I am often influenced by what I am reading at the time. Not so much story-wise but ambience and timing and rhythm. I studied guitar for a very short while; but, in a sense, it's like listening to your teacher play a riff on the guitar and answering with your own melody. When I wrote my first novel, I was reading All the Pretty Horses and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and so my first novel, When the Elephants Dance, had a very sort of gritty yet romantic, old-world muscularity. It wasn't my answer to their novels but more like a dialogue.

So, when you ask about themes and relationships, The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes has a lot to do with what I was reading at the time, for pleasure. Whenever I read anything, various themes and storylines suggest themselves to me. When I was younger, I would see someone on the street and make closure on who they were, what there life was like. I would give them a whole story in my head.

Still, the way this book came about took me entirely by surprise. I have to take you back to how it all began in order to answer your question, because The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes wasn't even planned; the book suggested then presented itself whole to me. It was like a gift from France and Italy. You know how people bring a memento back from vacation? Well, in a very real way, The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes was my memento.

I was working—OK, wrestling—with a novel, and my mother-in-law suggested I take a break and accompany her on a trip to the South of France and Italy.  For the plane ride, I brought along Hemingway's Complete Collection of Short Stories, Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever and Carson McCuller's Ballad of the Sad Café. The whole idea was for me not to write. I didn't even bring a laptop—just one notebook to journal my observations. I wrote the entire book by hand in three weeks, mostly from the window seat of a train. I'd never been on a train before and I was fascinated by that small taste, that little Petri dish of train culture. Which is where the train theme comes in and also became a kind of literal and metaphorical experience for the characters. It was a very Jane Austen experience.

By the time we landed in Milano, I had finished Barrett's Ship Fever and a good chunk of Hemingway's [collection], and I was in a short story frame of mind. Barrett and McCuller's stories have that yearning, that sense of just missed happy endings, and I guess Hemingway (as he always does) gave me that sense of adventure. Still, I wasn't planning on writing anything. But Cannes, Nice, St. Paul, Cinque Terra, Rapallo, Milano—you can't be in these places and not absorb their magic and wonder. And like any place I visit for the first time, there's this heightened awareness for me, of every little nuance, that I go on a sort of observational high.

It was summer, and the end of the cinema crowd and the little boutiques were full of sale signs, and the cafés were infused with the scent of fresh lobster, pasta, red wine, garlic, and baked bread. Even then, the vacation already had that sense of déjà vu, of a memory you would have later and feel with a stunning sense of loss and yearning. The entire trip for me was charmed, full of slanted sunlight and the sound of the ocean.

I've always been a huge daydreamer; as a child I would go on these extended daydreams and, with all of the sights and sounds on this trip, I was primed for one. So you can say the beauty of the place, the happiness I was experiencing at that moment, set the stage for the melancholy and drama of Chazz' opening scene.

My mother in-law and I were sitting at a sea-side café in Cannes, and it was around lunchtime, and people were trickling in from the beach, families with sun on their faces, full of light laughter, light-footed children kicking soccer balls----and I thought, "How nice. These people must come here every year." And the next thought was: "What if, one year, years and years later, one son can't make it back to the annual family reunion?" 

I wrote the idea down for future inspection, then forgot about it, but I guess this is where the idea and theme set in for melancholy and family. Seeing happy families and being in a place of contentment, myself. The following thought was: "What if this were taken away?"

I was born and raised in this huge extended family in San Francisco. My cousins, two sets of them, lived within a five-block radius of our little Bernal Heights home. My mother was a big churchgoer and she had this social circle that often came to visit. Our house was the hub, and there were constant mahjong games and food; my father was the most amazing cook, ever. In addition, the house was full of my older brother Danny's Army boot camp buddies—before and after they got shipped to Vietnam—as well as my grandfather's Navy Veteran's group. So, when I say full house, I mean literally 25-30 people in our house almost on a daily basis.

But at the time I wrote the book, our family was drifting apart, in the way that families stretch and flex and return. There's always that one stretch of time, in any family's life, when everyone is out trying to sail their own ship and full of miscommunication and misunderstanding of one another, and our family was experiencing that. And I think I felt the loss of them. I wished my parents, my brothers and cousins could have all been there with me.

After that premise back at the café popped into my head—the one about this one person not making it back to some fictional family get-together—I started to reflect upon the idea of the screw up of the family. That one person every family has who isn't quite the ideal everyone had hoped for. The one who lives outside of the family's traditions and expectations. Sometimes, this person can also be the golden child, the charmer. What type of struggle would a family have with this child as they came into adulthood? If you remember that short story, that movie A River Runs Through It, the brother who gambled was both the charmer and the golden child.

From there, I began to think about my friends and their families. What actually qualified as dubbing someone 'The Screw Up'? 'The Addict'? 'The Alcoholic'? Someone who marries 'The Wrong Person'? Someone from a different culture? A different religion? The son that becomes a dancer, out of a family of firemen? That's when the lines start to blur and that's what I'm fascinated with. What qualifies? Who creates these rules? I wanted to underscore these types of conflicts. I'm always interested in the push-pull for power—especially the silent, not readily apparent ones.  

So, just because the Bruiser is a rough guy, I knew that he would still have a soft-spot or a tension spot for someone who held a psychological hold, a kind of nagging conscience for him. I knew that he was raised with love because he isn't entirely bad—he's not even evil—and, if you think about it, he has a great work ethic, always gets the job done.

Well, from those themes I began to extrapolate themes of regret and loss and the thread that really began to hum was 'What if a person tries to recapture a dream once dreamt, or a life unraveled?' And then each story linked and quickly formulated with that sense of melancholy and wistfulness you mention.

As for the stoicism, I guess the immediate answer is that my father has always had a towering influence in my life. He grew up in the midst of WWII Manila. As a boy of 12, he experienced loss, on a daily basis, over a three to four year period. He was captured during the war by Japanese soldiers and hung by his thumbs, which I go into in my first book. On a separate occasion, he was running alongside a favorite cousin; the next second that cousin was dead from a bomb blast. As a result of this constant loss, I think you become either crushed from it or you adopt a quiet sort of resilience. And, in my father's case, a willingness—an almost Buddhist approach—to finding joy in simple things and not taking each day so seriously because, otherwise, the wheels of war would just crush you. He had to parcel out his seriousness for the day. He accepted tragedy with a quiet grace. He never flew off the handle, ever. He had a lot of patience he could pay out, endlessly.

He was also a very generous, optimistic person with a huge sense of humor—a big practical joker—and I always, as a young girl, tried to model myself after him. We were very close. They used to call me his shadow because I would follow him around everywhere. So, I infused the characters with this sense of stoicism. Especially the ones in the story who had to deal with life changing, irrevocable circumstances—like Alex Colter, like GianCarlo and Roberto, who come from harsh roots.

You know, what's interesting is after this book was finished. About a year before my father passed away, we were driving to have dinner (and I forget now what we were talking about), but he said, quite unexpectedly, to my husband and me, "I wish I had lived my life differently." And my husband asked what he would have been and he answered 'a doctor'. So, maybe I felt this sense of melancholy from him growing up. He would have been a fantastic doctor; he had a way with people, but he came from poverty and so that was never even in the cards for him. He had to do manual labor from a very young age. I owe a lot to my father for so many things. He's now influenced two of my books in a tremendous way.

The motif of Americans a little bit adrift or lost in Europe has proved a popular one through the decades. How does this apply to the stories in your collection?

Yes, The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast come to mind. Still, this wasn't a conscious decision for a theme; it was the direct result of my being an American on vacation in Europe.

Sophie and Chazz are the ones adrift, but on a bigger scale than just Europe; they're adrift within their own lives. Chazz is trying to recreate a time in his life that was fruitful. Sophie is there on a job assignment but she is, indeed, adrift. She doesn't have an anchor, a home base. If there was anything working subconsciously for me, I guess I would have to say the romance and the danger of being so far from home. If anything good or bad happens to you, there is no sounding board. That sense of vulnerability is powerful stuff.

We have a lot of writers and aspiring writers in our community, and you've achieved a good level of success both from the business and artistic angles of writing. What advice can you give us, as it applies to the craft of writing fiction as well as to things like getting your work out there, getting an agent and a publisher, things like that?

Well, for the craft of writing, I'd suggest, on the macro level, reading widely and writing boldly. I think it was Goethe who said, "Whatever you dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."  This is true on so many levels, especially when the inner critic starts breathing down your back and flogging you with "it's not good enough, it's not good enough".  Be kind to yourself; you have to put something down in order to start somewhere, right? There were many times during the writing of my first book, after weeks of wondrous writing, when I'd suddenly hit a dark, cynical evening and think to myself, 'Who wants to read a bunch of old mythical stories told during World War II?', and I guess the answer is, thankfully, a lot of people. But I wouldn't have known that had I thrown everything into the shredder in a moment of weakness.

As for getting your work out there, the submission process can feel like a maze and give anyone vertigo. When I had something resembling a manuscript, and I was ready to start thinking about putting a query letter together, I remember the whole process felt so daunting. Thankfully, I found a book by Blythe Camenson, called Your Novel Proposal: From Creation to Contract, that helped to serve as a starting point. The book has examples of query letters and proposals and some tips on what to present to an agent, and if you're in a position to meet one face to face—the types of questions you might want to ask. I think writers are so overwhelmed at the prospect of pitching their books, they forget they can also use the opportunity to ask the agent questions.

I met my agent, Mary Ann Naples, co-owner of The Creative Culture literary agency, through the Maui Writer's Conference, where I pitched my first novel. Camensen's book helped me to use those 10 to 15 minutes productively. Researching and attending a reputable conference can be rewarding in that you get to skip sending the query letter, and waiting those excruciating weeks or months to hear back from the agent on whether they would like to see your manuscript or not. At a conference, you can have your one-page summary read and give your pitch and the agent will probably let you know if they'd like to see the rest of your work or not right on the spot. Also, you can sign up to meet more than one agent and get a feel for whom you'd like to work with, who would be a good fit. You can ask the agent questions about books they may have published that are similar to yours and how they see pitching your book to the different publishing houses.

It's important, from the get-go, to find an agent who represents the type of work you're submitting, otherwise you're just sending out your work blindly. You may be a contemporary novelist sending work to someone who only represents historical novels, or a mystery novelist sending work to someone who is looking for pop culture. One of the things I'd suggest to anyone ready to submit their manuscript and looking for an agent is to look at the acknowledgement page of books that are similar in genre to your work. This page will usually have the name of the novelist's agent. At least then you're on the right path.