Author Interview: Stephanie Garber

Get the inside scoop on ‘Alchemy of Secrets’!

Stephanie Garber is the author of our October Adult ‘Deal with the Devil’ featured book: Alchemy of Secrets. Read on to get the inside scoop from inspiration to favourite scenes and more!

What was the spark that led you to write Alchemy of Secrets, was there a specific moment or idea that ignited the story?

There were a couple! Usually with my books there’s one or two sparks, and I like when there’s multiple sparks that don’t seem like they connect at first. One of the first sparks was a magazine that I bought in a grocery store, as I’m always a sucker for when they have history magazines! I’m a sucker for all the celeb stuff, too, but when they have, like, pirates on the high seas or haunted places, I buy them all! I bought one about secret societies, and unlike the others, I read the whole thing and I was fascinated! But I was also really disappointed because I thought, if I’m reading about these from a grocery store magazine, they’re not really secret, and none of them seem like they actually have magic. And that got me thinking and wanting to create an actual secret society, but doing it in the framework of a class that feels like an urban legend. Like, there’s this myth about a college course which you can’t sign up for on any website. Instead, you have to follow a breadcrumb trail to find it and it’s taught by a mysterious woman known as the Professor. I liked the idea of making this class almost like a secret society, where you have to find it to be a part of it and you can’t share any of these urban myths and legends with those outside of the class. And that the myths can actually come true, so there would be magic and it wouldn’t just be stories or people just doing these rituals or whatever. That was my first spark for what became Alchemy of Secrets!

The title Alchemy of Secrets feel so evocative. How did you land on it, and what does “alchemy” mean to you in the context of this story?

My agent and I sold this book way back in 2020! When I pitched it, it was very different, but we had that title! I think part of it was because I was really into all these secrets societies, and there’s a lot about the alchemists, and I just really like the word “alchemy”. Which is funny, because we titled this six years ago and now a whole lot of books have some variation of alchemy, but I was like ah whatever! So it was a title we came up with, but honestly at the time we didn’t really know how it was going to fit into the story. At one point, I was thinking about if we were going to keep this title or if it was going to change. But as I was writing the book, I feel like it’s right around the mid point that you realise what the title means in the story. It became a really fun easter egg inside of the book and so my hope is when readers get to that point, it sheds a whole new light.

The setting in Los Angeles and the incorporation of old Hollywood glamour and urban legends feels so rich. How did you research or imagine the city and its myths for this story?

I live in California, and I also used to live in southern California for a couple of years. So, I’ve been to Los Angeles a lot, I’ve been to Santa Monica a lot, and I love it down there! And when I sold the book I knew I wanted it to be urban fantasy and for it to take place in a city. I’m not familiar with New York or London enough to write a book, but I was like, you know what, I’ve been to Los Angeles a lot! And I also live close enough to be able to hop on a plane a fly there and back in the same day, so I thought it would be easy peasy to research. So we sold the book, and then everything shut down the following week. It was early 2020 and so I just had to laugh about it, because it was my first time setting something in the real world and I thought it would be so easy to go, and now I can’t. Eventually I did go, but in the meantime I had to find other ways to research, so I bought a tonne of books! I bought a tonne of books on old Hollywood, old Hollywood and the occult, old Hollywood murders, and old Hollywood scandals. I have a whole stack of these books, and in 2020, I had a whole lot of time for reading! I went through them all, and it felt really good because my main character’s name is Holland St. James, and she has a job working at this place called the Santa Monica Coffee Lab, and once a week they show old classic movies and have discussions. It was really fun to research the things that she would be researching. And she’s a graduate student and she’s writing her thesis on old Hollywood murders and linking them with the devil. So I also tried to delve into that which was actually really hard because as I started reading these stories, they were just so sad! There was so much mystery and strange things, so from that perspective it’s really fascinating to look at what happened and to see how corrupt the police department in Hollywood was and how when people would get murdered, instead of the police coming in first, the studios would come in first. And there would be strange suicide notes and bodies in places, and there was just a lot of weirdness. But it was also really dark, and so I pivoted the story away from focussing so much on that to making it more of a treasure hunt. And then I also watched a lot of classic films. Growing up, my dad managed a movie theatre and he loves movies, which is one of the reasons why I had Holland have this special relationship with her dad which has a lot to do with films. So I watched a lot of movies with my dad and read a lot of books, and then finally when the world opened back up again, I took my first official research trip to Los Angeles. One of the urban myths in the book is The Devil’s Sidecar, and it says there are a number of haunted hotel bars in Los Angeles, and there’s one in particular that the devil likes to frequent because he likes their sidecar. And if you go there and you find him and you buy him a sidecar, he’ll give you a business card which you can use for a favour. And so when I did my first research trip I wanted to visit every hotel bar to find the one that I thought would be it. And I also imagined that that was what Holland would do, so it was really fun to go on this trip and put myself in her shoes. Plus, who doesn’t want to go from hotel bar to hotel bar in Los Angeles?! There is a lot of other real places mentioned in the book and I went to all of them! I took a ridiculous amount of notes and loads of pictures, because I just wanted it to feel real in the book and I wanted to make it feel possible that there’s magic around every corner.

The fictional course, Folklore 517: Local Legends and Urban myths, is compelling and mysterious. What inspired that idea, and how did you decide what myths or legends to include or invent?

I feel like when writing, especially a first book, there’s an element of plotting. But there’s also, for lack of a better word but also I actually think it’s the perfect word, this alchemy that occurs when you put your pen on paper. I actually write by hand, and then I type it up! And this was one of those occasions where I did free writes, which is basically where I sit down, turn my phone on silent and put on a timer. I knew I wanted this book to be in Los Angeles, and l knew that my main character had a mysterious mentor. Originally, she was an author, but then I started writing in this first person perspective warning someone away, and this was how the secret society fitted in. Like, hey, there’s this school and I don’t want to give you the name of it because I don’t want you to find it but I need to tell you this story. So the idea of the class really came from a writing exercise, and I say that for any writer out there because I feel like you can plot and plot and plot, and then different things happen as soon as you put your pen to the paper and that’s one of the magics of writing. A lot of the time I’ll do a skeletal outline and then fill them in because I’m always surprised by what ends up showing up on the paper. And then for the classes, there were a couple that I wrote, like The Devil’s Sidecar and there’s also a myth about The Watchman, which is this figure who can tell you the exact day and time you’re going to die. But the rest of them actually came when I took that first trip, and a dear friend of mine whose name is Victoria Van Vleet, and if you’ve read the book that name might be a little familiar! She took me around, and she took me to all of these really great places. So we went to the old LA Zoo, the Hollywood Reservoir, and all these other iconic locations that I knew I wanted to be in the book. For me, so much of reading is spending time in a place I would like to be in, and I really wanted readers to feel like they were in Los Angeles and feel like they were on this treasure hunt. And so, I picked the locations, and then came up with the myths that came along with them.

The magic in Alchemy of Secrets is woven into the real world in a subtle way. How did you balance the line between what’s believable and what’s fantastical? One of the interesting things about Folklore 517 is that there’s some students who think it’s a hoax and are just there for a story, and then there’s some people like Holland who wholeheartedly believe it. 

I feel like its something that I do in all my books, where I love to have heroines who believe in things that no one else does. Like in Once Upon a Broken Heart, I loved writing about Evangeline because she has this story where she’s like oh my gosh, the love of my life is cursed! He’s marrying someone else so therefore he has to be cursed! But its like, that’s not reasonable. And it was kind of the same approach with this book. I liked the idea of Holland really believing these classes because they help her make sense of the world. So I tried to start off purposely making the magic really light, so there was the question of is she right or is she delusional. So for the first part of the book, the readers really question like, wait, are these urban myths real or are they just a scam? They’re thinking are they trick? Are they just something this professor figure is using to manipulate? And you know, it could even be both! I like looking at questions like, even if it is real, the Professor may still be manipulative. I like stories that make people think and question, so for me, I framed it so the magic was very light in the beginning, so readers could make their own assessments and they they could reflect on how they would feel if they took the class. So I wrote all the clues in the second-person chapters to give readers that feeling. I feel like if you make it feel real enough, if you start off with less magic, hopefully by the time you bring more magic in people will already believe your world so much that they also believe the magic.

Trust and betrayal are core themes in this book, and there are characters whose motives remain ambiguous. Were you always planning certain reveals, or did the sense of mystery evolve as you wrote and come as a surprise?

I think both! So there’s one reveal near the end that was there from the very beginning. It was one of the driving forces for this book. But there are others, like one part of this book is that Holland is told that if she doesn’t find a certain object she’s going to die at midnight on Halloween, and I played a lot with who was going to be the one to kill her. I wrote out a lot of different scenarios for how that could play out, and that one ended up surprising me. There’s also a reveal near the middle that I kind of didn’t think about until I put it on the page and I was like of course! That makes sense! I feel like for a first book in a series, I will figure out the world and the goals, and then I really do try to just write, and discover as I write. You have to plot more for the second and third, but for the first I like the idea of just going in and really discovering the characters and letting yourself be surprised. I try to surprise myself, because I feel like if I’m surprised, then the readers are going to be surprised!

Off the back of that, what surprised you the most while writing this novel, either about the characters or about yourself as a writer?

I read a lot of adult fiction now. Like, when I first started writing I just read YA. And so it was really exciting, now that I’m older and adult fantasy is really having such a big moment, to be able to have that and write that. But the thing that surprised me was missing my YA. I love this book, but I also felt like oh gosh, I’m older now! Am I too old to write YA?! But nope! I think my heart is definitely still this age and I love it and I miss it.

For readers who love your YA work, what would you say is similar in this adult novel, and what’s different both thematically and stylistically?

I think a lot is similar! I feel that although the world is really different in this one as it’s set in the real world, I wanted it to be like if my YA readers picked it up, they would still feel at home. I tend to write softer females, and in terms of my main character Holland, she, like Evangeline in Once Upon a Broken Heart, is an optimist. She firmly believes in the things she has always believed in. She has a lot of stuff and a tragic past, and so her optimism comes from a place of wanting to rewrite the world to give herself a better narrative. So I think if you like my other heroines, you’re going to feel at home with Holland. I also really like the idea of giving my main characters potential love interests. So we all know Jax and Evangeline, but it never started that way! She had multiple potentials in those books, as I like the idea of mystery and choice. And so with Alchemy of Secrets, I gave Holland a number of potential love interests, too. I don’t think I can go as far to say that it’s a love triangle, as the book covers such a short period of time, so it’s more falling into attraction. But there’s that too, that mystery of not knowing who my main character is going to end up with and so there’s a thread of romance hinted and that there’s going to be more to come! And again as previously mentioned, you don’t know who to trust! I feel like through all my books I have characters who lie, but I also feel like we all see the world differently and a lot of people see truth differently. I like having different pieces of a story, and having my main character figure out who and what to trust. And trying to create a sense between Holland and not just the men, but her friends and other figures in her life such as her sister, of questioning. So I feel like I have a lot of the same themes, but I think what’s different is that Alchemy of Secrets probably has one of my biggest casts. I have a lot more characters because I wanted to create this bigger story and I knew I wanted to make it three books from very early on. Another difference is the second-person chapters! And that it’s a very, very mystery and plot forward, whereas my YA’s are more romance forward. This one does have romance, but it’s definitely more a treasure hunt like The Da Vinchi Code or The Inheritance Games or National Treasure. So I think the biggest difference is that I tried to make it this really fun, fast-paced treasure hunt, and whilst the romance is there, that wasn’t the fuel.

What part of your writing process feels the most “magical”?

I think just taking my notebook, sitting down, and writing! I sometimes start with just wanting to explore my characters feelings, or I just want to sit down and and have fun and play. Playing in my notebook continues to be the most magical part because I feel like when I’m just putting pen to paper, and discovering the story for the first time, I feel like I’m never know what I’m going to find! Revising is also fun because I love perfecting it and cleaning it up because drafting feels so messy, but I also feel like it’s a treasure hunt whenever you sit down.

If you could pick one artefact or piece of lore from Alchemy of Secrets and imagine it existing in real life, which would you choose, and would you go and find it?

Ooo that’s a really good question, oh my gosh! I feel like I’m going to give an answer that you’re not going to like because it didn’t make it into the book, but it’s referred to! As I mentioned earlier, the book goes between Holland’s perspective and the perspective of you as the reader taking the Folklore 517 classes, and there’s one class that was kept from the book. It was the After Midnight Menu, which there’s a tiny reference to later on in the book. It wasn’t needed for the story to make sense, but I loved that piece of lore! It talks about how in Santa Monica, there’s an alley which if you go down it after midnight, there’s this grimy coffee and tea window. If you ask for the After Midnight Menu, they’ll give you a specific menu which is very, very expensive. And when this person does it, they’re like blown away that they’re looking at this menu and they’re pointed towards a nearby ATM. The person is like, am I being scammed?! But it’s basically a fortune-telling window, where if they give you a drink, once you finish it you can pick things like love, job, money, or family, and then you remove the sleeve and it will tell you a bit about your future. This is probably the one that is the least dangerous but it’s also really magical.

Is there anything you can tell us about the sequel?

I have a title, and I have written all the second-person chapters. But they won’t be a class this time, they will be something different — a different piece of world-building which I am very excited about! Also over the summer, I took a research trip, so if you look back at my reels you can find places that I visited that will most likely make it into the sequel. Oh, and you will meet January!

What’s your favourite thing about the FairyLoot edition of Alchemy of Secrets?

Oh my gosh, it’s so hard! So this was illustrated by Tom Roberts, and he just did an incredible job with it! And the endpapers are gorgeous! Even the case, it’s just all so perfect! But, I feel like the sprayed edge is my favourite. I like the key on the edge, I love how it turned out. And if you’ve read any of my other books, you know I’m a sucker for a key! I like the sparkle on the front, too.