We caught up with the brilliant and insightful S.j. Carson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi S.J., thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

My most meaningful project is my first novel, Aveline, which will be released from The Wild Rose Press on October 9, 2024.

The book centers on thirteen-year-old Aveline Fleur. For Aveline, a child of her country’s ruling house, life is perfect. She attends a private academy, owns a horse, and lives on an enormous estate where she and her best friend Bruno run wild. But when she discovers that her family is involved in a sinister plot to brainwash people who speak out against the regime—and that Bruno and his mother are in danger—Aveline must summon the courage to save herself and her friends before it’s too late.

The novel started out as a short story in 2012. Although I developed three of the main characters—Aveline, her grandfather Alfred (the country’s leader), and her mother Allyn (the government’s propaganda minister)—I didn’t have much of a plot. I knew that I wanted the fictional country, Alterra, to be a dystopia, but I didn’t yet know what sort of evil was lurking behind its beautiful facades.

I worked on the story on and off for several years before deciding to develop it into a full-length novel in early 2019. My first draft took almost four years to write and was over 120,000 words long! It involved two of the main characters going on a journey through a dark forest, battling the bad guys, crossing national borders, and returning to their home country. As I began bringing the manuscript to my local writers’ group chapter by chapter, I discovered how to simplify the plot and strengthen the character arcs. The Sin City Writers Group here in Las Vegas was instrumental in helping me turn my book into a powerful adventure story about a young girl finding her voice and fighting to save her loved ones.

Aveline also has a special place in my heart because it is one of the first novels that I actually finished. When I was in college, I wrote a novella, then a novel that unfortunately did not turn out the way I’d hoped. I look at those as practice manuscripts. All writers have to start somewhere, right? Between 2009 and 2019, I worked on dozens of manuscripts that I never completed, either because I lost enthusiasm or encountered plot problems that I couldn’t fix despite my best efforts. Aveline was the first novel that fully captured my imagination and that I was willing to see all the way to the end, through multiple drafts. That was mainly due to its universal themes—family, friendship, and loyalty in a repressive society that mirrors our own in many ways.

S.J., before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Most of my formal training is as a poet. In college, I majored in English and went on to earn an MFA in creative writing (specifically in poetry). Shortly after graduation from my MFA program, I published a collection of poems based on my childhood and the early loss of my father. Although I adore poetry, and still write it occasionally, I discovered a passion for fiction in my mid-to-late twenties. I now consider myself primarily a novelist. My first novel, Aveline, would be classified as young-adult dystopian. My second book, currently in progress, is a sci-fi/romance novel for adults.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I always say that I write to give myself wisdom. There is an inner self, a higher voice, that I strive to bring out through my characters and their struggles.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One lesson I had to unlearn is that, to be a writer, you have to follow a particular routine. Write in the morning, write at night, write X number of words per day, and so forth. Over time, as I began to understand myself better, I realized that I cannot write on any particular schedule or with a word-count goal in mind. I can write only when I feel inspired. When inspiration strikes, I will often write for many hours a day, late into the night, producing tens of thousands of words in a short period of time. Then I might not write again for the next few months. Instead, I’ll use that time to edit or outline.

Another lesson I had to unlearn is that you must finish every story or manuscript you start. Deciding to stop writing a particular story is not failure; it doesn’t mean that you gave up. It just means that you recognized that you have limited time and are not willing to fall prey to the sunk-cost fallacy. Sometimes, even after investing months or years in a particular manuscript, it makes more sense to start fresh with another one that excites you more. I want to be fully engaged in the writing process, to take my characters on a rollicking, unpredictable journey. In the words of Donna Tartt, one of my favorite authors, “If there’s real danger for the character, there’s real danger and surprise for the reader as well.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sjcarson.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorsjcarsonofficial
• Twitter: https://x.com/SJCarsonAuthor
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@sjcarsonauthor

Image Credits

S.J. Carson
Valeria Andraka
Kristian Norris