TMN Magazine issue 4

TMN Magazine / January 2017
INTERVIEW
MARIAN L.
THOMAS
‘I Believe In Butterflies’ is your latest book release; for those who don’t know, can
you tell us a little more about it?
It’s an unparalleled story that follows three women as they navigate life’s often rocky
terrain in search of hope, courage, and love.
Emma Lee Baker is a seventy-six-year-old woman from Barrow County, Georgia. She’s
a straight-shooting woman who believes in speaking her mind and has lived a
seemingly ordinary life near the banks of Thomas Bay. However, when Emma makes a
shocking discovery, her ordinary life turns into something altogether extraordinary.
Emma has one daughter- Honour Blue Baker. Their relationship is more like burnt
toast and year-old jam.
Honour Blue Baker’s greatest fears are centered around two
things: her past and the idea of falling in love. Those fears come
full circle when she returns to Barrow County to visit her
mother. Her journey home turns into a journey of a lifetime.
Honour is my favorite character in I Believe In Butterflies. She’s
strong, yet, has a gentleness that makes your heart understand
her seemingly tragic tribulations.
Lorraine has spent twenty-three years believing in three things:
love, butterflies, and the fact that she’s a white woman. However,
the day comes when all that she’s held dear is shattered, after
discovering that her close-to-heart
beliefs are nothing more than fallacies.
Have you always wanted to be a writer? (And was there a particular moment you
thought, ‘I can do this!’?)
I have always enjoyed writing. The idea of becoming an author was something that I
resisted at first, even after my first book, Color Me Jazzmyne was published in 2009.
Being an author brought about responsibilities that I wasn’t sure I was ready for.
Readers now wanted more of me and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that type of
exposure. I felt like running away from it. It wasn’t a matter of not being able to do
it, it was more a matter of—do I want to put a part of me, out there. That’s what it’s
like to write a book. It’s putting a small piece of yourself out there for the world to
either love or hate.
Talk to us about your writing routine; what’s a typical writing day for you?
Long evening while my hubby is off in sleep Ville. That’s typically my routine. I tend
to write the foundation of my books in one month, and then I spend the rest of the
following months, trying to put up the walls, the paint and all the other details that
make a book, a book. It’s a crazy process. It drives me nuts, but, it’s a process that I
have come to embrace.