Something Wicked Returns: Eliza Crewe, Cracked Interview & Giveaway

Hi everyone!

I recently discovered a fabulously original new YA paranormal - Eliza Crewe's debut novel, Cracked. Cracked has pretty much everything I enjoy in YA: a fantastic plot, excellent pacing, a somewhat unusual romantic focus and a likeable and hilarious heroine who makes morally questionable choices at every turn.
The latter, of course, is what I liked most, so I invited Eliza to tell us a bit more about her MC, Meda. Enjoy!

Title: Cracked

Series: Soul Eater, #1

Release: November 5th 2013

Publisher: Strange Chemistry

Pre-order: The Book Depository

Ever since my mom was murdered, I’ve been completely alone. I live in the shadows, because there’s no one like me. I have no choice because I have to fight the Hunger, the Hunger that drives me to hunt people and eat their souls. And I have to fight it if I want to stay out of the darkness.

Who am I?

I’m Meda Melange.

What am I?

I don’t know—but I’m not human.

And now, I finally have the chance to find out.

In this first book of the gripping Soul Eater trilogy, find out who Meda is and which side she will come down on in a thrilling tale of the war between good and evil.

Welcome, Eliza! For me, the most interesting part was Meda's moral ambiguity. Was it a difficult decision to write a character like that? Did you consider it risky?

Honestly, I can’t say it was a conscious decision--more ignorance than anything!  I just didn’t know any better.  I was new to writing when I first drafted Cracked, so I didn’t realize anti-heroes were problematic--I just thought Meda was different. It wasn’t until after I finished Cracked, when I started to read books and blog posts on the craft of writing that I realized I might have a problem.  They, particularly Blake Snyder's Save the Cat, which really emphasizes the importance of making a likable main character, made me a bit panicky.  I started looking for YA books with anti-heroes, and there really aren’t a whole lot, especially with a girl anti-hero--it was not reassuring! It certainly didn’t help that that’s when a river of rejections from agents started to flood in.

 Fortunately, right about that time I read Chime by Franny Billingsley and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Bryony Larkin, the main character, is a perfectly horrid girl and the book is brilliant and clever and funny. It reminded me that writing is fun, and if I loved Cracked maybe someone else would, too, so I stuck with it.  Fortunately that turned out to be the case, and I lucked into two editors, Penguin in India and Strange Chemistry for the rest of the world.  So short answer:  I didn’t know enough to realize it was risky until it was too late!

 How did you balance her questionable choices and her fabulous sense of humor?

It wasn’t so much a question of balance as much as trying to find a way to make the reader like Meda despite her questionable choices. Meda is pretty horrible; she murders someone in the first chapter and plans her second by chapter three. She is selfish and greedy and manipulative.  Even her decision to murder only bad guys is largely self-interested.  With all that working against her I needed something to make the reader turn the page. They might not root for her, but I wanted them to like her.  Meda is a guilty pleasure--I wanted the reader to giggle along with her even as they know they shouldn’t.

Mission accomplished! She is perhaps one of the most interesting characters I've come across in a really long time. Can you talk a little about the challenges you faced writing her?

Thank you!

Besides making the reader like someone so awful, another challenge was that Meda is an unreliable narrator.  What she thinks she feels isn’t the same as what she actually feels a lot of the time (if that makes sense).  So I had to keep two story lines running in my head at all times--one of Meda’s actions which shows her true feelings, and the inner monologue which demonstrates what she thinks she feels.  Both of those story lines each have to have their own motivations, as well, i.e. why she feels the way she feels, and why she thinks she feels a different way.  And lastly, it has to be done subtly enough so the reader recognizes the conflict but doesn’t want to slam their head against the wall at the the main character’s inability to recognize something so obvious.  It can get a bit tricky to keep it all straight!

I also adored that Meda didn’t have a love interest in Cracked. It was different and so surprising. Why did you choose to leave Meda without a love interest, which is very unusual in YA, and focus on the romance of secondary characters instead?

Because breaking rules is addictive.  Even though I didn’t quite realize how uncommon a YA-girl-anti-hero is, I knew I was going against the norm, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Most YA books, especially with female protagonists, have romances, so I didn’t. Plus, there’s been a lot of griping on the interwebs about the romantic element in YA recently, so I thought it’d be fun to set the reader up to expect it by introducing a handsome male hero in the very beginning (I imagined the readers rolling their eyes and bracing for insta-love)--then surprise them when it never happens.  Of  course that cat’s out of the bag now, lol, but it was fun while it lasted :). Another reason I don’t have a romance for Meda, though, is just practical--I’m not nearly a talented enough writer to make a monster like her believably fall in love in 300 pages.

Thanks so much for having me, Maja!

Thank you for stopping by!

Eliza Crewe always thought she’d be a lawyer, and even went so far as to complete law school. But as they say, you are what you eat, and considering the number of books Eliza has devoured since childhood, it was inevitable she’d end up in the literary world. She abandoned the lawyer-plan to instead become a librarian and now a writer.

While she’s been filling notebooks with random scenes for years, Eliza didn’t seriously commit to writing an entire novel until the spring of 2011, when she and her husband bought a house. With that house came a half-hour commute, during which Eliza decided she needed something to think about other than her road-rage. Is it any surprise she wrote a book about a blood-thirsty, people-eating monster?

Eliza has lived in Illinois, Edinburgh, and Las Vegas, and now lives in North Carolina with her husband, her hens, her angry, talking, stuffed dwarf giraffe, and a sweet, mute, pantomiming bear. She likes to partially-complete craft projects, free-range her hens, and take long walks. Cracked is her first novel.

Thanks to the lovely people at Strange Chemistry, you can now enter to win a copy of Cracked. My review is scheduled for November 4th, but trust me when I tell you, you want to give this book a chance. Even if you don't win here, make sure to get a copy when the time comes. :)

The giveaway is international. Just enter the Rafflecopter below.

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