Transcript Season 3, Episode 5
Edwin Hill
Terri Trespicio:
What does it mean to make it big? Well, it depends on who you ask and we did. Welcome to making it big in 30 minutes, a podcast for, by and about the Emerson community. You're about to meet an Emersonian who's making it, making a living, making a difference and sometimes making it up as they go. I'm your host and alum Terri Trespicio and if you like what you hear, subscribe and share with your friends and meet me and other Emersonians over on emerge, the only digital platform exclusive to the Emerson community. Just go to emerge.emerson.edu for more. All right. Let's get started.
Edwin Hill will tell you that when he started writing, he was terrible. His words, he was way into Agatha Christie. So a lot of his stories took place in Manor houses, but he loved it and he took it seriously. And when Edwin graduated from the masters of fine arts program in Emerson in 2003, he not only had the draft of a novel, he had a fancy New York agent, things were looking pretty good.
And then the book didn't sell, this changed his approach to writing as you'll hear. Meanwhile, he got busy building a career in college publishing. A career that spanned 20 years. Ultimately he ascended to the high office of vice president and editorial director for Bedford Saint martin's a division of McMillan. All the while though, he was working quietly on his novel, little comfort, which published in 2018 and which was also nominated for the Agatha award for best first novel. That's when he knew it was time to pursue his fiction career. In earnest, he's written several other critically acclaimed crime novels, including Watch Her and The missing ones. And he was recognized as one of the six crime writers to watch in mystery scene magazine. His latest novel, the secrets we share will be available in April 2022. Edwin is above all a pragmatist, and you're going to love his honest, straightforward take on writing.
I give you Edwin Hill on making it as a crime novelist, Edwin Hill, professor Edwin Hill. You mentioned in a recent interview that you read a book as a kid, a book you bought at a gas station. I didn't know there was ever a time when books were sold at gas stations, but so be it. And you read it and said, this is it. This is what I'm going to do. This is the dream that anyone has any. Of course and you might have watched the moon landing. I mean, like that's what I'm going to do. Like how old were you when that happened and how much did you believe in that later? Or did it feel like a pipe dream then?
Edwin Hill:
Oh, that's such an interesting question. It definitely, I was about 11 or 12 and I picked up a copy of Agatha Christie or my parents picked up a copy of Agatha Christie's, one of her books. I can't remember which one. And I read it in a couple days and I finished it and I thought to myself, that's exactly what I want to do with the rest of my life. It did take me about 35 years to teach myself how to do that. So there were lots of starts and stops-starts in the process. There was a lot of self-doubt in the process and I just had to work through some of those things. As I went along through my merry life.
Terri Trespicio:
In Merry life, doing lots of things, and we'll get to some of what of those things are as well, because you've done a lot of things in addition to writing award winning books. But I've heard you say that you initially thought of your writing as a hobby. The word hobby interests me here only because why we refer to things as hobbies? We do it for different reasons. For some, it might be that it lowers the stakes enough, so that it's something fun. What it did it mean to you to have writing as a hobby?
Edwin Hill:
Oh, that is a great question because I arrived at that word midpoint in my journey to becoming a writer. And I think I used it as a way to distance myself from my dreams, which is, I'm only thinking of this right now as we're chatting about this. So I took writing very seriously, learning how to be a writer. I was terrible at it. I had a lot of false starts. Again, I was a big fan of Agatha Christie. So I wrote a lot of novels that were set in Manor houses that had people that said things like darling and stuff like that. And they were all terrible.
Terri Trespicio:
That's where you learned it.
Edwin Hill:
That's exactly right. And they'll never, ever see the light of day. But when I was in my mid twenties, I kind of started thinking that I wanted to be, I really wanted to make writing my career. And so I really started dedicating myself to it. Like I talked about it a lot. I told anyone who would listen to me that I was a writer.
Terri Trespicio:
Oh, really? Okay. That's interesting that you did not have a published book. You're in your twenties, you're writing a lot. You are writing though, in your own time.
Edwin Hill:
Yes, absolutely.
Terri Trespicio:
And you, when people ask you, you said I'm a writer, you identified as a writer.
Edwin Hill:
Yeah.
Terri Trespicio:
[crosstalk 00:04:49] And did it feel that real to you?
Edwin Hill:
Oh, it felt very real. And it felt like something, it both, I'd have to say it felt both real and something, it both very, very real and very tangible and something that completely impossible and out of reach at the same time. And I would sort of go between those two emotions quite a bit. I had a friend who wound up who I'm not going to name drop, but I had a friend who wound up who is my exact same age, we went to college together and he became very, very, very famous. And I remember right before he became famous we were walking around San Francisco together. And we were both basically saying we're writers. And I remember thinking to myself, he is going to make it.
And I just knew that he was going to make it. And I always wondered he'll never remember that moment, but I always wonder if in that moment he thought to himself, I'm going to make it. I know that I'm going to make it. It took me a while. It took me a lot longer to sort of get to a place where I really believed in my writing skills and believed that I could actually make it.
Terri Trespicio:
But back up. What made you think that? Was it You had just read a manuscript of his, you were walking down the street...
Edwin Hill:
Oh, no. It was just like [crosstalk 00:05:54]
Terri Trespicio:
He walk like a writer.
Edwin Hill:
No, it was, it was absolute confidence in the way he stated it.
Terri Trespicio:
Edwin you and I both know lots of confident people who are not great writers and who say they are confidence. Doesn't get you a book deal. Right?
Edwin Hill:
Oh, no, it sure doesn't.
Terri Trespicio:
But did saying, this is really key though, because a lot of people, here's why I say there's this complex at every look, I'm a writer too. We all suffered. It's like the Velveteen writer complex. Like someday I'll be real, but I'm not real yet. I've been telling my family, I wasn't real anything. There's a million things that we say. You said you were a writer, you believed it. And I think that is really important. Did you, when was the moment when you felt like it was really real?
Edwin Hill:
Oh, I had a couple of different places where I thought it was really real. So I graduated from Emerson in 2003. I got my MFA from, from Emerson and I actually finished a novel and I got an agent right out of after graduating.
Terri Trespicio:
Really? Wow! You're right off the gate.
Edwin Hill:
Well, but this is where the resilience comes in because I got an agent...
Terri Trespicio:
Okay.
Edwin Hill:
...fancy agent in New York. We shopped it around New York and it didn't sell. And it was a total, total bummer. I retreated from writing for maybe five, six years. And that's when I came back to writing in the late 2010s. That's when I started talking about it being a hobby. And I approached it in very different way. That second time around when I was going into writing. First of all, I did not talk about it with a lot of people. I really kept it to myself. It's something that I was very focused on my day job. My other career at that point, I very much wanted to keep it private. I wanted to keep it something that I was doing on my own. And I wanted to test and see whether I was actually able to make, make a go of it. And it took me a couple of years to finish a manuscript and start shopping that one around again. And that whole time I was quiet. I was very secretive about it. And when I did finally sell that novel, it was quite a surprise to a lot of people.
Terri Trespicio:
Isn't that so fascinating. You were saying, I'm doing this, you had the confidence, you had the wherewithal and you put in serious investment of time and resources into your education, getting an MFA to Emerson. And then you get the agent out of the gate. You have I assume it's fiction. You had to have the full manuscript to get the agent to shop it around. They're shopping it, they're shopping it. And it kind of dies on the vine a little bit. You know, it doesn't go anywhere. And the agent says, what says, Hey, you need to do some changes to it. Let's try it again. Or, Hey, let's take a break. How did that what happens then?
Edwin Hill:
At that, oh gosh, there was a lot going on. So one thing was, gosh I could sit in a psychology chair for hours and talk about this, but a lot of it had to do with myself, the age, there are all different flavors of agents out there. And agents will oftentimes stick with you for a project for a long time. They'll give you lots of edits. They'll help you maneuver through the process of creating a product that's saleable. And I actually think this agent would've stuck with me, but I didn't have the wherewithal to stick with it at the time I felt like I had pushed that manuscript as far as I could. And I didn't...
Terri Trespicio:
You ran out of gas.
Edwin Hill:
...do with it. I did ran out of gas and unfortunately I also ran out of money and I got a great, honestly, I got a terrific opportunity. I got a job working in publishing in college publishing. And I focused on that. And I think that in life, you always need to focus. And the fact of the matter is that that point in my life, I needed to be making money.
Terri Trespicio:
Yeah.
Edwin Hill:
I needed to be focusing on building a career where I made money and publishing was a really good place for me to do that. I did that for 20 years. I was extremely successful. I wound up being the editorial director, the vice president editorial director at a division of McMillan. And I needed to go through that process in order to get to the place where I am now, where I have my fourth book coming out next year.
Terri Trespicio:
I know this is so fascinating because writers go one of two ways. They're either going to continue to bartend as a revise and revise and revise and in a kind of place of not earning enough really, but just I'm going to be a starving artist kind of thing. And then there are people who go into the business of publishing to be close. Look it maybe right now that novel's not happening, you're going to rework it. You'll try something different. You need to take a break, right? Novel is not factory work. And you decided to kind of apprentice yourself and turn your focus in another direction. Where you were still close to the word you're still in the business of word. And yes it's very impressive that you are let me say that again, VP and editorial director for Bedford St. Martin's a division of McMillan. You were a high ranking exec in publishing. You certainly didn't do that overnight. You said you were there for that career was a 20 year career.
Edwin Hill:
Yeah, almost 20 years. I mean...
Terri Trespicio:
Wow!
Edwin Hill:
...and let's be honest here. It's not like I came up with this path and went through it. I mean, there are many steps along the way where I was lucky I was in the right place at the right time. Or I had to make a decision at the time based on where I was financially. But you know, it did all work out in the long run, which was great.
Terri Trespicio:
Well, right. But you did even just said it, it, there always is a little luck involved somewhere. I say this Edwin, because yeah, it's lucky when you meet the right person at the right time, the right opportunities there, but you took it. You didn't take the job as director from out of the gate, but you started to work in that industry and had a career and you need to make living. Right? What did you learn in a career in publishing where you are working with making some kind of saleable product to some kind of client, how did that give you perspective on the business of writing? Did it, or was it like, no, I turned off that part of my brain. I went back to it later.
Edwin Hill:
Oh, no, gosh. I use that part of my brain all the time. I think one of the things that as an author, when you come into it for traditional publishing, when you're working with a traditional publisher, as I do as an author, one of the things that it's really important to remember is that you are working within a business, an actual business.
Terri Trespicio:
Yes.
Edwin Hill:
And the people who you work with are responsible to their investors. They all have to turn a profit. And so when you're having a conversation with your editor, your editor also deals with dreams, right? Like I'm an author and I have dreams and my editors dealing with my dreams. And so when I'm having a conversation with him, a good editor will understand both that you're dealing with an author stream, but there, you're also dealing with the nuts and bolts of running a business and the fact that you have to deliver a profit.
Terri Trespicio:
Oh.
Edwin Hill:
And if the author can come into that conversation, understand that as well. That's super, super helpful. I also wonder, I also know all the, every piece of the book making process, which is a complicated process. And so just knowing what goes into making a book and the time commitment that goes into making a book, I think that's really helpful too. Because when you're working with a publisher, it can be frustrating because you hand over a manuscript, it takes a year for the book to come out. You are like, what are you doing with all that, that, that time. But I actually know what they're doing with all that time.
Terri Trespicio:
Right. Because we think it is, writer writes book, hands it to someone, they fall in love, we're committed to you, we make your dreams come true. Like meanwhile, I said writing isn't factory work, but publishing is factory work. They have to put a thing through and make sure it holds up. And all the other things has to make the money. I'm curious if it made you sympathetic to the process and to editors and the whole thing or cynical of it being like it's just a business. I just have to do something that will sell. I just
Edwin Hill:
I'm a very pragmatic person. And so one of the things I always tell my students, I always tell my fellow writing colleagues is that editors, agents, all of these people that you're working with, as you are trying to create your product, they're all professionals, they're all busy professional people. And the more you can have a relationship with them where you're respecting that sense of professionalism, the better your relationship's going to be in the long run. And so I always, I treat everything, every conversation very seriously. And I also try to be as brief as possible because I know they're busy and they've got other authors that they need to talk with. So I try and move through whatever the business is as quickly as possible.
Terri Trespicio:
They're trying to connect the dots and, and we need to recognize that so that we're a good client essentially, or whatever. Like we need to hold up our end. Like I just went through this process for the first time myself and I was like, I just want to be good and compliant and make sure everyone's happy. Because if you create what you don't want to be is the author who's a problem.
Edwin Hill:
That is exactly right. Yep.
Terri Trespicio:
Now you have to talk to me though about the day now you have, you're a seasoned veteran of the publishing industry. There's a day when you go, okay, that's enough. And you left. I mean, that's a big decision and I'm sure there are lots of factors. So there's two parts to that. When did you decide? And also you said, now you're going to, have you been working on a novel this whole time and you're ready to come out with it. What's that look like?Edwin Hill: Well, I'd already, I'd published my first book and I'd finished my second book and...
Terri Trespicio:
You were still working.
Edwin Hill:
I was still working full-time and my first...
Terri Trespicio:
You did both. It can be done.
Edwin Hill:
Oh yeah, I did for quite some time. So I worked on my first book for many years. As most people work on their first books for many years and it took a while to sell and it took a while for it to publish. And...
Terri Trespicio:
Did you have like a little PTSD there? Were you like, oh God, this is going to happen again. Like they're not going to buy it like that fear.
Edwin Hill:
Oh sure. I had a little PTSD. We could go into that as well. So it took a while for it to sell. And then I had a contract for second book. Nobody knew, like people knew I had sold the first book, but they didn't really know. And so there wasn't a lot of attention. So I kind of, I worked on that one while I was still working and managed to finish it. Then I had a contract for a third book and at that point I was getting to a place where I really just had to choose. I mean I had a very big job. It took a lot of time. I had lots of people reporting to me, lots of pressure. And I could either finish this third book or I could continue working at McMillan. I couldn't do both anymore. And so I ultimately decided that I wanted to try to keep writing and try to be a professional writer for a while.
Terri Trespicio:
It's bold though. Right? It's a bold move.
Edwin Hill:
Oh, it was as scary as can be.
Terri Trespicio:
You didn't breeze out and go, I guess I'm going to be a novelist now. Like it's just, this is the dream.
Edwin Hill:
Oh yeah. Well and you know, eventually you have to make choices in life. Right? And so I made a choice and I'm excited about it. I also will quote someone who I always quote, when I talk about this choice, if you make a bad decision, just make another one, make another one. So if it turns out that this decision that I made was a bad one, I'm just going to make another one.
Terri Trespicio:
Right. You're right. It wasn't running off a cliff here. You had been doing it. But what my, I want to back up for a sec because you had written a book publish it. You had finished a second book. What was it about the third one that was like, this is too much. Is it that the effort of writing the book or was it that a launch? We know a launch takes a lot of time and attention. What was that breaking point when? Because you're you're right. That is the breaking. When you go, I either have to choose now. Now I'm not going to go try to be a novelist. You already were.
Edwin Hill:
Well, I think what happened....
Terri Trespicio:
What was the thing?
Edwin Hill:
I had finished the second novel before the first one came out, I'd finished the entire manuscript for the second.
Terri Trespicio:
Wow! That is productive.
Edwin Hill:
So once the first book came out and I had to do a lot of publicity for it and I had to have sort of this public life and manage everything. It's not like I'm that famous but...
Terri Trespicio:
Still a lot of work.
Edwin Hill:
I did have to have a public piece my life. Once I sort of had to focus in on that a little bit. And it sort of became real. It actually became too much to do the work, the publicity and then the getting up at 5:00 AM every morning to write the novel. And I started giving, I started not doing the waking up at 5:00 AM to write that third novel. And once I had not done that for three, four months, and there was no manuscript being produced. That's.When I knew I had to make a make a choice.
Terri Trespicio:
Now you've written several critically claimed books. Three that little comfort, the missing ones and watch her. The fourth one is coming out.
Edwin Hill:
Fourth one comes out in April, it's called the secret we share.
Terri Trespicio:
You've won awards. You've been splashing across the pages of us weekly. This is like every writer's dream. To have their work seen, acknowledged and praised. Can you tell us now you've run the whole gamut. Right? Went from the beginning. No one even will touch it to now you're selling books and doing all this. Tell us what does that kind of attention do for the writer and what does it not do?
Edwin Hill:
Oh, I mean, this is what I'll say about, I am shocked anytime anyone reads any single thing that I wrote.
Terri Trespicio:
Still?
Edwin Hill:
Yeah. Still shocked. And I'm grateful. I'm grateful for any reader who drops me a note, who talks me at a conference and says I enjoyed your work. And what it does is it makes me want to do even better. And I also, I like to listen to criticism that you get and see if you can, if you can improve as a writer, improve as a storyteller and it makes you want to achieve more. I think that for me, at least.
Terri Trespicio:
But that's the best possible thing because it's making, it's like rising tide, right? Like you want to keep doing better because you know that there are more people than like it than don't or you wouldn't have a job. But then the flip side of that is if you, every writer who dreams of having their work seen, if you're going to have your work scene, not everyone's going to love it. And so of course, a questions authors are often asked is like, well, how do you do with, I won't say rejection necessarily, but the ongoing criticism, the ongoing public gnawing away of work. Now on one side, if no one sees it, no one's going to criticize it. But also it's sort of part of the world we live in. Does that have an under toe on how, on your process on any of that? Or are you like meh, I don't read it.
Edwin Hill:
Oh gosh, no, I read it. This...
Terri Trespicio:
You do. You're reading the comments. What is this? Even?
Edwin Hill:
No I read this and I read it and it's no one likes to be criticized, but it is part of what you sign up for when you, when you decide to become, put something out for the public to see. Once you put work out there, it's no longer yours. It's other people's to comment on.
Terri Trespicio:
Yes.
Edwin Hill:
Sure. I would love it. You know, I would love it if people didn't write nasty, goodreads reviews. I would love that in general. I would love if there was more kindness out there in the world. But the fact of the matter is we live in a world where everyone is a critic now. And that's part of what you sign up for when you decide to do something like this. And you can be really mindful about filtering things out, but you also learn things from people who don't like things, or you can say to yourself, guess what? This book wasn't for you. And I'm going to continue to do exactly what I'm doing, because I know it was for some people.
Terri Trespicio:
Right. If you're trying to please everyone, you will not create any kind of art.
Edwin Hill:
Absolutely not.
Terri Trespicio:
And not how that happens. And the fact that people don't like it, isn't it. If it's their work too, if they get to have it, now you've put it in the world. It's really none of your business, what they think.
Edwin Hill:
Yep.
Terri Trespicio:
And the people who loved it, they just loved it. Maybe they didn't go, I don't think I've ever written a review on goodreads. And I love a lot of books. Right?
Edwin Hill:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Terri Trespicio:
So it's something I think about. I want to talk about Emerson for a second because well, you and I both graduated with our masters. MFA at Emerson college. I know what it gives us all insight and craft tools and all those things. But I want to know from you, can you speak about, look no one needs an MFA to write a book, just go write a book. People who decide to do this. First of all, it's not guarantee that you're going to breeze out with any like Edwin Hill, but at the same time, there's a reason why people do decide to invest in that. What was your reason and what do you think it did for your own craft?
Edwin Hill:
Oh, sure. I would say there are a couple reasons. I wanted the structure of what an MFA can provide. So I wanted the structure of both my fellow students, the students that I worked with in workshop, but also the mentorships that comes from the faculty in the program. I also, I think what Emerson gave to me that I don't know that I knew I needed when I came in, but I definitely had it when I left is it instilled some self confidence in me. What I had struggled, I entered my MFA program when I was about 30 and I, what I'd struggled with as a writer up until then was confidence in finishing.
I think that's one of the most challenging things to do with, especially with long form fiction with, with writing novels, you can get caught in that murky middle. You can doubt your ending a lot. There are so many places where you can get caught in long form fiction. And so I needed that mentorship. I needed that companionship for my fellow students in order to bolster that self confidence and get through to the end of a long form piece of fiction.
Terri Trespicio:
It's the whole collegial thing. I mean, we write alone, but this is why writers need community. Right. Why we need mentorship and now you teach there.
Edwin Hill:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Terri Trespicio:
Yeah. Right?
Edwin Hill:
Yes.
Terri Trespicio:
Tell us a little bit about what you teach.
Edwin Hill:
Well, I teach both undergrads in the writing program at Emerson and I also teach in the popular fiction MFA program, which is a new it's a few years old, online MFA program. Which is great is for genre fiction, which is what I write. And what I love about that program in particular is that we have people literally from all over the world who are coming in. I was nervous about teaching online, but it turns out that it's an awesome way of connecting with people. And it's an awesome way of sort of sharing work from so many different backgrounds from so many different places. And I've really just thoroughly enjoyed participating in that program.
Terri Trespicio:
Let me ask you this, you were drawn, a lot of writers teach, but were you drawn to teach because it was part of what you imagined like that lifestyle you wanted to spend your time doing something besides writing on your own. Was that why you wanted to teach? Or what else drew you to it?
Edwin Hill:
Oh, I like [crosstalk 00:24:46] teaching for this. For that very reason that you're saying writing is very solitary. I mean, you are about yourself all the time, except for you're with your imaginary friends, of course. And your imaginary friends can start to really annoy you after a while. And so teaching is awesome. It's a really great way of connecting with people. I love how intense MFA courses are and how you really get to know people in those courses. And it's a great way of just having some human interaction. I love to teach too. I mean, I love to see people progress in their writing and I love to really be able to help people sort of realize their dreams, realize where they want to go with their craft.
Terri Trespicio:
If there's something you could set the records straight for all writers. This is something that you keep thinking, and this is holding you back.
Edwin Hill:
What I say a lot to writers is there are lots of, everyone has a toolbox. Every writer has a toolbox and there you'll get various tools from different people and you can put those in that toolbox and you can pull them out as you need them, but you have to decide which of those tool are useful to you versus which ones you never touch.
And so one of the things that I really emphasize with my students is you'll get a lot of advice from people about writing. And there are often absolutes. Always do this, never do that, and never include prologue in your novel. Always write in the third person. What I encourage students to do is take that absolute verb. Always never, and replace it with consider. So consider don't not using a prologue. Consider writing in the third person. And then see if you want to break that rule that just been presented to you.
Terri Trespicio:
You really are pragmatist. It's so funny.
Edwin Hill:
Absolutely.
Terri Trespicio:
When you think it you're just so it's very refreshing because if it were too mystical and we believed that only a few people were just blessed with this skill. Number one, why have a program? It would be misleading. And also the risk of over romanticizing the novelist's life and the practice of writing does no service to any writers at all. And even what you just said of you have a toolkit, you're going to use this. They say it never use it. Well consider using or not using it or try it and see if it works like this is to me, no different than plumbing. Like plumbing's a real skill. And the goal is always make sure the water gets from one end to the other.
Edwin Hill:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Terri Trespicio:
Make sure fluid goes through. And the same, I imagine with the way you do it, I imagine that your students are very lucky because they don't [inaudible 00:27:25] I guess I don't have it. Well, that's just not helpful, Right?
Edwin Hill:
No, not at all. And writing is a skill. You're absolutely right. Writing is a skill and writing is a skill that anyone can improve at. Anyone can learn and it's just showing up. And I'd actually going back to your question about why do an MFA? I was a much better writer at the end of my MFA than I was at the beginning of my MFA. And that is a testament to the instructors and the students that I worked with. But it's also a testament to showing up and actually practicing the skill. Because like any skill, the more you do it, the better you get
Terri Trespicio:
They can't teach you to write though, right? Like you came and you were a 30 year old man. You knew how to write and people can't come in there going, someone's going to teach me to be a novelist. You're saying that's not what happened though, that you were, you like the structure and you were forced to show up, but you have to do the work.
Edwin Hill:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's the thing about writing. I mean, ultimately you have to sit down and you have to sit down and do the work every time you're going to have...
Terri Trespicio:
To do it. There's no way around that.
Edwin Hill:
Yep. [crosstalk 00:28:31] I will tell you, after that the other day I'm working on a new novel right now and I had, this is my favorite type of writing day. I sat down I knew I looked at this, the book and I thought there's a missing chapter here. And I have no idea what should be in that chapter. And at the end of two days, the chapter existed and it was really good. Or at least I think it was, I have to go back and reread it and decide it actually really was really good. But I had something where, whereas I had nothing, I didn't even have an idea for what it should be. Two days later, I somehow managed to get something on the page that I think is going to help with with this overall novel. And that's really the exciting part of the novel. And if you sit down at your computer or you don't sit down at your computer and you don't work through the frustration of those two days, you'll never have that chapter.
Terri Trespicio:
And you didn't sit and try to figure out. This figuring it out before you write it. It sounds like you did what a pragmatist is. You write into it and you had to do it.
Edwin Hill:
Yes. Exactly.
Terri Trespicio:
But you know, there's no way around it. There's only through. And so you show up and you do it and you discover it. And every time there is a mystery that you can get at with a hammer. And that is, that is the lesson. And when is, you said the new book is out in April?
Edwin Hill:
Yep. The new book comes out in April. It's called The secrets we share. And my last book was called Watcher.
Terri Trespicio:
So keep an eye out for Edwin Hill. My last question for you is what does it mean to you to make it as a writer and how will you know when you've gotten there?
Edwin Hill:
Oh, I will say this is the pragmatist in me. To make it for me to make it as a writer I think there is something about making it in on a financial level. So like making it into a job...
Terri Trespicio:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Edwin Hill:
...Where I'm doing it, where this is, this is how I support myself. But there's so many other aspects of it too, making it as connecting to readers and connecting to other writers and connecting to students in when I'm teaching at Emerson, I think it is creating something that makes people, writing something, creating something that helps people think in some way, think differently about something and makes them feel like they've been moved by the time they've finished the novel that they're reading.
Terri Trespicio:
Fantastic. Edwin, thank you so much.
Edwin Hill:
Oh, thank you. This was awesome. Thanks so much for having me
Terri Trespicio:
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