Betwixt And Between follows a man who wakes up with a new identity, missing memories, a mysterious woman’s photograph, and clues leading him deeper into a world that seems to be rewriting itself. Where did the inspiration for this novel come from?

Betwixt And Between started out as a spy story, similar to a James Bond tale but with a comical twist. The trail I fleshed out in the outline didn’t feel right, and that led me to have the hero wake up in a cheap hotel with total amnesia, my way of letting my hero, Johnny Marathon, lead the way. I encountered some false starts, added and deleted some scenes before an idea struck me. Using the amnesia idea, it wouldn’t be physical or psychological trauma that had brought on Johnny’s memory loss; it was his author, a fledgling writer who built a familiar world (NYC) for his story but failed to consider his characters beyond a name, and even then had little consideration in naming some of his characters beyond descriptions. From there, the scenes and chapters followed what popped into my head, many of them complete surprises to me, like when Man In The White Suit kills Julie or Judy, or when I realized The Fat Man is not only a woman but also a little person.

The novel shifts dramatically in tone and structure early on. Was that twist part of the original concept from the beginning?

My original version started with my hero waking up in the cheap NYC hotel before he sets out to understand who he is and who his love is, but that created a problem – who was this man and why should the reader feel empathy for him when they know no more about him than he does about himself? That was remedied by the addition of five starting chapters that introduce Peter Noble and establishes the reason my story’s author transitions Peter to Johnny.

The novel contains several surprising shifts in perspective and reality. How did you keep the narrative coherent while embracing unpredictability?

I addressed the shift between Peter Noble’s world and that of Johnny Marathon by using a character’s dialogue to foreshadow a major shift in time/space. This is when my character Nick Peggoli makes a statement of fact: “What I can tell you,” Nick said in a near whisper, for her ears only, “is that if Peter’s body is not located, the world as we know it is at an end.”

Linking fiction and the real world was more of a crapshoot. I didn’t know if it would work. That concern changed when I found the reported existence of spirits, Tulpas, who are conjured by Tulpamancers through intense meditation. (See Google AI) That concept was the entry point I needed, with a boost of imagination, for my fiction characters to step across the line between their world and ours

What do you hope readers are still thinking about a week after they finish the book?

I hope readers of Betwixt And Between will appreciate the story my characters created and enjoy referencing the movie dialogue the story’s fictional author provided.
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