5 Minutes With... Paullina Simons
THE BEST-SELLING RUSSIAN-BORN AMERICAN WRITER TALKS ABOUT HER LATEST BOOK, A BEGGAR’S KINGDOM, AND WHY SHE’S NEVER COMPLETELY HAPPY WITH HER WORK
You have three books coming out this year, all part of the End of Forever trilogy. How did that come about?
I had an idea for a story about lost love and one man’s desperate quest to get a second chance and to try again to make things right. The story of Julian and Josephine came to me all at once, in one two-hour sitting. It wasn’t an acorn, it was an entire oak! I didn’t realise how large the tree really was until I finished the first book and saw that I had barely started. So I kept working until the next two books were finished and the story was told in its entirety.
Are you happy with the result? In total, I spent five years working on these books. I’m still not done. Happy is a relative term for an author. The perfecting of words is never finished. I feel that I have done justice to my original inspiration in terms of story and character. At the moment I’m in the final stages of preparing the third and final book for publication and all I can see are the little places where I can still do better.
What is the best part of being a writer?
The unforgettable moments when I interact with my readers who enjoy my work and get it as I had hoped and wished that they would; when they love what I love; when they cry when I cry and when they find their own unique things that move them.
What next for you?
I have two things I’m working on at the moment. One is a mystery set in south Florida involving characters named Spencer and Lily and a femme fatale, and one is a story that returns to the world of The Bronze Horseman.