Featured Interview With Rebecca Howie
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I’m a 19-year-old writer from Scotland, and I live with my family and our two dogs- a Westie and a Cavapoo.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I can’t remember how old I was when I started writing for fun, but I do remember it being after a party and getting a shiny blue notepad in the gift bag and that I had a compulsion to fill all the blank pages.
We got a computer a few years later and I was glued to it, but then I stopped writing for a while because I never thought that writing could be a career or that it was something I could do. Something got me back into writing eventually, and it was a coping mechanism for me through the hard times I didn’t realise were difficult until they were over.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favourite genre is either mystery or thriller, depending on what I’m in the mood to read. If I start trying to predict the book’s end, I’ll change it up and read some YA novels, or humour, until I get bored of those, but the cycle usually repeats itself after a few months.
I don’t think I could choose favourite authors, because I tend to choose a book based on its synopsis, its cover and its reviews, but JK Rowling and Arthur Conan Doyle would definitely be on that list because I know I can go back to their books and reread them if I can’t find anything else which catches my interest.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
The Game Begins is a YA mystery, and is about a seventeen-year-old girl who’s still struggling to come to terms with her dad’s death four years after the car crash which took him away. When her nightmares return, her friend Alex suggests she take a PI course and find answers herself, but Sam is brought a case which at first appears to be about a series of break-ins, but which quickly becomes far more sinister when Sam is threatened and one of the victims is murdered.
It was inspired by my curiosity as to whether I could write a mystery novel that kept its answers a secret until the end, and by asking myself what if things had been worse, because the last few years haven’t exactly been easy for me and I’m a pessimist, so had to consider the alternatives.
Sam herself is based loosely on me, but she changed a lot when I redrafted and edited and nitpicked and realised that the first draft was more or less a dramatised autobiography of my life. There’re still quite a lot of similarities, and I write her reactions by imagining myself in her situation, but the big difference, aside from the fact that my hair isn’t red, is that I would never go after a crime family like she did, or continue to investigate my case if they threatened me off it.
It takes all sorts.
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