RisingStar Star

Sharon Michalove writes stories full of romance, suspense, and mystery. Get to know the author behind the captivating Global Security Unlimited series!

What were you like as a child?

I was pretty active as a child, riding bikes, spending summer days at our local park district field house. Unfortunately, I also had poor hand-eye coordination and no depth perception, which meant that I had trouble learning to tie my shoes and cut with scissors. I was always the last chosen when we had to make up teams in gym classes. I never was able to play tennis—too afraid of the ball hitting me—but I enjoyed badminton.

One of my prime activities was going to the movies. They were cheap when I was young and my friends and I went every weekend.

I could be disruptive though. In school, my report cards usually said I talked too much (to other kids, obviously, not interacting with the teachers). I was easily distracted until I finally got glasses as the age of seven. I did well when I was interested and not well when I didn’t like something, so my elementary school days were checkered with bad grades in math and good grades in history and English.

Like most other girls of my generation, I was a Brownie and a Girl Scout, but I dropped out by the time I was twelve. By then I knew I hated Girl Scout camp, wasn’t interested in the badges (none of them were for reading), and didn’t care about selling cookies.

I didn’t like being different. My father’s family had emigrated from Russia. They all had accents. When they saw you, they hugged, kissed you on both cheeks, and you were overcome by the scents of perfume and powder. The aunts wore coats with fur collars in the winter, and the fur would rub against your skin.

As I got older, life became more complicated and I got quieter. Over time, I became more of an introvert, but that’s another story.

Were you a big reader? What do you think influenced your love of reading?

My mom read to me from the time I was very young. We had a lot of Little Golden Books, and some picture books from when Mom and her sister were young. I read at home, at my grandparents’ houses, and was always in the advanced reading group in school.

I became fascinated with the worlds that books opened up for me, and by the age of four I was reading on my own, although I used to think that Mom stopped reading to me when my brother was born. When, many years later, I asked her about that, she told me since I could read on my own, there was no reason to read to me.

I was always reading something, and we had a lot of books around. My dad was a teacher and encouraged me, until I became so unsocial that I would read in my room instead of watching TV with the rest of my family. When I was forced to join them, I’d bring my book with me and read anyway.

An ambitious reader, I first tried War and Peace at the age of twelve, but it defeated me. I could read all the words, but I couldn’t understand the story line. I have read it since, several times.

My parents gave me a two-volume Complete Works of Shakespeare when I was about thirteen, and I – over time – read all of the plays. Other writers, like Dickens and Jane Austen, I discovered in high school.

What made you want to be a writer?

I talked to myself growing up, making up invisible friends and I did all the voices. But the writing urge was a fitful one. I wanted to write like Agatha Christie. Instead, I wrote bad poetry and, perhaps recklessly, sent my adolescent efforts to

“The New Yorker,” “The Saturday Review”, and “Poetry Magazine”. I subscribed to “The Writer” and “Writer’s Digest”. Mostly I wanted to have written, not do the hard work of producing a book. I could picture books on my shelves with my name on the spine. Being an author was the goal, not necessarily being a writer.

In college, we were asked to write a stereotypical story in freshman rhetoric. All I remember was my instructor telling me that it was too inventive to be stereotypical. Guess I was always going to go my own way.

In my twenties I took my first crack at a murder mystery. For all the ones I’d read, I couldn’t plot to save my life. I gave up after two chapters. Another try in my thirties brought the same result, and I turned to writing history instead. My first completed book was my doctoral dissertation when I was forty-five.

When I was sixty-seven I tried again, and produced the first draft of my romantic suspense novel, At First Sight, in six months, which I published on my seventieth birthday. This time I knew I could be a writer.

What is it that drew you to writing suspense and mysteries?

Mystery is the genre that has always stayed with me. I’ve read plenty of classic literature, and I was a big fantasy reader for a while. I didn’t really start reading romance until I was in my early sixties. TV was another influence. I loved watching mysteries and spy shows when I was young, especially BBC adaptations of my favorite British crime writers. Maybe I could blame it all on “Midsummer Murders”?

Writing mystery seemed the natural choice, and when I couldn’t plot a traditional mystery, I combined suspense with romance, a choice that works for me. I have been able to branch out into mystery since those first forays, as well.

Did any of your life experiences influence any of your storylines or characters? If so, give us some examples!

A really formative experience for me was watching movies. I grew up in Chicago and our local TV station, WGN, had the largest movie library in the world. Most of the movies had been made in the 1930s and 1940s, filled with wacky characters, snappy dialogue, noir plots, and screwball comedy. If there was movie I really wanted to see on the weekend that was running in the middle of the night, I’d go to bed early and set my alarm. One morning, my mom came downstairs at 3 a.m. I’d woken her up, laughing at something. She also loved old movies and stayed up to watch it with me. I think my strength in writing dialogue and creating characters out of whole cloth comes from watching “The Thin Man” movies, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and the Marx Brothers. My characters are an amalgam of people I know and things I imagine. Like most writers, they are also part me. Cress Taylor, my first heroine, has a Ph.D. in history, writes novels, only has a few close friends, and is one of the clumsiest women you will ever meet. She’s also a hockey fan and loves to eat out. Yes, she’s me with some twists.

Max Grant, her love interest, is a former spy, something my late husband aspired to. Unlike my husband, he’s tall, dark, and looks like a movie star. But they share a love of bad jokes and foreign languages. I wanted to write my perfect book boyfriend and that’s Max.

His cousin, Guy, a composer, is dead when the story opens, but his death is a significant part of Max’s psychological make-up. Guy died young and Max couldn’t get home to be with him at the end. He feels guilty about not having been there. Much of the emotion is based on my experience of watching my husband die, and the guilt of not being with either of my parents at their deaths. In addition, my husband was a composer, and I modified a post he had made not long before his death where he explained what it’s like to lose essential pieces of yourself. Not only could he no longer compose, he couldn’t make sense of the music he heard. I turned his writing into a letter from Guy to Max.

What is your absolute favorite, and most dreaded parts of writing a new novel?

Planning a new novel is always fun. Creating characters, choosing settings, figuring out the bare bones of the plot are the first creative phase. Every time I get an idea for a new novel or story, I make a mock cover and write a blurb. I have a lot of these pieces floating around – probably enough to keep me going for the next ten years.

The other thing I love is editing. My creativity goes into overdrive as I modify my draft to add emotion and rich description. I want the reader to see the places and engage their senses. In the process, I discover new things about the characters. Editing is an ongoing part of writing for me, but at some point I have to declare the project done and move on to the next book.

On the other hand, writing the first draft can be torture. The writing is pedestrian. The ideas don’t always flow, and I worry that the plot isn’t working. Scenes can be boring. Imposter Syndrome rears its head. I just have push through and hope I can improve it in the editing process without having to completely rewrite.

What’s a writing bucket list item of yours?

I would love to go on a writing retreat with some of my favorite authors in Italy, or on a Greek Island cruise.

If you could give anyone wanting to write a story one piece of advice, what would it be?

Look back occasionally to see how far you’ve come. You might be surprised.

So many writers only think ahead – to the next book, the next event. We all tend to moan about not being good enough, productive enough. We want to make more money. Be a star. Get recognition from our peers, or win awards. All of these are laudable desires. But we need to appreciate how far we’ve come, even as we contemplate the next step in our journey.

Check back through the goals you set in the past. Did you meet them? So what if you’ve published one book or twenty? Maybe you’re unpublished but you have lots of drafts sitting around. If you’ve been writing, you’re accomplishing something. Celebrate those incremental victories before you worry about surpassing them.

What is something you’d like readers to know about you?

I have wanderlust. Sometimes I wonder if living full-time on a cruise ship would fulfill my desire to travel.

I have always wanted to go somewhere else. When I was a child, I would visit my grandparents and not want to go home. I chose a month at summer camp when most kids only spent two weeks. Not being able to study abroad in my junior year was devastating as my dream of living in London evaporated.

At one time, I planned on going into the Foreign Service, but I wasn’t sure I could pass the test. I still wonder what my life would have been like if I had pursued that track.

The man I met the day before classes started had traveled abroad after he finished his Master’s degree. Our married life was filled with travel, something that has featured in my books. At first we took a trip every couple of years. By the time he died, we were doing several trips a year, some of them as long as five weeks.

I still travel when I can. This year I went to Antarctica and Venice. Next year, I hope to spend a month in Sardinia writing with a friend. The wanderlust is still there, even if the execution is harder.

I think books are a way of sating our wanderlust any time we want to leave home.