"As she left I had this crazy thought: What if it was a set-up?"

Bestselling author Sophie Stava on following her "weirdo mind", going to auction after 75+ rejections, and her twisty thriller, COUNT MY LIES

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Sophie’s buzzy debut, available now.

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Me: Sophie, hi!

Sophie: Hi, Andi!

Huge congrats on COUNT MY LIES! How are you feeling?

Thank you! In general, things are great! This morning, I'm tired lol. A lot of the post-debut hubbub has died down, so back to the daily grind of editing and new projects (and mom stuff, always mom stuff!) 🙂

It's always bittersweet but a relief when things slow down, right?

It's funny because a lot of people are like, god, you must be SO busy, and I'm like, um, not that busy? Even at the height of it, it felt manageable - as a debut, I didn't have a multi-city book tour or an intensive interview schedule, so when people asked 'can you fit x in,' my answer was almost always yes!

But my 'work day' still feels busy - is there ever enough time in the day to write and edit and read everything you want to?!

Did your pub days/weeks get busier with each book you published?

I hear you—the days around publication aren't actually THAT busy, there's just this thrumming nervous energy underpinning every hour

Ohhh, yes. And THAT is a relief when that subsides!

It's been different each time, though! Busier for some books than others.

But before we go too far—can you share what your debut is about?

Yes! COUNT MY LIES is about Sloane, a self-admitted compulsive liar, who turns a chance encounter (she sees a little girl get stung by a bee in the park and tells the girl's dad she's a nurse) into the opportunity to become a nanny for a wealthy Brooklyn family - only to discover that they're hiding darker secrets than she is. . .

I love an unreliable narrator, and this is such a fun twist on that! Where'd the idea come from?

Yes! And one of the things that I tried to be intentional about is that even though Sloane lies to the other characters in the book - she's not lying to the readers; I really wanted to feel that you were along for her ride and she wasn't lying to YOU.

The idea came from a chance encounter that I had a few years ago!

My kids were really little, my daughter was 4 months old and my son was 2.5, and we always went to the same park each day around the same time. It was just as Covid was ending so the park was usually empty, but one morning there was a woman I'd never seen before, also with 2 kids around the same ages.

[crunching on popcorn...]