The Haunting at Ice Pine Peak
1. What inspired you to write this book?
I always wanted
to write a more traditional gothic ghost story since I was thirteen years old
and saw a contest for that type of story in the mall bookstore, but I only got
to do it in 2015. Starting off with the setting of a traditional Chinese
mountaintop temple, I wasn't sure at first what genre I wanted to work in but
eventually decided to do this ghost story. The first order of business was to
figure out who lived in the temple and why they were dead. Traditionally, the
people living in this setting would be male Buddhist monks, and there's
certainly a lot of representation of them in East Asian literary history and
media, so I wanted to put some thought into who else could live there. (I
started thinking about this story in 2013.) Then in 2014 I noticed some
headlines in the news about ISIS attacking churches and the Yazidis in the
Middle East and about the recent capture of the female assassin who killed a
group of Catholic nuns in Liberia under Charles Taylor back in the 90s. Both of
those news stories gave me some place to start exploring the problems of
isolated, vulnerable religious groups in world history, particularly women's
groups. I ultimately decided to create a fictional world with a fictional
religious community of young women, sort of like a religious finishing school,
where a conflict among the acolytes led to this historical massacre that my
main heroine tries to unravel in the novel's present day.
Of course, the novel was also very much inspired by East Asian regional history and language, which I've studied intensively for 20 years. The early Vicki Zhao Wei TV series "Princess Returning Pearl/Huan Zhu Ge Ge" definitely gave me ideas about how I wanted to write my group of main characters, and the now defunct local pan-Asian film festival I worked for for a dozen years provided some of the cultural range of my work since the festival's content covered mostly the traditional Silk Road region, which I wanted to use in my stories as a support to the organization's mission. I also looked back at Victorian-era literary horror stories, both classics and lesser known stories such as "The Jewel of the Seven Stars," which inspired me to use some Indian archaeological sites as inspiration for the culture of the province near my mountain temple in the novel as well as some of those traditional horror tropes for my villain, the murderer. This allowed me to feature the spectacular stepwells from India that were discovered not all that long ago. I'm specifically targeting the old "Egypt Gothic" from 19th century British literature by replacing it somewhat with traditional Indian cultural markers.
2. Who should read it — and why?
Although this
novel has two awards for YA and Tweens, one traditional and one
non-traditional, I actually write my stories for other adults. However, because
I write stories a reader wouldn't feel embarrassed to read with their
grandmother or that the whole family can enjoy together, they're not
excessively graphic in spite of my very dark themes. I think that's why my
customers have been looking at them as good fodder for the precocious young
readers in their families, much younger than I had anticipated, which is fine.
I liked to read stuff like that, too, at those ages. It should appeal to anyone
who likes ghosts, monsters, mystery, historical fiction and even romance, as
well as to readers who want something to enjoy together with their older kids around
Halloween. Readers interested in foreign cultures or who have international
families also find it interesting. I've also had some local readers tell me
that, although they didn't typically like to read horror, they really liked
this book.
3. How is it better or different from others in its genre?
My main
perception of my novel and how it fits in the genre is actually kind of
strange. I'm not really sure that it does fit in the horror genre any more
after I started marketing it, and I actually was pleased that it won for the
fiction category for Moonbeam rather than horror after the fact. I've noticed
that the horror genre seems to encompass such a wide variety of topics that it
doesn't even seem like it's a singular genre at all. I saw the list of
nominees for another book award I was up for, and looking over the titles and
descriptions, I was really struck by the fact that my novel seemed almost
quaint in comparison. I felt it was really out of place in the category at that
moment, though as far as I knew it was horror. However, I did write it to be
more of a throwback to another era, and I wrote the type of story I wanted to
read, and it just doesn't happen to sound like these other books.
My story should have a much more romantic feel with the sensibility of a historical novel. Right or wrong, I definitely want my story to feel more literary even as a genre piece. That's just my background. I've studied multiple languages since I was in eighth grade, majored in a language/literary field where we did literary analysis, and continued to learn more languages to an even deeper level later as I entered the workforce and volunteered on the side as an ESL teacher. Exposure to world literature and reading excerpts of those works in their original languages just puts you at a different starting point as a writer.
4. What challenges did you overcome to write your book?
It took me an
awfully long time to get from that contest I saw as a teen to the point where I
wrote this book, and I actually went through a phase in the early 2000s where I
decided I wasn't going to write again. I was really excited about the idea of
being a writer back in college, but I lost interest in that quickly enough even
if I continued to write stories for no one in particular. Eventually, I put
away my pens and just didn't do any creative writing for over a decade, turning
to other art forms instead. I started writing again mostly out of necessity as
a blogger and as part of this local pan-Asian film festival, as well as creating
a place to react to the reading I have been doing for years in the foreign
languages I study. Writing fiction is a way of processing the culture and
language that I've been exposed to, and some of my novels I've published since
this book are part of my project to experiment with writing in my second and
third languages. I've been looking at second language acquisition studies for
years on advanced reading and writing, so these stories also function for me as
what we would call "student generated texts" from my years as an ESL
teacher. I'm very interested in the cognitive processes that entails, and I
know there's not a lot of data available to advance the field otherwise,
especially with native English speakers.
5. What lasting messages do you hope your readers are left
after consuming your book?
I hope that
it's fun and still leaves a good feeling in the end in spite of the awful
deaths and hauntings. I wanted my group of main characters in the novel's
present day to be as warm and silly at times as the characters from
"Princess Returning Pearl" who served as their direct inspiration.
Though it's horror, the story still has its moments of humor and humanity that
I hope come through to the reader. I've taken to calling the type of horror I write
"transcendent horror," because I want to emphasize the mystical side
of the hauntings, which sometimes puts me more in the genre of straight
fantasy, as well as give the reader some feeling of being uplifted by the end.
6. What advice do you have for struggling writers?
I would
recommend just spending some time working on the nuts and bolts of writing.
Many years ago, I went through a phase where I'd just get up on days off and
write passages in different ways to see how I could get different effects. I
also would tell them to expect to produce a box or two of finished manuscripts
that just don't work that will stay buried under your bed forever. Like
everything in life, you only get better with practice. Reading widely also
helps your writing.
7. Where do you see the book publishing industry
heading?
I hope that it gets more diversified, and what I mean by that is that it's willing to take more risks on different types of stories rather than just looking for the next story just like the last big seller. Hopefully, the indie and self-publishing scene will help make that possible.
For more information, please see: http://icepinepalace.wordpress.com
DON”T
MISS THESE!!
How
Authors Get Bulk Sales Now
A
podcast on book publicity that you need to listen to today
How Authors Can Market To Libraries Successfully
Unfu*k
Your Book marketing
How
Authors Get A Yes Out Of Others
Some key principles to rally your book marketing around
How
to write powerful, effective book advertising copy that sells tons of books
So
what is needed to be a champion book marketer?
The
Book Marketing Strategies Of Best-Sellers
How
authors can sell more books
No.
1 Book Publicity Resource: 2019 Toolkit For Authors -- FREE
Brian Feinblum’s insightful views, provocative
opinions, and interesting ideas expressed in this terrific blog are his alone
and not that of his employer or anyone else. You can – and should -- follow him
on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels
much more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2019. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in
Westchester. His writings are often featured in The Writer and
IBPA’s Independent. This was named one of the best book
marketing blogs by Book Baby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs and recognized by Feedspot in 2018 as one of the
top book marketing blogs. Also named by WinningWriters.com as a "best
resource.” He recently hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.