It’s September 11, 2001, and Zelda is in New York City with her best friend and business partner, Charlie, to pitch potential funders for their website, a virtual pawn shop. While having breakfast in a diner, they run into Zelda’s ex-boyfriend, Ari, the love of her life whom she hasn’t seen in six years. He invites them to an exhibit of his paintings at a gallery in the World Trade Center, hands them a business card, begs them to come. The connection between Ari and Zelda is still strong, and her carefully contained emotions come rushing back.
When the meeting is moved from a conference room to Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, Zelda and Charlie panic. They’d planned on a PowerPoint, but the restaurant won’t have the necessary equipment. Zelda races out to find a copy shop to make printouts of their presentation. Charlie steps into an elevator.
We all know what happens next. A plane hits the tower. The world goes dark. Zelda can’t find Charlie or Ari, her best friend and the love she thought she had lost.
Published just in time for the anniversary of 9/11, Blue Sky Black is debut author Lea Vale’s second-chance romance about love, loss, and the possibility of finding your way back to the person who once meant everything. Set in New York City on one of the most devastating days in American history, the novel asks what happens when life can change in an instant—and what it takes to begin again.
Congratulations on your debut romance novel! You have also written two previous novels, A Bend in the Stars and Atomic Anna, as Rachel Barenbaum, both historical fiction. Your new book, Blue Sky Black, is a romance! Why did you make this shift, and how was writing this book different from your previous ones?
First, I want to say thank you to Dead Darlings. I’m a huge fan. Emily Ross, in particular, got me started. The very first place I published on this journey was Dead Darlings. From there I got to publish many other places and eventually made it onto New Hampshire’s NPR. So, thank you, Emily, and go Dead Darlings!
Thank you for having me, Andrea. I’m really excited to talk to you. So, why a romance? I started writing a version of Blue Sky Black probably ten years ago. The story is very, very personal to me. It’s set around 9/11. It’s a dual timeline that tells the story of two kids falling in love before 9/11 and then what happens to them on 9/11. It’s based loosely on my own experience of being down there and having lost a friend on 9/11, so that’s really hard to write about and think about. Literary fiction can get very dark and stay very dark. For romance, you are guaranteed a happily ever after. That is the rule. You have to have a happily ever after or happily ever after for now, some people say. A lot of romance goes very dark and heavy. People don’t realize that, but it does. Once I realized I could go dark and still guarantee myself an HEA, I knew I could get through this book. Once I made that switch, it was much easier and I was able to write toward hope. It’s not that everything is perfect, but there is hope at the end, and I needed that.
You published the book under a pen name. You have a pen name! Why publish this under a different name?
Writing as Rachel Barenbaum, I have amazing readers and fans, and they expect a very particular kind of book. I love to write historical fiction and literary fiction and this is not that, so like many writers, it’s a marketing tool to have different names. I’ve started seeing more and more writers doing this, especially as they dabble in romance or other genres, so I thought I would try it out.
Your other novels were published by Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, and this latest was self-published. Why did you make that decision and what challenges have you faced?
I’m a big romance reader, and almost all the romances I read are through Kindle Unlimited. They’re self-published, and I love them! There’s this raw energy to those books. They haven’t been overly polished, they’re not trying to check boxes. It’s a big movement, and I started having extremely successful self-published authors on my show, Check This Out on NHPR: Jennifer Armentrout, Callie Hart, Stacia Stark. And they were all saying, “Why aren’t you self-publishing your books? You’re writing romance! Why are you waiting around?” And I just didn’t have a good answer. I was like, What am I waiting for?
And we talked about the freedom that you get when you self-publish. I love writing for Grand Central, but it’s very slow. It’s a very different timeline. Self-publishing has been very freeing, although also very challenging. I’m very concerned with the end quality. Every detail only happens if I do it, so I have to figure out copy editing, promotion, layout.
And those aren’t things you’ve done before.
No, I’d never done any of it, so I had to learn a ton, how to literally publish, not only on Amazon, but other places. And then I contacted the woman who was one of the voices for the audiobook of Atomic Anna, and I actually had to publish and record the audiobook, too. It’s been a huge learning curve.
I read an early draft of the book, back when it was more literary historical fiction. Wait, do you call a book historical fiction if it’s a romance?
Yes. Romance readers can be very specific. They might say I only read historical fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, women’s POV or men’s, depending what characters they like, hockey romance, 2010 and forward, F1, NASCAR, football, bodice rippers, you name it. It’s so much fun!
Was fictionalizing what happened that day incredibly emotional and hard for you?
It was, but again, because I knew I was working toward a HEA, I could do it. I wasn’t just going to kill everybody off and leave this bleak, horrible landscape.
I was also living in New York on September 11th. Like everyone, I remember the perfect crisp blue sky, the empty streets, paper falling from the sky, cellphones not working, but otherwise I remember different details. I voted for mayor that day. I remember looking down 5th Avenue, where I worked at the time, and not understanding what I was looking at because, I realized later, there was only one tower. Seeing the towers fall was the part that knocked the wind out of me. The chronology of what I saw and when still scrambles my brain. How do you transform a historical tragedy into fiction?
My other books are set in Russia 100 years ago. I’m about to publish Lady Killers and that takes place in 1880s Russia, but that’s pretty far back, so like you were saying, your brain is scrambled. When I sat down to do research, to make sure I was remembering things properly, I realized so much I thought I’d remembered I had actually misremembered. It’s not that different from my other books, because I still had to go back. I’d totally forgotten that we had voted that day, and there is a part in the book where the main character says, “Where can I go to the copy shop?” and the guy at the World Trade Center says, “You can’t go downstairs because it’s election day.” That was because, true to the time, the copy machines were all jammed up with people copying brochures and flyers to hand out to voters. So, I still had to go back and do all this research to make sure I got it right. I also forgot how my Blackberry worked!
You had one?
I had one! And I totally forgot, was it a phone also or just a fancy pager device? It took a lot of research.
I also love that the story is set right on the brink of the Internet taking over the world. Did you really have a website you needed funding for? What drove your interest in that part of the story?
That part is true. I had a dotcom. I had raised money and I had a make-or-break meeting scheduled that morning. I see that day as the line of before the internet and after the internet. I had a company, but it was really just the beginning. We were still using Napster, Kozmo was going, all these websites that are now defunct. Since then, we’ve had the social media evolution, which has been an even bigger explosion.
Was your dot.com for a pawn shop?
No, it was called Planethopper.com and we were an inventory management system, so if movie theaters had seats left over or bars wanted to bring people in last minute, you could text back through our network and send out a blast text like “Seats half price for the next 10 minutes” or whatever. Then 9/11 happened.
Let’s talk about your protagonist, Zelda. She’s smart, funny, confident, ballsy, and a great friend, girlfriend, daughter, businesswoman, but she also lost the grandmother she was incredibly close to and has had a hard time with her alcoholic single mom. Her stubbornness and self-protectiveness keep her from being vulnerable and getting close to people. How did you come up with this character?
Every character I’ve ever written evolves as I write them. I knew I wanted to have two kids fall in love while they were working in a pawn shop and went from there.
Let’s talk about the characterization of Ari. He’s the perfect boyfriend—
Well, yes and no!
Really? He seems like the perfect boyfriend to me. I was searching for flaws and maybe, like, paint under his fingernails?
He did go to Paris and say to Zelda, “Come live here.”
He followed his dreams and asked her to come along!
He said, “I’m not staying in Philadelphia with you. I know that’s what you want and where your life is, but I’m not staying,” so that’s hard. I think that’s a real-life conflict that couples face.
I’m wondering about the men in romance novels. Are they generally these ideal, hunky, sweet, loving men? Or do they have a range of flaws and issues?
I don’t think it’s unique to romance to have a character that everyone falls in love with. And just like in all books, Ari is deeply wounded. His father is abusive and has left them, and he feels like he has to protect his mom. He has protected her many times and taken beatings for her, and now he depends entirely on his uncle for a paycheck. He’s in a tough spot and Zelda is also in a tough spot, entirely dependent on this man. I don’t think that’s unique to romance.
I also really love Leo, the gruff pawn shop owner who becomes Zelda’s father figure. Zelda doesn’t trust him at first, but he ends up being the reliable parent she never had. When she was suspicious of him at first, I kept thinking, “Trust him! He’s so good!”
He was hard to write, because he’s also sad. He wanted to have children, he wanted to marry for love, and this was not the life he wanted, but then he realizes it actually is the life he wants. He falls in love with these teenagers and gives them everything he can: his heart, his money, his home. And again, he is deeply flawed and wounded. And yet, he’s healing with these kids.
The book goes back and forth between 1993, when Zelda and Ari meet in Philly, and 2001, when the Twin Towers fall. Did you always plan to have dual timelines?
It was not always the plan. I’ve written it both straight and dual timeline and, like making this romance, that is what makes it possible to digest this story. You can’t sustain a novel just on 9/11 for 300 pages. The point was to give you a break, a chance to breathe, a chance to feel other emotions besides the stress and fear. That’s what enabled me to tell the story of 9/11.
Zelda and Ari’s breakup hinges on a misunderstanding, which is a common trope in the genre, but it can make readers want to shake the characters, “Zelda, please just talk to him! He loves you! He’s perfect!”
Yeah, this is the classic Romeo and Juliet misunderstanding. I think you’re dead, I will kill myself. You’re not dead, what did I do? It’s also very common in life. That we misunderstand each other. It’s too scary to face what is actually happening. Yes, there was this misunderstanding and they broke up, but they were in such different places in their lives. Ari only wanted to stay with Zelda if she moved to Paris and she wasn’t willing to move, so something was gonna break them up anyway. That’s not a sustainable relationship.
Your book jacket says the book is an example of second chance romance, slow burn with heat, dual timeline, found family, female ambition, emotionally devastating love stories, yearning, and book club fiction. That’s all very specific! I like reading romance novels. I even started writing one years ago, before I’d published a novel or even really started writing fiction, and I recently started another one, but I don’t actually know much about the genre, which you clearly do! Tell me about the different types of romance storylines and the ones you’ve included in Blue Sky Black.
Like I told you, romance readers can be very specific about what they like and read and will search for and only read certain tropes, like some people like age-gap billionaire romance. Some people like single dad, grumpy sunshine. This is coded language for my readers, so there are some people who only want second chance romance, some who only want found family or emotionally devastating. These are the key words so people are like, okay, I can read this.
The book is much spicier than your other novels! Are romance novels expected to have a certain amount of sex, or is there a spectrum, and how did you decide how much intimacy—and heat—you wanted to include?
If you read my Amazon description, I gave it three chili peppers. Romance readers know what that means and will choose accordingly. Some people like totally PG, closed doors, don’t see anything and they kiss at the end, and some want the full-on five chili peppers, open door, serious! I write what I’m comfortable writing.
Will you continue to write romance novels? Are you working on any more traditional historical fiction?
Yes! My next Lea Vale book comes out in February and my next Rachel Barenbaum historical fiction is called Lady Killers and comes out in May.
What a year for you!
I’m telling you, I spoke to these women on my show. They were unbelievable! I don’t know if you’ve read Quicksilver by Callie Hart or any of Jennifer Armentrout’s books, Sara MacLean. These are major hitters in the romance space, and all of them became overnight successes when they published something like their 30th book. Something hit and, all of a sudden, Callie Hart is selling 50 million copies. And like all of them, I write these books really quickly. I also read them quickly. These authors encouraged me and I finally heard them. I wrote these books, so I’m putting them out there, because what am I waiting for?
That’s a great message to writers in general. Go for it.
I also want to say I think publishing has changed tremendously. It used to be shameful or mean you were not successful if you were self-published. And now, in genre writing—romance, cozy mysteries, that type of world—all these people who are now selling the most books started as self-published authors. That’s how they found their base, and they are not ashamed. They are proud. In fact, some of them continue as self-published authors, because they’re making so much money. Colleen Hoover won’t commit to one publisher. She’s publishing her books all the different ways, because she’s making so much money. Jennifer Armentrout, also. She’s the queen. She writes a lot of romantasy. She’s published so many books. When she was on my show, she had contracts with Disney, Bloom Books, Blue Box, which you’ve probably never heard of—they’re a small indie—and herself. Publishing has changed and you can make a lot of money self-publishing.
Any advice to writers thinking of taking the leap into a new genre?
First of all, if you want to write in a new genre, you have to read in the new genre. If you want to write romance, you’ve got to talk the talk. You have to know it and also LOVE it. No romance writer is out there saying, I didn’t know what else to do. You have to read it and then you have to write it.
The book is about love, grief, and loss, and also about following your heart even when life gets in the way. What do you want readers to take away from this story?
I want people to remember 9/11 and remember the terror and the fear, but also know you can go through the darkest day of your life and there is still hope on the other side. I think Blue Sky Black ends with hope and, again, that’s the Happily Ever After. I had Katherine Center on my show once. She’s had a bunch of books made into movies that have made her really famous: Happiness for Beginnings, The Lost Husband. She wrote The Bodyguard, which is coming out as the movie Guarding Stars with Leighton Meester, and also The Love Haters, The Rom-Commers, The Shippers. She has been publishing for like 30 years and started off in very traditional, traditionally published literary fiction, buttoned up, and then she read this Tessa Dare book that I absolutely love and said she never looked back. Because romance can go so dark, but you can always trust that you will find hope at the end. And that’s what I wanted for Blue Sky Black. It is dark, but it’s a romance so you know it will end in happiness.
Lea Vale writes emotional, angsty romance about the kind of love that doesn’t let go. When she’s not writing, she’s usually reading, playing mahjong, or deciding between chocolate and ice cream — and usually choosing both.
