Book talk with Wendy Walker, author of "Blade"
The thriller set in the world of competitive figure skating hit shelves on Sunday, and Wendy joined me for an Instagram Live chat on Monday night.
Wendy Walker is the best-selling author of multiple psychological thrillers, and is also a former competitive figure skater. She married those two worlds together for her newest novel, “Blade,” which follows the tale of Ana Robbins, a former competitive skater turned defense attorney who is forced to confront her past when a young skater is accused of murder at the same skating facility Ana lived and trained at as a teen.
Fresh off the successful release — nearly 1,000 5-star ratings on Goodreads already — Wendy joined me for a chat on Instagram Live on Monday night. The video is below, as is an edited transcript for those (like me) who prefer the written word.
Adam: I’m excited to talk to you about “Blade.”
Wendy: Thanks so much for having me on.
Adam: This is so exciting.
Wendy: Oh, it’s so much fun. It’s getting ready for the Olympics.
Adam: It’s amazing. It’s about to be figure skating season for the 95% of the world that only pays attention every four years.
Wendy: Exactly, yes. And it’s gonna be incredible this year.
Adam: I think we’re in for just an amazing, amazing Olympic experience. I almost wish it was 2034 and it was in Utah and I could go and actually watch it, but I’m going to be watching on TV and excited to see how Team USA does, excited to see how some of my favorites from Europe do. I’m sure you’re excited as well. And I’m sure you’re already in full excitement mode because your latest novel, “Blade,” was released to the world yesterday. First, congratulations on that. What is it like to have another book out there, one that is so close to you, out in the world now?
Wendy: It’s terrifying. I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel. It’s always nerve wracking when you release a book and there’s so many things that authors do and try not to do. Looking at reviews and checking ratings and I don’t know that it ever gets easier, but this one in particular, I was curious how I was going to feel because a lot of the promotional material that has been filmed and was getting ready to be released, I started to see it. I’m not sure the dates, everything’s being rolled out, but it’s me, it’s me on the ice. It’s me talking about my life. So, yeah, I feel like it’s about to get real.
Adam: That’s what I wanted to ask you about, actually. This is your 10th book, right?
Wendy: It’s my 10th thriller. Yeah.
Adam: But it’s your first one set in the world of figure skating. What made you feel like it was time to revisit a world that you personally grew up in?
Wendy: Well, I wish I had a really incredible, profound answer, but it was really my agent who suggested that I mine some of my knowledge about that world into a thriller. And I don’t know why I hesitated in the past to do that, but I wasn’t sure how I would go about it. And so that was my first question, was how. When you live something, it’s not just like writing about being in Connecticut and setting a crime in Connecticut. Because the atmosphere that you’re writing about is completely separate from the people and the crime that could take place probably anywhere. But to make this about the world of skating and not just have that be the place where a murder happens and have it sort of be in the background, I knew I was going to have to really dive deep into my own experiences, but then make sure it was also a fictional story. So this was the hardest book I’ve ever written, hands down.
Adam: You’ve been pretty open throughout the lead up to this book that it is, in a way, autobiographical — obviously not the murder part, at least I hope not — but how much how much did revisiting that and going through your past and your experience with going to basically your version of The Palace in Colorado, how did you deal with those emotions?
Wendy: Oh, wow, it was, this is the most interesting thing about it. So, first of all, I felt as though the most interesting thing to me about my experience there was the component of living alone at this dorm, and having, it’s almost like Lord of the Flies, where it’s just children on the island. What will they do? I mean, we were all young people, real young people who are usually in a supervised setting, sort of in this very unsupervised place. And then having it be super competitive and people from all over the world, that’s what I really wanted to write about.
Over the years, I had really dealt with -- it wasn’t like I left skating, never thought about it, and there was this secret box of things I had to unpack. I mean, I unpacked this for many years because it was a very important piece of my childhood. And it had a huge impact on my life. And I am always going back and checking in with it and “Okay, am I feeling this way because of what happened in Colorado? Am I feeling that way because of what happened in Colorado?” So I knew there was a lot of dark material there, but in order to write the book and have it be fiction and have it be authentic, I really wanted to explore the joy that these girls felt. And the reason that they are at this training facility, they loved skating. They loved it from the minute they put those boots on and stepped onto the ice. And so I had to start remembering what that felt like to describe it in the book and be accurate in that description. And that was what was most surprising to me, is that there was this huge box of joy that was sitting alongside the box of trauma, and so, I suddenly was unpacking joyful things, like, “Oh, yeah, I remember when I used to love this, getting out on the ice and just doing these things, and feeling my body move, and learning when you land and you jump, it’s like magic, and you just feel so good.” So that was really surprising and I’m really glad that I was able to rediscover that.
Adam: And you have recently gotten back on the ice yourself. So what was that like?
Wendy: That was shocking. Over the years, I have I’ve gone back on the ice whenever I felt like it. So in my 20s, I went back. When I was in law school there was an ice rink right in downtown D.C., and I would go skating with friends and I was doing double lutzes and layback spins, and like, “Wow, look, I can still do all this.” And then when my kids started to learn, I would go out and be helping them and then, you know, I break loose and go stroking around, maybe do some spins or, you know, even a double toe loop, maybe. It started to decline, what I was able to do, but this time it had been 15 years. And I actually went back through all of my pictures with my kids to see the last time I took a picture of any of us on the ice, and it was 15 years. And that’s a long time. That’s a really long time.
So when I stepped on the ice, I just thought I was gonna take off and be able to start stroking around and do crossovers. And my body was like hurling out of the gate and my boyfriend was filming me. He was a hockey player in college. So he had already gotten on and he was filming me because I wanted to capture it. Like, “This will be a great video.” And I literally stumbled and almost fell. And I thought something was on my blades or that something was wrong with the ice, and I looked up, and I was like, “Something’s wrong. Like, this is not right.” But then, you know, he encouraged me to just keep skating. So I just kept moving, and I could actually feel the connection between -- they call it muscle memory, and it’s really the connection in your brain, the sort of wiring in your brain, that remembers how to do a certain movement. And they all had to come together, right? There’s the balancing, there’s probably a million different neurons that have to connect to instruct all of these muscles exactly what to do, so you can glide, so you can balance. And it was, it was really humbling, very, very humbling.
I thought about what it is like for skaters. So these skaters were going out on the Olympic stage and there’s such precision that has to take place between mind and body to do those jumps that it has to be flowing and working normally. And the one thing that interrupts that more than anything, well, 15 years interrupts that, but also adrenaline, right? So when you, if you let that sort of fear get inside you and the adrenaline flows, that’s a brain chemical that will interrupt everything you’re doing, and it doesn’t want you to be doing a triple axel. It wants you to be like running for your life from this terrifying moment. So it was really interesting, that experience, but I’m glad I did it. I’m really glad I did it, because it really helped me in describing what it feels like to be on the ice.
Adam: In the book, Ana has been away for about that long, too, and we see the story play out in dual timelines, where the mysteries of what happened in the past are just as important as solving the mystery of the murder that brings Ana back to The Palace in the first place. I’m curious, what made you decide to take that route of that dual timeline?
Wendy: It was really trial and error. I knew that I wanted to explore the impact that that kind of experience has on a person that lasts throughout life. And most of my books have some element of past trauma informing future behavior. And that’s really just what I’m interested in, very interested in psychology and exploring different ailments that people have and conditions and things as they go through life. And so I really wanted to focus on childhood trauma in this book, and explore what that kind of environment could do to someone while they’re still there, right? So we have Grace Montgomery who’s accused of murdering her coach. And then this woman who’s 14 years out of the experience and in her mind, she’s moved on and she’s now a defender of children. She’s a defense attorney.
She goes back, and is -- I made it a snowstorm, so that everything is kind of deserted. So when she goes to these places, it’s almost like they’re frozen in time because there’s no one there. And so the structures are just pretty much the same as when she left. That was the exact structure of whether to tell this backstory with its own point of view. It’s sort of like going down a technical writing rabbit hole, but there are, as you know, there are different ways of dealing with backstory. You can have flashbacks, you can have internal thoughts and conversations and just a story that’s moving forward. But if there’s enough of it, or maybe even too much for that forward story to hold, it makes sense to do a split narration and have another point of view that’s dedicated to that backstory. And it sort of tells readers like, “okay, when you get to this next chapter, you’re gonna have, we’re gonna slow down a little bit. We are not going to be finding out who killed this coach. We’re gonna find out what happened to these girls 15 years ago. And 14 years ago, and you’re going to have to absorb that.” And so once readers get those cues, I think it allows that backstory to be as full as it needs to be.
Adam: You mentioned this briefly, and this is such a writer thing, but the modern chapters are first-person POV, and then the history chapters are third-person POV. And I found that very telling. Maybe I’m just reading into it too much and you’d just be like, “no, I wasn’t thinking at all,” but it was almost like Ana couldn’t be narrating the past because she hadn’t quite dealt with it.
Wendy: Yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking. This version was the second draft, a full rewrite, because the first rewrite, I had kept it all in first-person, dealing with the backstory, through just memories and thoughts and things that she was having, and it was too claustrophobic in her head. So when I pulled it out -- usually when I do a split time frame, I usually will do a different tense even and and even a different point of view, first or third, because I think it can start to feel too much like you’re inside someone’s head. Sometimes having sections where you’re stepping back a little bit and getting a little bit of detachment, it can, it can be helpful.
Every book is different and, but you’re right, with this one, I thought, “this is really appropriate” because she is -- not that she doesn’t necessarily remember, but it’s just not in her thoughts. What happened to this girl that made her possibly kill her coach, to her is a product of maybe the environment, but she doesn’t know how much it actually has to do with what happened to her and her friends 14 years ago. So yeah, that definitely added to that decision making.
Adam: Having grown up in the world of figure skating, you’re very familiar with the sport. But as an author, how do you balance writing about a sport you know so much about and still make it accessible for readers who might not know everything about the sport.
Wendy: Oh my gosh, that was so hard as well. And that’s really relying on my agent and my editor and then an outside editor as well. It was a little bit of a back and forth and it’s always a matter of taste, right? So some readers would love to have even more description of the jumps and the environment and what the rink was like and all of that. And then some are probably skimming past it just to find out who murdered the coach. So you get readers on both ends, and the goal is to kind of please as many readers as possible, and not, and even people who are the outliers, to not make them turn away from it. So trying to strike that balance is so hard.
What was really important was describing the jumps because, to me anyway, that is such a huge force in skating, right? You just can see it. Anybody, even if you’ve never watched skating before, tune in, watch the Olympics, you’ll see the box with the scores, and it’s mostly about those jumps, getting the triples, and now the quads. So, it was the same when I was skating. All the men had triples, the women were just starting to have triples, and it was sort of the name of the game.
What was really important was trying to describe these jumps, what it’s like to learn them. And it’s so hard to describe, and maybe they have better techniques now, but when I was skating, when you were learning going from a single to a double or a double to a triple, you basically knew how to do whichever one you could do, and you knew you had that muscle memory. You go up, you tuck in, and your body just knew when it was going to release for the landing. I remember I could do like five double flips in a row, just double flip, double flip. That was my best jump and just in, out and you’re just doing it.
But to try the triple then, you just hold in as much as you can, and you know you’re gonna fall. There’s a 90% chance you’re gonna fall because your body hasn’t learned yet. First of all, how to get that rotation, but then when to release and land. So you might underrotate, and then you’re probably going to fall. You could overrotate, and then you’re gonna fall a different way. And it’s just what it takes to keep that speed up, and hurl yourself into the air, and not break out into a landing after two rotations or three, and just keep going until you finally learn that jump. It’s a lot.
I remember skating around and making a bargain with myself. Like, if you just don’t slow down this time, you can eat a whole carton of ice cream, or you can stay up late watching TV or whatever it is, but just making these bargains with myself. And to try to overcome the natural fear impulse in your brain, just slow down and not jump as high. So I really wanted to describe all of that because it’s kind of important for what’s going on at this rink, with the coach, and one of the girls who has a terrible bruise from falling, and all of those things are important plot points, and they kind of only make sense if you understand a little bit about these jumps.
Adam: Yeah, because as we saw with Indy’s story in the book, falling hurts.
Wendy: Yes, yes. And sometimes you fall in different ways, but sometimes whatever it is you’re doing that’s not completing the rotation or whatever, you just keep falling in the exact same way on the same hip or on your tailbone or whatever it is. And so you get these bruises and those are all things that I witnessed when I was skating. So a lot of that stuff was drawn from my experiences.
Adam: Obviously, the book has only been out in full release for a day, but there have been ARCs, there have been other things like that. I’m curious if you’ve heard from other people who either skate currently or skated in the past about what’s in the book, particularly as it pertains to the experience of The Orphans.
Wendy: Yeah, I had a few fellow Orphans reach out and, like, “Oh my god, I remember how we used to, jimmy that door, or keep it open, and prop it open, so we could sneak in, sneak out,” and I’ve had some funny DMs from skaters, and it’s the place I skated in, the dorm that I stayed in. I don’t even know how many skaters went through that facility. I mean, at least thousands. It’s been fun to see those people come out and just share a little snippet like, “oh, we used to do this and we used to do that.” I’m like, “yep, I know.”
It’s like boarding school, but completely unsupervised, and without anyone there watching, really keeping track of you. I was actually talking with someone who works at a boarding school earlier today, and it’s a lot of the hijinks that we see in boarding school stories. It’s a little bit like that, except what we were all missing was a grown up that had our backs. So you get all these hijinks and all of that, but then when things go wrong, as they do in the book, for the Orphans, there’s really nobody there who has their best interests at heart and who’s really looking out for them. It’s just not that kind of place. I mean the coaches are busy. Our coach, my coach was nothing like the coach in the book. He was a straight shooter. He was an excellent coach, but he wasn’t gonna take us aside and say, “Hey, how’s school? How’s your social life? How are you feeling? Do you miss home?” That was not his job, and there was nobody else sort of assigned to do that. But it’s been really kind of fun just to get these messages from people who’ve been through the dorm.
Adam: Was there anything from your experience or from your research that you wanted to get in the story that just you, in the end, it just didn’t make sense narratively?
Wendy: Yeah, there were so many things that I thought were just great stories. And a lot of them were outside of the rink. Yes, a lot of this takes place outside of the ice. There’s a tiny bit of this in the book towards the end. At a certain point, I was asked to leave the dorm because of my behavior. I talk about this in an article that I wrote online for People magazine, that my homesickness turned into an attachment to older skaters, and so I grew up very fast that way. And as my skating started to decline, there were all these things available to me, staying out late, drinking, just all that kind of stuff. And it was comforting, right? I mean, that it was like an outlet. It was an escape from this sort of pain I was feeling when I started to realize that my skating was not gonna be, that I wasn’t progressing, really, as I should have been to stay on track.
So anyway, when I was asked to leave the dorm, there are a lot of families in the area that take skaters in. And there were some crazy stories from that. And I guess about 10 years ago one of my close friends back then was in New York traveling and we got together. We met at Grand Central Station and we got together and we had stayed in one of these homes and we were comparing these stories and we were both like, “Can you even believe that that happened?” So there were things like that that there was no space to even make something fictional in the same kind of light as those experiences. But yeah, so many things, so, so many things. And I tried to pick the ones that really fit well with the plot, the different aspects of that experience.
Adam: Ana, Indy, Kayla, Jolene, they were all at The Palace, all had dreams of going to the Olympics. In real life, the Olympics are starting this week. So I’m curious, who are you most excited to watch in Milan?
Wendy: Oh my gosh. I’m most excited to watch the ladies event, and I’ll be honest that I have not, um, I have not really seen the international stage. I just watched nationals and I tune in to nationals every year and I love watching the skaters that have been coming up. So I’m really excited to watch our three leading ladies. And we’ll be really cheering them on because they’re just, they’re all so good and there’s so much talent, but I know they have competition. What about you? Are you, do you have any events that you’re going to be like on the edge of your seat in particular?
Adam: I mean, obviously the ladies and our trio has a nickname as well. They’re not the Orphans, they’re the Blade Angels.
Wendy: Yeah, the Blade Angels, appropriate for the book. Yeah, I know, it’s great.
Adam: Perfect timing. I’ll be locked in on everything, but I am so curious to see what happens in ice dance. Um, I don’t know if you, you probably haven’t. You’ve been so busy. It’s really only been 24 hours, but Netflix put out a documentary yesterday, a three-part documentary looking at the top three ice dance teams: Madison Chock and Evan Bates, Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, and then Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron. And there is obviously so much drama behind the scenes and they’re all so good. Any single one of those three teams, and honestly, there are a couple others too. You can’t forget about the British team [Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson]. And then the Italian team [Charlène Guignard and Marco Fabbri], I mean, they’re skating at home. You would think they would get a little score boost from that. But that ice dance event is going to be full of drama. And check that out.
Wendy: I’ll watch that tonight. I love how ice dancing has become so popular. It used to be it didn’t get the same attention that it does now. And I love how it’s just become on par with the other events. And actually anyone who loves ice dancing should read a novel by my friend, Layne Fargo, who wrote The Favorites, which is a reimagining of Wuthering Heights, but set in the world of ice dancing. And it’s a really great twisted romance story that follows these two ice dancers who have this love that comes and goes and people are breaking them apart and they’re coming together and it’s just a great book.
Adam: It’s a very different vibe from Blade. I believe you’re chatting with Layne in Chicago later this week, right?
Wendy: Yeah, tomorrow night, I’ll be with Layne. And yeah, I’ve known Layne for years. I’m a huge fan of her work and she kind of took a pivot, The Favorites, away from thrillers. But she can write some dark, some dark stuff.
Adam: I don’t want to spoil too much, but there were some thriller elements in The Favorites.
Wendy: Oh, yeah. Yes, yes. For sure. And the pacing, and you can see all over the talent that she has for the pacing and the structure, but, yeah, they’re very different books, and honestly I don’t know if I could have written something that was lighter than this book. This was, it was just like, this needed to be the story it was, otherwise it would have, I don’t know. I would have had to really change genres or make it more YA, young adults. So to be a thriller, this was sort of where it was going, like a full-on thriller.
Adam: Well, this has been so much fun.
Wendy: Oh my gosh, I like, I feel like I could talk to you about books and skating all day. Like where else do you find writers and skating enthusiasts, right?
Adam: I feel like I’ve seen more and more books set in the world of skating lately. And they’re all different. Like you said, Layne has sort of, I wouldn’t call it a dark romance. It’s not that genre, but it has romantic vibes, but it’s not a romance. Yours is a thriller. And then there’s a lot of straight up romances.
Wendy: Oh my gosh, the hockey/figure skater thing? And honestly, when I was skating, I never met one hockey player because our rink was dedicated to figure skating. So I never saw hockey players, ever. Occasionally Colorado College would have a game there at night, but I don’t even remember going to one. It was not part of our world. But I get the appeal. It’s very, very sexy.
Adam: But even in rinks where they do commingle, I feel like the figure skaters look at the hockey players as just, “oh, these are the guys that just come in and wreck our ice.”
Wendy: Yeah, totally. Yes. And I think the hockey players are like, “ugh, figure skaters.” They’re two totally different sports. They just happen to take place on ice, but, like, there’s not much going on between them. But you remember with “Ice Castles,” which I think was one of the first big ice skating movies -- and just a small bit of trivia: where she trained and where the dorm that she goes to live in is the dorm that I lived in. So, that movie, you see her walking down the hallway when she first arrives, and that’s the hallway of the dorm that I lived in. So it’s funny. -- but that was a figure skater and a hockey player too. There’s something very romantic about it.
Adam: Well, thank you so much. Everyone who’s watching, please be sure to follow Wendy. She’ll be doing more events throughout the coming days and weeks. Pick up Blade, wherever books are sold. It is an incredible read. It is so much fun. Obviously, it’s a thriller, so it’s dark. It’s scary. There are elements that are very serious, but it is a book that I devoured in like a day and a half .
Wendy: Oh, that’s so good. Thank you.
Adam: Yeah. and everybody watch the Olympics and root for Amber Glenn, Alysa Liu, Isabeau Levito, Ilia Malinin, Madison Chock and Evan Bates, and my personal favorite from the U.S. ice dance team, Emilea Zingis and Vadym Kolesnik. But I will be rooting hard for Piper and Paul, even though they’re from Canada.
Wendy: Yeah. Well, I can’t wait now to watch the documentary and get schooled on everything going on in ice dancing so I’m ready to watch too.
Adam: And if you look very closely at the beginning of Episode Three, you will see me and Layne sitting next to each other at Skate America.
Wendy: Oh my gosh. Amazing. Amazing. Okay, I’m gonna look for you guys.
Wendy will be embarking on a book tour with “Blade” with multiple stops in her home state (and mine) of Connecticut, along with visits to Colorado, California and New York.
Thanks for the love you two ❤️ So excited to see you tonight, Wendy!!