Sascha Rothchild, Deb Rogers & Virginia Hartman: A Conversation

Deb Rogers has been a blogger, a statewide policymaker, and a nationally recognized victim advocate. As a freelance writer and business development consultant, she has worked on projects such as expanding the Listen to Your Mother Show storytelling series and a pop culture vertical for BlogHer. She has traveled from Pensacola to Key West to improve the state’s response to violent crime and spent five years in the woods as a wilderness school teacher in Crescent City. In her debut novel, Florida Woman: A Novel (Hanover Square Press), readers meet Jamie. She grew up on the beach, thrives in humidity, has weathered countless hurricanes, and now, after going viral for an outrageous crime she never meant to commit, she’s a lurid headline. Her chance to escape infamy and imminent jail time is community service at Atlas, a shelter for rescued monkeys, which seems like just the fresh start Jamie needs – until it’s not. Something sinister stirs in the woods, secrets lurk among the women who run the shelter, and her summer is ready to inspire an even stranger Florida headline than she ever could have imagined.

Sascha Rothchild is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter who has written and produced shows such as G.L.O.W., The Bold Type, The Baby-Sitters Club, and The Carrie Diaries. Rothchild has written for L.A. Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, and the Miami Herald. In Blood Sugar: A Novel (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), Ruby may be a murderer – a three-time murderer, to be exact – but she is not a sociopath. She is an animal-loving therapist with a thriving practice. She’s felt empathy and sympathy. She’s had friendships and relationships. And she adores her husband, Jason. But when Jason is murdered, the homicide detectives at Miami Beach P.D. have questions. When we meet Ruby, she’s in a police interrogation room. This is one murder she did not commit – although a scandal-obsessed public believes differently. As she undergoes questioning, Ruby’s mind races back to details of her life that led her to this moment and the dead bodies in her wake. After all, though she may not have killed her husband, Ruby certainly isn’t innocent. Alternating between Ruby’s memories of her past crimes and her present-day fight to clear her name, Blood Sugar is an addicting mixture of sour and sweet.

Virginia Hartman has an MFA in creative writing from American University and is on the faculty at George Washington University. In The Marsh Queen (Gallery Books), her first novel, Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother, Ruth, recover after an accident, Loni’s neat, contained life in Washington, D.C., is thrown into chaos. Soon, she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be. Going through her mother’s things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forget – a childhood marked by her father Boyd’s death by drowning and her mother’s persistent bad mood. When Loni finds a cryptic note from a stranger – “There are some things I have to tell you about Boyd’s death” – it sets her on a dangerous quest to discover the truth. Caught between her professional life in Washington and the small town of her childhood, Loni must decide whether to delve into murky half-truths and avenge the past or bury it, once and for all.