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Jennifer Vido | Jen’s Jewels Interview: DO NO HARM BY CHRISTINA MCDONALD
Author Guest / February 12, 2021

What inspired you to write DO NO HARM? I’ve spent much of my adult life watching my brother’s addiction to opioids. Watching someone you love go to war with themselves is a special level of hell. The experience profoundly changed me and my view of addiction and opioids. So I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to write a thriller set against the backdrop of the opioid epidemic. Then one day I saw a news story about a podiatrist who’d been arrested for starting an opioid ring and it got me thinking: why do people start selling drugs? Is it money, power, status? What would drive someone to do that? The only thing I believed I could ever understand, given that I’d watched my brother’s descent into addiction, was love. My children. I would do anything for them. And that was the moment I first thought of the story for Do No Harm. When Emma’s son is diagnosed with a rare cancer, how does her life change? After a troubled and lonely past in which her parents were killed in a car accident and she was raised in foster care, Emma has finally found the happiness and belonging…

Victoria Christopher Murray | Exclusive Interview: WRATH
Author Guest / January 5, 2021

Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Victoria! We are thrilled to have you here. Please tell us a little bit about yourself!   Out of all the questions I’ve been asked, this is always the hardest for me. I guess I can sum it up by saying, I’m a New York City girl who fell in love with an LA boy. And after we met in graduate school, he encouraged me to pursue my dream of writing. Sixteen years later, he finally convinced me and now thirty books into my career, this is where I am. WRATH is the latest book in your Seven Deadly Sins series. Will you set up the series for readers who may not be familiar with it?   I’m writing this series based on the seven deadly sins. So many people believe that the sins of lust, envy, greed, wrath, pride, gluttony, and sloth are biblical, but they aren’t. They are of course based on Christian principles and what I’ve done is taken each individual sin and created characters who find themselves in the middle of the sin and having to deal with the deadly consequences. WRATH is the story of Chastity Jeffries who meets a man…

Elizabeth Bear | Q&A: MACHINE
Author Guest / October 29, 2020

What are you currently reading, watching, listening to? Well, along with the rest of the world, I just rediscovered Fleetwood Mac and I’ve been listening to their live album rather a lot. On audiobook, I just finished Jeff Guinn’s THE LAST GUNFIGHT, which is a pretty clear-eyed look at The Matter of Tombstone, often referred to as “The gunfight at the OK Corral,” but really a two-year trainwreck of patronage, black market cattle operations, and opportunism. I’m reading C.L.Polk’s THE MIDNIGHT BARGAIN, which is just as enjoyable as I expect, and Carlos Hernandez’s SAL AND GABI BREAK THE UNIVERSE, a very fun romp. (I totally read kid’s books and I think every writer should. Kids don’t have patience for a lot of nonsense.) My spouse and I have been watching LOVECRAFT COUNTRY, which just finished as I write this, and catching up on SCOOBY DOO: MYSTERY INCORPORATED. I am incredibly impressed by LOVECRAFT COUNTRY in general, though I did feel the ending was rushed and missed several opportunities for character development in preference for gotcha moments. They could have used a 90 minute finale. And of course we’re watching the current season of THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF, because we live…