Interview with writer Julia Buckley

The following interview with Julia Buckley first appeared on the Erica Writes blog on Friday, June 08, 2007

I first "met" Julia Buckley last year when I won a critique on Julie Kenner's auction. She enjoyed reading TATTF (now: Hi-Jinxed), so obviously she's *brilliant*. =)

Julia Buckley made her imprint on the mystery scene last year with THE DARK BACKWARD. This summer she launches a new humorous mystery series with her first book, MADELINE MANN, which Kirkus Reviews calls a "bright debut." She lives in the Chicago area with her husband and two sons, and she maintains her own blog at juliabuckley.blogspot.com.

What is your process for coming up with a good mystery? Do you pre-plan like crazy, think of the ending first, let things just work themselves out?

I'm not sure that I have a good scientific process. I usually start with one basic idea that comes to me in the shower or something. :) Then I spend a lot of time just working it around in my mind. However, I will advise anyone who is a writer or wants to write that the real ideas don't start to flow until you sit down and start pecking something out. That opens the floodgates.

Any tips on being suspenseful, yet funny?

I grew up reading Mary Stewart, my all time favorite writer, and you should read one of her romantic suspense tales to see a great example of maintaining tension and mystery while building romance--and yes, humor. She's the queen. But I think if you have a sense of humor it shows up in all of your writing.

What made you chose to write mysteries rather than any other genre?

I have always loved reading mysteries the most, so when I decided to write I never thought of leaving that genre. In a way, every book is a mystery to me, because there's always the question of how the conflict will be resolved, no matter what the style.

When writing a mystery do you make your villain somewhat likeable or do you have the reader hate him/her completely?

That's an interesting question, because in the case of my first mystery, THE DARK BACKWARD, I made my villain absolutely evil (and yet, in a dark sense, sort of funny). Some readers have complained that he's too one dimensional, but I never wanted him to be anything else. It was inspired by Macbeth, and the fact that by the end of the play Macbeth has become a "monster," according to his enemy Macduff. The original title of the book was OUR RARER MONSTERS (but that's too hard to say), and I wanted Nob Stevens to be that kind of person--one who doesn't realize that he's lost his humanity and has become monstrous.

I'm curious to know why, if this is Julia's second book, Kirkus called it a debut. Is it because it's a series debut?

That's a good point! It's because this is the first of the Madeline Mann mysteries. Ironically, I wrote MM before my first book, but I ended up selling the other one first, and then my publisher bought MM, as well.

Do you have a "call" story?

I was about to turn forty, and I knew that one of my manuscripts was under consideration. I really wanted it to get an offer, and I wanted it to happen before I left my thirties so I could say it was my last accomplishment of that decade.

My husband picked me up from work on a Thursday, his day off, and he had the boys in the back seat. He kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye. He finally asked, "If I know something, do you want to know that I know, or just find out when you check the messages?"

I felt torn; if it was something bad, I really didn't want to hear it.

"Do you think I'd want to know?" I asked.

"I'm not sure. Would you rather hear something from your agent? She called from New York."

By this time I was dying, so I just told him to spill. He turned to the boys and said, "Mom's going to be a published author!"

It was also right before Christmas, so that made a nice little celebration.

The previous interview with Julia Buckley first appeared on the Erica Writes blog on Friday, June 08, 2007

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