A Reader's Interview with Jaime DeBlanc

Hello!

On a semi-regular basis, I talk to authors about my two favorite topics: reading and writing. You can find previous examples here and here. This week, I’m excited to share my conversation with novelist and writing coach, Jaime DeBlanc. Jaime’s debut novel, After Image, published by Thomas & Mercer, is available in bookstores and online now. She lives in East Austin, where she is a coach for fiction and memoir writers.

Here are some of the things that people are saying about After Image on Goodreads:

“immediately captivating”

“well-crafted”

“impossible to put down”

“I still can’t believe this was a debut novel. The plot, the characters, the pacing. Everything was so good!”

I can personally attest that I started reading After Image and got to page 100 before I realized that I had stayed up way past my bedtime.

I asked Jaime about reading mystery novels, true crime blogs, and what she reads while she’s writing.

1. After Image is a suspenseful mystery about a young woman who is looking for answers regarding the strange disappearance of her stepsister four years earlier. The novel has some classic genre elements--a gruff but caring detective, the young femme fatale--but you are definitely telling a story set in today's world with a more nuanced understanding of psychology and family dynamics than perhaps we would typically find in mysteries or crime fiction of the past. When you were coming up with the idea of After Image, were there any classic mystery authors that you found inspiring? Or the opposite--authors that you intentionally did not want to emulate?

I’m a huge fan of Ross MacDonald (whom Sue Grafton would later emulate) and Raymond Chandler. The plot, the pacing, the dialogue, the humor—all so good! And there’s something about that crisp, hard-bitten prose that really appeals to me.

Sometimes while writing After Image, I would get anxious that the prose was too plain and workmanlike—it certainly didn’t read like the lush, literary language of some of my friends’ writing. But then I would remember MacDonald and Chandler, and they would ground me back into what I was trying to do with After Image. I wanted the sentences to be, as James Baldwin famously said, “clean as a bone,” but also to have these flashes of lyricism that would stand out because they were more rare.

I also