What's in a name?Visit Barbara Nickless's website.
I wish I could explain how Dr. Evan Wilding’s name crawled out of the primordial soup of my subconscious brain and presented itself to me. But, alas, that answer lies twenty years in the past (if, in fact, it lies anywhere at all). I created the character of Evan at a writer’s boot camp as part of a writing exercise. The character appeared as a man in full in the middle of the night—his dwarfism, his interest in language, his intelligence, his police work. And his name.
The name given by the media to the serial killer in At First Light also popped up without much thought. What else do you call a murderer who, after torturing and slaying his victims, leaves them with poems styled after the Old English poets and written in futhorc—the Viking runes used in England during the Viking Age?
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
My teenage self would...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: At First Light.
Q&A with Barbara Nickless.
--Marshal Zeringue
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