She Wrote a Thriller About Every Writer's Worst Nightmare: A Stolen Story | The Mentor with Angela Douglas

So what brought this story to life? I'm assuming it's not au- autobiographical, [laughs] 'cause I've read the end, so it can't be.

No.

No, no. It's not autobiographical, for sure.

[laughs]

I think that a lot of ideas popped into my head during lockdown, and, and this was one of them, how people pivoted and made money and did things and survived, and at the same time, I was a new author, not published yet.

I just finished writing my first book, and I thought, "What is the scariest, most vulnerable, horrific thing that could ever happen to one of us, is having one of our stories stolen?" And under the guise of a lockdown, a lot of scary things could have happened.

There was a lot of opportunity to do bad things, and I thought if we mesh the two of those together and just saw what that would look like.

So I had a lot of fun [clears throat] going deep in what bad things people could do.

So is this concept, lockdown six years ago, is this concept six years old? Is this, did this happen at the same time as Every Fall? Th- for those listening who aren't familiar with Angela, her first book published was Every Fall, and n- now she's back again for her second time.

Thank you for being here again for The Mentor.

Yeah, so it's not as old.

The idea, you know, when you're writing a book, your next idea starts haunting you before you're finished.

I don't know why that happens-

Yeah

...

but it always does, and it's equal parts annoying and so exciting.

So this one was actually bugging me while I was writing my second book, which actually isn't out yet.

It may be my next release.

Um, so while I was writing that one, this one was like, "Let's go, let's go." So I actually, um, hurried to finish the other one so that I could write this because I think it was probably around '21 or '22 that I started writing, but everything was still obviously fresh in my mind, and I thought just having poked into the literary world a little bit, and if you're on Threads, which at the time was probably more Twitter, you can see things like this, not exactly [laughs] like this, but that literary theft does happen, and it's nasty.

Coming up with these book ideas, do you, as you're writing, do you find ...

You have, you're working on one idea, and you have another idea.

Does that other idea that intrudes ... 'Cause for new writers, other ideas might be, like, the next thing to jump into, right? You're writing one book-

Yeah

... and you're like, "Oh, I have this idea, or this idea can consume me.

Now I'm gonna switch to this other book." How do you stop yourself from recognizing one idea that you should run with and give up on your [laughs] current project versus finishing a project that you've already started? 'Cause I feel like for new writers especially, this is a problem, of jumping to the next great story idea.