A stranded detective tries to solve a murder in a tiny Alaskan town where everyone lives in a single high-rise building, in this gripping debut by Academy Award–nominated screenwriter Iris Yamashita.
Hi, Iris! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I’m an engineer turned screenwriter turned author. I graduated with a masters in Mechanical Engineering from UCBerkeley and started working at a Japanese construction company and then at a software company. However, my true passion has always been writing. Literature/Writing was my minor as an Undergrad and I continued to write as a hobby. I took night classes after work at UCLA extension – first for writing novels and then for writing screenplays. I found screenplays were a lot easier to finish, so I wrote my first screenplay and started entering screenwriting contests with it. A Creative Artists Agency (CAA) agent was a judge for a contest I won and she offered to represent me. That eventually led to my first screenwriting job with LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, directed by Clint Eastwood. The movie ended up being nominated for a number of awards including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Despite the lottery-winning success of firsts, however, it’s been an uphill slog since. So I decided to try my luck elsewhere and went back to my first love of writing novels, and this time around, I’ve developed enough organizational and outlining skills to actually finish.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I actually can’t think of a time when I wasn’t making up stories. When I was given my first diary as a kid, I thought I was supposed to write about my fictional self living in another time period and not about my real life.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
I think one of the Babar the Elephant books was the first I can actually remember. The book that made me want to become an author was Little Women. I just wanted to be Jo March. The book I continue to go back to for inspiration on crafting sentences is That Night by Alice McDermott who was one of my writing instructors.
Your debut novel, City Under One Roof, is out January 10th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Alice in Wonderland meets Fargo.
What can readers expect?
Expect a lot of secrets, odd characters, humor, a number of hidden Alice in Wonderland references and a creepy, isolated town that you just might be tempted to visit afterwards.
Where did the inspiration for City Under One Roof come from?
The real isolated town of Whittier, Alaska was something that has been in the back of my mind for over 20 years. I had watched a documentary back when the city could only be reached by train or boat and the tunnel had not yet been open to car traffic. When I started thinking of setting a murder mystery there, I watched a video driving through the two-and-a-half-mile one-way tunnel and it made me think of falling through a rabbit hole where I was going to end up in a strange Wonderland with some odd characters, and then the pieces started to come together.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I fell in love with a lot of the characters as I started to write and explore them. Lonnie is a long time resident of the fictional town of Point Mettier who wears different color berets every day and keeps a pet moose. She has a mental disability and suffered trauma as a child. Everybody in town kind of looks out for her, but in my mind, she is much smarter and more observant than everyone gives her credit for. She is the Mad Hatter character. I enjoyed exploring different voices so I especially liked writing in her voice and discovering her backstory even though it was difficult and I could only do short chapters with her.
Can you tell us a bit about your journey of getting City Under One Roof published?
I wrote a number of chapters and hadn’t gotten very far before I started researching literary agents through the old fashioned “Guide to Literary Agents.” I was making up a spreadsheet thinking I would probably be fielding a lot of rejections. But in my first batch of three, one of the agents, Lucy Carson, responded and asked for the rest of the manuscript. Unfortunately, I hadn’t finished it, so she told me to get back to her when it was done. I was still working in Hollywood and teaching as well, so I didn’t have much time to work on it and put the book aside, but Lucy would gently prod and continued to check in on me to see how it was going. Then COVID lockdowns gave me more time to focus on it and Lucy suggested we go ahead and try selling the partial. Lucy was brilliant and the people at Berkley were (and continue to be) amazingly supportive and I’m kind of going through that winning-the-lottery feeling again. It feels like a life-long dream coming true.
Do you have any advice for those who may have set some writing resolutions for the new year?
I always come up with grandiose resolutions and then quickly forget what they were. I would suggest instead to set small daily or weekly goals throughout the year. Our brains want instant gratification and it’s harder to keep motivated on long term goals. So keep your goals in bite size pieces. For instance, it could be to write a ½ a chapter of an early draft or a edit a whole chapter of a later draft per day. Then check it off your todo list and give yourself a reward–a piece of chocolate, an hour of game time, or whatever your small reward is. I also have a writers group that keeps me motivated. We get together every other week and read each others’ pages aloud. The instant gratification there is being able to entertain the group, if no one else.
What’s next for you?
I am currently writing the sequel to City Under One Roof, with a title still TBD.
Lastly, are there any 2023 releases our readers should look out for?
City Under One Roof will released on January 10, 2023. Knock on wood that the sequel will be ready for release in 2024.
You can find Iris at her website and on Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads.
