Featured Interview With Angie Gallion
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised on the rhythm of night trains rolling through a small farm town in Illinois. My husband and I live south of Atlanta with our daughters. We have two dogs, Ruger, the Great Great Dane, and a Toy Fox Terrier, Bailey. The girls have two Dwarf Lion Head bunnies, Olive and Jo-Jo Fry.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
When I was in the third grade I had a teacher who asked us to turn our spelling words into a narrative. I did and she asked me to read it in front of the class. She was the first person to ever tell me I was a writer and it was maybe the first time I ever stood out for anything, so it made a big impression. I have thought of myself as a writer ever since. Teachers make an eneormous impact on the children they teach.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
It’s a shorter list to tell you what I don’t like to read. I don’t zombies, I don’t like vampires, I don’t like anything that is graphically violent or explicitly sexual. Everything else is fair game, and if it comes from a small press or is indie published it may make an appearance on my review site, Gallion Picks at www.angiegallion.com.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
I’ve just released the third book, Icara, in the Alison Hayes Journey. I wrote the first book in this series in a college creative writing class and spent the next twenty-five years editing it. It transformed over the years and when I finally decided it was ready I reached out for recommendations for a good editor and negotiated with her to work with me. I chose to self-publish because it gave me so much control, I was in charge of my covers and when I released my books. I also chose to self publish because I didn’t want to wait for a hundred “no”‘s to get to one “yes.” I gave myself a “yes.” The second book was inspired by the responses I was hearing from readers, and I relaized that like them, I wanted to know where Alison went from there. I wrote Purgus in 30 days, and it was an incredible, cathartic experience. I started work on Icara in February and after exceelent work with my editor, it was ready to joins it’s mates in June.
The overriding questions that walk through the series are: Who do you become when everyone around you has made all the wrong decisions? This is the question that Alison Hayes is asking herself through this first book, Intoxic, (released August, 2016). How do you become a person of quality? How do you stop being a have-not and become a have? How do you know what is right? We walk with Alison through her fifteenth year, a year that begins with her mother loosing yet another job, and the eminent loss of yet another live in father figure. The downward spiral escalates from there.
The second novel, Purgus, (released December 2016), steps right on the heels of Intoxic and Alison is released into the world to fend for herself. Her first year as an “adult” is confounded by missteps, by trying to make the right choice, but not fully understanding what that means. By the end of this book she has suffered heartbreak and has made a very mature choice pertaining to an unintended pregnancy. We walk with her through her heartache, through the small triumphs of the year, the beginning of her understanding that choices that will lead to a better life.
The third novel, Icara, (released June 2017), picks up a few days after the end of Purgus, and Alison is set to flee or fly, following a friend to California in hopes of building a better life. She is drawn into the a “big life” of a budding modeling career, and for a time she thinks she can trully escape the taint from her past. Ultimately, Alison’s past catches up to her and the broken shards of her soul spring forth. She finds a safe place to heal and grow and at the end of the novel there is hope, that Alison has finally come to terms with her life, and has matured to the point that she understands she must reckon with her past.
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