Peeking at the Mystery of THE BOOK OF BLOOD AND SHADOW, with Robin Wasserman!

Having author friends is really fun, but having author friends whom you also used to work with is its own special kind of great. Robin Wasserman and I worked on the same floor together (she even had my job, before I had it) years ago in publishing, and watching her writing career unfurl has been a distinct pleasure. Robin is already the author of an intimidating number of great books (Hacking Harvard, Shattered, the Seven Deadly Sins series and more), and her newest title, The Book of Blood and Shadow (Knopf) is packed with history, mystery, science, romance . . . and of course more than a little blood.

Here’s the summary: When the night began, Nora had two best friends and an embarrassingly storybook one true love.  When it ended, she had nothing but blood on her hands and an echoing scream that stopped only when the tranquilizers pierced her veins and left her in the merciful dark.

But the next morning, it was all still true: Chris was dead.  His girlfriend Adriane, Nora’s best friend, was catatonic. And Max, Nora’s sweet, smart, soft-spoken Prince Charming, was gone. He was also—according to the police, according to her parents, according to everyone—a murderer.

Desperate to prove his innocence, Nora follows the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. It ultimately brings her to the ancient streets of Prague, where she is drawn into a dark web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all driven by a mad desire to possess something that might not even exist. For buried in a centuries-old manuscript is the secret to ultimate knowledge and communion with the divine; it is said that he who controls the Lumen Dei controls the world. Unbeknownst to her, Nora now holds the crucial key to unlocking its secrets. Her night of blood is just one piece in a puzzle that spans continents and centuries. Solving it may be the only way she can save her own life.

Robin took some time to answer the complicated questions I had about this twisty, gripping book, and, as usual, she had a ton of smart things to say. (To learn more about Robin and her books, visit www.robinwasserman.com.)

TEM:  It’s clear that an inordinate amount of research went into this book. What were some highlights for you during this process? Lowlights? Secret discoveries?

RW: At the beginning, just getting to do the research at all was a bit of a(n embarrassing) highlight.  I’m a recovering grad student and much as I never thought I’d actually miss homework, it was kind of fun at the beginning to dive back into reading about history and getting to count it as “work.” Especially since reading other people’s books turns out to be infinitely easier than filling up blank pages of my own. There were a few times when the reading list got overwhelming (it turns out there’s always more to know…especially when you’re looking to procrastinate on actually writing) and more than a few times where I found myself taking long afternoon naps with a book in my hands. (Technically working?) But in general, I really enjoyed letting the research take me where it wanted to go, finding out all about the weirdnesses of my Renaissance people (like the way Edward Kelley supposedly got his ears cut off as punishment for fraud, and the fact that everyone thought he’d turned a baby into a donkey) and the history of secret codes and ciphers.

That said, as much as I enjoyed reading about Prague, the biggest highlight of the research phase was absolutely getting to go there myself and poke around all the ancient streets and sites that my characters were going to visit.  I went on my own, and was so embarrassed by my horrible Czech pronunciation skills that I think I spoke maybe two sentences over the course of a two week trip, but it was beautiful and amazing and productive. (And I’ll admit that I still love to be able to say the sentence, “I went on a research trip to Prague.” It wasn’t nearly as glamorous and exotic as it sounds…but it does sound pretty great, right?)

TEM:  You have an enviable ability to end a chapter with the kind of sentence that both wraps up the chapter, and then propels the reader to go further. As a fellow writer, I have to ask you: where did you learn this amazing skill?

RW: It’s funny that you asked about that, because no one ever has, but it’s something I’ve always been aware of and a tiny bit ashamed by, maybe because I know exactly where it comes from. My first job out of college was editorial assistant at a publishing company, and one of my jobs there was writing cover copy, ie the snappy, hopefully intriguing summaries on the back cover of books. When done right, cover copy has to encapsulate the flavor of the book, draw the reader in, and leave them hanging on enough of a cliffhanger to force them to buy the book.

Not to brag, but I was kind of a cover copy genius.

Okay, that’s totally bragging, but maybe it’s allowed if I say it was probably the only part of my job I was good at?

I loved writing cover copy. I could have written cover copy all day long. And when I first started trying to write novels, I’m afraid kind of just writing paragraph after paragraph of cover copy—cryptic paragraphs ending with a gut-punch of a last sentence. Which is great for the back cover, but probably gets a little tiresome when you string together an entire book of them.

Eventually (I hope) I figured out the difference between writing about the story and writing the story itself, but old cover copy habits die hard and, as you say, the occasional punchy cliffhanger can come in handy when you’re trying to persuade someone to turn the page…

TEM:  There’s a lot about trust in THE BOOK OF BLOOD AND SHADOW: whom to trust, whom not to trust, what to do when your trust gets broken . . . Can you just . . . talk about trust and where it fits in either your own head and/or this book?

RW: One of the great pleasures of writing this book was that I really had no idea what it was about until I finished it. I mean, I knew what the plot was, but—not to sound like an eighth grade English teacher—I didn’t really know what the themes would be until the story filled out on the page. I didn’t know that I was telling a story about grief and faith and choice and trust until it happened, and I think sometimes that’s the only way it can work. What I did know, ahead of time, was that the book was going to focus a lot on belief, because that was so central to the plot and mystery—but it turned out, as I wrote, that the concept of belief extended itself into so many parts of the characters’ internal lives that I hadn’t imagined, especially when it came to their relationships, and their beliefs about who to trust.

The characters spend a lot of this book grappling with the question of faith and how you can decide what to believe in even when you don’t have all the information you need to decide (which, in life, is almost always the case). And even though they’re usually talking about it in terms of religion and the Lumen Dei, the fact is that every day they—and we—have to decide who we’re going to trust and what we’re going to believe when it comes to the people who are most important to us, something that I think becomes especially confusing in adolescence, when relationships can be so intense and confusing and in flux, and it sometimes feels you don’t know who anyone really is, and barely even know yourself.

Is trust possible if we can’t know anything for sure? When is trust foolish and when is it brave, and are there times when it’s both at once? What do you do when your reason and your instincts are telling you opposite things about who to trust? What do you do when you’ve been completely wrong to trust—how do you trust again? Does real strength mean surviving on your own, or finding the courage to lean on someone else? And how do you know who to lean on?

For me, these are the questions at the heart of the book (not to mention the heart of life), and it was one of those awesome, aren’t-I-an-oblivious-idiot surprises when I realized how neatly they dovetailed with the story I was trying to tell.

TEM:  There are so many twists and turns in THE BOOK OF BLOOD AND SHADOW, that it’s difficult to talk to you about it without any spoilers. Still, I’m curious about what elements you knew were going to turn out certain ways, and which ones were surprises during the writing process.

RW: I’m an obsessive pre-planner, and even though with this book I tried to keep the plotting a little looser than usual, at least in terms of the character interactions and the emotional arcs, I knew pretty much everything about the twists and turns of the mystery before I even started writing. I have a bunch of computer files for this book, and several of them are named things like “What people think is happening vs what’s REALLY happening” and “Who does what, when, and why.” I figured out the solution to the mystery ahead of time, along with what all the clues would be and how they would be found. I also made sure I knew who the various potential villains were, what motivations they had, and exactly who was secretly betraying whom at what parts of the story. I felt like I couldn’t write the deception and the intrigue until I knew exactly how people were being deceived.

I’ve talked to a lot of other writers about this, people who’ve written mysteries at least as intricate as this one, and a lot of them say they plotted their books out as they went along. I honestly can’t imagine how it. It’s like hearing someone tell me they can fly.

TEM:  You have an incredible network of writer friends. How, specifically, does a writing group like this help you? (Versus working solo in a room of teacups and heavy drapery.)

RW: When I do work solo, which happens a lot, it’s more like a room of cookies and unopened mail, but I take your point. I’ve been really lucky to stumble into a close-knit community of incredible writers, many of whom have been very generous with their time and wisdom, reading my drafts and telling me exactly how to turn a disaster into something…well, slightly less disastrous.

While it’s definitely a relief to be able to break up that solitary life of isolation by meeting up with friends at a coffee shop (and I find my best work is often done under the peer pressure of someone typing furiously on their own laptop, presumably writing something brilliant while I stare out the window), that’s like the cherry on top.  The actual sundae, chocolate sauce and all, is having a community of people who are struggling to do exactly the things that I’m struggling to do—write, write well, write without going completely crazy over the writing and all the non-writing things (sales, marketing, tweeting, selling, waiting for editors to call you back, etc etc etc). I often feel totally unworthy to be part of this group of writers who are so insanely talented, but for some reason they keep me around, and I’ve benefited a ridiculous amount from their company, their comfort, and their advice.

Which is a longwinded way of saying: Awesome friends are awesome. Everyone should have some.

TEM: THE BOOK OF BLOOD AND SHADOW feels so much, to me, like a work that could have been serialized in the old days of Victorian magazines. (The Elizabeth Weston stuff seems it could be its own entire book.) Since you’ve done great series in the past, I’m curious: Did you consider making this a series? And if not, why not? If so, why did it turn into a stand-alone book?

RW: Actually, a huge part of the appeal of this book for me was the idea of getting to write a stand-alone—tell a straightforward (if twisty-turny) mystery and wrap it up in a single book. Like you say, I’ve written a lot of series, and when I started Blood and Shadow, I’d just come off three years of writing the Cold Awakening trilogy, which was in some ways a great experience and in other ways an exhausting one. I’ve jumped around a lot, genre-wise and style-wise in my career, and that’s largely because I often get sick of whatever I’m doing and want to try something completely different. So after three years of writing a dystopian trilogy about bitchy mechanical teenagers in the future, it’s probably not surprising that I plunged into a contemporary stand-alone about nerdy teenagers plundering the mysteries of the past.

And I’ll tell you, I loved it. After dragging a story out over multiple books, it was incredibly satisfying to be able to contain everything I needed to say in a single volume…and to finish it feeling like I’d really taken the characters to the conclusion of their journey and could now start fresh on something brand new.

TEM: Eli and Max, as the boy characters/love interests of this book, are so interesting. Both of them have so much appeal, and yet both of them also have traits that make you go, “Hmm, I don’t know . . .” Can you talk a bit about developing these characters, and what you were trying to do with them?

RW: It’s always a challenge to develop interesting, believable, three-dimensional love interests, but as I discovered with this book, it’s significantly more of a challenge to do that while making sure that the other characters, and the reader, barely know anything about them.  That was probably the toughest part of both Eli and Max—giving up just enough of their character to make you feel like you knew them and cared about them, but not giving up enough to spoil the mystery.

They were difficult in different ways. In terms of his interactions and his style, Eli came pretty easily to me, as that kind of snarky, banter-iffic guy is one I’m very comfortable writing. (Raised, as I was, on the combined ouevres of John Cusack and Robert Downey Jr.) With him, the challenge was making him seem untrustworthy enough that we worry about him, while appealing enough that we don’t think Nora’s a complete moron to trust him, and making him somewhat rootable even though we know basically nothing about him.

On the other hand, we learn a lot about Max up front, and there, for me, the biggest challenge was coming up with a character that wasn’t that typical snarky guy.  I’ve written very few genuinely nice guys as love interests, and one of the things I set out to do when I started this book was find a way to write a kind of shy, nice, slightly weird  guy—ie the kind of guy you might actually meet and fall for in real life—as a compelling love interest.  My starting point with him was Christian Slater’s character in Pump Up the Volume, who I think is the most compelling shy guy ever portrayed on screen (with, as you know if you’ve seen the move, some seriously hidden and unexpected depths).

TEM: What do you most hope readers take away from reading THE BOOK OF BLOOD AND SHADOW? What do you want them to gain/learn/experience/understand?

RW: That’s such a tough question because it’s not like I went into this book hoping to preach a message to the reader. I guess I hope that they come away from the novel with some sense of the way that religion and science have always been intertwined, and the idea that there can be a continuum between knowing and believing, and that it’s always a good thing to keep asking questions about how we do both. But honestly all I want is for people to take away something from the book—to read it and (in addition to enjoying it) feel like it gave them a new perspective on life or a glimpse of some recognizable truth, something they realize they’ve known but have never put into words before. I want people to recognize something of themselves in the pages—to grab onto some kernel of the story that has some relevancy in their own lives, and for them not to be able to get those parts out of their head, even after they’ve closed the book and gone on with their lives. That may be asking a lot, but it’s my dream for all of my books.

But no matter what, I’m thrilled by the idea of anyone actually, voluntarily, sitting down and reading it in the first place. Love it or hate it.  I still find it totally unfathomable that real people are spending hours of their lives with this story that I just typed into my computer one day. (Well, a lot of days.) It seems insane to me that anyone would agree to do that, and I’m beyond grateful that they do.

TEM: Thanks a bunch, Robin! I’m grateful to you for this amazing interview, and we’re all very grateful that you keep writing!