Now available is the romantic thriller Hell Will Rise, book in the Bloodthirsty Mafia series, by Skyla Murphy.
The author has taken a few minutes out
of her busy schedule for a Q&A about her newest novel.
When did you become interested in storytelling?
I’m sure my parents would tell you that I’ve always been a storyteller, but I had never seriously considered writing as a profession up until two years ago. When I was in high school, we were made to undergo career assessments. Numerous questions were asked to decipher which career path would be best for us on an individual basis. In a fate I couldn’t understand, my results came back for creative writing. Ignoring the assessment, I studied social work, power engineering, and medical transcription instead. I’ve always written along the way, completing multiple novels that I didn’t ever take the leap to publish.
What was your first book/story published?
When I had just hit junior high, I wrote a story about a penguin that played baseball. (It was cool back then, I swear - ha!) It won first place and was published for a local festival, but that was just something I did for fun. I’ve written a handful of novels over the past few years, but Hell Will Rise will be the first one I officially publish.
What inspired you to write Hell Will Rise?
One night around a campfire, me and a few buddies were discussing which superpower would be the coolest to have. A little bit of an odd conversation for a group of twenty-five year olds to be hung up on, but we were.
The most common answer was the cliché of invisibility. Someone said X-ray vision. Another said the art of flying. I chose teleportation. I would take myself wherever I wanted to go with a snap of my fingers. Could you imagine the uncomfortable conversations a girl could avoid with that superpower?! But I would want myself to be so skilled that I could bring anything I was touching with me. I would show my friends the world!
While considering it, someone suggested seeing numbers in people’s eyes (their bank pins, driver’s license numbers, stock holdings etc.) so they could steal identities for fun. The friend who gave that answer had eaten one too many Bailey’s centered marshmallows that night, but it got me thinking. It was then that I told everyone I was going to write my next book about exactly that.
What character in Hell Will Rise is the most/least like you, and in what ways?