"It's okay to let go of the wheel, because it turns out you don't have that much control over the direction anyway."

Bestselling author Ashley Winstead on writing through grief, thinking like an amateur sleuth, and her unputdownable new thriller, THIS BOOK WILL BURY ME

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 Ashley’s latest page-turner, available now.

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Me: Ashley, hi!

Ashley: Hi, I'm so sorry!! I didn't see the request

But I'm here!!

Okay, no problem!

I'm also a dummy who put it in my calendar for 11 CT, not ET

oh no! are you still cool to talk now?

oh totally! Just making a great first impression

lol well we are all about showing up as our imperfect selves here at Get It Write

Thanks for chatting with me, and huge congrats on THIS BOOK WILL BURY ME!

Thank you so much for having me! I love reading these interviews so it's a joy to get to talk to you!

Yay! How are you feeling post-launch?

I'm feeling pretty great, actually. This launch has been a little different because we're spreading out events throughout March and April, a little in May. So it's not that rush of commotion and noise and then silence, which is always so weird in a normal book launch. It feels like a steady drip of activity, which is nice

And I'm up to my elbows in drafting my next thriller, so that's always such a good escape and way to diversify your emotions, isn't it?

Yes, working on the next project is ALWAYS the key to your sanity. That's so interesting you're spreading it out, was that a conscious decision on your/your publisher's part?

I actually don't know if it was on my publisher's part -- either that or that just happened to be how the scheduling chips fell. But it has been such a healthy and gratifying way to launch that I'm learning lessons!

Pub day and the day or two surrounding it are like drinking from a firehose, just running around trying to do things and read posts and thank people and talk about the book--I never feel like I'm doing any of those things as well as I can, all compressed. Spacing it out is lovely!

That makes a ton of sense!

The bane of my existence is IG Stories disappearing after 24 hours...I feel so guilty when I don't catch them in time. Do you?

Sorry that might seem like it came out of left field, but just thinking about trying to catch all the messages around pub week

Hmm I hate missing them but also...if I tag an author and they don't reply, I truly never notice or mind or take it personally? So I'm sure no one's ticked off!

I'm the exact same way -- I don't notice when I'm the tagger, but feel immense guilt when the taggee...something for my therapist, I guess!

Haha, I promise you are not the only author that feels this way.

We can get more into our psyches soon, but to start, can you share a bit about the book?

Absolutely! THIS BOOK WILL BURY ME is a thriller about a young woman named Jane Sharp who becomes obsessed with true crime and amateur sleuthing following the unexpected death of her father. She transmutes all of her guilt and unanswered questions about her dad into a fixation on other people's tragedies and trying to help them. She finds community and even found family there in a group of sleuths she becomes close to, but when a huge case breaks that gets the world's attention, Jane and her friends, in their hubris, decide they have to be the ones to solve it, come what may...and what comes is a lot of danger and complicity, all while the world watches

So fresh and modern! Where'd the idea come from?

Thank you. This one is a bit different in that more than any other book, it came directly from my own life. Following my dad's passing, I became obsessed with true crime for the first time, and then when I started to piece together that it might be my grief and deep-seated desire for answers to really hard questions that was driving me toward true crime, I knew I wanted to write about that intersection. So the initial premise at least comes from somewhere really close to home.

Wow, that's such a powerful insight, and I'm so sorry for your loss. Was working on this book ultimately cathartic in some way? (Like, do you find yourself less true-crime obsessed now?)