Interview with Katharine Allen, author of Mirror

 I'm excited to welcome a very special person today to my blog! Katharine Allen is the daughter of one of my writing friends, Kathleen S. Allen. I love how she's following in her mother's footsteps and taking the plunge into writing!

1. Tell us about your novel! 

Mirror is a novella and it is essentially about a teenager named Beck and who she is. While her classmates and friends are worrying about where they are going to college next year she is trying to determine who, and what, she is. Beck is no ordinary girl. Now, I know you’ve heard that a million times, but it’s true in her case, as it may or may not have been every other time you have heard that claim. She is devoid of all innate emotion, unable to feel joy, despair, love, or grief. But she feels everything. Nothing of her own of course, but only what’s in other people’s hearts. She feels the love of her boyfriend and the hatred of her mother. Having experienced every emotion in the world she struggles to feel one of her own. The novella follows her life as she tries to find herself amid the clutter of everyone else’s emotions. 

I wrote this novella because I was intrigued to explore the personhood of someone without emotions. We don’t think about it much but how much of who we are is how we feel? Beck was the vehicle for my exploration into this question and as she struggles with this very same question I hope that an answer becomes clear.

2. What is it like to have such an awesome mom that’s also a multi-published author?

It’s great to have a mom who has written and self-published so many books! It gave me the courage to write this and other novels/novellas as well as to self-publish this one. I see how much joy she has in writing and it inspires me to seek that out in my own. 

3. What got you started writing YA?

Well, to be honest, I started writing YA because when I first started spending a significant amount of time writing I was still in high school and I made my characters my own age. Although I may move on at some point to writing all adult novels (I have an adult novel written and ready to edit…eventually) I still feel that there is something special about YA. YA is to the adult novel like espresso to a cup of coffee. Both are enjoyable but YA will give you everything faster, and in my opinion, more intensely. YA novels are full of surface (thought not necessarily shallow) emotion with stories and characters that don’t wait to let you get to know them but instead immediately demand your interest in their own private dramas. You fall in love with them within the first twenty to fifty pages or not at all. 

4. What other genres do you think you’ll write? 

As I mentioned above I have written an adult novel. I have also experimented with genres ranging from scifi to contemporary fiction. I have loved trying all of these genres. I love comedy especially but find that it can be tricky to maintain. I am most comfortable writing stream-of-consciousness character studies like Mirror.

5. What are your aspirations with writing? 

I hope to become obscenely rich and famous…just kidding. No, really, I don’t know where my writing will go in the future. All I know is that I will keep on writing and will self-publish more of my work. That’s my goal and anything else that happens, blessing or curse, is out of my hands and thus, out of the scope of my future plans.

6. Where can we buy your book?

My book can be found at Amazon.  

Thanks for visiting, Katharine! Nice to meet you!