[00:00:00] Jane: Welcome to Historical Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction novels. I’m your host, Jane Healy, and in today’s episode, we welcome bestselling author Joy Jordan Lake to discuss her latest novel, Echoes of Us, which has been called an immersive historical journey.
brimming with detail and characters who positively leap off the page. Welcome to my lovely friend Joy. Yay. Thanks for having me, Jane.
I’m so happy.
[00:00:30] Joy: It’s an honor to get to be with
[00:00:32] Jane: you. I know. Usually I’m really nervous. Like not really nervous, but a little nervous going into the podcast when I haven’t met the author before.
But this morning I woke up and I’m like, Oh, it’s Joy. This is going to be great. It’s going to be fun. It’s I know we may forget there’s anyone listening and just start. I know. I know. Exactly. I’m going to do a little brief intro on you. And then I have a ton of questions and we will dive right in.
Hello, Tori. Joy Jordan Lake is the best selling author of 13 books. Her most recent works include Echoes of Us, which comes out next Tuesday. October 8th as well as Tangled Mercy, a Historical Novel Society’s Editor’s Choice, Under a Gilded Moon, a North Carolina Reads 2023 Selection, and the Christie Award winning Blue Hole Back Home.
Additionally, Joy has published three children’s books. So impressive. Having earned a PhD in English Literature at Tufts University, Joy currently writes full time and teaches occasionally as an adjunct professor at Belmont University. Again, welcome! Thanks for having me, Jane. Oh, Patricia Sands is here, too.
I see all these names pop up. Oh, Paulette, too. Awesome. Okay, back to you. Tell us the premise of this fascinating dual timeline story and how you came up with it to start. Echoes of Us.
[00:01:48] Joy: As it’s always a challenge to talk about dual timelines because in theory, they’re so intricately woven, right?
Yes. This one as you said, World War II and present day in the midst of World War II, you have three young men. One is a Tennessee farm boy. One is a physics student at Cambridge University. It’s a British guy who is also Jewish. And one is a German POW, and they, against all odds, forge this connection as they’re all stationed in St.
Simon’s Island, or end up on St. Simon’s Island in Georgia and they forge this friendship that endures forever. But in present day, this corporation that they founded together when they were young men is in trouble and the descendants are fighting for control. There’s this big succession battle going on.
So they’ve hired two event planners, Hadley Jackson, her sister Kitsy, and they’re supposed to plan this big reunion for the descendants of these men and also trying to remake this tattered corporate image of this multinational corporation. But in the process, these two young women, Hadley and Kitsy begin to uncover secrets and including this remarkable young woman who was this some sort of connector.
Among these three men perhaps all three men were in love with her. We don’t know yet. But they begin to uncover secrets and then they begin to realize that some of these secrets could really reopen old wounds. And so we’re off in the story.
[00:03:18] Jane: Secrets are always good. Good fiction. I was just thinking, gosh, I was like gushing about the book before we got on.
I just wanted to say everyone I love the story and I’m so excited for you. I want to dig into and start with research questions because you’re I mean for research nerds and historical author nerds like I just loved your research notes at the end all your author notes. And so I want to start with the place and the sense of place you created with St.
Simon’s Island. This quote I thought was really interesting. I often start my books by following, falling in love with a place, then learning more about its history, peculiarities, and little known people or events. As a story begins to take root. In this case though, a love for St. Simon’s Island is something I was born into.
Talk about your really personal connection to St. Simon’s Island and this story and the res and some of the research that shaped it.
[00:04:15] Joy: And it really was interesting because in this case it was almost like Not quite a second home, but a place I’d been almost every summer growing up and my kids, I think, are the fifth generation, I believe.
And so it’s, we’ve just been one branch of the family actually lives there on St. Simon still. And it’s just this beautiful place. It was my father’s favorite place on earth. You could just watch his blood pressure drop, when we were there with these long armed live oats. And so I thought I knew it I knew lots about the the history of the Spanish there and the British there and the tragic history of enslavement there.
And but I didn’t know anything about the World War II Humphrey. History until they open to this brand new museum called the World War Two Homefront Museum. Big plug for it. It’s amazing. And it’s this great interactive, one of these new museums where you go in and you can try everything.
You can try on these different roles of what these different men and women would have done during World War Two. But the one thing they really hit you in the face with when, as you come in, is that During World War II, more people died on the east coast of the United States than in, by German submarines, than in Pearl Harbor, which was like, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention in high school history, but I sure don’t remember that.
So that was the first thing that kind of, caught me up short wait, what? And they even show how it would have looked and it’s like in April of 1942, there were German, a German sub lurking right there on the coast of St. Simon’s Island, just watching what was going on because they could see a dust.
They could see everything because no one was. There were no blackout rules for that part of the country. No one thought there were German subs just off the coast. So the lights were blazing. And so the the subs could, the U boats could see everything and see their targets perfectly because it was all backlit, of course, by lights.
So the story begins, the novel begins then with this. This U boat an actual U boat. I use the actual captain, Hardigan. U boat 1 2 3 is just lurking there right off the coast ready to fire and just waiting for a ship to come by. And so then we get to know a young merchant marine named William Shakespeare Dobbins, the Tennessee farm boy, and he’s one of the merchant marines.
That’s coming out as the U boat’s watching. And then our German character is one of the submariners on the boat. So
[00:06:42] Jane: that was wild that I actually have this, that note that right after, right after my note about research questions the fact that more Americans were killed.
on the east coast of the United States by German U boats than those killed in Pearl Harbor. A couple people in the comments are like I had no idea. I had no idea. And like you and I have done a lot of World War II stuff over the years, like you would think, but I didn’t. And I think that the history of St.
Simons Island is so interesting and unique to that to the home front during World War Two, to that era. Another fact that I wanted to ask you about, I knew that there were POWs imprisoned in the United States during World War Two, because there were some Italian POWs, several thousand imprisoned on the Boston Harbor Islands.
Yeah, during World War Two, but I did not know that over 400, 000 German POWs were imprisoned over here, including on St. Simons. Is that correct?
[00:07:45] Joy: And not right on St. Simon’s, but they served meals, oddly enough, yeah, in the surrounding
[00:07:51] Jane: areas.
[00:07:52] Joy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was best. I could tell they were actually, they slept in a camp nearby.
But but yeah, they served meals to the the allied officers in the radar training school, if you can imagine. Which is just
[00:08:04] Jane: what wild. Yeah. Yeah. That was shocking. And I didn’t realize like 400,000 is not is a significant number. I didn’t know it was that many over here.
I,
[00:08:13] Joy: I didn’t either. And that, as you say, there were Italians and Japanese too, but the majority were German POWs and the and they were mostly doing farm labor, that kind of thing. But some were doing other sorts of things like this. And the the officers who were the Nazis, were the Nazi officers were not forced to work.
They the, but the enlisted men, some of whom, of course, would have been drafted into service. So some of them wouldn’t have been committed Nazis. They were, They were just folks drafted into Hitler’s Navy or Air Force or Army. But anyway, they, but the enlisted men did work, they were paid for their work, but that whole thing was just this, again, somehow I missed those days in history class or, past me.
[00:08:57] Jane: Completely wild. Another asset, one of the main characters in the World War II timeline is Joanie. And I love that you pulled in, she’s she flies planes and she becomes a WASP, a woman, make sure I get this right, Women Air Force Service Pilot. I always, I’m always afraid I’m going to screw that up.
So this is like another, The Wasps, that whole program is another lesser known story of women in history that I’m really glad that you wrote about. So talk a little bit about Joanie’s story and that history.
[00:09:28] Joy: I was fascinated to Jane because I I think most of us knew the wax and the waves and the wasp and, but I just when I was searching for you probably do this and when you think to about what if you’re using fictional characters, where are the you.
the bumpers of how far you can go in making things up and what’s realistic that this person did this. And so it’s a lot of times it’s best to base your fictional characters on real, on actual people to make sure this, could this have actually occurred? Could this person actually have done this?
And so I used a lot of women whose stories I read about to, to base Joanie on. And they were just amazing, a time when. When lots of women didn’t even drive, didn’t have driver’s licenses for cars, and these women were and some of them in the very beginning of the the WASP program, some of them were wealthy women who had learned to fly for the fun of it or because they loved it.
But some of that, many of them just came to one of them, her dad was a crop duster and, just lots and lots of different stories or they just always wanted to learn to fly. So as the program went on, they could come with no experience and be trained. But it just blows my mind.
I sat in, I went out to Sweetwater, Texas, where the I bet nobody else on this program has been to the Wasp Museum in lovely Sweetwater, Texas. But it was fascinating, of course, like anything like that. Everybody there is just so passionate about this and they have these great stories and the woman I talked with the archivist there her I think it was her mother was a wasp and anyway it was just or a mechanic that’s a mechanic with the wasp and anyway she but one thing you can do is sit in the cockpit of one of the flight planes that these women flew.
They flew every plane that was that like 72 different planes or something. Anyway, essentially any plane that was in service during World War II, they flew ferried and did all kinds of things. They flew live targets, like people were shooting, like brand new recruits were shooting at live targets that they were towing behind their planes.
If you can imagine people shooting at you. Anyway, live ammunition. But they were just. They were extraordinary. There’s just story. One of them, Hazel Lee, one of the few, there were just two Asian American wasps, but she was in training and a lot of these men were not as qualified as the actual women they were training, but that was just the protocol.
Like you had to be trained by men. And so some of these women had a lot more flight hours than the men who were training them. But Hazel Lee was Was going up with her, the person who was supposed to be training her and just to show off, he did a barrel roll. Her seatbelt gives way, it’s, it malfunctions and she falls headfirst upside down out of the plane toward the ground.
And, and later that day she comes walking into camp. She had just figured out how to, pull her parachute and she comes in dragging her parachute. I
[00:12:20] Jane: read that true story in your notes. I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding me. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. Yeah.
[00:12:26] Joy: There’s just story after story about these women.
They were a kick.
[00:12:29] Jane: They were. So this is a dual timeline narrative. We’ve, you and I have talked about craft and I have more craft questions. But so it’s present day 2022 and, World War II era. How did you come up with both storylines and which came first?
[00:12:43] Joy: You and I have talked about is like, how do you decide when it should be just a straight up historical and when it should be dual timeline? And I guess, the bitter test is do you need both stories? And I just really was intrigued with the idea of. Of the past impinging on the present, which of course it always does.
We’re just not as always as aware of it. But just, family secrets and what is it about the past that is still haunting the present or changing the present or needs to change the present or just lots of. Lots of those things, what does not knowing something about the past do in terms of the rot that can take place for one thing but also sometimes the damage you’re trying to keep from happening by keeping a secret, you’re trying to keep.
Good. That’s a good thing. I didn’t think anybody cared about somebody else. Somebody else from being hurt. So anyway, I’m just was intrigued with the, with playing with that. And of course there are bear about halfway through writing a dual timeline. I truly I’m cursing myself. I hate, lie. I’m you know, it’s just, it’s just not pretty.
I, you don’t want to get anywhere near me. I don’t know if you’re that weight.
[00:13:46] Jane: Oh, I am. Yeah, ask Charlie. He’s upstairs. But so Did you write it’s like essentially weaving two books together. So did you, let’s talk a little bit about process now. Like we’ve talked about this before. I ask every, you’ve listened to the podcast.
Are you a plotter or a pantser? I think I know the answer on this one. And and especially with the dual timelines how’d you do it? I’m really curious.
[00:14:11] Joy: I’m always so curious too. So I, that’s one thing I love when you ask these questions, I love to listen to other authors talk about it. I wish I could be a total pantser because I would love to just write and see where it goes and whatever, but I find, especially with dual timelines you can’t have something funny happening in one timeline and then the next one, there’s death and destruction and, there’s Tommy Kaze plane coming at you, so there has to be like an emotional weave as well as just time and place, and you don’t want to be jerking your reader all over the place.
It’s when most of the novel takes place, as both storylines in St. Simon’s, but there’s a little bit. On the northern coast of France and a little bit in the South Pacific. And so there again just, as it’s tricky you don’t want your readers head just spinning and have them lose track of places and characters and whatever.
So it’s always a dance and. It’s really helpful to have fabulous editors or early readers or to tell you the truth about, I’m confused or I lost interest or, whatever truth they need
[00:15:14] Jane: to
[00:15:14] Joy: tell
[00:15:14] Jane: you. Yeah, absolutely. On that note, too, in terms of process, how You, there’s like a great cast of characters in both timelines and I want to know what’s your character development process like?
Like, how did you come up with these two sisters in the present day? How’d Joanie, it sounds like she was a composite of all the different stories of the different wasps you read about but then she also has a brother who, Sam, who has a lovely story as well. So how, like, how do you develop characters and does plot come first or character come first or a little bit of both?
[00:15:47] Joy: I think, I think a little bit of both. I made that with my very second novel, first one I started writing, but the second one to be published was a Tangled Mercy, and it’s a dual time one. And I made the mistake there of just researching the heck out of it. For years and years and years, and I would keep re, it would get, All must be acquired, and then not, and all must be acquired, and so I would just go do more research to, drown my sorrows in more research.
And then, then it’s hard to have really be honest with yourself about which parts of the story are riveting and which are really a big yawn, because you’ve done all this darn research, you don’t want to cut those parts out, and
[00:16:23] Jane: Yes.
[00:16:23] Joy: So I’m learning as I go to try to do that dance back and forth of doing enough research that I start grabbing on to, wow, that would be an interesting character.
I was interviewing a woman named Mimi. I have a cousin, Mimi, who was instrumental to this. She lives down there in Brunswick, Georgia, near St. Simon’s. She was great. And then a woman named Mimi who works for the Coastal Georgia Historical Society was great. And when I interviewed her, she just randomly mentioned that she had been intrigued reading some letters from a guy who was in the radar training school there and actually had become an instructor and he was writing home saying this is heartbreaking because I feel like I, I’m training the people who go out and risk their lives and are going to be killed or, just.
Facing grave danger and they have so much pressure on them, 2000 men on an aircraft carrier, they’re responsible to make sure, these men aren’t killed and I’m sitting here in this posh resort and in safety. And I want to sign up to go I don’t want to teach anymore and just that kind of, and yet, he was such a good instructor, he ended up saving.
Many thousands of lives by training the people so well to go out, but that tension, I was so intrigued by that, just the ethics of that, of his soul just hurting knowing that he wasn’t being shot at. And he felt guilty about that every single day. And anyway, so that kind of thing, that’s where one of the characters, Joe Silverberg came from and that sort of thing where you know, I, As you do research, as as you do research, you think, Oh, that’s, anywhere there’s tension, Oh, that’s, I bet that would have been hard.
That sounds intriguing.
[00:18:04] Jane: Yeah. Anything you can weave in like that. That’s great. You have a cover? Do you have a copy? Cause I read it. I had the Kindle neck galley version. Can you hold up a cover for everybody? Yes. Love the cover. So pretty
[00:18:15] Joy: and like even has a should I do this?
I haven’t done this for anyone. It has a lovely inside the cover.
[00:18:21] Jane: Oh, cool. Yeah. So did you how is the cover? I know like we’re with the same publishers. How is the process? And was this like the first one they came up with? Or was this like a multiple rounds?
[00:18:32] Joy: Oh, great question. Yeah. It was multiple.
I think it was three rounds and they you’ll see there are silhouettes of airplanes. There’s one there. And if you can see, there’s a one here airplane. There we go. Even the airplanes were when there used to be a person. Up here at the top of the lighthouse, but the editor that several of us share Danielle said that person looks to me like she’s about to jump.
Let’s take her out. We don’t need readers being worried that somebody’s going to jump from the top of the lighthouse. That does not appear in the novel. So they took the woman out. So she’s not jumping anymore. The there were lots of different covers. One was One of the iterations early on was a woman.
You just seeing her from the back, of course, and that’s very popular right now. But she looks like an Amelia Earhart look, she’s clearly a female aviator and you see her from behind and she’s on the wing of a plane and And we all liked that one, but we were afraid it would because she’s one of the main characters, but not the sole main character, we were afraid it would create an expectation that this was almost a biography or something.
And and then originally the planes here were biplanes. So they really looked more, even though there is a biplane that Joanie and her brother train on that’s a real plane that was fun to research. The, we were afraid that it’d be confusing to readers who would know, wait, that’s, aren’t those World War I planes?
And not, as opposed to, anyway, things like that. It’s, but it was, I was grateful they were willing to go three rounds because yeah, cause we all know sometimes it’s it. They need to move things along. Yeah. You don’t want to be the squeaky wheel always. So
[00:20:09] Jane: right, no, I love it.
And I’m always curious about process. Was it always called echoes of us? Was the story always called echoes of us? It was. It was. I have not, of my novels, my, I can’t remember what the original my title was, went down in flames and we went with something else, but this one, because of the radar, the echoes, I was trying to come up with something that that evoked that the radar, which I, again, I knew almost nothing about radar.
[00:20:34] Joy: And that was fun to learn about how it was one of the things that shifted the course of the war that. The allies so easily could have lost the war that when the novel starts in 1942, things look terrible. It really looks genuinely like it could be all over. And of course, you’ve done a ton of gorgeous World War II writing and research.
But for me, this was a stark reminder because we’re, we know how things turned out, but to try to put yourself in their shoes and realize that, They really thought this could be, Hitler could really take it all.
[00:21:09] Jane: Yeah, you forget that their perspective was completely different.
They didn’t have a crystal ball, right? Everything’s gonna be okay. I have a few more questions. And then I see that we already have some questions from the audience. If you have questions for joy, you can put them in the Q and a or in the webinar chat. So I always ask this question, too.
And I think it’s such a Like you said, you delicate dance. How do you strike a balance between fact and fiction in your storytelling? And are there any strict rules you have?
[00:21:40] Joy: Great question. I love to hear other people answer this because I’m so intrigued to mainly, as I mentioned before, the main rule I have for myself is it feasible?
Is it feasible that this could have happened? And one of my past novels. There’s one decision that I made that it’s feasible, but it was a little bit more pushing the envelope. And since then, I’ve really tried to adhere more closely to again, when you’re creating fictional characters, you could, If they can do anything right and but I know that’s something that always drives me crazy when you watch a movie like cars one versus cars to, for example, one thing about cars to that doesn’t work is the cars can suddenly like sprout wings and then they suddenly are in the water and then they say, they like there are no rules.
So there’s no tension because just when you think they’re in trouble, they just fly away and everything’s fine. And, so that’s been a good lesson to me, going back to when I had small children at home and watching these movies. But it’s a good lesson to realize, okay what are the rules of that world and what is feasible and can I find someone in history who did do this?
So that makes, even if it’s a fictional character, it makes it plausible.
[00:22:53] Jane: Yes, yeah, that’s, yeah, it’s great. I always, I think you and I are the same that way. It’s if it didn’t happen, could it have happened? Is it authentic to the time and the place? I always think about it that way, too.
Yeah, I agree. So it’s so impressive. You’ve written so many books, including children’s picture books. Like, how? And also, like, how does that process differ from writing historical fiction? I imagine we’ve talked about it a little in the past. It’s a little different, but and what do you like about that versus historical fiction?
[00:23:25] Joy: It’s so much fun. And it’s, maybe it’s like when you do a different kind of exercise and it feels like so much fun because you’re using different muscles or, or sometimes it feels really hard because you’re using different muscles. And it’s just, it’s such a different process.
For one thing, you’re working with an illustrator who has sometimes very different ideas of, What, how things should look. It’s, and you, it’s a, and that’s a dance back and forth. You don’t get to just say they’re my words, it’s no, they’re, they’re a creative person too.
And they get to interpret things and that you can suggest, I was picturing her wearing red overalls, but but unless it’s crucial to the story, they’re, they have their own vision. And that’s been, and she’s been a blast working with different illustrators. And in fact, this last one is named Jane as well, that I got to work with in Great Britain.
And, and again, you’re going across the ocean back and forth and seeing her, how she interprets then my words. It’s just a delight, honestly. But it’s, you get your, you and I know what it’s like to hear from your editor. Okay, edits are coming, and you’re going to have two weeks or you’re going to have three weeks.
And you’re like, oh, dear God, clear the schedule. You tell your husband, just, forget my name for three weeks, I’ll wear a name tag later, whatever bring in, take out and and you get the same warning from your editor writing a children’s book, it’s six to 800 words.
They’re like, okay, now clear your schedule, it’s, you got a week and it’s it’s just such a delight, it just feels not that it’s not. One thing I have learned is it’s a lot harder than it looks like anything. Really hard to get published and really hard to get it right.
And I’ve learned a lot from illustrators I’ve worked with, all of whom have been more, have been veterans and so much more experience than I have. So I’ve learned a lot about, You can’t just slap or, it’s as much a, an art as anything else. And you have to craft the words and the word choice is incredibly important and the rhythms incredibly important and all that, but it’s just so much fun compared to, the long haul of writing a novel, as
[00:25:26] Jane: yeah. Oh, so cool. That’s awesome. I know we have aspiring authors in the audience and you’ve been at this for a while now. What’s the best advice you can give them about writing and about getting published? We know those are very two, two different things, but what’s some advice you have?
[00:25:42] Joy: Not just. Never give up Winston Churchill, right? Never give up. Never give up. I used to teach at Belmont part time. I still do sometimes, but every couple of years or so teach a creative writing class. And the thing I have noticed. The whole time I’ve been doing this is that it’s not necessarily the most talented people in the class who end up getting published.
It’s the people who stick with it and the people who can take the critique. That sometimes those of us who are writers are such sensitive souls and that’s why we love to write because we see the world in every little, flicker of an eyelash and but sometimes people are so sensitive they just can’t bear critique.
They just cannot bear it. And those people are probably never going to get published. And whereas the people who just decide, all right, I’m going to listen, I’m going to learn from people who are more experienced, I’m gonna learn from my colleagues, I’m going to keep at it. I’m going to, it’s just really interesting to me to watch that some sort of combination of some raw talent, but also I think primarily just taking joy in it and deciding.
You’re going to be humble enough to learn from other people and then just not giving up because it’s, as it has its days when it’s brutal, right?
[00:26:56] Jane: We both know, I know. Drew is one of the people I commiserate with on this journey. So yeah. And thank God for writer friends. That’s the best.
Including some that are on the on the webinar tonight, which is so nice to see. Do you want to talk? I have two more questions and then I’ll take the questions from the audience that are sitting out there. Do you want to talk a little bit? I know you can’t talk too much about what you’re working on now.
[00:27:23] Joy: Yeah, just vaguely. I’m intrigued. We’ll see where this goes. But I think this one, instead of being a dual timeline, will be more present day, but really reliant on the history. So present day, but then 1969. Present day is in northern Italy around Lake Como and in a villa there from the 16th century.
And then 1969 in Palermo in Sicily. My husband’s actually from Sicily, so I’m always, and there are all these jokes in the family about Uncle Frank was a barber, but his wife always wore furs and they drove, Mercedes and whatever, because we, and, oh, and then everybody’s sitting there watching a movie one night on TV.
And then they break in for a news flash and here’s Uncle Frank being led away in handcuffs. And, these hilarious family stories, but definitely mob involvement. But it was always yuck yuck, and. And there’s a Sicilian and Calabrian and but it’s been fascinating to read about the mobs involvement.
And then there was a significant theft in 1969 that plays into this novel. And so trying to figure out what’s happened to that. And Anyway, so we’ll see where it goes, but it’s been fun so far.
[00:28:30] Jane: That’s awesome. Okay, and you’re going to have your launch party in Lake Como and we’re all invited.
We’re all going to show
[00:28:35] Joy: up. Yes, absolutely. Please come and we’ll, and if if it’s just a few of us that’s wonderful too, we’ll sit around and drink wine and eat chocolate. Oh,
[00:28:43] Jane: terrible. So and last question before I take the questions from the audience what’s the best way readers can keep in touch with you?
[00:28:51] Joy: I love it when people subscribe to my newsletter. It’s very interactive. We have a lot of giveaways and people, have suggestions about things or send pictures of and recipes or so that’s fun. And that’s on my website. That’s JoyJordanLank. com. And then I’m on social media. I have a definite love hate relationship.
There’s some people on this webinar who are fabulous. Patricia Sands, you’re one of them, about just supporting other writers and readers. And I really go in spurts. I try really hard. And then sometimes I’m just, I just don’t want it for weeks on end. I love to connect with readers there, but I just don’t ever want anybody to get their feelings hurt if they send me a message and then it’s three weeks till I reply.
Cause I’ve just shut everything down so I can write. Oh yeah.
[00:29:36] Jane: No, I understand that. Oh, and also you have excellent book club questions on the back, in the back of Echoes of Us, I should mention. And so you, do you zoom with book clubs?
[00:29:45] Joy: I love to zoom with book clubs and I go in person when I can, infants.
If it’s part of a travel thing or if it’s here in the greater Nashville area, but yeah, zoom is great. It’s some book club. People are so much fun. Yeah, I’ve been friends for years, usually, and they’re hilarious, and yeah, I love that. Thanks, Jane.
[00:30:04] Jane: Book clubs should run the world, I swear. Like some of these women have been at it together for 20, 30 years, and they’ve got it scheduled down, and they’re like, yeah.
It’s so impressive. Okay, questions from the audience. How, oh, Christina Mott. Hello, Christina. How do you come up with your character names? I love this novel. Yeah, that’s a great question.
[00:30:24] Joy: Oh, thanks for that, Christina. Different ways. I was an English major in college, so the William Shakespeare Dobbins character, obviously named after the other Will Shakespeare and then Dobbins, I was just reaching, I grew up in Tennessee, so I was trying to think of a Tennessee sounding, a rural farm boy name.
The Joni Dewberry. Originally, when I wrote the first draft of this novel, I used one of my, one of my cousins who actually grew up on St. Simon’s Island. I used her name, which is, was Joni Mayberry. And then as we got closer to publication, I thought Tony is going to be perhaps very embarrassed.
And also, if this person does something, if this character ends up doing some things that perhaps Tony would not feel comfortable with my cousin, Jody. So changed her last name, but but anyway it’s fun to, to play around with with different the, one of the characters does Silverberg. I was.
Trying to think of just a one syllable name that, and so sometimes I’ll, Google around for 1940s British male Jewish baby names, and then what they mean too. And so Dove, I think is bear. But anyway, I just, it’s just fun to play with, even if you know that most readers are never going to look up, what does this name mean?
It’s just fun if I know in my head. There’s a reason I named this person that,
[00:31:45] Jane: I know, same here. I do that too, and I’m like, people are never gonna even make the connection, but I like it. So yeah, that’s so funny.
[00:31:53] Joy: Do you ever put in little cameos with I had two very early readers. One was one’s named Betsy, and one is Suzanne, but her grandkid’s color is ZZ.
So they’re two very minor characters. That I renamed at the last minute, just to honor as a way of saying thanks to these two people. So there’s a Betsy and a Zizi just tossed in there as I think they’re both. Oh,
[00:32:12] Jane: yeah, there’s a book club, a very powerhouse book club here in Boston.
And there’s one of the organizers of it. There’s an Easter egg in there just for her. So I’m going to say much more than that. So I don’t think she’s on this call, but I just want to surprise her. I love it. This next one we’re working on. Yeah. Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. This one. Oh, more questions. What was your biggest hurdle?
This is Anissa Armstrong. Hello, Anissa. Your biggest hurdle to clear with writing this book, which is also a good question. What was the biggest hurdle? Great
[00:32:42] Joy: question. I think always my biggest hurdle Because I talked about being an English major and then I went to grad school for English lit two in 19th century English lit specifically.
And so I am from, the time I was, I don’t know, maybe 10 or 12 was reading these books where it’s very normal to just, the main character doesn’t even show up till page 30 or 40 or whatever. And I, that feel, that pacing feels. Okay, to me, I feel, I love to describe a tree for five pages if I could get away with it, but no editor on the planet would let me get away with it and which is good.
God bless editors. So I, but it’s always a struggle for me because I want, I love novels like a Louise Penny, even if it’s a. Mystery. I love the why behind what’s going on in this person’s head, and so I can totally get off on just, the backstory and what’s going on in their heads and what are they thinking and but as we know that can really slow things down.
And to me, that’s always the biggest hurdle is. Trying to make it literary enough that you’re giving that to the readers who are looking for that. But they also keep turning pages that things are happening. As my younger daughter said, she only reads like action novels and she’s something needs to happen, mom, something needs to happen.
Something does need to happen. And especially these days when we’re competing with Netflix and, Amazon prime and all the things.
[00:34:08] Jane: Yes.
[00:34:10] Joy: Things need to click along. So that’s always my struggle is not pretending I’m writing like James Patterson. I’m not, Not but also I don’t need, nobody’s going to put up with my five page treats.
They’re just not, they shouldn’t have to.
[00:34:25] Jane: But thank God for editors. Exactly. Let’s see, there’s a couple more questions here. Oh, do you ever do a pitch? Sharon? Hello, Sharon. She’s she never misses one either. Thank you for coming on. Sharon Person. Do you ever do a picture board? When you write? And how do you picture the characters?
I’ll actually share him to that point. I always ask do you have any actresses or actors that you picture, like playing Joanie or playing Kitsy or Hadley?
[00:34:51] Joy: I do. I picture them in my head. I, to this point, I haven’t done much of the tearing out pages. I will for the place. I’ll put a lot of pictures around the place to keep it in my mind.
And I always have. Pictures and a lot of my main characters look a little like Julia Roberts in my head. I don’t know why I do a lot of them have our brunettes with, really great smiles. I, in this one, I can read a Hayworth was the Joanie character was what I had in my head just very naturally gorgeous but.
But very impatient with anybody who wants to focus on her beauty because she has a job to do, she wants to fly that plane and she wants to be part of the allied effort. And so I do have, I, the Dove Silverberg character, my hair in my head looks a lot like Cary Grant and, just in my head, I, my friend Barbara Davis, a lot of folks on this call would know she does a whole notebook.
And for this next novel of mine, I’ve started trying to do that with a picture even just creating creating the cover myself, that of course won’t be the final cover, but just to remind myself what’s the vision for this book and what’s the setting and that kind of thing.
So I’m trying a little more of that on this book. There’s always more to learn, right?
[00:36:05] Jane: Always. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, Barbara Davis is awesome too. Let me see if there’s anything else that I didn’t cover. Some questions. Oh, let’s see. Paulette had one. Let me see. Echoes of Us is such a unique World War II novel.
I agree. Do you think you’ll ever write another set in the same era? Any other areas of interest that piqued your curiosity while you were researching this book? Thank you, Paulette.
[00:36:31] Joy: Paulette’s great, too. I love her books. I would love to write more. Jane, you and I have talked about this, that the market is so saturated with World War II books, and yet we all love it I know I keep reading them, and so that’s an ongoing conversation with my editor and my literary agent about currently they’re trying to say Let’s do a different time period because the marketplace is so flooded with World War Two.
But my so that’s I’m listening to their wisdom. They know more than I do. But also my husband then. is a regular course. Every time we pass in like an airport, we travel a lot. And every time in an airport bookstore we pass, the latest World War II bestseller, he’s shame World War II fiction doesn’t sell, he said.
But their point is, that when a nightingale or, these books come along that just, but those are the ones that, that break through the noise. So anyway, I, I love the challenge of an era. Of a new and different era. So far, I’ve not done the same era yet. And it is fun to relearn.
You don’t get to use a lot of your research from before but it’s fun to learn a whole different there’s always just so much. What’s the old Harry Truman quote about? The most interesting thing in the world is the history we don’t know. And there’s a lot of history I don’t know.
[00:37:49] Jane: Oh, yeah, you said that quote in your author’s notes, too.
I love that quote. That’s so good. Yeah. Joy, this was delightful. Thank you so much for coming on tonight. Thank you to everyone for coming on. We’re, Joy and I are going to catch up offline tomorrow on FaceTime. But I wanted to say before we go, we have a huge October and November October on Historical Happy Hour with Linda Leugmann, Emily Bleeker, Samantha Woodruff, Marjan Kamali, Tosca Lee.
I know I’m missing some, but all the registrations will be up on JaneHealy. com, and if you’re on my mailing list, you’ll get those regist those invitations as well. Joy, I wish you so much success. Remember, everyone pre orders are huge. The book comes out on Tuesday, so consider pre ordering. Pre ordering Echoes of Us, and and I’m so grateful to have you as a friend in this industry.
Thank you for doing this. Oh, thank you, Jane. You’re awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, have a good night, everyone. Bye. Bye.
