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The Long and the Short of It is very
happy to welcome Eilis Flynn, author of Introducing Sonika.
Eilis has spent a large part of her life working either on Wall
Street or in a Wall Street-related firm so, as she says, “Why should
I write fiction that’s any more based in our world?” She spends her
days aware that there is a reality beyond what we can see … and
writes stories about it.
I asked Eilis about her heritage and
she told me, “My mother was Japanese and my father came from
Arkansas. I’m a mutt, basically.” This background, though, came into
play when she wrote her first book, The Sleeper Awakes, about
Cal Deveney, who wakes up after an earthquake in a place and time
she doesn’t recognize... so she doesn’t know if she’s awake or
asleep. Eilis said a number of factors went into writing this book.
“First, in my mother’s hometown, outside of Tokyo, there’s a shrine
that has a series of gates, one after another. I loved that image,”
she said. “Why was it designed that way? What happens if you go
through them all? What’s on the other side? Then I read a few
articles about people for whom their dreams are more real than their
lives. And I knew that somehow I wanted to explore both those
things.”
Eilis told me she wanted all new
writers to know, “Writing a story can be as daunting as swimming
across the Pacific or as easy as breathing. Sadly, we never know
which it’s going to be.” It’s also important, she added, to make
your reader care. “No matter how boring the subject,” she said, “or
objectionable, if your reader cares, one way or another, that’s good
writing.”
In Eilis’ writing, usually the plot
comes first, but she said, “Sometimes the plot comes in the form of
a character. That was the case with my second book, Festival of
Stars, when Dare Borodin came to mind. What do you do with a
character who can’t accept who he is? What is he drawn to? And what
does he do when he falls in love with a woman who is everything he
wants to be?”
Eilis has written five or six books,
but Introducing Sonika is the third one published. She comes
from a different route than a lot of romance writers. She told me,”I
come from a comic-book background. I worked in the comic book
industry; I wrote a few comic books; I married a comic book fan. I
knew I’d use a comic book theme in one of my books, so when the plot
of Introducing Sonika came to mind, I knew that I could
finally combine writing romances and super-heroes, two of my
favorite things.” She added, “Actually, I got to turn one of these
earlier books, a category-style romance called “30 Day Guarantee”
into an online graphic novella, so I was pretty pleased about that
too.”
On a more personal note, I asked
Eilis if she ever cried during movies. “It’s embarrassing,” she
said, “I think I can more easily name the movies I haven’t cried
during!”
I also asked her if she was a morning
person or a night person. She told me, “See, I wake up at 5 AM
during the week, because I want to get some writing done before I go
to work. But truly, I’m only awake for about fifteen minutes between
2:00 pm and 2:30 pm.”
Please, check Eilis’ website out at
http://www.eilisflynn.com. She will also be with us for a
Question and Answer session in our
Yahoo Group. |
