Q. how did you come to write Dani Noir?

A. At the start of DANI NOIR, the narrator, Dani, is stuck in her middle-of-nowhere town, her only escape the old black-and-white movies she discovers at the local theater. Dani falls for film noir just the way I did: when she first sees Rita Hayworth starring as the femme fatale in a classic noir movie called Gilda. This was also the moment that the writing of DANI NOIR clicked for me—when I saw Gilda for the first time. The eye-opening scene is just as Dani describes: Rita Hayworth enters the room and nothing is as it was before.

I’ve done work-for-hire writing and ghostwriting for tweens and young adults before, but this novel was my chance to write in my own voice for the first time, to not have an assignment or a set of characters dictated to write about. Before this, my own original writing was always intended for adults. And yet, weirdly enough, I mostly wrote from the perspectives of teenagers: 14-year-old, 17-year-old, 13-year-old girls—so I see now that writing a novel for tweens was inevitable. Dani's voice poured out of me: She started on the rooftop of her house, surrounded on all sides by an endless sea of trees, just like places I lived at that age, and she came alive from there. I began to watch films the way Dani would see them. I began to picture Rita Hayworth as Dani might. And my imagination went wild from there. How would Dani imagine her life to be different if she were someone spectacular, someone who doesn’t listen to anyone, a femme fatale... just like Rita Hayworth? Once you can hear a character’s voice in your head, once you can SEE her, she’s not going to let you alone until you put her story down. Dani did that to me.