Interview with novelist Susan Sloate

Novelist Susan Sloate joins me today to chat about her new music fiction, Scenes from a Song.

During her virtual book tour, Susan will be giving away a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly drawn participant. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit her other tour stops, too!

The book will be $0.99 during the tour: https://amzn.to/3JGG198

Welcome, Susan. Please tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m a multi-genre author who’s written or co-written 26 published books. This includes Forward to Camelot, a time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination that became a #6 Amazon bestseller, was honored in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a Hollywood company for film production. I also wrote the autobiographical Broadway novel Stealing Fire, which became a #2 Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release, and Realizing You (with Ron Doades), for which I invented a new genre: the self-help novel.

I’ve also written young-adult fiction and non-fiction, including the children’s biography Ray Charles: Find Another Way, which won the silver medal in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam Awards. Mysteries Unwrapped: The Secrets of Alcatraz led to my 2009 appearance on the TV series MysteryQuest for The History Channel. I’ve also been a sportswriter and a screenwriter, edited the popular Kyle & Corey young-adult book series, managed two political campaigns and founded an author’s festival to promote student literacy in my hometown outside Charleston, SC. I’ve appeared in multiple volumes of Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in Entertainment and Who’s Who Among American Women.

Please tell us about your current release.
My latest novel, Scenes from a Song, was a 2018 Nanowrimo entry, written during that insane annual marathon to write 50,000 words of an original novel in thirty days. It’s different from anything else I’ve ever written and I’m excited to share it with your readers!

What inspired you to write this book?
A few years ago, I went looking for YouTube clips of my favorite Beatles song, “Please Please Me”, one of their earliest hits. I’ve always loved it, and I found a great YouTube clip of Paul McCartney singing the song to close a concert with his band.

McCartney turned that concert tour into a film, so he had cameras filming the audience, and I watched their reactions as he sang. They sang right along—knew every word—and literally danced in the aisles at times. And toward the end, people were crying. And I thought, Why would people cry at such an upbeat song? And then I realized they were remembering other times in their lives, and the song was evoking deep emotions in them.

I loved that clip—watched it more than 100 times—and a few months later, I was planning for Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), the insane November marathon to write 50,000 words of an original novel in one month. I had done Nano many times before, hit 50,000 words most of the time, but this November I wanted to do something different. So I decided to write about a song that brings out that kind of emotion in people—and when I started, as you often do with Nano, I didn’t really know how the book would evolve. But it became the story of a band and then the individual stories of other people affected by that song. And yes, I did make 50,000 words that November, and I finished the first draft of the book just before the end of that year.

When I found out that reading the book was making my beta readers literally cry, I knew I had something special.

Excerpt from Scenes from a Song:
Jimmy hesitated for a moment, then took a good slug and felt it burn down into his stomach. Only then would he trust him-self to strum the first chords of “Bawk Bawk”. He’d written it in a sardonic mood one day, when he heard Debby playing “The Twist” on her record player and wanted to make fun of it. It had never occurred to him he’d end up playing it for a bunch of guys in a seedy bar after midnight.

Jimmy took a deep breath and launched into the song, speaking as well as singing it. After he’d written it, he’d realized he could even dance it a little, too, and he made gestures as well:

Imitating a chicken, clicking his heels together, clapping his hands. His father had told him he was a natural showman, so he gave it his all.

When he began to ham it up in the dance part, the boys be-gan to laugh, and they laughed right through to the end. Jimmy finished with the high whistle he’d learned the previous summer, and a final click of his heels before bowing to them.

Mark, Kellen and Hammy applauded enthusiastically, and Mick, who’d come back to see if they wanted another round, said to him, “Terrific, fella. Funniest thing I’ve seen since ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. You a comic?”

“Are you kidding? He’s a musician!” Mark roared. “A great musician! And ‘Bawk Bawk’s a number-one hit if ever I heard one!”

He jumped onto the floor and imitated Jimmy, clicking his heels together, arms flailing like a chicken, and making the ‘bawk bawk’ sound. In a minute, Hammy and Kellen were following him.

“Play it again, Jimmy!” Mark shouted. “So we can dance it this time!”

What exciting project are you working on next?
I’m writing a musical (script and lyrics)! This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done.

I fell in love with a novel 40 years ago and always felt it was the basis of a great musical (and I can’t be too far off, since Doris Day wanted to make that book into a movie musical many years ago, when it was new and popular, and the author said no.) But I got the rights and now I’m working on it—it’s scary and it’s exciting and I’m thrilled! I really believe it could be something special.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I’m not sure when I began to realize I am a writer, but maybe after I wrote several books in a row under contract and was paid for all of them, maybe then, on good days, I thought I could call myself a writer. On my bad days, I’m still not sure…

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
Since January 2025, I’ve been a full-time writer, working on my own projects. Typically I spend my mornings gearing up on story and hit the draft in the afternoon, along with marketing I’m doing for this latest book. Sometimes the marketing stuff goes into the evenings, as well…

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
Since childhood, I’ve had a fascination with notebooks that I use to jot story notes and other minutiae in; I’ve collected them for years, and I usually have 10-20 unused ones in my house at any one time, because I just haven’t started a project in them yet. I tend to save the most beautiful ones for what I think will be the most important projects, so some are still absolutely pristine; I’m pretty sure some of them will still be unused when I pass away.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Strangely enough, I wanted to be an actress, though while I was plotting to win parts in plays (and usually not getting them), I was also writing all the time—that was my go-to hobby. Short stories, plays, bits of novels–I never stopped doing it, but I never thought of it as a career until the age of 16 or so, when I was playing the piano one night and in the middle of a very long, non-standard 32-bar song (“Begin the Beguine” by Cole Porter), I realized I was going to be a writer. And that was that. I never thought about acting again.

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The book will be $0.99 during the tour: https://amzn.to/3JGG198