Was there anything from your own life that worked its way into INK AND BONE? Some part of yourself that slipped into the character or plot? I find that the interests and passions we’ve developed during our lives can both inform and inspire our novel writing. I’m already a violinist (strictly amateur) with a lifelong love of music, and that knowledge helped inform the musical aspects of the story. That’s when both parts of the novel came to me - a story about a 1930s Jewish composer whose haunting melody will nearly destroy the life of a woman violinist 70 years later. There I saw memorial plaques dedicated to the Venice Jews who were deported to death camps during WWII. That day I wandered around Venice and ended up in the old Jewish quarter.
Something about the power of music to haunt and to transform people. I woke up wondering what it meant - and knowing there was a story here. A baby was sitting nearby, and as I played a dark and disturbing melody, the baby’s eyes suddenly glowed red and she turned into a monster. Tess Gerritsen: It was a nightmare! I was in Venice for my birthday, and after a night drinking a bit too much wine, I had a freaky dream. Was it a character, or a story, or curiosity about something else that led you there? So I was struck while reading PLAYING WITH FIRE that you, too, had walked into some of the same territory. Which is, of course, the joy and the magic of writing. Eloise’s story has told itself in a way that I wouldn’t have expected, and it has led me down some roads I didn’t imagine I’d go as a writer. She’s had a couple of books since then, three short stories, and in my upcoming INK AND BONE we meet her granddaughter Finley, who has powers of her own. My characters have minds of their own, so I was disappointed when she only had a small part to play in that book. I thought: Oh! A psychic! Even if she’s a fraud, that’s still interesting.
Lisa Unger: A couple of years ago, when I was writing FRAGILE, I ran into a character I wasn’t expecting, psychic Eloise Montgomery. Tess Gerritsen and Lisa Unger at the 2014 Key West Literary Seminar
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