don’t because I don’t have to. I’m lucky.

Gina
50:08
I have learned so many new things about you as a writer, and, of course, about your new book. This has been a delightful conversation. I appreciate your time in visiting with us, and I hope our listeners get a lot from this as well.

Pat
50:25
I do too, and thank you so much for the opportunity to talk to you and your viewers. And yeah, I’m excited about the 16th, but as always, I’m a little bit nervous. You know, I think you understand that.

Gina
50:41
Oh yeah. That’s all part of the process too, isn’t it?

Pat
50:44
That wonderful mix. You know, like, ahhh.

Gina
50:48
So do you have another book in the works? I know this wasn’t something we were going to talk about, but I’m curious.

Pat
50:53
Only here. Keeps me awake. But yes, thank you. I may go back to writing short stories for a while. 

Gina
51:05
Yeah, bridge that time in between until that voice is clear?

Pat
51:12
Yes, yes. 

Gina
51:14
Well, thank you again. I appreciate you being here. Listeners, thank you for tuning in. You can get this episode on our website, AroundTheWritersTable.com, you can hear it on all of the different podcasting platforms, Spotify, Google Play and also on YouTube. So thank you again. Pat. We look forward to our next episode and bye, listeners. Take care.

Gina’s Pop
51:14
Thanks for joining us around the writer’s table. Please feel free to suggest a topic or a guest by emailing info@aroundthewriterstable.com. Music provided with gracious permission by Langtry. A link to their music is on our homepage at AroundTheWritersTable.com. Everyone here around the writer’s table wishes you joy in your writing and everyday grace in your living. Take care, until next time.

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