What was the most challenging part of writing the book?

One challenge was I had to stop and take a long break after researching weaponry used in Iran during the late 1970s. The heaviness of the topic was too much for me.

And a bigger challenge was that this third book actually began as a screenplay! I was taking a screenplay writing class at UCLA taught by the amazing Bill Boyle in 2009. As an exercise for class, I adapted my first novel, Harem Sister, into a screenplay. The page count grew as I tried out new, more visual/visceral methods of storytelling; some of which were unique to screenplay writing.

To my initial dismay, my screenplay Meetup group requested more current-day characters, insisting that dusty ancients wouldn’t interest modern-day moviegoers. Their feedback resulted in a 120-page script being pared down to ten good pages to move forward with, after six months of writing.

To my delight, I discovered that by adding a modern story layer to my ancient tale, and reincarnating my original characters yet again, new life was breathed into my fictional family. Those “ten good pages” traveled with me from LA to San Francisco where I was determined to reverse-engineer the screenplay into a novel.

A year of writer’s block followed, from all the editing, auditing, and striving for marketability that goes with screenwriting, as well as the truncated, haiku-like style that is required to create the technical document called the screenplay. I could only write in shorthand for a while; stretching my creative wings in other new directions with paint and canvas.

Eventually, my writing muse returned, and the roadblocks that I’d perceived as hindering that part of myself disappeared. I realized I am at heart a novelist with my love for flowing, embroidered prose, and that I was at last ready to rework what was a screenplay back into the writing style I love most. The third novel was born!