Discussing DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS with Lou Aronica
like each of my writing projects to provide new challenges. I find myself significantly more engaged if I'm doing at least one thing with a new book that I haven't done before. For DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS , the novel I just published with Julian Iragorri, that one thing was substantial -- and therefore endlessly interesting. DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS is the story of four people from four different times whose stories converge in a way that has a profound effect on the protagonist. Writing a novel with multiple viewpoints wasn't the challenge. My last novel, BLUE, had three main characters. What was going to prove difficult here was that all four stories needed to remain completely separate for most of the novel. How were we going to move four stories forward at once? More important, how were we going to do it in a way that felt cohesive and interesting to the reader? One way was to draw connections between the characters. All of them came from the fictional South Amer...