Constance Sayers Interview - The Star and the Strange Moon ~ JeanBookNerd

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Constance Sayers is the author of A Witch in Time. A finalist for Alternating Current's 2016 Luminaire Award for Best Prose, her short stories have appeared in Souvenir and Amazing Graces: Yet Another Collection of Fiction by Washington Area Women as well as The Sky is a Free Country. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

She received an MA in English from George Mason University. She lives outside of Washington D.C. Like her character in The Ladies of the Secret Circus, for many years, she was the host of a radio show from midnight to six.

When/how did you realize you had a creative dream or calling to fulfill?

My writing goals were not lofty! As a kid, I was enamored with television. I’m dating myself, but at the height of General Hospital’s Luke and Laura phenomenon, I said to myself “I can do that,” and I cranked out a 100-page treatment for a new soap opera on my sister’s Smith Corona typewriter.

Beyond your own work (of course), what is your all-time favorite book and why? And what is your favorite book outside of your genre?

While not a book per se, Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit, changed my life. Like so many English majors, I read all the English writers and in my senior year of college, I began taking French literature classes and really opened my eyes to writers like Proust, Gide and my beloved Sartre. The play’s premise is brilliant: three people locked in Hell together and each unwilling to give the other what they need or want and one utters famous line “Hell is other people.”

Tell us your most rewarding experience since being published?

For so many years, I went to my local Barnes and Noble and dreamed about what it would be like to see myself on the shelves. To have that experience of seeing your novel on the front table never gets old. Never!

What advice would you give to someone who wanted to have a life in writing?

You must be merciless on both accepting the feedback you get and changing your book (in your way) to address the changes. Writing a book is a solo effort only to a point. At a publishing house, you have a creative team with you and the make your book better, but you need to listen to them, and you need to turn drafts around in a timely manner. In my day job, I worked on the business side of Atlantic Media (former publisher or The Atlantic) and I saw the professionalism of the writers who would get the feedback and turn their work around quickly. I admired that skill and decided to develop it in my own writing. Now, I see that was an essential skill that I learned before my book was accepted by Hachette/Redhook.

What was the single worst distraction that kept you from writing this book?

I have a day job that got difficult in 2022, so there are days that I work sixteen hours. I would log-off of my work computer and just start writing in the late hours. This book’s theme was challenging, so I feel like I struggled with this one the most. I wasn’t always as mentally fresh as I always needed to be when I came to the page and this story was tricky to write.

What were your feelings when your first novel was accepted/when you first saw the cover of the finished product?

The Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) are always my favorite part. It’s the first time the book goes from a redlined Word document to an actual shaped book!

Your Favorite Quotes/Scenes from THE STAR AND THE STRANGE MOON
The story starts out in 1986 with a young boy, Christopher Kent, who is traveling with his mother to Pittsburgh, where she is starting a new job as a lounge singer at an airport hotel. The boy is the primary caretaker for his mother who struggles with both mental health and substance abuse issues. As a result, he is wise beyond his years, and everyone refers to him as “the little man.” My hope was that the reader will feel the tension in this scene as the boy who has a series of rituals designed to keep his mother safe, must now adjust to a new life. Quickly, the new life falls apart when his mother spies a photo of an actress on the hotel’s wall and in a violent rage, rips the photo from the wall. In a dizzying set of events, the boy watches his mother spiral with no idea why this photo of actress Gemma Turner has set her off. This episode becomes a turning point for him and its connection to this mysterious actress.

The inspiration for this chapter came when I was in a hotel in Rome and they had these amazing black and white images of actors. I just loved the setting—this long, lonely hallway in a hotel—and filed it away for what would become the inciting incident of the book.

Early in my drafts, I need to “picture” my main characters so I can begin to move them around scenes in my mind. While doing some research for The Ladies of the Secret Circus, I happened upon another photo of a striking redhaired actress named Françoise Dorléac, the older sister of actress Catherine Deneuve. Tragically, Dorléac was killed in a car accident in 1967 as she rushed to get to the airport in Nice. As the pieces of this book formed, it was Françoise Dorléac’s face I saw as my character, Gemma Turner. We meet Gemma Turner in chapter two, she’s a down on her luck actress who gets one final shot to save her film career—the lead role in a New Wave horror film called L’Etrange Lune (The Strange Moon), directed by French cinema darling, Thierry Valdon. The reader gets Gemma’s desperation to win over Valdon and get the part.

I wanted to do a gothic novel as well, so the film, L’Etrange Lune is based on the Hammer horror films of the 1960s that introduced audiences to actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Dracula and Doctor Van Helsing. Gothic was the rage in the 1960s and this idea this type of setting began to have a great influence on the shaping of the novel as did reading a bunch of Victoria Holt novels. I felt like this was the perfect type of film a French New Wave filmmaker might want to re-shape into a more serious work of art, so I started there.

As the book progresses, I hope there is a sense that Gemma, while hopeful about this role, has sealed her doom with this film. The film’s set is a nightmare. Thierry Valdon turns out to be both cruel and temperamental and the script he’s written is laughable. During a night shoot, Gemma is filming a scene when she discovers she’s been transported inside the L’Etrange Lune, so the set is now her reality. Now, surrounded by the characters from the film, the plot is playing out, but Gemma knows the script—and its ending where she is doomed to be turned into a vampire. There are both the confines of being inside a gothic horror film, but also a film set in the 19th century where women don’t have freedoms they had in Gemma’s 1960s Paris. Working against both, Gemma needs to break conventions to try and get home safely.

When her typewriter is delivered and the staff thinks it’s the devil’s instrument, there are comical elements. I do try to have fun with these scenes. Like Groundhog Day, Gemma must relive scenes repeatedly until the director is pleased. Gemma begins receiving “director’s notes:”

“Mademoiselle Turner

As you can tell, I wasn’t pleased with the first version. Dracula won’t be written for another nineteen years, so using modern vampire vanquishing methods is just plain cheating.”

It’s a very meta thing. I loved that Gemma knows she’s inside a film and she’s aware of the tropes and how to push them. When I was working with Nivia Evans, my editor at Redhook, she encouraged me to push the story further and have Gemma be required to do “retakes.” Then it was like Run Lola Run (great film if you haven’t seen it), where with each retake, Gemma challenges herself and begins to learn the world she’s in. As a result, she begins to change the script to get different results and she blossoms as a character. As her relationship with these “stock” characters become deeper, she can get them to help her. Gemma’s arc develops in these scenes and for me, it was exciting.

The framing voice of the book is the little boy from the first chapter, Christopher Kent, who grows up, but remains traumatized and haunted by what happened to his mother (who never recovers from the hotel incident). When he learns that actress Gemma Turner disappeared on the set in 1968 and was never seen again, he becomes convinced the two incidents are connected and obsessed with solving her mystery. Personally, Christopher feels like his own family story is shrouded in mystery. No one will tell him what really happened to his mother, and he has no father on his birth certificate, so he feels adrift. The mystery of Gemma Turner anchors him in a way nothing else does and he also begins to spiral into this dangerous world of the cult film of L’Etrange Lune.

Christopher is a documentary film maker and this connection to film and the magic of filmmaking was a prominent theme. Throughout history, many people were superstitious that photos could “steal your soul” Film creates “magic” but is the actual act of filming magic? The idea kept swirling around in my head: Could a film steal your soul?

You must read The Star and the Strange Moon for answers to all those questions!

What is the first job you have had?

Baton twirling instructor. I can twirl both fire and knives.

What was your favorite subject when you were in school and why?

Algebra. I know that sounds weird, but I love, love Algebra. There is an order to it that appeals to me.

What decade during the last century would you have chosen to be a kid?

The very one I grew up in: the 70s. The Saturday cartoons were the best. I think Syd and Marty Kroft messed me up, badly.

Name one thing you miss about being a kid.

Summers off. I love my down time!

What is the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning?

I look at my Fitbit to see how well I slept. I’m obsessed with my sleep score.

What’s your most missed memory?

Anything involving my mother. She died last year and I miss her terribly.

Which incident in your life that totally changed the way you think today?

I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020 in the middle of Covid. That was a life changer. My cancer was stage one and not aggressive, so I had minimal surgery and radiation, but I’ll never forget when the doctor called with the news. The world tilted.

Which would you choose, true love with a guarantee of a heart break or have never loved before?

In hindsight, I think I would have taken better care of my heart. In my youth, I was someone who loved hard and, as a result, I had my heart broken a lot. It makes for good fiction, but some of those scars left an indelible mark on me.

What was your favorite subject when you were in school?

Tie: Algebra with Mr. Stansak at Clarion-Limestone high school and French with Joanne Viano at Pitt. Both were teachers who liked order and my messy mind really seeks out structure.

What is your greatest adventure?

I spent four years finding my uncle’s lost World War II files that had been destroyed in a fire in St. Louis. I went to Italy to track his journey as a solider with the 30th Infantry division. We got to the exact location where his death certificate said he was killed by shrapnel. Just as luck would have it, an old woman was walking on the path on our guide talked to her and she pointed to the exact spot where the battle that killed my uncle had taken place. It felt like one of the most important things I’d ever done.

What event in your life would make a good movie?

My dad was a twin and both he and his brother were separated at birth. It’s a wild story. I did borrow a bit of it for Juliet’s story in A Witch in Time.

What is one unique thing are you afraid of?

I have Megalophobia (it’s a real thing). My dad took me to see the Goodyear blimp when I was a kid and I now have issues with things like big ships and, of course, blimps!

When was the last time you told someone you loved them?

Every day, so…this morning.

What were you doing the last time you really had a good laugh?

When my sister and I saw Barbie.

What is your most memorable travel experience?

When my sister was a flight attendant, we would travel around together on “space available” status, so we would have to be flexible on our plans. One time we’d gone to New Orleans for Jazzfest and we were young and flat broke. The flight we needed was overbooked and it didn’t look like we’d be able to get out, so we went to the airport early hoping that people were hung over and would miss their flights. The flight ended up having five seats available and we got back home to Pittsburgh with something like $5 in our pockets.

1968: Actress Gemma Turner once dreamed of stardom. Unfortunately, she’s on the cusp of slipping into obscurity. When she’s offered the lead in a radical new horror film, Gemma believes her luck has finally changed. But L’Etrange Lune’s set is not what she expected. The director is eccentric, and the script doesn’t make sense.

Gemma is determined to make this work. It’s her last chance to achieve her dream—but that dream is about to derail her life. One night, between the shadows of an alleyway, Gemma disappears on set and is never seen again. Yet, Gemma is still alive. She’s been transported into the film and the script—and the monsters within it—are coming to life. She must play her role perfectly if she hopes to survive.

2015: Gemma Turner’s disappearance is one of film history’s greatest mysteries—one that’s haunted film student Christopher Kent ever since he saw his first screening of L’Etrange Lune. The screenings only happen once a decade and each time there is new, impossible footage of Gemma long after she vanished. Desperate to discover the truth, Christopher risks losing himself. He’ll have to outrun the cursed legacy of the film—or become trapped by it forever.

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