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What can you tell us about your new release, Letters From Rachel?

The original story was based off a writing prompt for a contest, where if you won, you were granted the opportunity to write a book with an extremely popular traditionally published mystery author. I’d had someone do a quick proofread of the outline and key chapter, prior to my submission, and when they had finished the review, they’d told me, “Please, if you don’t win—you still have to write this story!” The story itself has been brewing for about 5 years and had to be put on the backburner while I finished up my other novels in The Guard Trilogy. It was just this past year that I pulled out the outline for it and began fleshing it out again, with the goal of having it ready for the holiday season.

What or who inspired you to become an author?

My path to writing novels was a complicated one, and my love of reading didn’t arrive until my late 30's, despite my mother and siblings being voracious readers. I have always loved mysteries, real, urban fantasy, paranormal, all types, but the idea of story writing had never sparked in me until I found an old journal of my mother’s along with boxes of old letters to and from my grandmother. Going through the letters and the journal had triggered the ‘what if’ question over the mysteries that I could potentially discover in them. A few story ideas had been born from there, and ‘the rest is history’ as they say.

What's on your top 5 list for the best books you've ever read?

Trying to nail down my top 5 books would be difficult, though naming my favorite series as part of the list might be a bit easier. Some books I prefer in print while others I prefer in audio—there is something endearing about being read to by a great narrator(s).
1) Jim Butcher – The Dresden Files series with 17 books currently, is probably one of the best urban fantasy series I have ever read.
2) J. R. Ward – The Black Dagger Brotherhood, another urban fantasy series, currently consists of 19 books and several offshoots, and I’m a big fan of the audio versions.
3) Karen Marie Moning – The Fever series has 11 books with the final one coming out next year. I can’t wait for that next book, but it will be very sad to see that series come to an end.
4) Anne Rice – The Vampire Chronicles, has 13 in total and a few side stories as well, and this was the first urban fantasy series I read, and it was the one that got me to eventually love reading.
5) Diane Setterfield - The Thirteenth Tale is not part of a series, but it was a book that I found myself completely engrossed in while reading and was in the audio version.

If you had an extra hour each day, how would you spend it?

This was an easy question. Reading!!! Interesting enough, I find that as a writer now, I have less and less time to devote to reading other author’s books, so I would very much enjoy a dedicated hour to just uninterrupted reading, for the sheer joy of getting lost in a book and not for any other purpose.

What's your favorite thing about writing?

I really enjoy the researching part that I do for my characters, the locations, and the facts that I like to include in my stories. I love plausible fiction stories where the characters could be real or you feel as though you might know them, and the things that happen to them occur in real places or are based on actual history or details you can look up. Using facts combined with the mystical is a fun way to write, and it’s even more enjoyable to hear readers say they feel as though the story I’m telling is real, that they ‘believe’ in the mystical parts because it feels like truth to them. I want my readers to feel as though they are there with the characters, that they might even miss them when they need to put down the book to go back to their real lives. The research I do to evoke this kind of feeling in a reader is the best part.

What is a typical day like for you?

Being an Indie author, my typical day is usually a combination of writing plus doing everything else that is involved in managing my author life. My days start at 5am during the week, 7am on weekends, there is always coffee involved, and I set certain days for writing and certain days for the rest, and all mixed in with the regular parts of my life. I prefer to be organized, so I set schedules for myself that involve doing all the marketing, social media and website maintenance, the creation of all the images used for those posts and advertisements, plus all the interactions required to maintain connections with readers and other authors. Glamorous it is not, but it seems to work for me, and being organized allows for me to make time for fun or relaxing with my hubby, and friends/family—as it was before the pandemic. Having the time to work on my writing these days I consider a luxury that I am beyond grateful for.

What scene from Letters From Rachel was your favorite to write?

The story is a murder mystery so I can’t tell you too much, but there is once scene—the turning point, or so the reader is led to believe, where one of the main characters comes face to face with a character who has been missing throughout most of the story. They don’t realize who they are until the last moment, the literal last second of the chapter. The pace and the dialog and moments within the chapter was fun to write because I knew the reader would feel the excitement and the urgency. It is not a long chapter, but it holds one of those ‘oh my god—oh my god’ moments that readers and authors love so much.

Do you have a motto, quote, or philosophy you live by?

If you get a chance to review my Bio on my website, you will read about the diversity and convoluted path I took to get to writing. One of the things I did prior to writing, was I ran a wellness business that had an emphasis on healthy living and trauma recovery. As part of the counseling I provided, there was a focus on creating happiness as opposed to chasing or trying to find happiness. Helping people find their joy. So, I guess my philosophy is more a question to you, to everyone, “How do you do joy?” Most people do not know what makes them happy, though they can easily tell you what they hate, but joy—that is much harder. Identify those things that bring you joy and focus on how to bring that into your life daily. Obviously, there is more to it, but that is one of the first steps to having a quality life.

N.L. Westaway is the author of the new book Letters From Rachel.

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By Lorhainne Eckhart

“I’m more important than you.”

How many times, especially as of late, have you felt as if someone else was more important than you, as if you just didn’t matter? Whatever the situation, have you ever noticed someone giving preferential treatment to others? It’s not a good feeling, let me tell you. Rightfully so, it creates strong emotions of anger and resentment. I’m not sure these instances have ever had such a spotlight on them as they do right now. People are actually willing to admit that bias has happened for a long time and is still happening quite blatantly in some communities.

The thing about this pandemic is that it brings out the worst and the best in people.

I remember a situation from back in the early eighties, when I was attending business school. This school was for women—because only women, not men, worked as secretaries. Anyway, in my last class before graduating, the last month was one of tedious work. My classmate was a young woman I knew well. Her father owned many businesses, had money, and was quite prominent in the business community, whereas the rest of the students were from the poorer side of town. Because of that, the owner of the business school, an older woman—yes, a woman—gave her a pass and let her miss the last month of tedious work. The owner actually stated this clearly: She didn’t have to finish because of who her father was, but we did, because we didn’t come from that kind of family.

Now, this was a really long time ago, but it shaped my perspective of how the world works, with different classes of people who have different rights and for whom different laws are enforced. I think most people are of the mind that this kind of bias isn’t okay, because it really builds and enforces an “us versus them” mentality. To be clear, the girl in question was a nice girl, but she didn’t understand that there was anything wrong with what had happened. How many times has this happened to you in the past? Even now, with the pandemic and the restrictions in place, we see those restrictions enforced for some and not for others. We’re seeing some communities come together while others are divided.

Over the past few months, the subject of transparency has come up over and over—or, more specifically, a lack of transparency. These types of issues have gone on forever. Just this past week, my family heard that someone at my daughter’s school had received a positive COVID test. We don’t know the details, because the information came to us from the news, which brought an entirely different outrage, as we should have heard from the school first. That lack of transparency had us questioning a lot of things. My daughter decided, even before the school notified everyone, that she was staying home that day, and then she promptly sent off an email to the administrator questioning the rampant rumors, some of which were pretty wild.

His response convinced her she’d made the right choice in staying home, because he simply said the school would be addressing the matter shortly. They did so in a vague letter the following day that indicated contract tracing had been completed and all those affected had been notified. The letter didn’t address any other facts of the situation. Now, no one needs to know any personal details, such as who tested positive, because that would create a witch hunt. But the reality is that a witch hunt is already happening on social media, where adults are condemning kids with nasty remarks even though it was a school staff member who works at the school and transmitted it to two students.

The problem is that questions aren’t being answered. How many people could be affected? We don’t need names, but we do need to know if the infected student and staff member travelled, if there could be any other hot spots. Who is being infected? Racial minorities, the homeless, the elderly, front line minimum wage workers, the poor? If you’re exposed and you receive that call, it means you can’t work. Depending on where you work, there’s no pay for that situation. For example, my daughter is in high school, but she also works at a restaurant. She really loves her job, and she can’t take the chance of exposing herself by going to school, then either spreading it or being put in quarantine, because the bulk of the restaurant’s customers are elderly. This would affect our entire household, including her two brothers and their jobs. She decided she can’t jeopardize her job, so the wiser choice is to stay home from school and take her classes online for now. The lack of answers and transparency from the school is creating way too much uncertainty, and she doesn’t want a community that is already outraged directing any anger towards her.

What’s happening is creating that “us versus them” mentality I mentioned earlier. While this pandemic is hard on adults, it’s worse for kids, who were never meant to be isolated. Though we want compassion and for our communities to come together, when an incident like this one incites fear because of a lack of transparency, we see either the best or the absolute worst in people.

Lorhainne Eckhart is the author of the new book And Then She Was Gone.

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