Author interview – Holli Castillo

Last week I reviewed her book and Holli Castillo was kind enough to answer a few questions for me. Here she goes:

B: Where do you live and write from? Tell us a little about yourself.

Holli Castillo

HC: I live in New Orleans, Louisiana, which is where I do most of my writing. I also have an evacuation house in the hills of north Alabama, and I also write from there.

For my “day job,” I am a Louisiana appellate public defender, and before that was a New Orleans prosecutor. I am happily married with two daughters, a dog, and a deaf cat.

In 2008 I was in head on collision with a drunk driver and immobile for six months. I lost two inches of thigh bone and broke both of my ankle bones, as well as shattered my elbow and fractured some lower lumbar vertebrate. I ended up able to walk again after about six months, several surgeries and a lot of titanium hardware in my body. The wreck put off the release of Gumbo Justice, which I had just signed the contract for with Oak Tree Press. Almost a year to the day from the accident, the book was published.

B: Ouch… When did you first become interested in becoming a writer? What was the deciding moment for you?

HC: I’ve always enjoyed writing and knew in the back of my mind I wanted to be a writer, but didn’t pursue it seriously until I had my first child and quit my job as a prosecutor. That was when I started writing Gumbo Justice.

B: Where do you find your inspiration?  Do you put yourself in your stories? (I sometimes do… ;-p)

HC: I write a lot about the types of cases I handled as a prosecutor and the cases I hear on the news. I don’t know if that’s inspiration, but it definitely motivates me to write. Crime fascinates me. I really don’t put myself in my stories, but I do put a few elements of myself into some of my characters.

B: What do you love most (and then least) about what you do?

HC: What I love most about writing is sharing my stories with other people. Hopefully I pull them out of their own lives for a little while, which is the same reason I love to read. What I like least is not having as much time as I would like to write. The real world intrudes so much on writing, it’s not always easy to make the goals I set for myself each day.

B: When and where do you write? Do you have a specific routine?

HC: I try to write every day, more of a page count than anything else. I either write in my study or in my living room, always on my laptop although I take notes longhand on yellow legal pads. I don’t really have a routine, because I am really not a routine kind of person and I tend to do my best work in the middle of the night, 2 a.m. and on. My favorite time of the day is around 5 a.m., right before the sun comes up and it seems like I have the entire world to myself.

B: Do you have any other project on the pipeline? I know there will be more of Ryan, can you tell us more?

HC: Right now I am finishing up the second in the Crescent City Mystery Series, Jambalaya Justice, which answers the questions left open by Gumbo Justice. In this next novel, Ryan is of course insinuating herself into another murder investigation, while Shep is doing an investigation of his own that involves Ryan. Lots of surprises in store for both characters and hopefully for the audience. In the end it’s another whodunnit, but there’s a lot more going on than just a murder. It is New Orleans, after all. A single murder barely qualifies as news. It should be released as soon as I can get it finished.

B: Yay, more on my favorite characters to come!  Did you query agents/publishers before publishing? If yes, for how long?

HC: I queried mostly agents for about a year. I received mostly form rejections, but a few agents actually gave me some advice. I think I received about 40 form rejections and ten with comments on them. At the time I didn’t realize comments were a good thing, because at least somebody read my letter and offered a way to improve my novel.

But I am nothing if not tenacious and so I took an online course for novel writers and found out what was wrong with the original version, mainly it was waaay too long, something like 140,000 words, so I cut out scenes and changed a few things and ultimately it turned out better. I then started querying again, some agents and some publishers, and had a publisher interested. Then Katrina hit and we evacuated and worked on getting our lives back in order for a while and I didn’t pursue the publishing angle. I heard back from the publisher who decided she couldn’t take on any new clients. I was contemplating my next step when I got an email from Billie Johnson at Oak Tree Press, saying she was interested if my novel was still available, and here we are.

B: What was your overall experience with publishing so far?

HC: I love my publisher and am so glad it worked out that an independent press was interested in my novel. If I had been picked up by a big house, chances are my book would have been out of print after three months. Obviously, it’s not a best seller (or more people would know who I am), but with the print on demand used by the indie publishers books can be printed as long as someone is buying them. I think my book is selling as well now as it did when it first released, over a year ago, which wouldn’t have happened if I was with a big house. Also, Oak Tree is like family to me now, not just the owner Billie but the other writers as well. It’s nice to have support from people in your own field.

B: Sounds like heaven… I should check that publisher! Anything else you’d like to say?

HC: I started writing Gumbo Justice in 2000, and took about eight years to write it, rewrite, edit, query, get a contract, and then finally see it in print, after getting 50+ rejections. I worked a day job, had two little girls, and almost died in a car wreck before getting published. My advice to anyone who wants to be a writer is to not let anything stop you from being one.

Thanks so much for having me!

Well thank YOU for allowing me to discover a very interesting author in a genre that I usually don’t read, but I’ve learned writers should read widely and all genres, so I’ll be happy to add you for the thriller/mystery section of my readers!

Posted by Barb on August 20, 2010

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