Camille Di Maio – Dual Time Mysteries

Camille Di Maio found inspiration for her first best selling historical fiction in a Beatles song – and then had the good fortune to meet the song’s composer and tell him about it! Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Camille talks about how history found her – rather than the other way round – and her latest book, based around the Marilyn Monroe classic Some Like It Hot and with another the ghost in story – the ghost in the Hotel Coronado! Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: Her fascination with the 1950’s How Marilyn Monroe features in her new book Why she’s set her next book in Rome Balancing writing and family life with four children The surprising number of books she’s read in 2018 Who she’s binge reading now Where to find Camille Di Maio:  Website:https://camilledimaio.com/ Facebook: @camilledimaio.author/  Twitter:http://@CamilleDiMaio Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/camilledimaio__author/ What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word forword but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. Jenny: But now, here’s Camille . . Hello there Camille and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us. Camille Di Maio – author Jenny: Beginning at the beginning – was there a “Once Upon a Time” moment when you decided you wanted to write fiction??  And if so what was the catalyst for it? Camille: In grade school, I spent a lot of recesses in the school library. I read through a lot of the Nancy Drews, and the Trixie Beldens. I was just captivated by getting into these stories and interested in who the authors were. This was way before the internet and social media, so the authors were especially mysterious people. They were just names on these books, so that really intrigued me. I had the idea of wanting to be like them some day. Jenny: Yes, that sounds great. You mention spending time in the library at play time – I know you’ve talked a little about how you naturally are an introvert, but you’ve done a lot of very extroverted things – we’ll get onto that. Being a Real Estate Agent for one is not something you’d think an introvert would take kindly to. But you’ve obviously managed to straddle the personality spectrum.  Camille: Definitely. I like to think I’m the person who steps up to do what they need to do. The introvert side of me definitely recharges from coming home and being quiet and reading especially. I’m a very avid reader; I think I’m up to 105 books for 2018, so that is really where I get my energy back and then I’m ready to go and do whatever I need to do.  Jenny: Fantastic. You’ve chosen historical fiction as your genre – what attracted you to it?  Camille: When I look back on a lot of my reading, especially in my young adult life, I was really interested in historical fiction without really even realising that it was a genre. It just seems to be what I look back and find what I was reading. Historical fiction really found me as a writer, because the particular story idea I had for my debut book The Memory of Us, had to take place in a historical period, and that’s the story I wanted to tell. So it more sprang from that.  The Memory of Us – Camille’s first. Once I wrote that book, I found that I enjoyed the research process so much, especially the historical research that every new book idea that came to me just happened to be historical in nature. So here I am. I’m working on book five that way right now.  Jenny: Your books focus on recent history – the 40s and 50s.  Is there something about that era that especially interests you? Camille:Yes, I like that that era is not so very different from where we are now. I mean they had automobiles, they had telephones- not as regularly as we do now, but it’s not a completely foreign concept. I live in an area in Virginia that goes back to the 1600’s and people always ask me if I’m interested in writing about that era, but it’s so vastly different. I still feel like the 1940’s and 50’s is something that is still very relatable, while being just different enough to be interesting. Jenny:Your first book The Memory of Us was chosen as a Summer Book Pick by a number of magazine including Redbook and was compared to Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds. It had a very interesting beginning – Tell us about the story. . . Eleanor Rigby – inspiration Camille: Sure. I really knew I was in the mood to write. I was just at a point where I was ready to write in my life, but I didn’t have a story yet. I have four children, and I was driving around in my mini van listening to my iPod in shuffle. One of the songs that came through was Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles. It was always one of my favourite songs; my dad and I are big Beatles buddies. The song always struck me though in a really different way at this particular time. I thought of these characters Father Mackenzie and Eleanor Rigby. All we know about them in the song is lonely old people, but we don’t actually know their story. So this concept hit me of “who are these characters, what if they had a history, and what if they had a history together?” That just wouldn’t leave my mind. So I looked at when that song was released, which was in the mid 1960’s, and I counted back to the era they might have been young adults in, and might have had a history. That put me in the end of the 1930’s into the 1940’s. And that’s how historical fiction found me. The story really had to be set in that time period, and so that’s the story I wrote; who was Father Mackenzie and who was Eleanor Rigby? ‘All the lonely people . . . where do they all come from?’ Fast forward to several years later when I actually had a publishing contract – they ended up wanting me to change the names. So now if you read it, you’ll just understand from my words that it’s inspired by those characters, but they do have different names. There are a lot of things I researched in there about what they would have been – it’s set in Liverpool, London and places the young Beatles would have been in and touched by. So that was the initial spark for it, and the path it took me on. Jenny:And you mention in your author biography that one of the thrills of your life was getting the chance to then meet Paul McCartney – how did that come about? Camille: It was such a neat surprise. I lived in San Antonio, Texas at the time. They had a brand new music venue – it was a fairly small venue, seating 1700 people – and their inaugural event was to bring Paul McCartney out. So he came between other tour dates to places where he’s playing at 50,000 seat arenas. He came to this small venue in San Antonio, Texas. I found out about it, and someone who I knew that knew I was a big fan bought tickets for myself and for my parents who were also big fans. So I bought this sign. It was still a manuscript at this time – I didn’t have a publisher or an agent or anything- but I bought a sign to this concert, and he played the song Eleanor Rigby. That was really special to me, because as I found out later; that had never been in his set list before, so it just felt meant to be. I held up this sign that said “I wrote a book about Eleanor Rigby” and he saw the sign after the song, and he called me to the stage and let me give him a copy of the manuscript, which was already amazing enough. But then he started reading it to the audience! If it weren’t on video from other people sending me videos, I would have almost believed it didn’t happen. It was a pretty neat moment in my life – Paul McCartney reading my book in public. Jenny: Amazing! I saw him here in Auckland, and he is remarkably personable on stage isn’t he? He’s very natural. Camille: He is. He’s so kind, and it was just a wonderful event. I’ve heard that from so many people who have either seen him or encountered him, and I certainly get the impression he is a very kind man. Jenny:How do you go about doing your research – did you actually go to Liverpool working on the book The Memory of Us? Camille: At that time, no. My first trip to Liverpool and London was actually two weeks before the book was released. So all of the research that I did was internet based research – Google maps, and walking the streets. I was a little bit terrified to go on that trip because I thought – what if I got something horrifically wrong? It comes out in 2 weeks, and it’s too late to change anything. But to my amazing relief, it felt s familiar to me. When I got to Liverpool especially, I had been pouring over documents of this city for four or five years. It felt like I had been there before. Beatles statue on Liverpool waterfront, donated by the Cavern Club I had walked those Google Maps streets so many times, it was completely familiar and I didn’t find anything that needed to be changed which was great. I got to go and visit some places that my characters would have been at. It was an absolutely surreal feel. It’s a lovely town, I absolutely love that part of Liverpool. Jenny: Then your second book – Before the Rain Falls – you have a ninety-year-old protagonist who has been in prison for seventy years – a very challenging central character to bring to life . . and a departure from your first book. She is a newly married woman driven to murder her only sibling . . .  I feel sure there must be a story behind this one too . . . It’s such a challenging storyline . . How did you come upon that story? Camille’s second book Before the Rain Falls Camille: It’s quite funny, right after The Memory of Us came out, my agent said “so, what do you have next?” It kind of took me by surprise because I had been so focused on writing just a book some day. I hadn’t given significant thought to what comes next, and what other stories do I have in me? As I realized that, there was another story that was sitting in my head. I was just flipping channels one night watching TV, and I stumbled upon a documentary and it was about science trying to disprove miracles. On this show, some of them they could and some of them they couldn’t. But watching this show, it kind of got my mind spinning. I had this thought in my head about a portrait that as crying, and suddenly the writer brain goes “why is it crying, who’s in the portrait?” And I started answering all of my own questions. It began to ravel into this story about this portrait in a small Texas border town that is supposedly crying, and all of the people involved who have some contact with it and what it mans to them. It did grow into this story about this 90-yearold woman who had allegedly killed her sister- her sister being the one in the portrait crying and finding out what the truth of all that was. So very different from the memory of us! I was so pleased and surprised when my publisher picked it up, because there is kind of a desire in the publishing world to do some things that are fairly cookie cutter. They gave me a lot of room to do something very different and creative, and I was really excited about that. Weeping Jesus in Robestown, Texas Jenny: Yes, they tend to anticipate readers who like your first book will be looking for something similar in the second book, and will pick it up. It was quite a brave move on your part. That one works on a dual timeline as well, doesn’t it? I mean it switches back and forth between her experience when she was a younger woman, and contemporary life when she gets out of jail. I gather that your latest book – The Beautiful Stranger- works on that dual timeline as well. Camille: Yes, I really like that juxtaposition between something more contemporary and more historic, because I really believe we have something more in common than we don’t. I like to explore how some of the similar themes can affect someone in one decade and another decade, but their circumstances in the history surrounding them and the time period surrounding them might affect things differently. But they’re still facing fundamental human challenges, human lives and human desires in the same way. So that fascinates me a lot. Jenny: You move to Hollywood and the filming of Some Like It Hot for the setting of that book, The Beautiful Strangers – that must have been huge fun to research . . . Marilyn Monroe outside the Hotel Del Coronado, the setting for Some Like It Hot Camille: That one really was. I have to give huge credit to my husband for the idea to set it there. We were in San Diego – we’ve been there many times, but we were most recently there for the Romance Writers of America Convention. We went over to Coronado as we’ve enjoyed doing in the past, but this was the first time I ever went as a writer. He said to me “you should write the story about this hotel. It just has so much history.” I knew about Marilyn Monroe and Some Like It Hot. But as we researched, I think it was my husband initially who found this story out. There was a woman who died on the steps in the late 1800’s, and it was never fully revealed if she had fully committed suicide or had been murdered. She had a pretty interesting story, and she was said to be the ghost that haunts the hotel. So I had this story of an alleged ghost in the late 1800’s, and I had the story of Marilyn Monroe in 1958. I thought what on earth can I do to connect these stories around this iconic place? So I created a fictional character who becomes a link between the two, and wrote the story out that way. But it was great fun to research, and it’s the most upbeat out of all my books. It was just really fun, taking place on a movie set. I really just had thorough fun writing it, and I really hope readers will enjoy it. Jenny: Is it out already? I was a bit confused about that, because some pages say it is due out next year, yet there are already a lot of online reviews for it. Camille: That one comes out on March 5th, and the early reviews that everyone is seeing are just early readers. The publisher has sent out some early copies for the purpose of drumming up excitement. But it does come out March 5th. In the middle of those, my most current release is The Way of Beauty which came out this last May, and is set in New York City. I guess I like these diverse geographic locations, the memory of us being London and Liverpool, Before the Rain Falls is Texas, The Way of Beauty is New York, and The Beautiful Stranger is California. The Beautiful Strangers – out March 2019 Jenny: Just flicking to your personal biography – I gather you’ve moved around a lot yourself in your life, so obviously a little bit of geographic spread is something you’re very comfortable with. Camille: It is. I’ve lived in all parts of the country of the United States, and I’ve travelled to majority of the States now and to four continents. I absolutely love travel and those experiences feed the idea of description and history for me. That’s a natural love for a writer I think, so I try to bring that to the stories. I’m just doing beginning research right now for something I’d like to set in Rome. So I’m excited about that. Jenny: Just harking back to the Hotel Del Coronado again- did you actually get to stay in it, and did you ever talk to anyone or find anyone who had claimed to have seen the ghost? Camille: I’ve been there many times, but I’ve not stayed in it before. Usually I’m staying on the San Diego side and then I’ll go into Coronado for the day. That is definitely on my list now. I plan to go and stay in it one of these nights. Actually, people go and request the room that is supposedly haunted, although I don’t know if I want to do that. There is only one person who I’ve talked to who has not necessarily seen it, but he has done a lot of research on the ghost. So I spoke to him for a little bit. But the internet is really such a great resource for writers. I watched a lot of Youtube videos and watched different accounts of people who had encountered this ghost, so I was able to pull from those. Kate Morgan – the Coronado ghost Jenny: You are a regular “Amazon Best Seller” and you get rave reviews from your readers on Goodreads . What do they tell you they like most about your books? Camille: My readers really tend to love my research. I love being historically accurate, so that’s probably the comments I get more often than not is that they feel like when they read my stories, they feel like they can trust the history. And my books aren’t history heavy; you don’t feel like you’re reading a textbook. I really like to sweep them up into the characters, the story and the location. But I’d like to make sure that every detail I have that is of historical nature is historically accurate as possible. I can be pretty harsh on myself by doing that! For example, in The Way of Beauty, I’d written this entire scene in New York City in the early 1900’s. My characters were taking this carriage to a restaurant, and in the scene I mention all the different things they see as they’re taking this carriage ride to the restaurant. The restaurant has been there for the past 100 years. I went and back checked myself for accuracy, and I find out that this year which was prior to the restaurant being there, the restaurant had actually been a different part of town. I was one year off. And so I changed my entire chapter just so that the route they took would be to the most accurate location. I don’t think anybody reading this today would have any idea that my location was originally off if I had just kept it, but I cared about that accuracy. So as my readers find those things out, they just find I go through the effort to make those things real. Jenny: Yes you’re quite right. I think a lot of historical mystery writers would think fudging something by a year was a no big deal sort of thing. But that’s amazing. Camille: Sometimes you have to. In The Memory of Us, I have two of my characters going to see Snow White at the movie theatres in London. It had already come out in the U.S, but it had not come out in London for several more months. But my scene had to take place in this month, and there were some reasons why they had to go and see Snow White. So I fudged that by a few months. Jenny: I really think that’s totally justifiable. Camille: Sometimes you have to do that and let the story win, but I usually put something in my author notes if it’s really going to have to be different. Or the one I’m researching now, I’m finding so much conflicting information and just having to choose what sounds the most consistent, and just do the best that I can. Or I like to inform my readers through the author notes of what I’ve had to tweak to make the story work. Turning to your wider career  . . .  Jenny: You have a very full life apart from your writing – raising four children and until recently working as a real estate agent, but you’ve also found time for some remarkable adventures.  For starters you’ve met both Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II.  How did that come about? Do tell . . Camille: My parents were so great about having us travel- that’s how I got my travel bug. I’ve been to Rome a number of times, my first time was as a child. We were at an audience in Rome where he come by and I was a little blonde girl with pigtails. I had a very tall friend who was with us, and he lifted me up and I have the picture of Pope John Paul ll holding me and giving me a blessing. So that happened when I was about five years old. I do remember it, and it was a very striking moment for me. I reflect on it, and looking back I realize what a special moment that was. Mother Teresa meeting Mother Teresa I met as a teenager. I lived in Denver, Colorado at the time and she was out in Denver at an event. My mum one somebody who was working backstage, so we got to go backstage and meet her as well. That was remarkable as well. She has a stunning presence about her. Jenny:  You’ve had the success of retaining Best- seller status for a number of your books. You’re published by Lake Union Publishing – which is an Amazon imprint.  How did  you find them – or they find you? Camille: With the really traditional route of getting an agent, as every author will tell you, you line up all your rejections for a while. Over the years I would make my manuscript better and better with each rejection. That’s just what you do. When I got it to the point where I really dug in and I thought – this is the one, this is the draft ready to go, I actually got two offers of representation at that point. So you have to go through all that and be willing to understand where your manuscript needs work, and have the humility to dig into that. When you dig in and do the hard work, eventually you can get an agent. I got a wonderful agent. She’s the one who has shopped it. We got a couple of several interests from several publishers at that point, and she steered me towards Amazon because she felt they were doing remarkable things over there, and I would be in great hands. I trusted her judgement, so it was great. They shopped the memory of us right up to best seller status which was really exciting, the first time out of the shoot! Jenny: That’s terrific. Are you happy there now? Camille: I’m very happy there. Every place has its pros and its cons and you hear that from a. Lot of other places, but I absolutely love my editor. He is always advocating for me. They’re always being creative as to how they can market it and find new audiences. So I’ve been really really grateful to how they do it. They have less of a presence in book stores and some of the traditional outlets, so those are relationships they want to continue to build. But they’re Amazon; they’re already pretty giant to begin with. They do some great things, and I’ve been able to be the recipient of that. Jenny: Is there one thing  you have done perhaps more than any other, that is the secret of your success? Camille: I’d like to think it’s the relationship with my readers. I have received compliments from readers all the time for being somebody that communicates a lot. If somebody sends me a direct message, I will respond to them. I’m most active on Instagram, so if your listeners want to follow me on Instagram, I talk about what I’m reading, what I’m doing. I’m very active over there, and I will answer all messages that come through. I’m on Facebook, so I think I’m really accessible. I think that has been one of the secrets to my career; if people feel like they know you and like you, they’re excited to talk about you and promote you. Turning to Camille as reader Jenny:  The series is called “The Joys of Binge Reading” because I see it as providing inspiration for people who like to read series . So – turning to your taste in fiction who do you “binge read” ? Any recommendations for listeners? Camille: My favourite living author is Kate Morton. She writes historical fiction, and it’s just exquisite writing. She came out with her sixth book which I have not read yet, but I think I’m going to read it in the holidays when I can really just sit and savor it. Her books are the kind where I just want to shut everything down and live in that for 24-48 hours! Kate Morton a favorite I think I’ve read every Poirot book Agatha Christie has written. So I’ve binged that. I’ve been on a Colleen Hoover binge this year. In fact I stayed up until 4:30am this past morning finishing the second one of her series, because I finished the first last night and I immediately had to go and download it. So I’ve pretty much finished everything Colleen Hoover has written, and I wish she could write as fast as I can read! She’s kind of a romance writer, whereas Kate Morton writes historical fiction. So I tend to like a lot of different genres, and if the writing is compelling, I will go and read everything they write. Circling back to the beginning at the end  Jenny:At this stage in your career, if you were doing it all again, what would you change – if anything? Camille: I’m a big believer of things happening when they’re meant to happen. I do believe that the more experiences you collect, the more experiences you have to draw from in your writing. So I don’t have any regrets. I certainly wish I’d started it sooner. My first book was published when I was 40, so I do wish I started a decade earlier! But I don’t really look back and think about that a lot, because I do very much have faith that you land where you’re supposed to, and I don’t try to overthink that or look back. Jenny: What is next for Camille the writer? You’ve mentioned a book set in Rome – can you give us any hints on that, or is there anything else you are working on in the way of projects? What are you working on, and new projects? Camille: My current work in progress now, I’m about 55,000 words into it. It’s definitely the one I was working on just before we talked too. It will be my first story inspired by a real life person, and it was a woman who owned a business in the early 1900’s. Very little is known about her, I can’t even find books about her. But I happened to discover her story, so I’m digging into that. And to own a business in the 1900’s as a woman, and to go through probation and the Great Depression, and in a lot of difficult times and to come out of that and succeed… it’s very inspirational to me. There was even a murder that happened in her past, and lots of really neat little details that said this needs to be a book. So I’m digging into that one. It’s also dual time period, and I’m really enjoying that. Jenny: And you’re sticking very much to your genre thread you’ve established. Have you ever had any temptation to attempt another genre, like romance? Camille: I would like to do a contemporary romance some day. I’ve had a few Sophie Kinsella kind of ideas cross my head. So I would like to explore that some day, but I have a good number of historical fiction ones in mind. I think I love the research so much. Not that you don’t have to research contemporary, but I think I love the historical research. Every time I’m ready to sit down and put some attention to an historical, something contemporary kind of nags at me. I’ll never say never, but I like this path right now and I’ve found a lot of readers who enjoy it and a great community in historical fiction. So it’s where I’m really happy right now. Jenny: And it sounds like you have plenty of other ideas backed up there waiting to be attended to. Camille: There are. I still have four kids, and my husband and his real estate business so I can’t write as many books as I’d like to. That’s life. We don’t often get to put things aside to give it out full time, and that’s how it should be. I love having involvement in all of those other aspects of life. Jenny: How many hours a day would you write for? Camille: When I’m very consistent about it, I’d say two to three hours a day. I just participated in the NaNoWriMo  in November where the goal was 50,000 words. I came in a little short of that because here in the United States we have Thanksgiving and it’s the kick off of some holidays and my college daughter was home. So I prioritized family over that. But I think I got to about 40,000 words which was big progress in the manuscript. I feel like I’m on the path to get it to my editor in mid January as planned. Jenny: Where can readers find you on line? Camille: I love to communicate with readers, and I love to find out what they’re reading too. I get my best reading ideas from them, so I’m very collaborative and I love to keep in touch. I’m most active on Instagram. I love that it’s a really positive place, and I love all the pictures. So they can find me on Facebook, Goodreads and BookBub. But I’m most active on Instagram and Facebook. Jenny: That’s fantastic. It’s been wonderful talking to you, thank you so much. I’m sure we’ll all be watching your progress with interest. Camille: Thank you so much. I loved talking with you.   Talk soon!! 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