I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ali from Reading at Eventide, a fiction-focused bookstagram account. She asked wonderful questions and was gracious enough to allow me to share those questions and answers with you.
Make sure to check out her account, especially if you prefer romance, historical fiction, or young adult!
Reading at Eventide: What do you hope readers take away from your book? What was your goal in writing it?
J. J. Hanna: Since 2018, I’ve been captured by the idea of sonder. This idea—that every person we meet is living their own deeply vibrant life in which they are the main character—heavily impacted how I think about the world. If only for a moment, I hope people realize that no matter how hard things can get or how alone they might feel they are not as alone as they seem. And I hope that comforts them.
RaE: What kind of reader would love The Regulars of Amanda Lexie?
JJH: I wrote this book as a love letter to baristas and comedic crime fiction. I hope the people who love stories of capers and heists and double lives will find this book, and I hope they share it with their coffee-loving friends.
RaE: Which character was easiest to write? Which was the hardest?
JJH: This book has, ultimately, six different character viewpoints. Of those six, I had the most fun writing, Adam—he’s grumpy, exhausted, caffeine dependent and in deeper with some bad people than he’d like to admit. For the prevalence of her role, Lucielle was actually the hardest. She was the character with both the most power and the most limitations, so navigating what she can and cannot do and when she could or could not do it was quite a challenge. Plus, putting the reader deeply into her life—as someone married to the job—was challenging because her job has the most obscurity. Research for her role was also quite complicated, which slowed the process down considerably.
RaE: What draws you to the crime/thriller genre? Do you usually write “cozy” books?
JJH: I have loved crime fiction since I was a child. Maybe it was the influence of big pop culture titles like Star Wars or vigilante stories like Arrow, but I grew up watching mystery shows with my family. Monk and Bones were on a lot in my high school years and I’m quite fond of the genre.
I think there’s something especially validating about bad people being brought to justice. I find the tension between stopping a bad person at any cost and the confines of staying within the law to be a very intriguing character dilemma.
I would not say that most of my work is cozy—this is the lightest work I’ve ever written. But I do try to be conscious of my readers. I want to create something that you, your mom, and your teen feel good about reading, even if it’s written for adult audiences, and that you don’t need to worry about leaving where your elementary school kids will see it. It may not be written for them, but I want them to be safe around it.
RaE: How did you come up with the idea for a crime story set largely in a coffee shop and drive-through?
JJH: When I was working as a barista I had a lot of time to daydream. I’ve always had an active imagination, and my favorite genre is crime fiction. So my thoughts flowed rather naturally from, “I wonder what my customer’s lives are like?” to “That man is so nice, I bet he would make a heck of a crime lord.” And it really developed from there. My customers always surprised me. So while these characters are not a depiction of anyone alive or dead—this is, in fact, a work of fiction—they are largely inspired by the wandering daydreams my mind took while I served customers day in and day out in the drive-through.
RaE: The book is dedicated to baristas– can you explain more about that?
JJH: Dedications are a fun and uniquely personal touch in a book. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about who the book would be dedicated to. There are old “rules” that your first book ought to be dedicated to your mom (sorry Mom!) and your second to your spouse (I’m still covered there). But the more I thought about it, the more I had to pay homage to the people who helped me carve out time in my life to write—the baristas who inspired me, greeted me, and kept me caffeinated while I wrote the day away in the corner of a local coffee shop.
RaE: The Regulars of Amanda Lexie has several point of view narrators—how did you differentiate each character’s voice?
JJH: Each character popped up nearly fully formed. I could see them and hear them. They each had their identifiable quirks—things that informed how I wrote them. I think it also helped that when I was drafting this I had “cool down” periods between each chapter. No one character’s voice was too present when I began writing for the day, so each day I came into their story with fresh ears. And then, when all was said and done, I read their stories aloud and I was able to fine tune their actual voices. Wherever I gave them more quirks in my verbal rendition of the chapter, I worked to write those back in. All in all I spent a lot of time with these characters and I let them choose how they were presented. I’m sure that sounds a little insane, but I’m glad to share my “imaginary friends” with you in this book.
RaE: What made you choose Amanda Lexie as the main character?
JJH: This is a tough question. As much as I’d like to say that I chose her, I think there is some debate over whether she is the true protagonist of this plot. Regardless, I wanted to write about someone who did their best to do everything right given the circumstances and still wound up in trouble. Often crime fiction shows us characters who are making dumb decisions—who aren’t really leaning into their individual agency. I wanted to show someone, a regular person, with the average layman’s knowledge of crime and punishment, who did the best she could with what she had. I hope I’ve done that well.
RaE: Tell me about the process of converting The Regulars of Amanda Lexie from serialized blog posts into a published novella?
JJH: It is very different to write with suspense knowing I have to keep you coming back every month. That’s a lot of time that I’m counting on you to remember. So writing these for my blog was a real exercise in committing to a first draft and twisting the plot into whatever it needed to be to stay true to what was written. With a novel, you get to go back and make adjustments. You can rewrite or change your mind. You don’t get to do that with serialized fiction.
So it was a relief, honestly, to compile it all, read it through, and decide where I needed to flesh the story out more. And then even more of a relief to be able to expand or change some details to best serve the plot.
But it was also very fun to work this story into a different medium—one that is much easier to read than a series of blog posts.
RaE: How long did it take you to write The Regulars of Amanda Lexie?
JJH: The fun thing about posting a chapter a month on a blog is that I can go back to the day I began writing this to answer this question. All said and done it took me three years, which is actually the longest it’s ever taken me to write something. This is also one of the shortest things I’ve written.
RaE: Were there any moments from the process of writing and publishing the story that surprised you?
JJH: The whole process of publishing this story has been a surprise. I’ve been very blessed to have doors open into this part of the industry in ways I couldn’t have foreseen or imagined. I’m very grateful to the team at Torchflame Books for helping make this a possibility.
As far as the plot goes, and I won’t give anything away, but there are two scenes I most enjoyed writing. In one, a character fights the inevitable. In the other, a character gets away. Those scenes and their aftermath surprised me quite a bit. I’m a discovery writer and often feel as if I’m following my characters around with a notepad and a camera recording what they do. In those scenes, those two characters surprised me quite a bit.
RaE: What’s your go-to coffee order?
JJH: We had to end with a hard one, didn’t we? Most current or former baristas fall into one of two camps: 1) I’ll drink anything as long as it’s caffeinated or 2) make my drink exactly how I ordered it or move over and I’ll make it myself.
I am the first type. I like to try new seasonal drinks and my default changes by the time of day. But if I had to choose, I have to go with a vanilla latte. It’s a classic for a reason, and it fits every circumstance I’ve run into. But really you can’t go wrong if you hand me a coffee.
I had so much fun with this interview! Again, make sure to follow Reading at Eventide on Instagram and if you haven’t yet, check out The Regulars of Amanda Lexie wherever books are sold!
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