Between Before and After by Jessica Stilling

Publisher:  DX Varos Publishing (November 8, 2022)
Category: General Fiction, Literary Fiction, Family Secrets
Tour Dates November 1-23
ISBN: 978-1955065665
Available in Print and ebook, 479 (or less) pages

Description Between Before and After by Jessica Stilling

Indie movie director Sebastian Foster has found his niche making movies based on the award-winning novels written by his estranged mother. However, his latest film, based loosely on the tragic death of his sister as a child, opens up old wounds best left under bandages.

Told in two concurrent timelines, now and when Sebastian was a teen, some twenty years ago in the mid-1990s, this story of learning unknown truths unwinds in the streets of Paris, where Sebastian lived as a teen and where he has returned to make his picture.

Praise For Jessica Stilling

Bronx Council of the Arts Chapter One Award for The Beekeeper’s Daughter

“Stilling’s take on this familiar tale is provocative and poignant, rich with emotion and powerfully described, laced with profound contemplation about dying too soon and growing up too quickly.”- Publisher’s Weekly review of Betwixt and Between

“At turns happy and unbearably sad, Betwixt and Between is a beautifully realized re-imagining of a classic story that will enchant readers as the original did.”- Booklist starred review of Betwixt and Between

“A suspenseful read. Jessica Stilling sets the story among a backdrop of stunning scenes of Greece described as being almost visceral with a unique compilation of romance, mystery, and self-inspection. A compelling story that comes to life off the page.”-San Francisco Book Review of the Weary God of Ancient Travelers

Interview With Jessica Stilling

TR: Please tell us something about Between Before and After that is not in the summary.  (About the book, character you particularly enjoyed writing etc.)

JS: This novel is about an indie filmmaker son who decides to turn all his mother’s very autobiographical novels into movies. There’s a lot of tension between mother and son, secrets, tragedy, longing, but I can’t think of a cooler thing than having your kid take your art and make it their own.

I also really like my main character, Sebastian. I know all authors say that, but I have published ten novels now and I’ve written a few others that haven’t (and perhaps will never) see the light of day, and with so many characters, all I can say is, you like some more than others. But this guy is interesting. He’s a good person and a genuinely nice guy. His longing for his past is based on trauma that does not control him, but it’s something he wrestles with in compelling ways. He’s someone I’d want to know and he’s someone I truly root for. I loved watching Sebastian through the lens of his childhood (during the sections when he’s 14 in 1994) and his adult life. He’s someone I might know personally, but he’s also someone special. I especially liked writing the scenes where Sebastian is with a Norwegian woman named Maja. That’s when he’s happiest and I like to see Sebastian happy.

TR: I always enjoy looking at the names that authors choose to give their characters. Where do you derive the names of your characters?  Are they based on real people you knew or now know in real life? How do you create names for your characters?

JS: I named Sebastian’s mother, Regina, after my mother. She hates her name and goes by Gina, which reminds me that she’s an Italian American woman who grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the 60s and 70s. But I love the name Regina, it means Queen, and while my mother is NOTHING like Regina Foster, I thought the name was appropriate.

Sebastian Foster got his name because it’s sophisticated and a little exotic, but not too exotic. I figured Sebastian was the only name Regina Foster would give a son. For most of the book, however, he goes by Bastian. I didn’t plan that, but as I kept writing him, he seemed a little more lose, a little more innocent and child-like and so the nickname stuck. He’s called Bastian much more often in the 1994 timeline, but people he’s truly close to, like his love interest Maja and his good friend Marcel, still call him Bastian as an adult. He’s the kind of guy that does not mind that.

Lucy, the little sister’s name, just sounded like a great name for a precocious little girl who loves to run around Parisian parks chasing pigeons and pointing at red awnings.

Their last name is Foster because at the end of the day, that’s what Sebastian is, he fosters, he takes care of people. There’s a lot more going on, but I thought it really fit him and so I made it the family name.

Maja got her name because it’s Norwegian, and the character comes from Oslo. Maja also looks pronounceable, as some Scandinavian names are not so easy on the English-speaking tongue. Most people who read the book end up calling her Maya and that pronunciation is close enough.

As for the French names, I literally looked up a few French names and used the ones that were clearly French but recognisable, like Marcel, Pierre, Tristian and Marie.

TR: Where did you get the inspiration for your cover?

JS: My publisher came to me with several covers, and I passed on the entire first round, mostly because the city of Paris wasn’t present enough. I really wanted Paris to show front and center and I wanted to show an element of the past, and how the past catches up with you, that’s where the postcards come in. There’s a sense of whimsy to the images that really works and the color scheme, reds and oranges, feels sweeping. I still would have liked to have pigeons or red balloons on the cover, but alas…not everything needs to be a bad stereotype of French New Wave Cinema.

TR: What is your favorite scene in the book? Why?

JS: My favorite scene in Between Before and After is the scene where Sebastian, as an adult, visits Quentin, his mother’s old boyfriend from when he was a child. In Sebastian’s mind, Quentin has always been the young, gorgeous poet his mother dated twenty-odd years ago. His perception of Quentin never changed because Bastian never saw him again after he leaves Paris at fourteen. In the scene, Sebastian visits the suburban home of a fifty-something Quentin, many years after he last saw him. He meets Quentin’s wife and three children, the dog barks at him, he brings over a bottle of inexpensive wine and takes in the suburban air of France. It’s a little slice of domesticity that really impacts how Sebastian sees Quentin. He has pictured Quentin his entire life as an attractive, artsy, twenty-something, but when he’s faced with who Quentin became, it alters how he sees this man who so impacted his childhood. Still, he appreciates and even envies the life Quentin led, even if it wasn’t the life Sebastian pictured him leading. Many of the novel’s themes are packed in there, but certain secrets are also revealed toward the end of the scene that impact that plot and Sebastian’s mental state, so the scene packs a couple of punches from a few different angles. I loved writing and exploring it, mostly for the ideas it presents and the ways it impacted Sebastian.  

Another scene I really loved is the scene where Sebastian films a scene from his mother’s novel, which is based largely on something that happens in his childhood. They’re filming his little sister Lucy (or the character based on Lucy from his mother’s novel) playing in front of Notre Dame and there’s something about the filming of this scene that Sebastian can never get right. He’s really frustrated by that, and this is where he realizes that you can’t just wish for your past to come back to you. What gave the scene some extra umph was that about halfway through drafting the novel, there was the fire at Notre Dame. That added another element, now not only can’t he get the people in his past back as they were and he can’t make the events the same, but now, a cathedral that has stood for hundreds of years, an image that rang so high in his memory of his childhood, is also never going to be the same again. Bastian keeps trying to hide the damage by using different camera angles, but it doesn’t work. At the end of the day, you can’t hide the damage through clever camera tricks.

TR: Which actors would you like to see playing Sebastian as a teen and as an adult from Between Before and After?

JS: To play Sebastian as a fourteen-year-old, I’d love a young, think Growing Pains era, Leonardo DiCaprio. He’s playful and can exude a kind of innocence other child actors didn’t really have and there’s something commanding but also humble about Leo at that age. Also, Growing Pains Leo had the whole ‘90s look down, from the hair parted in the middle and slightly gracing his temples to the nice T-shirt and flannel combination that was all the rage. That is just how I see young Bastian wandering the streets of Paris with Marcel or Maja in 1994.

To play Sebastian in the present, I can totally see Paul Bettany pulling off the role. He’s able to be nice, friendly, but tortured, and he has the right bone structure. Alexander Sarsgaard could also pull off the role pretty well, but I fear he might play it a bit too tortured and while there’s that aspect to Bastian, especially as we near the end of the novel, he’s fun and nice and playful too.  

TR: What kind of messages do you try to instill in your writing?

JS: In Between Before and After, the theme of nostalgia is forever present. But there are variations on that theme. I wanted to explore a person’s longing for their past. I also wanted to explore what it’s like for that longing to manifest in someone’s art. The idea that you can’t ever truly get your past back, even through art, and that sometimes the past wasn’t what it seemed, are other variations on that theme. Honestly, I almost, almost, called this book A Cure for Nostalgia, but I was talked out of it by a couple of people who said Between Before and After better rolled off the tongue.

TR: What draws you to this genre? 

JS: I love that literary fiction focuses on character and themes. I love creating characters and exploring their inner and outer lives. I also love philosophizing and playing with ideas. I think setting, a sense of place, is super important in literary fiction, and I love taking my readers, and taking myself, to just so many places. I also love the act of writing literary fiction. I write at a slower pace, I stop to consider, I reread. I love the slowness. You can really roll it around on your tongue and take it in.

As someone who writes in multiple genres (I also write young adult fantasy), I feel the difference when I write. Literary fiction is a slow stroll, YA fantasy is more of a race I’m running with ideas and characters, books in a series and the dreaded Market. Sometimes when I read or write genre fiction, it’s like eating a candy bar. It’s a good candy bar, maybe a nice, big Toblerone, but at the end of the day, it’s a candy bar. Literary fiction is like a long, slow meal at a gourmet restaurant. The feeling of fullness lasts…and there’s not so many empty calories.

TR: Will Sebastian have more to tell readers in the future?

JS: This book was supposed to stand alone, and it does. However, while I like the ending of this book, and it is by far the very best ending for Between Before and After, it doesn’t leave Sebastian in a great emotional place. A few years after I finished this book, as I was getting ready to publish it, a friend of mine who had just finished it said, “Look, I like the ending, I get it, but did you have to be so mean to this guy?” It was definitely the best place for the book to end and that ending will have an impact on the reader, but I was truly mean to a truly wonderful character, and I wanted to rectify that. So, I have written a one-hundred-page novella that I plan to give away on my website a couple of weeks after the book comes out, that picks up with Sebastian’s story and gives him a better ending for his life. It doesn’t take away what happens in this book and this novella has no place in Between Before and After, but I wanted to send Bastian off in better place and that’s why I wrote the novella and that’s why I’m giving it away to anyone who wants to see a happier ending for Bastian. I’m calling this novella…you guessed it, A Cure for Nostalgia.

TR: Do you have any writing projects that you are currently working on?

JS: I’m currently writing Book II of my second young adult fantasy series, The Seidr Sagas, it’s about Viking witches. I have a thing for Vikings. I don’t have a title yet, and the book is a hot mess, but I’ll dig in there with a backhoe sometime and fix it up. I’m about ¾ of the way through Draft I. I’m also working on a literary novel called Beatrice and Persephone. It’s about two women in different timelines exploring the trauma of loss and what it means to create as a woman and an artist. Anyone who knows who Beatrice and Persephone are in literary history, may have a better understanding of the book’s themes. The book is also a bit experimental. I don’t want to give too much of that side away, but one of the characters becomes romantically linked to the Ocean (yes, THAT Ocean).

The Emergence of Expanding Light, Book IV of my Hugo-nominated young adult fantasy series, The Pan Chronicles, will be coming out early in the new year.

I will also be publishing another literary novel that takes place in Paris in May of 2023. That book, After the Barricades, explores the turbulence of the 1960s and juxtaposes it with our world today while also focusing on the May 1968 riots in Paris. That’s why the book’s coming out in May, it’s the 55^th anniversary of the riots.

TR: Is there a question/s that you would have liked me or another blogger to ask but didn’t? If so, please ask and answer.

JS: Nope, I think you got it all. Thanks for the interview!

TR: Your very welcome, thank you for joining me!

About Jessica Stilling

Jessica Stilling has written three works of literary fiction, Betwixt and Between, The Beekeeper’s Daughter, and The Weary God of Ancient Travelers. She also wrote poetry and short fiction for various literary journals.

Her articles have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Bust Magazine and she writes extensively for The Writer Magazine. She has taught Creative Writing in both high school and university. She also publishes young adult fantasy under the pen name JM Stephen.

Jessica loves Virginia Woolf, very long walks, and currently lives in southern Vermont where she writes for the very local newspaper, The Deerfield Valley News.

Website: https://www.jessicastilling.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JessicaStilling
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jessica.sticklor

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