Little Library Muse: Interview & #Giveaway: The Window by Amelia Brunskill

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Interview & #Giveaway: The Window by Amelia Brunskill

Amelia Brunskill was born in Melbourne, Australia, but she grew up mostly in Washington state where she picked a lot of blackberries, read a lot of books, and failed to properly appreciate the epic beauty of the mountains and the Pacific ocean.

She earned her bachelors degrees in psychology and art from the University of Washington and her master in information studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She now lives in Chicago, where she eats as much Thai food as possible and works as a librarian.

The Window is her debut novel.

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Tell us something fun about you?
For a little while, I had an Etsy shop where I sold ceramic animals that I’d made. Unfortunately, they were extremely heavy so I ended up having to charge almost as much for shipping as for the items themselves!

What do you feel is the most important aspect of story development for you?
Good pacing and well-developed characters are the most important aspects of story development for me. Without good pacing, mysteries just don’t work right, but, as a reader, if characters aren’t well-developed then I simply won’t care what happens to them, good or bad.

What books have most influenced your life most?
Cynthia Voigt’s Izzy, Willy-Nilly and The Runner both really stuck with me. How the main characters responded to, and processed, the events in their lives continues to influence how I try to advocate for both myself and others.

How much of your time do you spend on research?
While, as a librarian, I love helping other people conduct their research, I actually don’t really enjoy doing it on my own behalf—for some reason the second I switch from causally reading for interest to doing directed research, I get a little twitchy. So I do some research, but not a ton—I’m definitely not someone who is at any risk of spending more time researching than writing!

How much input do you have in the cover art process?
Random House has a questionnaire on cover design that it gives its authors, so I filled that out, and I also made a document with covers that I loved and notes about what I loved about them, so that they could get a sense of my aesthetic. One of the covers I loved was Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls, so I was thrilled when my editor told me that the same artist, Regina Flath, would be working on my cover. When they sent me the cover she’d made, I absolutely loved it, and it basically didn’t change from that point.

Who was the hardest character for you to write about?
I really struggled with Sarah. For a long time, she didn’t have much personality—she was just a nice, kind of bland, person that Jess became friends with. I had a lot of false starts before I found my groove with her, but now she is one of my favorites characters.

What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
I really enjoy watching movie trailers. I can watch ones that I like a ridiculous number of times, and I love how good ones can tell a story while at the same time not giving too much away.

I also like going on long walks through the park—I feel like fresh air and trees are good for my brain.

Favorite quote?
I have a million favorites, and here is one of them:

A book is a dream you hold in your hands. —Neil Gaiman

Synopsis:
Anna is everything her identical twin is not. Outgoing and athletic, she is the oppo-site of quiet introvert Jess. The same on the outside, yet so completely different in-side--it's hard to believe the girls are sisters, let alone twins. But they are. And they tell each other everything.

Or so Jess thought.

After Anna falls to her death while sneaking out her bedroom window, Jess's life begins to unravel. Everyone says it was an accident, but to Jess, that doesn't add up. Where was Anna going? Who was she meeting? And how long had Anna been lying to her?

Jess is compelled to learn everything she can about the sister she thought she knew. At first it's a way to stay busy and find closure . . . but Jess soon discovers that her twin kept a lot of secrets. And as she digs deeper, she learns that the an-swers she's looking for may be truths that no one wants her to uncover.

Because Anna wasn't the only one with secrets.