Jamey Gilbert is an indie author and nature lover who enjoys reading and writing mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, adventures and horror. Her favorite authors include Scott Sigler, Jeremy Robinson, and Douglas Adams. Before committing to writing, Jamey also considered careers in art and psychology. She loves diving deep into a variety of characters and truly hopes you enjoy reading her stories as much as she enjoys writing them.
Q & A
Why do you write?
I just have so many characters and so many stories floating around my brain it seems a shame not to share them with the world. I think if even one of my stories can mean as much to even one reader as books like The Outsiders did to me—or inspire them the way The Tell-Tale Heart did me (to writing not murdering, lol)—then I shouldn’t keep it to myself.
What inspired you to write Garden of Secrets?
It all started with the car accident. I saw an interview one night with Jason Momoa where he talked about driving past a volcano and just knowing that it was going to erupt. That made me think about tourists getting caught in places they shouldn’t be; and “wouldn’t it be wild to get rescued by an ‘actual’ superhero?” The tourist became someone new to the island, and inheritance was the obvious choice for getting them there. But Ellie’s character was originally a guy with some half-baked ideas about homesteading. It was always meant to be an adventure but the romance aspect developed later.
What made you want to focus so much on Hawaiian culture?
It just sort of developed organically. The original inspiration for the story involved a volcano which sort of limited me to Hawaii. But the more I looked into it the more I loved it. When I started researching symbolism and ways of foreshadowing, I started simply with the volcano goddess Pele, which led me to the other gods and Kapu law, the history and sanctity of the land. The whole thing was just so fascinating it changed the whole direction of the story.
Why did you make Ellie a botanist?
I think there were a few factors, one of which was simply that it’s a career path, other than the obvious marine biologist, that might bring a person to Hawaii. One of the things I loved about Hawaii when I started my research was the giant exotic flowers, which is where I got the florist bit. My own gardening hobby was another one. I like to incorporate forageable wild plants in my landscaping. Around the time I started writing Garden of Secrets, I had some new weeds popping up and was researching their potential usefulness, which led me to botanical medicine and eventually to the garden itself. I also thought it fit nicely with my original character idea because he would have quickly learned that there was more to homesteading than growing plants, creating some interesting and potentially comical conflict.
Does writing make you happy, or does it feel like work?
Both. It definitely makes me happy when the ideas are flowing freely. But when they aren’t, it’s more like work. Editing can be exhausting, but even that makes me happy, in a way, because it’s part of the process of sharing my stories with world.
