Welcome to FIVE QUESTIONS. In this feature on my blog, you'll learn about new and exciting books from the author's themselves. You'll hear about the book, their characters, the inspiration behind the book, and other insider details. All through five simple questions.
Today, we are hearing from Abigail Miles about her debut novel THE BUILDING THAT WASN'T, available now.
What is your new book about?
THE BUILDING THAT WASN'T is a genre-bending sci-fi thriller about a young woman who discovers a strange building where nothing makes sense.
Shortly after the death of her father, Everly Tertium is approached by a man in the park one day who claims to be her grandfather, and he invites her to visit him at a building she’s never heard of, called the Eschatorologic. While there, Everly is assailed with memories she shouldn’t have, and a pervasive sense of deja vu: the feeling that she's been to this building before, and already met these people, and heard all of the things that her grandfather is telling her. But that’s impossible, of course. She’d never even heard of the building before her grandfather found her.
The more she visits the building, the more Everly begins to suspect the people living there may be trapped, and that there is much more going on than she is being told. Everly must piece together the riddle of what the building is, who the people inside are, and how her family is connected to all of it before she, too, becomes ensnared by whatever force is keeping the people there.
What was the inspiration behind the book?
This book was inspired, first and foremost, by a dream. This is not a unique concept, I am aware—plenty of people will tell you their stories came from dreams. But that really is where it all started for The Building That Wasn’t. Years ago, I had a dream that was so visceral and tangible, the kind that you wake up from feeling like you just watched a movie in your sleep, and I decided that I needed to immediately write down everything I could remember. It was the kind of dream that felt like it was happening separate from me and like there must have been an ending in sight, just beyond where I had woken up, but I just couldn’t see it. I decided that the only way to find that dream’s ending would be to write it myself.
The trouble with most dreams (this one included) is that they often don’t like to adhere to the rules of reality. There were certain really specific details in the dream (which also made their way, eventually, into the book) that would not have been possible in a realistic setting. So if I was going to write this story, it had to be something speculative; this, eventually, evolved into the science fiction plot that came about after years of playing around with rules and backstory and weird genetic anomalies and alternate timelines and unique energy signatures. The plot came about gradually over the course of several years, but the seed of the book was born in that initial dream.
Of all the characters in your book, which one do you relate to the most, and why?
I relate most to my character Luca (or maybe he’s just my favorite, and I want to see more of myself in him). Despite growing up in the bizarre world that is the Eschatorologic, Luca is the most grounded of all my characters. To me, he feels the most like a person you could run into on the street or find as your next door neighbor. He’s grown up in the building and he knows what his place is meant to be in there, but at the same time he’s always seeking ways to make life better for his friends and the people around them. This is simultaneously his greatest strength and weakness. Luca can at times take on somewhat of a self-sacrificial mindset, blaming himself too much when things go wrong or placing the burden of others’ well-being on his own shoulders, when it doesn’t always have to be there. While I am far from as noble as Luca Reyes, I do see similar tendencies in myself: the desire to make people happy, to make their lives a little brighter if it’s in my ability to do so, while feeling the weight of “failure” when I can’t always fix situations the way I’d like to. I’m a people-pleaser, I guess you could say, and while I think Luca and I are similar in that in some respects, Luca is definitely living out a life with much higher stakes, where letting people down genuinely could be a life or death thing.
Luca also has a great love for people that, if nothing else, is something I strive for. He’s an optimist who’s willing to put in the work—and so I guess what I’m saying is that Luca is the character from my book whom I most aspire to be like, and maybe I wrote him in some subconscious way to inspire myself to try to live out my life more like he does.
What was the biggest challenge (research, literary, psychological, and logistical) in bringing this book to life?
The biggest challenge for me when writing this book was, honestly, figuring out what I wanted it to be. I started with these seeds of ideas that I knew I wanted to be in place: a building with people trapped inside, a young woman who stumbled upon it, and a boy who was special and somehow tangled up in all of it. But figuring out how to craft a plot out of those bits and pieces was far more challenging than I had been prepared for. There were many scrapped drafts and rewrites, and fresh brainstorms to get to the story as it is now. The antagonist changed, almost all of the characters’ names changed, and the worldbuilding, more than anything, shifted and slid around and had to be remolded again and again before it settled into a form that I was happy with.
It goes back too to that initial conception coming in the form of a dream. How do you bring a dream to life, but have it make sense? Dream logic never makes any sense once you wake up; so how do you retain that dreamlike quality, but captured inside a book with rules that can be followed and a story that can be latched onto in the waking world? These were questions I had to go back to over and over again, until eventually the answers made themselves known, and the book gradually shaped itself into what it wanted to be.
Which is your favorite minor character and why?
My favorite minor character is Mary (Everly’s mother), who is so minor, she’s not even alive at all during the book. Mary passed away when Everly was very young, and so she has taken on over the course of Everly’s life a quality of being more a legend in the story of Everly’s life than an actual person she can remember and grasp onto. When a person has faded out of our life a long time ago, they can take on a certain mythos, a larger-than-life quality where their flaws are almost erased and we can’t imagine them doing wrong. In some ways, it was fun for me to play around with the character of Mary via flashbacks or loose memories from different characters or other out-of-order chapters that gradually reveal little bits and pieces of who this woman once was, and what she means to this story. I really enjoyed shaping our (the reader’s) expectations, as well as Everly’s, of who Mary was and how she fits into everything, and then in some ways inverting that by the end: moving away from the mythos, and toward the reality of who she was. There’s more to her than meets the eye, even if she perhaps didn’t know that herself. And I really loved exploring what that could mean for the greater story.
THE BUILDING THAT WASN'T is available now, and can be purchased at the following retailers.
Bookshop.org - Supporting Local Bookstores
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