How a Facebook meme, a lifelong hunger for stories, and a personal obsession with the stars led these authors to the page — and eventually, to publication.

Every book begins with a moment. A news story glimpsed in passing. A grandmother’s love letters found under floorboards. A birthday nearing and a question you can’t shake. The authors interviewed by Authorlink over the past three years reveal that inspiration rarely announces itself loudly — it tends to sneak up on a writer like light through a curtain, until suddenly the room is bright and there is nothing left to do but write.

For Katrina Kittle, author of Morning in This Broken World (Lake Union, 2023), the book germinated from a quietly hopeful idea about combining childcare and eldercare facilities. Then the pandemic arrived, and with it, a Facebook meme that stopped her cold: “We’re not all in the same boat. We’re in the same storm. Some have yachts. Some have canoes. And some are drowning.” That single image crystallized everything. She set out to gather a cast of characters in wildly different vessels and let the storm show her who they really were.

“You can make it better later. First, you have to make it exist.”— KATRINA KITTLE, MORNING IN THIS BROKEN WORLD

Leesa Cross-Smith, whose seventh novel As You Wishpublished in 2025, traces her inspiration to the warmth and intensity of Korean dramas. She wanted to write a book that felt cozy, intimate, and rooted in friendship — and even traveled to Seoul and took Korean lessons to honor the setting. She built in playlists so readers could inhabit the same sonic world as her three au-pair heroines.

LEESA CROSS-SMITH

As You Wish (2025)

Inspired by Korean dramas, K-pop, and the magic of three female friendships. Cross-Smith’s apprenticeship began not in a classroom but in stacks of short story collections she devoured before writing a word herself.
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JESSIE ROSEN

All the Signs (Putnam, 2025)

Rosen’s curiosity about astrology had been simmering for years. As her 40th birthday approached and a period of personal questioning deepened, she embarked on the same journey her heroine takes — seeking out people with identical astrological charts to see if their lives had taken similar paths.
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AGGELIKI PELEKIDIS

Unlucky Mel (Three Hills, 2024)

Inspired by Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and a desire to put a middle-class woman at the center of an academic satire — a story that had, remarkably, not yet been told. She also drew from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to explore the theme of revenge and the doubt that delays it.
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JULIE MA

Love Letters (Mountain Leopard Press, 2024)

Moved by the absence of Chinese characters at the center of fiction, Ma turned a bundle of old love letters found under floorboards into her narrative engine — a teenage girl, a dead grandfather, an unsolved mystery, and a new town.
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R.L. MAIZES

A Complete Fiction (2026)

Maizes watched one writer after another cancelled on social media and became obsessed with the subject. When she’s obsessing about something, she says, she knows it’s the right subject to write about. Humor became her tool for processing what made her angry.
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MARYELLEN DONOVAN

The Road to Yesterday (She Writes Press, 2025)

Donovan never imagined becoming a writer — all she ever wanted was to be a mother. But after losing her husband in the 9/11 attacks, she discovered her story had a power she hadn’t known. Inspiration was not a craft decision; it was a compulsion to transform devastation into hope.
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ANN PACKER

Some Bright Nowhere (2025)

Many years ago, Packer heard an account of a dying woman whose women friends moved in to care for her — displacing her husband. The story nagged at her for years. She was compelled to ask: what about the husband? The question animated the entire novel.
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DEBORAH CROSSLAND

The Quiet Part Out Loud (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

During pandemic lockdown, Crossland became obsessed with a song — “If the World Was Ending” — and the idea of two people who loved each other intensely but couldn’t get out of their own way to be happy. Jung’s shadow archetype theory and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice completed the inspiration.
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What unites these writers is a shared willingness to be ambushed by what matters. Inspiration doesn’t arrive on schedule — it arrives when a meme cuts to the bone, when a K-drama makes you feel held, when a birthday makes you confront what you don’t yet know about yourself. Stay curious, stay open, and when something arrests your full attention — write toward it, not away.

Source: Authorlink.com written interviews, 2023–2026. Authors interviewed include Katrina Kittle, Leesa Cross-Smith, Jessie Rosen, Aggeliki Pelekidis, Julie Ma, R.L. Maizes, Maryellen Donovan, Ann Packer, and Deborah Crossland.

 

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