Today, I am pleased to have author Carolyn T. Dingman over to talk about her debut novel Cancel the Wedding.
by Carolyn T. Dingman
Genre: Contemporary
Hardback: 240 Pages
Publication: July 8, 2014
by Harper Collins
On the surface, Olivia has it all: a high-powered career, a loving family, and a handsome fiancé. She even seems to be coming to terms with her mother Jane’s premature death from cancer. But when Jane’s final wish is revealed, Olivia and her elder sister Georgia are mystified. Their mother rarely spoke of her rural Southern hometown, and never went back to visit—so why does she want them to return to Huntley, Georgia, to scatter her ashes?
Jane’s request offers Olivia a temporary escape from the reality she’s long been denying: she hates her “dream” job, and she’s not really sure she wants to marry her groom-to-be. With her 14-year-old niece, Logan, riding shotgun, she heads South on a summer road trip looking for answers about her mother.
As Olivia gets to know the town’s inhabitants, she begins to peel back the secrets of her mother’s early life—truths that force her to finally question her own future. But when Olivia is confronted with a tragedy and finds an opportunity to right a terrible wrong, will it give her the courage to accept her mother’s past—and say yes to her own desire to start over?
Tell us a little about yourself and how you got into writing.
I wish I had a better answer for how I got into writing other than to say that there are always stories swirling around inside my head with voices and characters and situations that just pop in there. Sometimes I write them down. I realize this makes me sound like a crazy person who is symptomatically hearing voices, but I like to think of it less as insanity and more as the creative process.
I learned the actual nuts and bolts of how to write through a personal blog that I had when my girls were little. Blogging taught me what it means to write, not just creating storylines and pacing the plot, but also the physical act of sitting down to do it. You have to make yourself go to the computer and do the work. I quit the blog cold turkey one day when my younger daughter, who was about eight years old at the time, came home from school and asked me not to write about her on the internet anymore. So I was left with the habit of daily writing, the voices in my head, and the privacy clause I had just signed with a crayon. There was nothing left to do but get serious about trying to write fiction.
How would you describe your novel in a tweet (140 char. or less)?
What inspired you to write Cancel the Wedding?
What did you enjoy most writing Cancel the Wedding?
What challenges did you face?
How have your life experiences influenced your writing?
I also think my fascination/aversion to the numerous man-made lakes in the north Georgia mountains created aspects of the story I didn’t necessarily see coming. Cancel the Wedding is set in a fictional town on the banks of one of these lakes. They are beautiful and strange bodies of water created from damming up rivers and flooding everything in their path in order to create a reservoir. And for some inexplicable reason people go missing in their waters every year. Seriously, it’s creepy. A person will fall off a boat or a dock and simply vanish. It can take weeks to recover the body. Sometimes the bodies are never found. What the hell is happening with the strange currents and sunken debris of these lakes that bodies can just disappear? I’m sure that setting Cancel the Wedding near one of these man-made lakes was the cause of the manifestation of the mystery that develops in the story.
What would you like readers to get from reading Cancel the Wedding?
What are you working on right now?
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
You can read my review of Cancel the Wedding here.
Author: alice
Alice is a stay-at-home mom of two children. Her favorite books are those send icy tingles down her spine, such as a good mystery or thriller, but she also enjoys a good hear-throbbing romance. She enjoys listening to music and drinking a cup of tea while reading and working.
Mary @ BookSwarm says
Ooh, most excellent interview! And, no, I don't think you sound crazy talking about voices — those stories swirl no matter what you do and they just have to come out in one way or another. So right about just wanting to get wrapped up in a good story. That's a huge reason I pick up a book.
Stacey Shubitz says
I love what Carolyn said about waiting. I am querying agents with a picture book manuscript I wrote. I started last week and now I wait. The waiting part is so hard. (And no one, other than other writers, understands that sometimes you need to wait weeks to revise/edit a manuscript again so it can percolate in your mind.) Great interview!