• The Story Behind the Book

    August Falling: The Story and the Characters

    Going into the novelization of “House of Cards”, I again went into planning stage. I thought the story would rotate between several groups of people: August and Julie August’s sister and her partner August’s workmates Julie’s school crowd Julie’s workmates the nursing home where Julie’s aunt lives the café where August hung out during lunch breaks. Lots of these groups involved blocks of characters, e.g. the workplaces, and Julie’s school. Most of them would be supporting or peripheral, but I wanted (and needed) them to all exist. I drew up eighty characters, assigning them different roles. In the book, I used only about twenty of them. The story never went…

  • The Story Behind the Book

    August Falling: The Inception

    While I was doing the Hachette Manuscript Development Program, then-Hachette publisher Bernadette Foley asked me to think about where my book fit in the market. As research to that question, I asked some of the other participants if they’d read similar books to my own. The wonderful Kim Lock made a number of suggestions, including one popular novel. I bought a swath of books with the intent of seeing how they related to Just Another Week in Suburbia. That was the summer I house-sat my friend’s house to dog-sit their dog, Jet, so I could work on the revision of Just Another Week in Suburbia. While I was off from…