Carmen Mola, without knowing it, changed the life of Greta Alonso
QUESTION.- Who is behind Greta Alonso? What can you tell us about yourself?
ANSWER.- I am a normal girl. I studied engineering and I am from a city very close to the CantabrianI never explain what it is. I have a job related to my engineering studies but I have always liked literature a lot. As a child I already wrote stories and as I grew older they became stories. In 2018 I went through a difficult work phase and I used literature to escape, almost as if it were therapy. I launched into writing a novel and the people around me encouraged me to contact a publisher, but I have always been terrified of certain things and one of them is public exposure. It was just when it came out carmen mola and I sent his agent, Justyna Rzewuska, the first six chapters. I thought she would understand me because she already had another author like me -me thinking that Carmen Mola was a woman like me-. Although she told me that the pseudonym is a double-edged sword because it sells less, she opted for me.
Q.- Have you overcome that fear of public exposure?
A.- Public exposure terrifies me and I move in my circle of comfort. I have encouraged myself to do interviews by phone, I feel comfortable and I have no problem doing it. It is true that there comes a point where the pseudonym comes to bear. My relationship with readers is through Instagram, where I write practically every day.
Q.- How does someone completely anonymous and far from the publishing world manage to contact an important agent and get them to pay attention to him?
A.- I sent him an email. I didn’t even call on the phone, I sent him the first six chapters. He answered me within half an hour, it didn’t take long, to ask me for the entire manuscript. I had been sending it everywhere for months and had no response from anyone. It was like throwing the manuscript into the sea. I was in a bookstore and Carmen Mola caught my eye, precisely because she published under a pseudonym. I looked up her agent and tried hers.
Q.- Presenting yourself for an award and then revealing who you are will not work for you. No?
A.- No. I’m dying. Having to go out there and give a speech.
Q.- What does an engineer like you do in a world like literature and art?
A.- I have always liked it. Look, when I studied I was doubting whether to choose science or letters.
Q.- What is your creative process like? how long has it taken you ‘The Lady and death’? How do you document yourself?
A.- The world of until It interested me for a long time, because in my house it was painted. when i posted ‘The sky of your days’ I didn’t write for a while because the characters were very inside and I thought that if I started I was going to do something similar. I wanted something different, related to art. I spent about three months thinking about it and in January 2021 I started writing. I always carry a notebook and a bunch of pads where I put my ideas and there comes a time when they all connect. So I start writing. There are times when the main idea branches off and I let it branch off. I give a lot of freedom to the characters and the plot. New ideas appear, new characters emerge, attitudes that I had not planned… All this makes the novel something more dynamic and rich.
“I design the characters, but they surprise me by doing unexpected things”
Q.- The characters in ‘The Lady and death’ They hide many secrets. Is this circumstance something sought on purpose, a sign of identity of your way of writing?
R.- It is not wanted or intended, but now that you say it, it is true. In any case, they say that people have four sectors: there is something that we know about ourselves and others also know about us; something that we know and others do not know; something that others know and we don’t; and something that neither we nor the others know. I think that there are many things that the characters in this novel don’t know about themselves and that are emerging. It’s a bit like what happens to me as an author. I design the characters, but they surprise me by doing unexpected things. The paradigm of this is Mateo, who evolves a lot throughout the novel, that there are things about himself that he doesn’t even know.
Q.- What are your sources of inspiration?
A.- I really don’t know. I read a lot, a lot. I watch a lot of movies, but not series, I really like classic movies. Some readers tell me it shows. When I read it is as if I got into a movie and that inspires me. I am also very inspired by what I call exploring. I love having a free afternoon, taking the car and going to explore a town, a city or an area that I don’t know. Sometimes a friend accompanies me, but I go alone a lot. There many ideas arise and I carry a notebook to write them down. In any case, creation is not something sought after. There is a moment of click, when suddenly everything clicks and comes out.
“Only in Lucas’s profile, the soccer playerthere is something real, although not related to a specific person, but to that world”
Q.- The warning that everything is fiction and that the characters are not real also calls my attention. However, some of the profiles you raise lead you directly to well-known public figures, for example a gay judge. Do you take certain clichés from reality to use them later in your characters?
A.- Unconsciously perhaps yes, but not on purpose. I put it because in the first novel, many readers asked me if she had similarities with the female character in the first novel, with the police inspector Natalia Herreros. She had to keep explaining that she had nothing to do with it. Many times people associate the characters with the author as if it were a biographical novel. There were even people who asked me if I had suffered abuse. I wanted to make it clear that everything was fiction, mark a kind of line that separates fiction from reality.
Only in Lucas’s profile, the soccer player, there is something real, although not related to a specific person, but to that world. I had read that many elite athletes suffered from anxiety and that world of success, spotlights and advertising contracts really caught my attention. Many of them, even if they do not show it on their social networks or comment on it in public, surely they must be having a hard time.
Q.- Is crime fiction the genre in which you feel most comfortable?
I have fun as a reader. In the end it is like a riddle, beyond reading. And as an author, much more. You have to spin all the plots to lead the reader where I want. But in the same way, when you get to the end, when you discover who it was and why, in this case discover who Dama is, who painted the pictures, what’s up, who the murderer is… There are many intrigues but I like to get that the reader is surprised, but at the same time that he does not feel trapped. Let him see that, obviously, it had to be that way and it made sense.
Q.- Who do you read? What kind of literature do you have on your nightstand?
A.- I read everything except historical novels, which I don’t like. Now I am reading a lot of essays, about stoicism. Black novels too, especially American black novels, the classics. James Elroy, Dashiell Hammett… Spanish thriller too, I liked it a lot Sunday Villar, who died, I loved his trilogy. It’s the best I’ve read in a long time. What I don’t like is the Nordic novel. I have tried with different authors, but I have not succeeded.
“I don’t like the Nordic novel because I have the feeling that they write with a pattern”
Q.- What did you not like? What are you missing?
R.- Although I know that there are people who love it, I have the feeling that they write with a pattern and some times that are following. It seems to me the same novel, the same prototype a little made up. I do not like the clichés. I’m a little tired, for example, of the typical crime novel police inspectors, with a gruesome past, full of misfortunes and violence. I wanted a normal person, a man without trauma who could be any of us.
Q. And Carmen Mola, who has influenced so much so that you can be talking to me today? Have you read it?
R.- Yes, the last one, ‘The mothers’, It’s the one I liked the most. It has been one of my best reads of the past year.
Q.- In ‘The lady and death’ Much is said about art and it is even questioned whether the secrecy that surrounds Dama is nothing more than a marketing operation. Each character has their particular idea about what makes a work of art. Transferred to literature, where do you think is the line between great literature and commercial literature? Could you reflect on this topic?
I believe that in the end all literature is important. There are times when I look for commercial literature, a book that entertains me, that doesn’t make me think too much because I don’t want to overwhelm myself or make me reflect too much. Is it of poorer quality? I don’t think so. There are many types of readers. I would rather speak of entertainment literature and reflection literature, not of more or less quality. In the end, if a book leads you to what you are looking for, at that moment it has fulfilled its mission.
