Interview with Kristy Kiernan, author of...

Today on Violin and Books is talented author Kristy Kiernan, whose first novel, CATCHING GENIUS, has garnered some stunning reviews. Kristy talks about inspiration, music, her working habits, finding a publisher, and her other works. At the end of the interview is a short review of CATCHING GENIUS by author/violinist Terez Rose.

Please tell us about your book, Catching Genius. What was your inspiration for this story and what prompted you to make the protagonist an amateur violinist?

Catching Genius is about sisters; Estella was diagnosed as a genius at seven, and Connie, five at the time, became a violinist in an effort to draw her father's attention back to her. Now in their forties, the sisters must come together and work things out, which is made harder by the facts that they're both hiding the reality of the current lives from each other and that Connie's youngest son, Carson, seems to have inherited some genius of his own.

Connie being a violinist was a decision made right at the beginning of my brainstorming. I have always yearned to be able to play the violin, but in many ways, the yearning itself was enough. Sort of like a crush on a movie star, I felt that the fantasy of it was likely more exciting and mysterious (for me) than the reality. I knew that even to become proficient a player must put in hours of work every day, and that sort of passion in my life was reserved for writing. I've never been good at multi-tasking when it came to creative energy, so this was a great way for me to explore that other fantasy life I occasionally indulged myself in, in the medium I chose to express myself in.

Sneaky way to live your dreams, huh?

Tell us about the writing process while working on this novel. How much time passed from the actual idea to the published book? Did you get caught up at times or did it flow evenly from start to finish?

Hahahahaha...ahhhh, sorry, it was that whole "flow evenly" bit that got me! From actual idea to published book? Five, six years maybe? But keep in mind, that an actual idea might fester for years before it becomes impossible to ignore, and that the publishing process itself (selling, editing, proofing, typesetting, production, distribution) often takes over a year. This book, from first word on the page to selling to a publishing house took two years.

And yes, I absolutely got "caught up." I got caught up in the research for months at a time, for both the math aspects as well as the music aspects. Perhaps an eighth of what I learned during that time is in the novel. Maybe a sixteenth. At one point I was sitting in bed at three in the afternoon, still in my pajamas, hair wild, surrounded by open books on Tesla, math theory, and the nature of genius, and watching "Pi" a black & white movie about numerology, Jewish mysticism, and the stock market, and I realized that I thought I might be on the verge of decoding the secret of the universe.

Yeah.

That was when I knew it was time to put the research away and finish the book!

Read the rest of this fascinating interview on my blog, Violin and Books.

Happy weekend to all!

Mayra Calvani