Author2Author: Chelsea Cain & Susan Kandel, Conclusion

Chelsea Cain: How challenging was it to find Cece's voice in I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason and Not a Girl Detective? It's so spot-on terrific. I think you really have a knack for writing in past tense, yet making her voice sound utterly in-the-moment. How do you do that?

Susan Kandel: It's interesting how easy it's been to channel Cece. I don't know what that means. She is a Catholic from Asbury Park who competed in beauty pageants and got knocked-up at 17; I'm a JAP from Los Angeles who competed in spelling bees. Go figure. But hers is somehow the voice in my head. And luckily, it's a more entertaining voice than my real-life one. My best friend of 30+ years, when she finished my first book, looked up and said, "I had no idea whatsoever that you were funny." It's a little sad.

As for parody, well, I am so impressed with what you accomplished, that you were able to sustain it. I think you're right, it's all about tone. And despite what you may have heard from some rabid fans, I think you were very respectful, while hitting all the targets with dead-on accuracy. You inspire me to write a parody of All My Children, which is the only universe I think I know well enough to riff on.

What are your other obsessions? (Not to get too personal...) I mean, are you or were you a fan of anything else that you could see feeding into future work, if not directly in the form of another parody? I tried to work a lot of my personal obsessions into Cece's world: All My Children, being one; eating; fashion; reading; gardening--well, that last one was a bit of a problem. I made Cece a gardener in my first book, because I'd just planted my first vegetable garden. Unfortunately, by the end of that summer, I realized that I was more of a killer of plants than a nurturer, but since it'd gone in the book, I'm having to sustain it throughout the series.

Chelsea Cain: A few months ago I was looking at the books I had written (a memoir about growing up in the counter culture, the Nancy Drew parody, a humor book about how to be a hippie, and a humor book about superheroes) and I thought, gee, that's kind of totally random. Then it struck me--all my books are about my childhood. How utterly typical is that? Willa Cather had that line about how writers gather most of their material by the age of fifteen. I think I had mine pretty much nailed by age ten. As for my grown-up obsessions, I'm a sucker for any fringe social element with its own language and tedious, absolutely specific knowledge base. From skateboarders to Star Trek nerds to punk rockers. I really admire people who have big passions, especially for the stuff that might not be exactly socially acceptable.

Right now I'm trying to write a thriller. It's been interesting because I think it's the next step in my dubious, self-taught, 1-2-3 approach to fiction writing. The parody was a good start because it came with its own de facto structure that I just had to sort of fill in. A thriller has a similar sense of inevitable narrative. A bad thing happens. There's a protagonist. An antagonist. There's some peril. Maybe a big show-down. Resolution. Easy, right? Naturally I got about 100 pages in and was like, uh oh, I better take a minute and figure some of this stuff out. My advice to anyone reading this: Decide who did it before you start writing. Trust me.