Emergence received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author Ellie Beals.
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
My book’s title is Emergence. It was published in late January 2021.
What’s the book’s first line?
I’d always liked the little bitch best – even before we met, while I was still Just Watching.
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
Emergence is the story of two radically different people whose lives intersect with dramatic, potentially lethal consequences, in the wilderness of western Quebec. The two are Cassandra Harwood, who grew up an urban intellectual and evolved into a professional dog trainer, successful obedience competitor, and committed backwoods adventurer; and Xavier, a complex and enigmatic “wild child” who with his anarchist father, lives an isolated life in the bush near Lac Rouge, where Cass and her husband have a cabin.
The first part of the relationship between Cass and Xavier is unilateral – Xavier, a skilled woodsman, covertly surveils Cass and her three dogs in a process he calls Just Watching. During his long Just Watching, Xavier becomes enthralled first with just one of Cass’ dogs, Katrinka, and eventually with the whole group, and the relationships between them.
The desire to observe Cass and her crew more closely eventually leads Xavier to engineer a meeting with Cass, which gradually evolves into a guarded friendship. The end of Just Watching and the start of this friendship is the catalyst for the spiral of danger that eventually encircles all of the human and canine characters in Emergence, as their fates converge in a deadly loop of revenge, fear, guilt and hope.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
The first tragic event in Emergence is based on a real-life event. Though it probably reflects poorly on my character, the most propulsive driver for Emergence was my desire to exact vengeance for that incident, while remaining the good, law-abiding citizen I’ve always been.
Of course, there were many other, considerably less-visceral drivers. I have always loved novels of psychological suspense – starting long before I knew that such a genre existed, when I first read The Turn of the Screw. But in recent years, I’d felt jaded….so many of my forays into the genre didn’t deliver the gripping but literate experience I craved. I wanted to write a compelling novel of psychological suspense, devoid of what I find to be some of the too-frequent conventions of the genre: 1) a vulnerable female protagonist attempting to either escape from or remember her past 2) the protagonist’s potential romantic involvement with males who may turn out to be either The Good Guy Boyfriend or the The Bad Guy 3) superficial character development 4) workman-like writing, devoid of lyricism.
I wanted to feature a strong female protagonist. Because I am a dog-trainer, I also wanted to create a story in which the protagonist’s perceptions are screened through the filter with which serious dog-trainers view the world. And I wanted to create dogs who are legitimate and well-developed characters critical to the arc and momentum of the plot. This circles back to wanting to avoid fictional conventions I dislike. Way too often, I find fictional canines are too-cute by half, behaving in a way that is not convincing to anyone who really works with dogs.
Finally, with Xavier, I wanted to create a truly compelling adolescent male character, with a unique and unconsciously poetic voice with which he narrates “his” chapters.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
I believe I was pretty successful at meeting my objectives as described above, and that’s the main reason someone should read Emergence. I hope and believe that discerning readers will find it subtle and uncomfortable, with characters way out of the mainstream of those that typically populate the genre today, and with writing that is at least good, and at best, lyric. And for anyone who is really into dogs – I suspect there will be great rejoicing at finding dogs so realistically depicted. Finally, I think Xavier is a unique character and that most readers of Emergence are likely to be intrigued by him.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
Though there are two protagonists in Emergence, Cass and Xavier, Cass is definitely the straight man, whose third-person narrative function is designed primarily to provide contrast and background to the first-person chapters voiced by Xavier.
Xavier came to me fully fleshed. It feels much more like I received, rather than created him. He reminds me of no one I’ve ever known or known of, though his open-mindedness and receptivity are much like that of my grandson and nephew. I believe that what distinguishes Xavier from the host of unreliable narrators that people this genre, is the utter truthfulness with which he addresses the reader. The tension around which his character is built, is the degree to which neither he nor the reader are fully aware of his motivations. Of course, this is not unusual for a thirteen year-old boy. But it makes for an interesting counterpoint to his eerily acute observations of others, and his frequent and accurate introspections. If he KNEW what was driving him, he’d tell you. Sometimes, he just doesn’t know. But, admirably from my perspective — he wants to know and works hard to figure himself out.
A number of readers have said that Xavier reminds them of Dexter (of television fame). I can see the parallels in intelligence and his juggling of personal vs. societal morality. But Xavier would be how Dexter might have been before age and experience blunted his openness and sense of fun. Fun is very important to Xavier, and Cass’ nature as “fun” demonstrated by the way she interacts with her dogs, is one of the things that drew him to her.
If they made your book into a movie, who would you like to see play the main character(s)?
Interesting question, and one I plan to pose to my readers on Facebook, once more people have had an opportunity to read the book. For Cass, any one of these actors, all of whom have done stellar jobs at portraying strong women in the past: Jodie Foster, Charlize Theron, Elizabeth Moss, or Kate Winslet. Xavier I’ve always envisaged as a heftier and more physical version of Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike on Stranger Things.
When did you first decide to become an author?
Ah, there’s a big difference between wanting to do something, deciding to do it, and then, hey-presto: doing it. I’ve wanted to write a novel since I understood what a novel was. I didn’t decide to become an author until June of 2020, when I was already far enough along in Emergence to feel confident that it was a “Go”.
Is this the first book you’ve written?
And I’m turning 70 soon. Long time coming.
What do you do for work when you’re not writing?
I had a 30+ year career as a management consultant for Canadian federal departments, specializing in training development, facilitation, program development, and program evaluation. But I entered the field as a specialist in plain language and reports and projects written in accessible, non-bureaucratic language were both the foundation for and the thread that unified all of my work as a consultant.
During the time that I consulted, I became very involved in training and competing my Golden Retrievers in Obedience. My boy Fracas and I were the highest rated obedience team in Canada in 2014, and both Fracas and I, and my husband David and his partner have placed in the Canadian Top Ten for most of the last ten years. We started coaching other competitors in about 2014, and a few years later both of us retired from our professional careers, in order to spend more time on our coaching and competition.
How much time do you generally spend on your writing?
Since Emergence is my first novel, I don’t have enough data to talk about “generally”. I can reference only what my pattern was for this book. I wrote it from our cabin in a remote area of West Quebec, after we shut down our coaching practice because of the pandemic. It was a remarkably civilized process, that spanned only three months during the summer of 2020. I had no particular schedule, but probably spent 3-5 hours writing, maybe 4 -6 days a week. But those were just the hours spent in front of my computer.
At the cabin, like my character Cass, I’ve always spent a lot of time in the bush or on the lake. Typically when I do that, I am pretty successfully “mindless” – until the summer of 2020 I never used that time as a slow-cooker for whatever I was working on. That changed completely during the time I was writing Emergence. In the bush or on the lake, I was often unconscious of where I was (got lost in the woods a couple of times!) because I was so immersed in developing ideas and passages for the book. I’d get back from whatever I was doing and run immediately to the computer. So while I said earlier that I spent 3-5 hours a day writing – that was just time spent on the computer. I was totally immersed in Emergence throughout the three-months in which it was written, even though only 3-5 hours a day were spent actively “writing”.
What’s the best and the hardest part of being an indie?
The best part is the autonomy and control. The idea of sitting helplessly while waiting (and waiting and waiting) to hear (or more typically, not-hear) from publishers and agents was extremely unattractive to me. So was the lack of collaboration and control on how the book would be edited, packaged, and marketed. I see the indie route as very good vehicle for someone skilled enough to assess their own work and whether it is good enough to be published and enjoyed by many readers.
The autonomy, control and timeliness of being an indie is evident in my timeline: I started writing the book in May. I finished writing it at the end of July. By September I had researched companies that specialize in “self-publishing” and contracted with Tellwell Talent for a suite of editorial and design services. Emergence was published in late January – nine months from when I started writing it. My understanding is that an author is likely to have a two-to- three-year window between the time that they finish a book, and the time that it is launched by a traditional publisher.
Here’s what I don’t like. And “don’t like” is euphemistic. Learning to deal, even at the most superficial level, with the prevailing digital realities of book marketing, has been extremely stressful for someone like me, who is not a talented technologist. There were times when I thought: if I’d known it was gonna be like this, I wouldn’t have bothered writing the damned book. Of course – those thoughts are transient. As I become more conversant with the techno-realities, I fall prey to such musings much less frequently.
What’s a great piece of advice that you can share with fellow indie authors?
If you are fairly confident that you’re actually going to produce a book, try to learn as much as you can about the digital dimensions of marketing NOW, so you don’t become as stressed as I’ve been by it. Or, if you can fund it, just hire someone to attend to that for you.
Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling? If so, why?
I doubt it – and not just because the royalties for Indie writers are so much better. I don’t think I’d enjoy the lack of control and collaboration I’m told is characteristic of traditional publishing.
Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
I’ve never sought fame or fortune. I would welcome both – but primarily as evidence of what really motivates me, rather than as intrinsic rewards. My real motivation is recognition – I want to be acknowledged as a writer who not only delivers high quality entertainment, but also one whose books have literary merit.
Which writer, living or dead, do you most admire?
Kurt Vonnegut remains my favorite dead writer because of my deep love for his (misleading) simplicity, and the wisdom and humour embedded in every page he wrote. My living favorites are both writers who epitomize what I know I can’t be. The first is Margaret Atwood, for the remarkable way she conveys emotion despite, or because of the extremely reserved voice characteristic of all of her work. The second is James Lee Burke, for the incredibly rich, even opulent imagery he creates, while still conveying an extraordinarily virile, male presence.