Laura Benedict: Isabella Moon

Title:  Isabella Moon
Author:  Laura Benedict
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Hardcover: 368 pages
ISBN: 978-0345497673

1. First off, congratulations on the big novel sale! Give us the elevator pitch. What’s your book about?

The title, Isabella Moon, refers to a nine year-old girl who is missing and presumed dead at the opening of the novel. But IM has an ensemble cast and the most significant character is fictional Carystown Kentucky, the small town where the story takes place. When Kate Russell, a young woman who has been hiding out there for two years is approached by Isabella’s ghost, she’s torn between finding justice for the girl and keeping her own secrets. The secrets Carystown is hiding begin to destroy its genteel, southern facade to reveal its dark heart. Think sex, drugs, murder, betrayal and Steely Dan. Here are my two favorite review quotes: from Booklist–”Benedict creates an entertainingly lurid atmosphere as she peoples a small southern town with not one but two psychopaths, a ghostly apparition, and various neurotic young women with some pretty twisted views on romance” ; and from The Chicago Tribune–”An amalgam of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, this mystery/thriller will simultaneously tug at the heartstrings and scare the bejesus out of readers. 
In a word: unforgettable.”

2. Most new novelists have an interesting story to tell about their journey to publication. What’s yours? Did you use an agent? Make sure to tell us about the day you found out you’d sold a book.

My journey was looooooong! I wrote fiction for eighteen years before I sold Isabella Moon. I call it my “third first novel” because I have two in the drawer that will never again be seen by other eyes than spiders’. And if my descendants ever try to publish them I will come back and haunt them. (Note to self: burn before dying.) I imagined that I was writing some imaginary thing called “literary fiction” for all those years. But my agent couldn’t sell it–and, frankly, I wasn’t trained to write it anyway. I approach writing as more craft than art, and, with the help of some very good writer friends, a few teachers and many, many pages read, I eventually honed my craft to the point where someone thought it was good enough to put on a bookshelf. I started IM on a piece of scrap paper on an airplane–I was on my way home from NYC where my agent told me, essentially, to get off my butt and write something she could sell. So, I sat down to have some fun (how ironic that getting off my butt actually entailed sitting in a chair for months!) and IM was the result.

I learned about the sale while I happened to be in NYC celebrating my sister’s fortieth birthday. My agent had sent it out on a Thursday afternoon, and we had an offer from Ballantine at 8:30 Monday morning!

3. Do you have another book in the pipeline? What are you working on now?

My next novel, Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts, will be on sale in hardcover on December 30th, along with the paperback of Isabella Moon. So right now I’m working on number three. It’s very top-secret and is (I hope!) the start of a horror series. I’ll be touring for CMLH in January, so we’re planning that right now. I’m also reading stories for the next edition of Surreal South, the anthology series I edit with my husband Pinckney Benedict, and spend lots of time at my blog, Notes From the Handbasket. Oh, and I just turned in the copy for my new website, which will still be at the same address: www.laurabenedict.com. The new trailer for CMLH is super-scary!

4. What’s your process like? Morning writer, night writer, or something in between?

I get distracted very easily these days and have gotten into the habit of staying up to work long after the family has gone to bed. It’s tough to get up at 6:30 and see the kids off, though, so it’s going to have to change or we’ll all go mad and never have clean clothes to wear and end up looking like a poster family for that movie about the guy who ate McDonald’s for a month! (Actually, we eat at Moe’s and Panera–McDonald’s not so much–but the effect is the same, darn it.)

5. There seems to be an unusually high percentage of writers who own cats. Here at The First Book, we’re doing a study to find out if there’s a direct relationship between writing success and cat ownership. Do you own a cat? If so, tell us about him or her. If not, tell us what you have against cats.

We did have two cats when I signed the contract for Isabella Moon and Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts. They went to live on a farm (a real farm, not the “farm” where most families send unfortunate animals) when we moved from Virginia to Illinois. Hm. I don’t have any cats right now. And I don’t have a new contract yet. We have two dogs. I wonder if that’s coincidence, or….