Book Talk with Linda Griffin

Who is Linda Griffin?

I was born and raised in San Diego, California and earned a BA in English from San Diego State University and an MLS from UCLA. I began my career as a reference and collection development librarian in the Art and Music Section of the San Diego Public Library and then transferred to the Literature and Languages Section, where I had the pleasure of managing the Central Library’s Fiction collection and initiating fiction order lists for the entire library system. Although I also enjoy reading biography, memoir, and history, fiction remains my first love. In addition to the three R’s–reading, writing, and research–I enjoy Scrabble, movies, and travel.

My earliest ambition was to be a “book maker” and I wrote my first story, “Judy and the Fairies,” with a plot stolen from a comic book, at the age of six. I broke into print in college with a story in the San Diego State University literary journal, The Phoenix, but most of my magazine publications came after I left the library to spend more time on my writing

My stories have been published in numerous journals, including Eclectica, The Binnacle, The Nassau Review, Orbis, Thema Literary Journal, and forthcoming in Avalon Literary Review, and and in the anthologies Short Story America, Vol. 2 and The Captive and the Dead. Four stories, including two as yet unpublished, received honorable mention in the Short Story America Prize for Short Fiction contests.

Member of RWA and Authors Guild

What book do you think everyone should read?

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. We would all understand ourselves and each other better if everyone read it. Also A Call to Action by Jimmy Carter.

Do you prefer to write in silence or with noise?

I usually listen to the radio, currently a 70’s music station, or write in front of the TV. Too much quiet is unnerving.

Do you write one book at a time or do you have several going at a time?

Usually one at a time, but there have been exceptions.

Pen or typewriter or computer?

When I’m writing, I usually keep a pen and notebook handy and scribble down lines and sometimes entire scenes as they come to me, all too often during the night, but I don’t consider them officially part of the story until I type them on my computer. Many of my earlier stories were composed on the Royal portable typewriter I received for my 13^th birthday. I still have it under my desk.

What is your writing process? Do you do an outline first? Do you do the chapters first?

I’m mostly a pantser, and don’t always know where the story is headed. I did know early on how The Rebound Effect would end, though. I usually outline only when I’ve written much of the story and need to keep the chronology straight. Chapters come in the editing stage.

Do you try more to be original or to deliver to readers what they want?

I write the story that wants to be told. I like Kurt Vonnegut’s quote, “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

Other considerations might enter into the editing, though.

What would you say to your younger self?

Richard P. Brickner, in his memoir My Second Twenty Years, says that a novel is an ocean to its author, but a mere drink of water to a reader. Don’t expect anybody else to care as much about your writing as you do and try not to take criticism or indifference personally. It’s your ocean. Enjoy the swim.

What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters of the opposite sex?

I’ve never found it that difficult. In Guilty Knowledge, I’m writing from the point of view of a black male detective and I’m none of the three. The readers will have to decide whether I did it well or not. We’re all the same basic human being, and yet each of us is unique, so categories like race and gender needn’t define us.

Do you believe in writer’s block?

Yes, I have one, hand decorated, on my desk! But seriously, I read an article in Writer’s Market a few years ago that said there is no such thing. The advice it offered freed me to abandon the scene I was stuck on and write scenes out of order, which I had never done before. I was then able to finish two stories that had been languishing for a long time. One of them was Seventeen Days. I do believe that the level of creativity in the universe is low at times, though.

About the Book

The Rebound Effect by Linda Griffin
Genre: Romantic Suspense, Psychological Thriller
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press, Inc
Publication Date: July 15, 2019

Synopsis

In the small town of Cougar, struggling single mother and veterinary assistant Teresa Lansing is still bruised from a failed relationship when Frank McAllister sweeps her off her feet.

Frank is a big-city SWAT officer who moved to Cougar only four months ago. He’s handsome, charming, forceful, very sexy, and a bit mysterious. He had his eye on Teresa even before they met and is pushing for a serious relationship right away.

Teresa finds his intense courtship flattering, and the sex is fabulous, but she doesn’t want her deaf six-year-old son to be hurt again. Her former fiancé cheated on her when he got drunk after being unjustly fired, but he loves her and her son, and the whirlwind romance is complicated by his efforts to win Teresa back.

And then there’s the matter of the bodies buried at Big Devil Creek…

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