"You think you just have a handle of publishing and then it rips the carpet out from under you"

Bestselling author Bianca Marais on navigating an editor switch, making a one-way medium interactive, and her witty and original mystery, A MOST PUZZLING MURDER

Hi, friends! Before we dive into today’s delicious convo with

Bianca Marais

, some news: I’ve been cooking up something exciting with my friend

Gretchen Schreiber

, the author of such delightful YA novels as ELLIE HAYCOCK IS TOTALLY NORMAL and ALL THE STARS ALIGN. She also works for one of the major book clubs by day and knows so much about publishing, it’s almost frightening. Make sure you’re subscribed to both our newsletters so you don’t miss the announcement next week!

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 Bianca’s clever new mystery, available now.

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Me: Hello!

Bianca: Hi!

How are you? Huge congrats on your BESTSELLING new book!

Thank you so much!! The universe threw me a celebration party by flooding our apartment from an AC unit, and then flooding a few of the apartments below us yesterday! The universe is a bitch. LOL.

How are you?

Gahhh, always a rollercoaster! I'm sorry to hear it!

Right?! Lots of rollercoaster! But I'm still over the moon!

As you should be!

I'm doing well—summer is flying by, isn't it? Which is all the more reason I want to be mindful of your time: For the uninitiated, can you share what A MOST PUZZLING MURDER is about?

Absolutely. It's a bit of GLASS ONION meets SUCCESSION meets CLUE with a major soap opera vibe! Oh, and a magical royal family who's fighting for the crown. Our MC, Destiny Whip, is a recluse enigmatologist who gets a mysterious letter which contains a hidden message in it inviting her to Eerie Island to unlock the secrets of her past. The book is filled with puzzles for the reader to solve, Choose Your Own Conundrum chapters, and you can email the main character for clues!

I LOVE how you took a fairly static, one-way medium and turned it into something interactive. What gave you the idea?

Thank you so much! I remembered wanting to live inside books when I was a child. That whole vibe where you wanted to be the main character and go on those adventures. And I wanted to see if I could recreate that for adults who are nostalgic for the same experience.

Also, I feel like we're losing our critical thinking skills which is terrifying, so I wanted to write a book that would force readers to engage with it and really think everything through.

Okay, we MUST dive into both of those reasons because they're so juicy! First: I TOTALLY know what you mean about living inside books as a child. How did you decide THIS was the book to recreate that feeling? (Vs, like, writing kidlit like the stuff you once loved?) And how did you go about shaping a narrative around the goal?