WORST NIGHTMARE
Author taps into mothers’ fears for her bestsellers
As Bruce Springsteen once sang, fear is a powerful thing.
Which may be why so many writers — from literary heavyweight John Irving, to thriller writer Linwood Barclay, to Springsteen himself — have created art by imagining their worst fear: harm coming to their children.
Similarly, Calgary author Steena Holmes seems to have carved out a niche mining parental anxiety as fodder for her bestselling melodramas and thrillers.
Her self-published, bestselling 2012 debut, Finding Emma, was about a mother’s anguish after her three-year-old daughter goes missing.
Her Stillwater Bay series focuses on the aftermath of a deadly school shooting. The Memory Child is a thriller that deals with postpartum depression.
Her newest offering, Saving Abby, introduces a heartbreaking, worstcase scenario for our protagonist, an expectant mom named Claire. Pregnant after six years of trying, she discovers she has a tumour and must decide whether to seek treatment, which could put her unborn child at risk.
“Every book I write I like to think ‘What are my own fears as a mom?’ ” said Holmes, in an interview from her Calgary home.
“I have three teenage daughters, so I have lots of them that I use for my writing. For this book, I always saw the very last scene. I wasn’t sure how we got there or what happened.”
Holmes has become an anomaly in the literary world, a writer who alternates between successful self-published books and those, like Saving Abby, that are released under the Amazon Publishing imprint, Lake Union.
While she may seem under-theradar in the broader publishing world, Holmes has sold more than a million copies of her books, which is impressive even when you factor in the sheer volume of books she has written.
Since 2012, Holmes has published an astonishing two dozen novels. In fact, at any given time, she can be working on two to three books simultaneously.
“I just sit down every day and I write,” she said. “I have a word count that I need to make for every project that I’m on — whether it’s one book at a time or, if I’m working on two books, there’s two word counts I need to hit. Sometimes, it will take me a couple of hours, sometimes it will take all day. Sometimes, because my life is busy with my daughters, I’m up until the middle of the night writing while everyone else is asleep.”
Growing up in Ontario, Holmes always loved to write, although she had convinced herself early on that she wasn’t good enough to do it professionally. Roughly a decade ago, she was working as a receptionist in downtown Calgary, a job she did not particularly enjoy. Her husband convinced her to submit a short story for a contest, which she won.
“It was a Christian romance and it was horrible,” she said with a laugh. “But I sent it in and I won. I’m still shocked. I laugh about it. Looking back, it was so poorly written and edited. But I guess is was good enough.”
She quickly abandoned the Christian-romance sub-genre and eventually finished a novel.
Finding Emma was rejected by numerous publishers, so she decided to self-publish.
The book sold 100,000 e-copies in one month. Suddenly, publishing houses were interested. Holmes opted to go with Amazon’s Lake Union because she figured it had the ability to get her books to the most readers.
Still, she continued to selfpublish as well. One of those books, Sweet Memories, became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, an impressive feat for a self-published novel.
As for the popularity of her novels, Holmes says readers have told her she writes characters that are relatable. Many readers are busy moms, Holmes said, though she counts grandmothers and men among her fans.
“I write them in a way that makes them feel like they are either part of the story or these people could be their friends,” Holmes said.
“They usually see themselves in my main characters. It’s usually about a fear, that they’ve known someone who has gone through it. They relate to it very easily.”
I write them in a way that makes them feel like they are either part of the story or these people could be their friends. Steena Holmes Every book I write I like to think ‘What are my own fears as a mom?’ I have three teenage daughters, so I have lots of them that I use.