How do you get inspired to write?
I started off as a painter. In college, I majored in art and art history. Then after college, I worked as a freelance art critic and kind of found my love of writing. Later, when I was thinking about having kids, I needed to take a break from toxic oil paints. I’m not really happy unless I have a creative outlet, so I decided to try fiction writing. It stuck, and as it turns out, I’m a better writer than I am a painter.
How do you deal with writer’s block?
I like to let things marinate for a while until a germ of an idea pops into my head. Then I take a legal pad and scribble everything down. I also go back and edit what I’ve already written. Sometimes different plot points will suddenly seem connected in new ways.
What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?
Hmm, I can’t say that my personal life is the stuff that high octane thrillers are made of. But I did discovery an ancestor on a genealogy website who had a suspicious number of husbands die mysteriously.
What are you currently working on?
Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?
Years ago, I stayed in a gorgeous mountain town called outside LA, which has had a number of close calls with wildfires. I wanted to set a murder mystery there and was very intrigued by the tension between beauty and environmental threat.
At the same time, after working in LA’s criminal court system, I regularly witnessed the devastation caused by meth-induced brain damage and the effect that drugs can have on families. One of my characters, Jacob, developed schizophrenia from meth use. His two sisters take very different approaches in dealing with the fall out. The book explores their family’s struggles from three different perspectives.
I’m very ADHD, so I tend to have a lot of different threads worming around in my head at the same time. Then the challenge is finding a way to weave them together into a coherent story. So, I also threw in a cold case mystery where a genealogy website connection yields an unexpected clue.
What kind of research did you do for this novel?
I want my characters to feel three dimensional and authentic. If I’m going to write about a particular type of struggle, I try to read a lot of first-person accounts of people who’ve gone through something similar. Kate, the main character, learns in her thirties that the man who raised her is not her biological father. I binge-listened to podcasts with first person accounts by people who made similar discoveries as adults to better understand what that trauma feels like. I also watched a number of interviews with meth addicts. My character, Jacob, slowly loses is mind over the course of the book. I wanted my description of that descent to be nuanced and realistic.
In general, what emotions do you usually wish to elicit with your writing?
I try to write character studies that are plotted like page turners. My books have a lot of darkness in them, but I also want to give readers something to hope for. There’s generally a touch of romance and a silver lining to balance the bleakness.
Best advice on writing you’ve ever received?
If the first book doesn’t sell, write another one.
You can never fully clean a crematory over. There’s always a bit of mixing.
Can you tell us a two-sentence horror story?
“Honey, the baby peed through his diaper. And I think he has pink eye.”
What else would you want readers to know about you? Where can readers find you online?
I’m on Facebook, Bluesky, Twitter and Instagram.
If you’re a writer looking to pitch agents and editors, I collected successful query letters on my website as an example bank. Check it out. https://www.alexkenna.com/blog
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