Five questions for Bethany Frankel
I grew up in a small town, wandering the marshlands and searching for ghosts on rural backroads. Now I write books with magical metaphors and complicated characters.
You can contact Bethany via email and follow her on Instagram.
What is your writing routine?
Calling it a ‘routine’ is being generous, but to push the procrastination demons away and get writing, I normally trek out to my local coffeeshop, grab a table, and order an inhuman amount of caffeine. Each writing session is a bit different—sometimes I write in fifteen-minute sprints, in which the only rule is that I have to keep going, I can’t stop to edit or anything. If it’s a good writing day, I find a song that evokes the right mood for the scene I’m writing and play it on repeat for the entirety of the writing session, even if that means the same song plays for hours! I can’t write without music. I need to listen to songs that help reinforce the mood, replicate the energy of the scene, or get me into the headspace of a particular character.
What was the inspiration for your manuscript?
I first got the idea for Crossroads when I was fifteen, after reading The Diviners by Libba Bray and watching copious amounts of Supernatural. I loved the bigger cast of characters in The Diviners and the monster hunter aspect of Supernatural, but was especially drawn to the idea of magic existing in a place where it could be written off as mundane (hence New Orleans). Until the start of the course, the only things I knew about Crossroads were the setting and one of the protagonists, Ezra Collins. I wrote a prologue from his perspective when I was fifteen, and found myself returning to it year after year, like Ezra was a character who wouldn’t leave me alone. A decade later, there’s a lot more to Crossroads than the setting and one character, but through the dozens of iterations I’ve written, Ezra’s first line— the first line of the book— has remained unchanged: Ezra Collins was more of a shadow than a boy.
Who is your favourite character in your book?
I’ll start with the obligatory statement that all my characters are favourites of mine in different ways and that I love them all – and in a book with five POVs, I’d be in a tricky spot if I didn’t enjoy writing from all their perspectives. That being said… Ezra takes the title by a landslide. Ezra is a monster hunter, born and raised in New Orleans, who causes a lot of trouble and has the misfortune of losing anyone that gets too close. He’s snarky and sarcastic, reckless and impulsive. He’s been through a lot in his seventeen years, which adds complexity to his motivations and makes what he’ll do in any scene a bit unpredictable. He’s so much fun to write because he causes chaos in whatever scene he’s in.
Describe your book in five words.
Supernatural-inclined friends face apocalypse.
Describe your perfect day.
Even though it’s super tempting to make a Miss Congeniality reference here, I’d have to say that my perfect day would be one spent outdoors, in summer, with a good book. Some of my favourite days have been spent laying out in the sun, beside a body of water (mainly either a lake or the ocean, though I’m not picky), with my head in a book I can’t put down. There’s something comforting about visiting new worlds via page while feeling the sun on your face and hearing water lap against the shore.