Music Fiction
Date Published: 09-30-2025
Publisher: Covfefe Press
For anyone who's ever said, "They're playing my song!"
Interview with Susan Sloate
What is your favorite part of the book?
What I enjoyed writing the most were the three vignettes after the main story of the band, because it allowed me to show the effect of the song on the lives of people in pain and make my point about how healing the right music is.
Does your book have a lesson? Moral?
Pretty much that music heals. It starts with us in youth and it stays with us throughout our lives and makes us feel better at the oddest of times, when we surely need it.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
The band members are entirely fictional; I just started writing them for the 2018 Nanowrimo and they started talking and acting for themselves! The characters in the vignettes, though the vignettes are not entirely fictional, were people I made up in my own mind. I needed people who would behave as they did, and fortunately, they just came to me and I started working with them.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
My two favorite characters of all time are Cady Cuyler in FORWARD TO CAMELOT—she doesn’t think she’s brave or adventurous, and yet when the chips are down, that’s exactly what she is—and Amanda Harary in STEALING FIRE. Amanda is a pretty exact version of me at that age (she’s 25 in the novel, and the novel is based on something that happened to me), and it’s hard to hate a character based on yourself. Of course, given that I was writing about myself, I naturally made her smarter, more efficient, prettier and more talented than me.
What character in your book are you least likely to get along with?
The character I think I’d clash with most is Mark Morgan, the leader of the band in SCENES FROM A SONG. He’s tough and vulnerable and gets angry easily; I don’t think I’d enjoy trying to get along with him, without tripping over his sensitivities and starting a fight.
What would the main character in your book have to say about you?
To my great surprise, I found out after the novel was finished that the main character in SCENES FROM A SONG is THE SONG, “Wrapped in Gauze”! It’s in every important story beat in the novel, and though the band members are the people you’d think are most important, I have to admit it’s the song that ultimately matters the most.
That said, I’d like to hope the song would tell you I was a pretty good lyricist (I wrote the original song lyric for the book, as well as all the lyrics in the text of STEALING FIRE, my autobiographical love story).
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?
My books are so different from one another that I can’t see many connections between them, except that most take place in or around New York or L.A., and I’ve lived in both places. I’d definitely like to see them stand on their own, though I’d like to think if a reader has read, say, FORWARD TO CAMELOT and liked it, they’ll want to read more of my work as well.
I’m in the middle of writing a sequel to CAMELOT (there are three books planned for that), which gives me more time with Cady, who’s a really extraordinary character. But as far as books intertwining, like Thomas Hardy did with his own literary universe, that’s not something I do. Each new work should stand on its own… I hope.
SUSAN SLOATE is the author or co-author of more than 25 published books. This includes 3 editions of Forward to Camelot, a time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination that became a #6 Amazon bestseller, was honored in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a Hollywood company for film production. She also wrote the autobiographical Broadway novel Stealing Fire, which became a #2 Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release, and Realizing You (with Ron Doades), for which she invented a new genre: the self-help novel.
1 comments:
Thanks so much for hosting me today; wonderful to be here!
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