How long have you been writing? I always wrote. Storytelling started when I was about eight or nine. I’ve been writing professionally for about 20 years.
When did you first know you could be a writer? I started out acting and dancing, then directing plays and choreographing musicals. Often I would rewrite scenes or add scenes, and when you do live theater, you know right away if something you’ve written works, because of the audience reaction. So I knew I could write. But the real thunderbolt was when I had written my first one-act play for a college class, and the professor had a graduate student cast and direct it. When my characters walked out on that stage and I saw how the audience reacted to them, I knew I WAS a writer.
What inspires you to write and why? That’s such an impossible question! I don’t think of writing as inspiration at all, it’s a constant state of being. It’s the way I process life, and the way I live life.
What genre are you most comfortable writing? Like most writers, I write what I most like to read. So that would be psychological thrillers, suspense, dark mysteries, psychological horror (not in-your-face horror!) I need suspense and thrills and psychological exploration.
What inspired you to write your first book? Pure fury. I was a screenwriter and working on a script for a production company that was having all these internal political struggles. Yes, it was a writing job, but it had turned into the day job from hell. But fury is a wonderful motivator and at the end of the day, every day, I was so pissed off at the producers I was working for that I would make myself write five minutes a day on the novel, my ghost story The Harrowing, EVERY NIGHT, just out of spite.
Okay, the trick to this is – that if you write five minutes a day, you will write more than five minutes a day, sometimes a whole hell of a lot more than five minutes a day most days. But it’s the first five minutes that are the hardest. And that often ended up happening. Sometimes I was so tired that all I could manage was a sentence, but I would sit down at my desk and write that one sentence. But some days I’d tell myself all I needed to write was a sentence, and I’d end up writing three pages. I had a book in six months. The Harrowing sold within two weeks and went on to be nominated for a Bram Stoker Award and an Anthony Award for Best First Novel.
Who or what influenced your writing once you began? Oh my God, everyone. Everything. Travel, surrealist painters, Lindy Hop, movies, books, people on planes. Literally everything.
What made you want to be a writer? It’s an odd thing, but I feel a tremendous responsibility to make these characters and worlds in my head real. It’s really obsessive. I can’t stop until it’s done. Once I have the idea I am driven to finish.
What do you consider the most challenging about writing a novel, or about writing in general? I think the amount of time you have to sit, literally sit in a chair at a desk, to make it happen. I’m a very physical person and eight hours per day in a chair is a real challenge for me. Thank God there’s the other half of writing, which is promotion, and a lot of that is on the road, meeting people, more social things. Even some dancing!
—- Book II in the Thriller Award-nominated Huntress/FBI series —-
Twenty-five years have passed since a savage killer terrorized California, massacring three ordinary families before disappearing without a trace.
The haunted child who was the only surviving victim of his rampage is now wanted by the FBI for brutal crimes of her own, and Special Agent Matthew Roarke is on an interstate manhunt for her, despite his conflicted sympathies for her history and motives.
But when his search for her unearths evidence of new family slayings, the dangerous woman Roarke seeks – and wants – may be his only hope of preventing another bloodbath.
*****
It is highly recommended that you read Book I of the series, Huntress Moon, first.
Buy Now @ Amazon
Genre – Mystery / Thriller
Rating – PG13
More details about the author
Connect with Alexandra Sokoloff on Facebook & Twitter
Website http://alexandrasokoloff.com/
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