PRose’ with Special Guest Colleen Oakley
Colleen Oakley is the USA Today bestselling author of You Were There Too, Close Enough to Touch, Before I Go, and the newly released The Invisible Husband of Frick Island (May 2021). Her books have been translated into 21 languages, two have been optioned for film and all have received numerous accolades. Oakley joined Cyndee Woolley and Vikki Locke on the PRose’ podcast to discuss The Invisible Husband of Frick Island and her writing process, where she gets inspiration for her books, her not-so-subtle obsession with death, and her next project. Listen to the podcast and find out what got her out of a pandemic-reading slump, and which real-life isolated island from her childhood inspired the fictional Frick Island.
Coming from a journalism background as an editor and writer for magazines including Marie Claire, Colleen Oakley loves the research part of writing a novel. “I am a research junky,” she says and her love of research harkens back to her journalism days. “I will spend months and months researching; I will spend an entire writing day researching something”.
This attention to detail allows her to take readers to an authentic world in the settings of her novels. The book The Invisible Husband of Frick Island is about an entire small island that goes along with the delusion of a young widow who believes that her husband is alive and there every day even though he had in fact died.
She visited the small island that inspired her to write The Invisible Husband of Frick Island several times, even though it is a remote and isolated location.
While some might assume COVID isolation gave writers the perfect time to settle in and get a novel finished, for this mom of four that was not true at all. About her upcoming book, she says she finished just in the nick of time. “I was lucky. I finished it right before the COVID shutdown, which was a blessing because I have four children and I had to shift into homeschooling when the pandemic started.”
Listen to the podcast for more on Oakley’s writing process – like who reads her first drafts, and who isn’t allowed -- plus the actor she has picked out who she says absolutely must be in the movie version of The Invisible Husband of Frick Island.
Are you launching a book this year? Email Vikki Locke to be considered for an upcoming episode.