Jennifer Vido: What inspired your new release, HOTEL LAGUNA? Nicola Harrison: The first time I started thinking about this novel was in the height of the pandemic. We were still living on the East Coast, staying home, and everything felt so uncertain. I couldn’t travel to do physical research so I thought to myself, where do I want to travel in my mind and live in my imagination for the next year and a half or two years or however long it takes me to write this novel. I kept coming back to the idea of Laguna Beach, a place that I know very well and have a lot of fond memories. I lived there after college and both my parents are artists and have exhibited in art galleries and the festivals in Laguna. I wanted to dream up scenes and adventures and quirky characters all living their lives in this beautiful, bohemian town that is a haven for artists. Once I settled on the time period of the 1940s and learned about the women who worked on the Homefront during the war, taking on jobs previously reserved for men, building airplanes and ammunition and tanks, I started to merge…

Jen: What inspired you to write THE SHOW GIRL? Nicola: Well, the truth is I had no idea I would be writing about a Ziegfeld show girl when I started thinking about my second novel. I had written article for a travel magazine about a hotel in the Adirondacks called The Point that was originally built by William Avery Rockefeller II to use as his family’s summer compound. Today it’s a five-star resort that promises guests a taste of times gone by while “roughing it” in extreme luxury. Through my research for this article, I learned about several of these “Great Camps” along the rugged lakeshores of upstate New York all built by Guided Age magnates and I knew that there was a story hiding out in those woods that was begging to be told, I just didn’t know what that story was yet. So, on a chilly Friday afternoon my husband, my son and our two chihuahuas loaded into the car and drove the five-and-a half hours from Manhattan to Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks where we stayed at one of these “Great Camps” called White Pines Camp. The next morning we were given a tour of the 13…