Author, Jaclyn Moriarty
A Corner of White
by B4R Staff Writer
If you enjoy fantasy books, parallel universes, mystery, and love, then author Jaclyn Moriarty has book just for you, Corner of White. Her newest novel is part of a trilogy and aims to bring readers into this magnificent world both real and imagined. Jaclyn shares her ideas, hardest part to writing and more.
JM: When you first began writing, what spurred you to create your fantasies, and is it the same now?
I was about seven when I first started writing stories and there were three motivating factors: (1) I was very, very quiet so my head was full of words with nowhere to go, (2) my older sister wrote stories so I assumed this was something Moriarty girls did, like playing Murder in the Dark and baking coconut cookies; and (3) our dad never gave us pocket money, but he did start commissioning stories from us: I got $1.50 for my first novel when I was eight.
Now that I am grown-up, it’s sort of the same: (1) I do talk a lot more than I used to (I might even babble), but my head is full of stories with nowhere to go; (2) writing is something the Moriarty girls do (two of my sisters, Liane and Nicola, are also authors—the other two sisters prefer to read them), although it’s years since we played Murder in the Dark, and (3) it’s how I pay the bills.
JM: What’s been the best compliment?
I think maybe my favorite compliment from a reader was a thirteen-year-old girl who said that whenever she feels sad she hugs one of my books and feels better.
JM: What was the hardest scene that you had to write?
The first scene of the book. The idea for the Kingdom of Cello had been in my head for years—ever since that day in the café with the pictures—so when I started writing it was almost impossible for my words to match what I had in mind. I wrote about twenty first scenes before it felt right.
JM: Tell us about the Issac Newton reference in the beginning. What do you hope readers take from it especially once they read the book?
I read a lot about Isaac Newton—he did some breakthrough research on colours, and colours are an important part of the book. Madeleine develops a fascination with him—there’s something almost magical about his kind of impossible genius and she’s feeling lost and chasing magic.
Also Isaac Newton is a great character himself—he once walked all the way home from the market leading his horse behind him and was so lost in thought that he didn’t realize, until he arrived, that the horse had slipped out of its halter and run away.
JM: What other projects are you working on?
A Corner of White is the first book in the ‘Colours of Madeleine trilogy’. I’ve just finished writing book two, and I’m planning book 3 at the moment. Around the edges of that I’m writing a novel about a teenage girl who starts getting chapters from a self-improvement book sent to her anonymously, and book about a girl whose parents have been taken by pirates.
Stay tuned for a book review of A Corner of White.