The Black List recently announced the seven winners of its inaugural Unpublished Novel Award, introducing the world to seven writers across various genres from children’s and young adult fiction to adult crime, horror, and literary fiction.
Debutiful recently chatted with all seven winners and is excited to introduce the world to each writer, discover why and how they write, and learn more about the book that won them the award.
Meet Roz Ray, winner of the Crime & Mystery award for her manuscript, Us Honest Crooks. She was born and raised in Seattle and received an MFA from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. Ray has spent years teaching writing to K-12 students and at universities and is in the process of becoming a certified Wired for Reading specialist.
We asked Ray to give readers a brief insight into her writing life and her Unpublished Novel Award-winning manuscript, Us Honest Crooks.
Can you introduce readers to who you are as a writer and what interests and informs your writing?
With anything I write, I’m always trying to hit a couple of things I love, which means any novel you see from me is going to be some combination of mystery, crime, historical, or speculative fiction. I like blending genres, and I like sitting in that sweet spot in between commercial and literary fiction. When people ask me what I like to read or watch, I want a story that’s firing on all cylinders. I want characters with depth and nuance, I want beautiful prose, but I also need the plot structure to be sound and I want somebody to blow something up, you know?
As far as what informs my writing, there are a few aspects of my life that I see converging in my work. I was a history major in college, and took a ton of biology and chemistry classes, so I’m usually writing something in a historical period and there’s often some kind of science aspect to it.
I gravitate towards characters with a lot of physicality to them. My dad’s a contractor, my mom’s an artist and a teacher, my sister’s a tattoo artist, my partner’s a painter and a luthier, so my people are always doin’ stuff. When I’m not writing or teaching, I’m remodeling houses with my dad, so it feels natural to write a character who works with their hands.
I grew up reading JRR Tolkien and Patricia C. Wrede, and these days I’m reading a lot of Tana French and Stephen King and Colson Whitehead. Somewhere in between all those writers is a claim I’m trying to stake.
The announcement over at Lit Hub gave a quick preview of what your book is, but I always like to ask the writer what their book is really about. So, what’s your book?
When I describe Us Honest Crooks to somebody, I usually say that it’s a book for someone looking for the grit and nuance of Tana French writing a season of Peaky Blinders. Underneath that, the book is really about becoming unbound. It’s someone stepping into their own and becoming the person they want to be, in spite of headwinds in every direction. In that way, it’s a pretty accurate representation of my headspace at the time I was writing it. This is my third manuscript. My first got very close to publication—seven acquisitions editors tried to get it through their editorial boards, to no avail—then I turned around and face-planted hard with my second manuscript. So starting Us Honest Crooks, I was feeling stymied but was also—can I curse here? You can bleep it—in a pretty fuck-you mood. The working title of the novel was Queen of the Fucking Hill (it’s okay if you bleep that too). The book itself isn’t quite punk-rock enough for that title—Us Honest Crooks is a better fit—but that’s the mood I was in and the tone I was going for.
How did this story come to be? What were the highs and lows (so far) of writing it?
This is maybe a weird thing to say, but I’m constantly trying to convince myself that I’m cool enough to write the book I want to write. As I said, when I started Us Honest Crooks, I was still picking myself up after a fairly disastrous draft of a different manuscript, so when I started this thing, I was pretty skittish. It took a lot of time and a lot of tiny successes to build momentum back up and start taking big swings. I had to get to a place where I trusted my own judgment again, which took showing up to the page again and again.
As far as the project itself, I knew I wanted to write a crime novel, I wanted it to have something to do with bootlegging in Seattle, and I knew I wanted there to be car chases and action scenes. I learned a lot about the Seattle bootlegging scene in the teens and twenties, and I also spent 18 months learning how to box. If nothing else comes from this book, I’ll take the joy of hitting the heavy bag a few times a week as a win.
What has this Award opened for you? Where are you in your journey now?
I’m in the querying trenches! The Black List award was wonderful, unexpected wind in the sails, and hopefully over the long term it will get more eyes on the project. For now, I’m still sending out queries and trying to find representation for this thing. And of course, while I do that, I’m working on the next thing.
What can we expect from you in the future?
I’m tag-teaming two different projects right now, which is something I’ve never done before but we’ll see how it goes! I’m writing a soft sequel to Us Honest Crooks, which follows a new protagonist but has a lot of characters in common. It’s a mystery, it takes place a couple years after WWI, with a lot of broken people who are trying to find redemption in all the wrong ways. I’m learning a ton about chemical warfare during the Great War, and basically re-teaching myself all the chemistry I’d forgotten since college. The other project I’m working on, which ambushed me out of the blue, is a survive-the-night horror novel set in a fictional small town on the Washington Coast, in 1999. Half the town turns into monsters and a group of teenagers has to stay alive long enough to figure out what the hell’s going on. It’s a lot of fun, not least because I’m already a subject matter expert, having myself survived high school in the year 1999 (I’ll admit the monsters at my high school did look different than the ones I’m writing about).