My writing desk as a child
Living in the great port city of New Orleans, my dad was a ship captain and then president of a shipping company whose cargo routes included many countries in central America. I remember my dad leaving for Panama or Honduras and bringing home little trinkets, and after a business trip, he surprised my sister and I with matching mahogany desks with our names carved into the backs of our chairs. He saw how much we loved to write—especially me—and wanted us to have a place to work. My writing desk is where I spent a lot of my childhood: writing short stories, illustrating them on pieces of construction paper, writing book reports, and then eventually typing out several books on a clunky IBM PC (none of the stories good and many to be deleted or lost on floppy disks forever!). The writing desk was a huge inspiration for me as a writer. And we still have it today. My son has it in his bedroom and keeps asking when he can have something “more grown up”. I should probably move the desk to my room.
Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I didn’t think I’d grow up to write suspense but looking back at what I read as a child, there might have been some clues. I read a ton of Nancy Drew—entire box collection sets that kept me enraptured by mystery. But then I stumbled upon Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles and there was something about the mood and description of the landscape: fog-shrouded moorland, the large sprawling estate, and the hound that prowled the bogs, and I was entranced by the creepy setting and suspenseful build-up. Fast-forward nearly thirty years and I’m finally writing suspense myself.
My two sons
My sons, Reece and Liam, spend their weeks practicing and playing for their travel basketball and school teams committing to hours of shooting hoops in the gym. On those same weekends, I’m working hard too: writing books, editing books, and coming up with new story outlines. I want my kids to see that at any stage in life, we must always work hard to follow our dreams. Nothing comes easy. But it’s our passion that drives us to keep working harder, even if that means 6 am writing times or evening practices at some court across town. I was rewarded recently when my fifteen-year-old son looked at me, my shoulders hunched at the keyboard, a new manuscript on the screen, and he said, “Mom, I respect the grind.”
Susie
When my best friend Susie, a former TV news reporter, was thirty-four-years-old, she died after a fourteen-month battle with cancer. Toward the end, she asked me to help her plan her funeral and it was one of the most gut-wrenching experiences of my life. I literally felt like I was wailing and losing my mind on the inside while we stood at the funeral home and picked out her coffin. We stood in the parlor and selected her flowers. She asked me to speak and that we sit by her mother. Afterwards, she put on a brave smile and asked that we go get ice cream which was profound because she was the one who wanted to cheer us up. When she died and we collected her ashes, there was a list of ten places Susie asked her ashes to be scattered. I had the list and drank a beer while scattering her in one of the first places she requested: my back garden where we played with my kids and dragged out a TV to watch college football games. After that, her mother’s garden, Monte Sano in Huntsville, Alabama, the beach, New Orleans, North Carolina, Hawaii, several keepsake urns for best friends, and Thailand where she was born—we’re still working on Thailand. The pain and grief took several years to comprehend until I sat down one day to write about Susie and her brave fight. Writing that short story helped me reflect on so much that had happened and what we’d lost. It was more than cathartic. It also helped jump-start my ability to write short stories again. And it paved the way for us to create Susie’s Wish in her name, a non-profit that sends patients with life threatening illnesses to the beach. Going to the beach and dipping her toes in the sand had been one of Susie’s last wishes.
Writers in the family
My dad is the first published author in our family! He wrote two memoirs which my sister formatted and created a cover and he’s now diligently working on Part 3. The books are called Why Me? and focus on the adventures of his shipping school days in Wales before becoming a ship captain in the South China Sea and then moving our family to New Orleans. Watching him write all these years has certainly been an inspiration. And my brother-in-law Josh has a master’s in creative writing from Columbia University and has had several short stories published, including in Ploughshares. He is also currently working on multiple books and is someone I can talk to about writing and publishing. When he read one of my short stories, he’s the one who said, “That needs to be a full book. You can do this.” And that’s what started my attempt at writing novels again in my thirties. That first book is also what landed my agent in 2016!
Georgina Cross is the suspense author of The Stepdaughter (September 2020) and Book 2 (January 2021) with Bookouture. And Book 3 with Ballantine, Penguin Random House (late 2021).
Georgina has been writing since she was a child. Notebooks & floppy discs filled with stories: adventures growing up in New Orleans and tales from Malaysia & England where her family lives. After graduating from Louisiana State University, she enjoyed a career in marketing & communications and founded Susie’s Wish non-profit which sends patients with life threatening illnesses to the beach. She spends time with her husband and their combined family of four sons watching plenty of scary movies and basketball tournaments.
