Author Interview with Cinasee Pollett

Cinasee Pollett's debut novel WildWood Revisited was one of my favorite reads of 2023, and I recently read it again. You can find my review of the book here. Read more about her book, her thoughts on writing and self-publishing, and what she's working on next!

Your debut novel WildWood Revisited took you a long time to write and edit. Can you tell us a little bit about the process?

The idea for “Tome Travellers” came about when I was 16. My interests at the time revolved around Sherlock Holmes, The Hobbit, and an old British spy series called Sandbaggers. More than anything, I wished I could live in the Shire or sit with Holmes in his flat at 221b.

What if I could? became the foundational question for my novel.

Over the years, I worked on a dozen different drafts, each with the same cast but set in different time periods, with different books, and varying levels of espionage. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre, and Pride & Prejudice were all different volumes the cast Travelled into at one point or another. However, none of them ever felt quite right.

I think I needed to reach a certain stage of life and experience certain things before the final draft could be realized. When I decided to take on the challenge of crafting a book-within-a-book (WildWood) instead of using existing British Literature… I knew I had stumbled onto the final draft. 

Author interview with Amanda Darcy

Amanda Darcy's debut novel Of Love and Beer was published March 12, 2024. You can find my review of the book here. Read more about her book, her thoughts on writing and self-publishing, and what she's working on next!

Your debut novel Of Love & Beer is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Why did you choose to write a retelling and why specifically Pride and Prejudice?

This actually starts with Pride and Prejudice. Every time I’ve read it, or any of Jane Austen’s novels (and I’ve reread them a lot), I’ve always spent days afterwards thinking about how a modern version might go. But until recently, I didn’t have the confidence to try it. About five years ago, things go so chaotic with politics that I got overwhelmed. I think now it was a kind of depression I went into, but it manifested by me turning away from all media except Pride and Prejudice variations which I had recently discovered. After reading nothing but what is essentially Jane Austen fan fiction for nearly six months, I woke up one day and just thought, “I could do this. I could write an Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy story.” For a while I debated whether to do a variation set in the Regency period like most of the books I’d read, or to do a retelling. The retelling won out partly because I’d been thinking of that for so many years, and partly because since I’d never written a romance novel before, I mistakenly thought it’d be easier to already have a basic structure and plot points to follow.