The Interview - Monette L Bebow Reinhard
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What inspired you to start writing?
Boredom. I had a temp job where there was little to do but answer phones so I started scribbling a short story idea on paper and before long I submitted it to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. I didnât know anything about formatting for submission, just winged it off! Never got it published but never lost my desire to fill empty spaces of live with writing. Some think Iâm a little ADHD, could be true. But Iâm also very focused -- since that time, Iâve published 17 books. 17? Howâd that happen?
Have you ever based a character on someone you know?
My mother got really mad at me while reading an early draft of Dinner at Marshall Field's. I used a lot of my childhood memories in that one, and she felt she didn't come off that well. If she had read to the end she would have seen that vindication. But then, Holly Day in that novel is really not that much like me. Although it is written in first person, both past and 1968 present, she is more like the movie "Nikita," which I finally saw for the first time last night. But I will admit to using personal elements in that Chicago-based mobster novel about the 60s assassinations.
Which book of yours was the most difficult to write, and why?
I had a dream about a vampire - a Greek vampire - so I started reading up on Greek mythology related to vampirism and it turns out thereâs a lot there. So Arabus Drake was born - I remember being fond of the character in the TV series Dark Shadows - and I gave him very human qualities with the nature of being unable to die, and having difficulties trying to control his demons. They wanted the blood. He just wanted to blend in and try to experience life with mortals.
Anyway, some success with his first book led me to decide to go back to college - I had a year as a drama student back when I was 18 but now I was maybe 40-something - to get a degree in communication. For Arabus I took a history class. But also because I was also into researching the experiences of my grandfatherâs great uncle in the Civil and Indian wars. And the professor there said I needed to be historian. I came to agree!
Arabus Drake first emerged into the world in 2016 in a novel called âAdventures in Death & Romance: Vrykolaka Tales.â I wanted a certain kind of cover but they used stock - I later became incensed when I saw it appear as the cover of another novel. During the editing process I learned its editor âdid not like these kinds of books.â It was promoted by Solstice as a paranormal romance, which in some ways it was. But the readers of those books couldnât get into its heavy historical and spiritual aspects. I wanted people to see what real vampirism felt like. They just wanted supernatural bodice ripping.
Finally, after finding a different version that I was working on and preferring that to what was published, and deciding on a different title for the trilogy - yeah, two books completed but still unpublished - I told Solstice I wasnât going to renew the contract. Whatâs sad is I thought Iâd saved the reviews it got and I canât find them.
Anyway, that was maybe another mistake. Because itâs hard to find a publisher for a novel that was published once. I tried, saying it had a different title and new content to make it interweave with the other two in the trilogy a little better. Didnât matter. In the meantime, I went to Crete (2019), took the photo that is now the cover of Journal of an Undead: Love Stories, and put it up myself at Amazon, where it languishes. It is well known, at least by me, that a traditionally published book does better than one that is self-published. I feel so bad for Arabus, because no publisher will look at the other two books with that one doing so poorly.
Whatâs the hardest decision youâve had to make while writing a book?
The focus of my masterâs degree in history, Civil War & Bloody Peace: one soldierâs orders, tried to find a publisher - I think I went through every one of them three times and never could find anyone to understand what the bookâs about, so I had to put it up on Amazon myself or call it a waste of time. Thatâs been the issue with ALL of my nonfiction, unfortunately. Except for my most recent book, Virginia City Vs. Bonanza; a Tale of Merging Histories, published last year by Rowman & Littlefield. But obviously I have a platform for that, being an authorized Bonanza novelist.
Do you outline your books, or are you more of a âpantserâ?
Iâm a firm believer in two writing processes for fiction â the outline, and getting inside the charactersâ heads so that they direct the story. So even though I have an outline, and I know how I want the story to start and end, the actual process of it is in the hands of the characters. What I recommend to new writers is to just start writing, and then, when they get stuck, if they get stuck, do the rest in an outline.
For nonfiction, itâs a little different. I take a topic, and I research the hell out of it, and only by seeing whatâs available on the topic do I know how the book will actually develop. I have to learn the basics of the topic of course, so that I have some direction, but itâs more than an outline, and itâs less. Because until Iâm done researching, itâs hard to say what the book will actually be. I donât like to have a preconceived notion of the book before I research it.
Most of the time, though, Iâm a timeline writer, I keep things developing in order of years, rather than jumping around exploring issues. Issues donât develop in a vacuum.
For instance, with Civil War & Bloody Peace, I figured that it would have to be about attitude, because of Henryâs comment that âwe didnât try hard to catch the Indians; we could see they were good people.â So I set out to find the attitudes of the time period, and tried hard to walk a path between opposing sides. But it wasnât until recently, after finding a Custer expert and doing a movie script on the Little Bighorn, that I saw what was in front of me the whole time. The book is also about U.S. Grant. This enabled me to improve the focus and shorten it.