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Friday Five: Q&A with ‘Freezing Reign’ author L.A. Goff

‘Your first book will be less than perfect. Write it anyway.’

L.A. Goff photo — L.A. Goff, author of ‘Freezing Reign’

Continuing this blog’s highlight of women writers during Women’s History Month, today’s Friday Five Q&A is with L.A. Goff, author of the dystopian thriller Freezing Reign and another writer from my area. Freezing Reign is Goff’s debut novel and the first in a series. A self-described “reformed journalist who discovered it’s more fun to create new worlds than report on this one,” Goff has extensive experience in non-fiction as well.

Why we write: thoughts from Junot Díaz

One of the author websites I read regularly is Junot Díaz’s StoryWorlds. Diaz is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, among other titles, and through his Substack writings he generously shares his ideas about the writing craft with his readers. A recent post, When the Words Become Breath, or A First Novel Written in Darkness, is one of his more personal entries, and it strikes at the heart of the question of why we write, and what we should expect from our efforts.

It’s also a hopeful story for anyone who struggles with depression, as Díaz did during his senior year of high school — “a depression of the deep dark kind.”