Welcome to Spotlight Sunday. I’m Liz Gavin and today I’m thrilled to introduce you to Aria Glazki.
Thanks so much for having me, Liz!
LG: Where are you from?
I was born in Russia, but I grew up in California. After some time away for college, I came back to CA to be closer to my family, and that’s where I live still.
LG: Do you have hobbies? What’s your favorite pastime?
Besides reading, you mean? 😉 I like to paint and bake when I can, and I love going to live performances (music, theater, dance, improv – just about anything), but my other hobbies have mostly fallen by the wayside at this point. Now I focus on spending quality time with the people in my life, and otherwise I use most of my free time to write!
LG: Tell us about something your readers would be surprised to learn about you.
I’m pretty open with my readers, so this is a hard one. Maybe that I used to be a competitive ballroom dancer, and my first job was at a dance studio. I still miss it, actually.
LG: How long have you been an author? Why did you decide to write?
My first book was published in 2014, so I guess that’s when I officially became an author. But I was always writing. I even wrote stories in Hebrew and Latin once upon a time for school!
After finishing my Creative Writing degree, I took an extended break from writing, but in 2012 a couple characters wouldn’t leave me alone, and I was in a good place to attempt NaNoWriMo (50,000 words in 30 days!). That project became Mending Heartstrings, which is what catapulted me into exploring publishing and writing my other books.
LG: What was the inspiration(s) behind your most recent title?
Fallen is a contemporary retelling of Verdi’s La Traviata, which actually itself is a retelling of La Dame aux camelias [The Lady with the Camellias] by Alexandre Dumas fils. Ever since I first saw Moulin Rouge! (another retelling), something about the underlying story resonated with me. Many, many years later I got to go see the opera, and as I was sitting there in the theater, Adrian’s voice started whispering to me.
Ultimately, though, it was seeing how the original and the retellings focused on the hero, on his journey, that inspired me to write my version. So often stories about chronic illness are written from the perspective of the healthy people – how knowing someone with an illness impacts them. I wanted to give more of a voice to the heroine, to explore how living with a chronic illness impacts her – her decisions, her relationship with the hero, and her life overall.
LG: Have you ever learned something surprising about yourself while researching and/or writing a book? If so, could you share it with us?
I’ve learned I am absolutely terrible at anything to do with names. Side characters, events, companies/businesses – there are so many things we have to name as writers! I use a lot of random name generators, but that only helps so much since I can tell when a name isn’t right; it just takes me an extremely long time to come up with one that works. Some writers can’t get a feel for their characters until they have a name, but for me sometimes the name is the last thing I nail down. And don’t even get me started on book titles!
LG: Please provide all your contact information so our readers can stalk you.
Nowadays I’m mostly over at Patreon.com/AriaGlazki, where I’m sharing my sexy new contemporary as I write it!
You can also find me at:
Thanks again for letting me pop by, Liz!
Thank YOU for being such a great host, not to mention awesome writer. lol