Show notes
On Binge Reading today, USA Today bestselling author A.W. Hartoin talks about her World War II, Stella Bled spy thriller series, and the young American honeymooner who becomes a double agent, trapped into working for both Germany and England.
Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today, A.W. talks about the sixth book in the series, Her London Season.
It’s 1940 and the Battle of Britain rages in the skies overhead. Stella is stuck, frustrated, in a lowly administrative job at the Special Operations Executive, the SOE. Until a mysterious set of orders arrives.
A.W. talks about crafting a story that challenges all the assumptions you may make about truth and power.
Our Book Giveaway this week
Our Giveaway this week is another Kobo Free Genre offer, a wonderful range of books from several genres – mystery, thriller and romance, and all of them First in Series, including Poisoned Legacy, my Book #1 in the Of Gold & Blood series.
Find the download link in the show notes for this episode on The Joys of Binge Reading website, that’s www.thejoysofbinge reading.com.
FREE KOBO GENRE LIST BOOKS
https://www.kobo.com/nz/en/p/free-ebooksKobo
And remember. If you enjoy the show, leave us a review, so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will definitely want to read.
Links to subjects mentioned in today’s episode
Kristallnacht: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kristallnacht
(*See Editor’s note at the end of the transcript.)
Kelly Rimmer, The Paris Agent, https://www.kellyrimmer.com/books/the-paris-agent
Pam Jenoff, The Lost Girls of Paris, https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Girls-Paris-Pam-Jenoff/dp/0778308618
Martha Hall Kelly: Lilac Girls, https://marthahallkelly.com/books/lilac-girls/
Janet Evanovich: https://evanovich.com/
Jana DeLeon: https://janadeleon.com/
Brian Cann, photographer: https://brian-cann.format.com/about
Laser guided bomb systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser-guided_bomb
The House Witch by Delemhach https://www.amazon.com.au/House-Witch-Humorous-Romantic-Fantasy/dp/1039410251
Stephen King: The Shining, https://stephenking.com/works/novel/shining.html
EM Powell: Stanton and Barling series. https://www.empowell.com/stanton-and-barling-mysteries
Liane Moriarty: What Alice Forgot, https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781743535493/
The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larson: https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Vile-Churchill-Family-Defiance/dp/0385348711.
The Rape of Europa by Lynn K Nicholas: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/121563/the-rape-of-europa-by-lynn-h-nicholas/
Kristin Hannah The Nightingale: https://www.amazon.com/Nightingale-Novel-Kristin-Hannah/dp/1250080401
Where to find A.W. Hartoin online
Website: https://www.awhartoin.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/A.W.Hartoin/
Introducing mystery author A. W. Hartoin
A.W. Hartoin – Best Selling mystery author.
Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s A.W. Hello there, A.W. and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
A.W. Hartoin: Hi Jenny. Thanks for having me.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve done a remarkably wide range of genres. You’ve done fantasy, you’ve done YA.
But I think the bulk of your work has been in mystery, either Second World War, a series with Stella Bled, or a more contemporary cozy mystery series with Mercy Watts.
So we’ll be focusing on those two today because most of our listeners are really interested in those mainstream genres. I wondered first what has attracted you to the mystery genre.
A.W. Hartoin: I’ve always loved my mystery since I was a child, but I think it’s the puzzle pieces and how they come together, and planting little clues here and there. I’ve always loved plotting and mystery’s all about the plotting And Cozy Mystery in particular is about characters and having really interesting people in them.
It’s not so gritty.
Jenny Wheeler: The plotting aspect, how do you approach that? Do you have. an involved grid or do you rely more on instinct? How do you do that part?
A. W. Hartoin: Intense cork board plotting
A.W. Hartoin: I break out my trusty cork boards. I start putting in exactly what I want to happen in scenes and moving them around. And then when I’m doing Stella, which is also a mystery and a thriller, I put in facts. I make sure I have every fact on the board so I don’t lose a fact, and I’ll have background on there.
It’s covered with note cards by the time I get done and I move things around constantly and make sure I don’t miss anything.
Jenny Wheeler: To give us a picture of it, how many boards do you have and how big are they?
A.W. Hartoin: I have two large boards. When I’m doing Mercy, it’s usually one board because she’s easier to plot, I don’t have a lot of historical facts to deal with.
When I do Stella, I have one large board for the actual plot and then I have one board that’s every fact that I want to have covered.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Now, Stella has evolved to a six book series, with Her London Season the sixth book?
You started in 1938. You’ve now got to 1940. Perhaps give us a sense of the arc of that series.
A.W. Hartoin: It starts out when Stella is newly married.
She’s on her honeymoon and she’s doing the Grand Tour through Europe in November 1938.
And she persuades her new husband to take her to Vienna. He’s less enthused about that idea, but they end up in Vienna on the eve of the Kristallnacht and are completely shocked by the events that happen and get drawn into a series of events where she ends up being a spy for the British Intelligence Service.
From politically naive to double agent
Then we go from there to trying to help people in Italy. Then she’s back in England and she goes on missions to different sections of the Reich, and in London season is actually already out, and that is one where she gets involved with the SOE and the formation of the SOE and a mystery that takes completely in place in London.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Now, the first one, she starts out as being rather politically naive, doesn’t she?
She hardly really understands what kind of world she’s entering. When she happily toddles off to Vienna, she’s got all these ideas about going to the opera and all that kind of thing, and gets really caught up in this heavy political stuff that’s going on.
How does her political understanding evolve during this series?
A.W. Hartoin: She’s completely naive at the beginning.
She comes from a very wealthy brewing family. They have no interest in politics whatsoever. She’s really insulated and with her family all the time.
She’s not been a person who is really interested in politics and she ends up there in Vienna and is completely shocked by how people are treated, and that the government is attacking their own citizens.
The police and the firefighters do nothing to help them.
And then she’s going through these things and experiencing Italy, for instance in Vienna, how the Italian population treated the Jewish population there.
And she becomes involved and understands more and more. How these things came about and how she can affect the war herself.
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How Stella reconciles her moral dilemma
Jenny Wheeler: We’ve just very recently interviewed the Australian author, Kelly Rimmer, with her book The Paris Agent. It was posted online this last week, and that book also deals with the SOE and the issues that arose that became very clear with the SOE after the war about the double agent aspect of the organization that they had there.
The whole double agent thing, I think that Stella becomes a particularly. committed to double agent in Book Five does she?
She’s working for both the Germans and the British at this stage, as a matter of self preservation. How do you handle the moral code side of that?
A.W. Hartoin: I think she really does struggle with that. She doesn’t expect to have that happen. Becoming a double agent was a complete accident. No one thought that was going to happen.
And then she’s in it. She’s dealing with real people. She lives and works with the people working for the Reich, and it’s painful.
She becomes attached to them. And even though she would, in theory do anything to defeat the Reich, it’s very different when you’re face-to-face with someone you actually like.
And when she returns from a mission, she’s very haunted by what she’s seen and done. She wouldn’t change it. But that is part of the guilt and that has been something I’ve tried to keep going, that she’s not a character who forgets what’s happened and just goes on.
It stays with her. She remembers everyone. She’s haunted by what has happened to them after she’s loved them. And surprisingly, she’s very attached to people that are working for the Reich against her.
And she still does what she has to do, but it’s very difficult.
Balancing fact and fiction
Jenny Wheeler: With the aspect of balancing fact and fiction, when you get into the SOE, for example, a lot of that history is very closely recorded now. How do you handle the fact and fiction balanced?
A.W. Hartoin: Stella’s mainly an SIS asset. She is involved at the SOE also by accident.
She gets involved with them in their formation. It is very difficult to deal with the SIS section because there’s not a lot written on the actual spy organization. But SOE is easier because a lot has been written and I try to get the exact facts every time.
It takes a ton of research to get that done, but there has been, as you said, much written about the SOE, so that’s a lot easier than any other kind of spy operation which remains cloaked in secrecy.
Jenny Wheeler: So how do you manage that and are you multilingual? Do you have to go to multiple sources or do you have people who translate for you? How do you work with that side of things?
A.W. Hartoin: One thing that’s really helped is going to actual sites and being. in Paris and going to all the museums. There’s a lot of very small museums that you’ll find on the Resistance in France, for instance, where you’ll be able to find, information. It won’t be in English, so I’ll be in there with my translator.
I’m not multilingual. I’ll be in there with Google Translate, pointing it at the placards and using books and trying to figure out exactly what they’re saying.
But I tried it with every book, whether it’s Mercy or Stella, go to the place where it’s happening. And when you see it, and the best research books are always at the museums and I can’t get them anywhere else, you’ll find something you’ve never saw before.
They’re almost always in English. Occasionally I can’t get it in English, but Google Translate is amazing and I just get so many facts that way.
Travelling to do research
Jenny Wheeler: How did you manage during Covid? Were you still able to travel during that period?
A.W. Hartoin: I was not able to travel during that period. I wrote the Berlin book while I was in lockdown here in Germany, we could not do anything or go anywhere, Berlin is a little interesting because it was mostly destroyed, so I had to really use a lot of historical photographs and things like that
I could use the grid map of Berlin itself, so I knew exactly where things were, but they don’t exist anymore.
I have since gone to Berlin and explored that area, but at that time I couldn’t go. But that’s the only book I have done where I did not go before I wrote the book.
Jenny Wheeler: Have you got an arc in mind that takes Stella right through the whole war? I don’t want to do any spoilers because of course, she could get killed during wartime, but how far ahead are you foreseeing with the series
A.W. Hartoin: I plan to have her go through the entire war. I know what happens at the end. And the next book is in Lyon, France, and that will be prior to the Butcher of Lyon being there. Then she’ll be in Nuremberg. And then she’ll be in Prague. I’ve plotted it out pretty far.
Jenny Wheeler: Going right back to the beginning, how did you get inspired to even start this? It’s like a patchwork series, or like a kaleidoscope. It is amazing the way that you fit all these aspects into it. How did you even get the idea for it?
A.W’s fascination with Kristallnacht
A.W. Hartoin: We were stationed in Germany for the first time in the early 2000. I had a British friend who had an intense interest in World War II history, and she gave me books to read on the history and one of them was on the Schindler’s List survivors. Their real stories behind there those people.
And one of the survivors talked extensively about his experience in Kristallnacht, and I had never heard about it.
I took history classes in college, and nobody ever talked about it. If it was mentioned, it was just in passing.
So, I really got interested in the Kristallnacht itself and then started looking at it and thought like what a catastrophic event and what would it be like to be there as a person who has no expectation of anything like this happening?
What would it be like to just have this event because it happened suddenly. It was not something that was building up like a war machine was building up. It just happened and so that’s how the Stella idea happened. An intense interest in the Kristallnacht and wanting to put someone in there that would be shocked and have no expectation at all.
Jenny Wheeler: You convey that very well with Stella at the beginning.
You’ve had some wonderful reviews and you’ve had some great writers that you’ve been compared to for that series. People like Pam Jenoff and her. The Lost Girls of Paris Book and Martha Hall, Kelly’s Lila Girls, which I’m sure a lot of our listeners would be familiar with.
World War II has become an amazing subgenre of historical oral fiction, remarkably popular. What do you think that people are really attracted to in the World War II area?
Why World War II fiction is so popular
A.W. Hartoin: I think we’re living in a time of great uncertainty and the Ukraine situation is very reminiscent of Hitler invading Poland.
We know how World War II it turned out, but it was filled with uncertainty at the time, but it was black and white. It was good versus evil, which is really appealing.
I can’t stop thinking about the price that people paid during the war. The more you learn, the more amazing people get.
My grandfather flew in the Pacific during the war. He played a terrible price and he lived with that for the rest of his life.
He never spoke about it to us. He did not want to talk about it at all, but my grandmother did talk about it, and it was very hard for the both of them.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Mercy, because you do have a lighter, more fun side to your mysteries, as we say with the Cozy Series and Mercy Watts. She’s been compared to more great names, like Janet Evanovich and Jana. DeLeon. So, you’ve got great company there. Tell us about your sleuth Mercy.
A.W. Hartoin: Unlike Stella, who is a great person, but Mercy is a lot of fun. She’s young, she has this large group of family and friends. Everybody’s interacting all the time.
She is not an alone detective. Her father is a retired police officer and a PI, and he really wanted her to follow in his footsteps.
She did not do that and became a nurse, and he’s always trying to pull her in cases because it’s the family business and she’s not real thrilled about that.
But she does what she has to do for the family.
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Mercy Watts – a change of pace – a Cozy Mystery
Jenny Wheeler: In the first one, A Good Man Gone, she’s a nurse and a dutiful daughter. She’s enjoying a well-deserved vacation when she gets drawn into a murder mystery or a foul play death after the sudden death of one of her father’s partners.
But she evolves. You are now up to number 14.
How does she evolve over the series?
A.W. Hartoin: She’s always growing and changing, which has been really fun with her.
She’s gone from being a very reluctant detective to actually becoming a detective by choice and she’s had her personal life evolve.
Other people with her have evolved. she’s always grown and changed, so it’s never gotten dull.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. How do you handle with these cozy mysteries, which go a long time? Sometimes authors have a difficulty about the aging aspect.
You’ve got 14 now, if you’d been doing one a year. She’s now 14 years older than when she started, but do you keep to real time or do you just, fudge around the edges, her aging?
A.W. Hartoin: We’ve not grown with each year. She’s just a few years older than she was when we started. She was 25 when we started. I had her turn 26 at one point, and I never mentioned it again. It’s not a year between mysteries. It’s happening constantly for her.
Time passes – and Mercy grows up
Jenny Wheeler: She’s engaged in this latest one. Perhaps, sorry, that’s the one I might have been getting muddled up with. That’s being published in the next few weeks, isn’t it?
A.W. Hartoin: She got engaged in number 13 and now she is currently engaged in the one that’s about to be released.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. And what’s the name of the one that’s just about to be released?
A.W. Hartoin: So Long Gone.
Jenny Wheeler: And what now? What happens in that one? Just a general idea of the setup.
A.W. Hartoin: We set up at the very beginning, the first book. She had a boyfriend that she was very much in love with who disappeared when she was 16
We’re going to wrap up what happened to him. That has been something that she has been dealing with her whole life. That was the first time she became a very public person.
The press became aware of her and stalked her and it was a hard introduction to the world of the press and attention, and we’re finally wrapping up the question of what happened to David in this book.
Jenny Wheeler: It sounds fun. They started in 2013. How do you keep yourself fresh doing a series over a decade?
A.W. Hartoin: Because she’s grown and changed so much, it never feels like something new isn’t happening.
And we’ve done a lot of travel. She’s been to Honduras, she’s been to Colorado, she’s gone to Paris a couple of times. She’s been to Germany. So those are things that always are fun for me to have a new place.
It’s a new experience for her, so it just really is fun to write every time I do it.
How A.W. Hartoin got into writing
Jenny Wheeler: How did you get into the publishing game? You sound as if you’ve got it amazingly under control. Did you start as a self-published author or did you go straight to trad publishing?
Tell us a bit about your pathway into writing.
A.W. Hartoin: I’m self-published. I did get some minor attention from agents with the first Mercy book, but, then self publishing happened and I thought why not?
How bad can it be? And then I got really lucky with the timing. because I was ready. I did prep a lot with long-term critique groups that I worked with.
I learned a lot from them. I had a lot of help from a lot of people.
Jenny Wheeler: And you’re still self-publishing now?
A.W. Hartoin: Yes, I am.
Jenny Wheeler: Is it really now very much, I would think, your first choice, you wouldn’t look at being traditionally published probably. Is that right?
A.W. Hartoin: I can’t imagine doing that. I’ve done it for so long. I enjoy having control over my covers and what I write and where they’re going to go. I can’t imagine doing anything different, because I’ve always done it this way,
Shooting your own covers
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. You mentioned control over your covers and we had a brief conversation off air before we started about the latest Stella Bled cover, I just love the cover.
I thought it was the most stunning cover, the one that set in London. And you mentioned that you had a photographer friend shoot that.
Did you do that as a whole live setup with a live model
A.W. Hartoin: Yes, I did. His name is Brian Cann. He is an award-winning photographer. He’s amazing. He is a good friend of mine.
He lives here in Germany. He’s a British citizen. And he shot several covers. also, we redid the Paris package cover number one, and he shot that model. And we’ve shot a bunch of books already for the future.
So we already have covers for Lyon. We already have covers for Nuremberg and probably Prague as well.
Jenny Wheeler: My gosh, I’m so impressed. Tell us about your actual writing. How do you set up your discipline for writing? Do you have a certain number of books you want to finish in a year? Do you have a whole publication plan set out ahead of time?
A.W. Hartoin: I do and I don’t. Things happen, things change. You never know what’s going to happen in your life. We’ve had a couple of deaths in the family this year, so that changed things a lot for me.
But I do plan, I use my cork boards and plan everything out, and then when I start a book, I am very disciplined.
I am at my writing every morning at nine o’clock without fail. And I do not do any appointments. I do nothing during the period of writing, and I plot out exactly what’s going to happen every day.
I write everything out. My family gets driven crazy by the amounts of paper, because I write out everything by hand before I actually type it.
Life in the military before full time writing
So, there’s a lot of layers that goes into it. But I’m very disciplined when it’s time to write a book.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s just amazing. Turning away from the specific books, to your wider career, before you became a full-time author, what did you do and has that fed into the work that you’re doing now? I.
A.W. Hartoin: It might surprise you, but I was active duty military and I worked on laser guided bomb systems. On the F15, the F16, I also worked on the A10 warthog.
I joined the military because I wanted to be a writer and I knew I needed more experiences. I had to get out of my hometown. It was just a wonderful hometown, but very small and not very varied in the people that I was meeting.
It was the best decision I could have made. I met my husband and I’ve been able to meet so many people from so many different backgrounds.
Not to mention that I’ve got to live in Alaska, Italy, Germany. I couldn’t have written any of the books that I’ve written without those experience and without all those people that I’ve gotten to know.
Jenny Wheeler: Wow, that’s terrific. And so you very much from the beginning, were planning on having a writing career. Were you writing in the evenings when you were in the military?
A.W. Hartoin: I was writing short stories and I was taking some classes as well. I took a short story class that was really great. I was prepping, but I really didn’t get too intense about it until I left the military and started seriously working.
Jenny Wheeler: And how long ago was that?
A.W. Hartoin: Oh, let’s see. Probably 20 years ago.
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The ‘secret’ of A. W. Hartoin’s success
Jenny Wheeler: If there was one thing that you see as the “secret of your success” in quotes, because people always like to know, they think there’s one thing that’s going to be like pushing a button. What would it be?
A.W. Hartoin: I don’t think I have any magic things except for, I’d have to say, it’s my husband.
When I told him I wanted to be a writer, I was so nervous, because I didn’t know what he would think, because we were both in the military, we were both doing non creative jobs, I’d say, and it seemed like such an unattainable thing that I wanted.
But he immediately says, ‘do it. You’ll be great.’ Then he read everything I’ve written.
He’s given me honest feedback on every single book and short story, everything. He’s put in countless hours on the website. He’s taking care of my computer because I don’t know computers. He’s done advertising. He’s just wonderful.
We take long walks and he helps me plot on walks. We’ll, he comes up with ideas and then we bounce things off each other. He’s absolutely the key to my success.
Jenny Wheeler: How wonderful. When you started writing, what was your main goal and have you achieved it yet?
A.W. Hartoin: I don’t think it’s a grand goal. I just wanted to be published and I wanted to reach an audience and have people enjoy what I write. That’s it, and every time I get a message from a fan, I know that I’ve done that, and it makes my day.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. We like to always check out with our authors the books they’re reading and what they’d like to recommend for our listeners, and because we are Binge Reading, we’re generally talking a about books for entertainment and escape.
What’s your reading like and how have you used it over the years?
I’m sure a lot of it has been for research, but do you have fun reading as well?
What A. W. Hartoin is reading now
A.W. Hartoin: Oh, I read just almost about everything. I don’t read a lot of horror because I like sleeping.
And let’s see. I’ve read The House Witch recently, which is something, a genre I’ve never read is like a humorous fantasy romance, and that was a lot of fun. Highly recommend that just for escapism. It’s just so much fun.
Before that, I did read Stephen King’s The Shining, which I decided it was worth the not sleeping, and it was wonderful. It was perfectly plotted.
For mystery? Recently I’ve read EM Powell Stanton and Barling series. It’s medieval and it was really fun and interesting to read that period, which I don’t really know much about.
Let’s see, what else have I read? Oh, I love everything by Lianne Moriarty and especially What Alice Forgot. I love that book.
Everyone should read that book. Let’s see, for World War ii, it’s mostly nonfiction. So, for that one, The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larson was great. So was the Rape of Europa by Lynn H Nicholas.
I’ve read The Nightingale, (Kirstin Hannah) which was great. I love that book, but I usually read a lot of nonfiction for the World War II stuff.
Jenny Wheeler: Looking back down the tunnel of time, if there was one thing you would change about your creative career, what would it be? I.
A.W. Hartoin: That’s really hard to say because I’m so happy with how things turned out.
But I think I would do self-publishing earlier and I wouldn’t be so hesitant and nervous about that.
I made a lot of mistakes. Had some terrible covers, had to fix that, had to learn a lot. But I think I would do it sooner and I think I’d be less shy about telling people what I do.
I almost never tell people when I meet them what I do.
A.W. Hartoin – a shy high achiever
Jenny Wheeler: Even today?
A.W. Hartoin: Even today I just don’t ever, I don’t really talk about it. I just do what I do and, get on with it. I don’t really talk to people. I should be less shy about talking to people and I should do more things like this podcast with you.
I tell people no when I should say yes,
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, amazing. Yes. You’ve got the vague phrase of bestselling author attached to your name, so you’ve sold lots of copies of your books and you’ve found an audience, haven’t you?
A.W. Hartoin: I have. I didn’t expect any of the things that happened. I didn’t expect to get people writing to me.
When that started happening, I was so surprised. It never occurred to me that would happen, and that’s been really great.
People asking ‘When’s the next book coming out?’ was just so much fun. Cause I thought, oh my gosh, people actually are looking forward to something I’ve written.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. Looking over the next 12 months, give us an idea of your publishing schedule. What have you got on your desk for the next 12 months?
Moving from Germany to Washington
A.W. Hartoin: It’s going to be a busy year. We’re actually leaving Germany and moving to DC. So that’s going to be a big block of time where I’m not going to be able to write, but Mercy 14 releases on July 11th.
Then I’m set to start writing a fourth book in the new series, Afterlife Issues.
Next week, at the end of July, we’re going to Lyon to research the next Stella.
Then during the move to DC, which is a huge long process, I will be doing all the Lyon research and plotting Stella without my cork boards because they’ll be packed.
That’s going to be interesting and I am hoping to start Stella # 7 in October, but you just never know what’s going to happen. During our move to Italy, both our desks got crushed, so something terrible could happen.
I could lose my computer. You never know.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you aim to publish one Mercy and one Stella every year?
A.W. Hartoin: I do, I would like to do more, but there’s so many things happening.
I have the new series. I would like to do two mercies per year, but the research on Stella really takes up a large block of time, so I haven’t really been able to do more than that in a while.
Jenny Wheeler: And you’ve been living in Europe for a number of years now. Give us an idea about how you got to Europe and how you’re obviously now moving back to the states.
Living in Europe ‘a wonderful experience’
A.W. Hartoin: We were living in Colorado for a long period of time because that’s where my husband was stationed and then he got a job over here.
And so we moved on over. Let’s see, when was that? I guess 2017 is when we moved over. It’s been a great fun. It’s been wonderful for research. It’s great to be able to just drive up to Nuremberg and research the for Stella.
It’s been a wonderful experience.
Jenny Wheeler: Now his work is taking a back to Washington is it?
A.W. Hartoin: Yes. It’s a new challenge. I’m sure Mercy is absolutely going to end up in DC at some point.
Actually, I’ve already plotted out the next three mercies so we know exactly what’s going to happen for the next three mercies and she will be in DC – Let’s see, for Mercy, 18, I think. I’m not sure I have it all written out,
Jenny Wheeler: Totally amazing. You mentioned hearing from your readers. Do you enjoy interacting with your readers and where can they find you online or where is the best way for them to get together with you?
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Where you can find A. W. Hartoin online
A.W. Hartoin: I really do enjoy chatting with readers and. A lot of ideas come from things that they say and they tell me. I am best about responding to Facebook, but I do respond to emails. I just tend to do those on the weekend. But Facebook, I answer them every day.
Jenny Wheeler: And that’s your main social media platform? Is it Facebook?
A.W. Hartoin: Yes, I also have Instagram, I do check it every day, I’m not as much interacting on Instagram as I am on Facebook.
Facebook is just seems more personal to me
Jenny Wheeler: A.W. it’s been wonderful being able to chat. I’m absolutely flattened with admiration by the way that you are managing to keep all these balls in the air as they say, and remarkable planning that you’re doing there. Congratulations and thanks so much.
A.W. Hartoin: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a really good experience for me.
Jenny Wheeler: Wonderful. A.W. Yes, do lots more. You’re great.
A.W. Hartoin: Thank you so much.
Jenny Wheeler: Thanks. Bye now.
A.W. Hartoin: Bye.
If you enjoyed A.W. you might also enjoy Kelly Rimmer
Kelly Rimmer’s sweeping World War Two historical suspense has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide and made international best seller lists, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
In this episode of Binge Reading, Kelly talks about her latest historical saga, The Paris Agent and two otherwise ordinary women who become spies in World War II France.
It’s a powerful story which threads their lives – they are real life woman – into history, leaving an indelible story of courage and family ties.
listen to kelly on binge reading
Next week on Binge Reading
Next week on Binge Reading: Adrienne Chinn and an epic, sweeping historical novel. Perfect for the fans of Lucinda Riley, about the three Frye sisters.
THREE SISTERS – Separated by distance, bound by love
Book two in the series, The Paris Sister, moves from the glamour of the roaring twenties in Paris to Egypt, the isle of Capri and London high society.
Critics call it an “immersive, emotional and highly enjoyable historical novel that takes readers all over the world and keeps them turning the pages.”
That’s next week on The Joys of Binge Reading. And just a reminder. If you enjoy the show, leave us a review. If I say it often enough, you just might do it.
Word of mouth is still the best way to spread the word and introduce people to great books they will want to read.
That’s it for today.
See you next time and Happy Reading!
*Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung (SA) from 9–10 November 1938