The Birth of Madeline Carter

One of the things that’s been really fun about republishing Mad Money, the first Madeline Carter novel, in e-book format has been revisiting all of the really wonderful press attention the book got when it first came out. People have always loved Madeline Carter: both professional reviewers and readers. Something in the way Madeline greets the world, I think. Something in the way she confronts her challenges.

Below is a snippet from an interview I did with Ali Karim for Shots Magazine back in 2008. The interview was done around the time that the first Kitty Pangborn novel was published in 2008. However, Karim asked me about Madeline’s genesis. I thought I’d share that with you here.

In the earliest part of this decade I developed a passion for the stock market. (Peer pressure: it was 2000 and all my friends were doing it.) I had this period where I dabbled in day-trading. And I have a personality that’s faintly obsessive. When I develop a passion, I live it and breathe it and dream it for a while. It overcomes me. With the stock market, though, there are only a certain number of hours in a day when you can actually trade. (Unless you’re into the international markets, which I lacked -- and still lack -- the proficiency to tackle.) And I found myself one day, after the close of trade, with this huge store of passion and no place to put it. And I could suddenly see myself -- only a finer, better, taller and more knowledgeable me -- in Malibu, in the house where I used to live, looking out towards the ocean from a desk, but not actually seeing the waves, seeing instead the dance of the numbers and the rhythm of the market’s tide. And I just started to write. And I jammed out the first 7000 words of what would eventually become Mad Money all in one sitting. I thought it was a short story. I didn’t look at it again for about a year and when I did I said, Hey. I think this might be a book. And eventually it was.

You can read that interview here. Snippets from Mad Money’s reviews are collected here.