Meghan: Hi, ladies. Welcome to Meghan’s House of Books. Take a seat and tell us a little bit about yourselves.
Marité: Sheníe and I are identical twins, and Taís is five years younger—although, most people mistake us as triplets. Taís is also an artist who illustrated our covers.
Meghan: What are five things most people don’t know about the three of you?
Taís:
1.) The three of us bought a house together and share a room.
2.) We all have a healthy fear of the dark, hence the part about us sharing a room.
3.) We see dead people (our houses have always been haunted).
4.) Out of the three of us, Sheníe is the only one who has ever read a Stephen King novel.
5.) As a rule, we don’t celebrate Halloween.
Meghan: What is the first book you remember reading?
Sheníe: The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown.
Meghan: What are the three of you reading now?
Marité: I am still currently reading Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, Sheníe is reading Two Dark Reigns (Book #3 in the Three Dark Crowns series) by Kendare Blake, and Taís is reading The Brotherhood of Olympus and The Deadliest Game by Guy T. Simpson, Jr.
Meghan: What’s a book you really enjoyed that others wouldn’t expect you to have liked?
Sheníe: Queen Bees & Wannabees: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World by Rosalind Wiseman. Our dad originally bought the book to help him understand girl world back when Marité and I had attended junior high. Being thirteen when I first read it, I didn’t think a parenting book would be at all entertaining, but I found the book resonated with what I was experiencing at the time and quite humorous.
Meghan: What made you decide you want to write? When did you begin writing?
Marité: As far back as I can remember I always had the longing to write something, yet I could never come up with anything worth writing. I recall reading a piece of writing advice in a book somewhere that you should draw inspiration from your life, and being a teenager at the time I read this leading a relatively quiet life I decided to wait until I had material worthy to draw from. A couple of years later, when the urge to write had intensified, Sheníe had a nightmare about a girl who moves into a small town’s haunted house and being (a) a teenage girl myself trapped in a small town in Texas and (b) living in a haunted house I knew I had my story. Three days later we started writing our first draft of what later came to be The Merging of Shadows, Sheníe and I had just turned seventeen two-weeks prior and Taís was only eleven at the time.
Meghan: Do you have a special place you like to write?
Taís: The living room is our regular haunt so it serves the dual purpose of acting as both our entertainment space and workshop.
Meghan: Do you have any quirks or processes that you go through when you write?
Marité: I can always be found writing with my earbuds in even if they are not plugged into anything—it helps me to block out the background noise, Sheníe has to listen to Linkin Park whenever she’s writing, and Taís always has to create a playlist to help her get into writing mode.
Meghan: Is there anything about writing you find most challenging?
Sheníe: Sticking to an outline is by far the most challenging as our writing style is composed of freewriting which means the ideas come as they go and the scenes are constantly evolving.
Meghan: What’s the most satisfying thing you’ve written so far?
Taís: The darker scenes were the most satisfying as we had to challenge ourselves to up the ante.
Meghan: What books have most inspired you?
Marité: Twilight, because the story was inspired by a dream, and The Hunger Games because of Suzanne Collins’ masterful blend of genres.
Meghan: Who are some authors that have inspired your writing style?
Sheníe: Suzanne Collins because her stories are fast-paced, J.K. Rowling for her ability to slip magic into the real world, and Stephanie Meyer’s romantic genius.
Meghan: What do you think makes a good story?
Taís: A good story is one that you can take something away from it. After all, stories were originally crafted to contain a message.
Meghan: What does it take for you to love a character? How do you utilize that when creating your characters?
Marité: For us, we find that the characters that we adore have within them the capacity for good, no matter how intrinsically evil they may be. With each character we bring to life we are careful they allude a sense of humanity, even if that may come as an illusion.
Meghan: Which, of all your characters, do you think is the most like you?
Sheníe: Marimar embodies all three of our personalities and she also serves as the personification of our ideal selves as well as our shortcomings.
Meghan: What have you learned creating your books?
Taís: It is our duty as authors to tell a story as it is meant to be told. Something one person might love about a book another may hate, yet what’s important is that you are never afraid to be daring and always ready to push the envelope.
Meghan: How important is the book title, how hard is it to choose the best one, and how did you choose yours (of course, with no spoilers)?
Marité: A title must embody the tone and theme of your book while at the same time clarifying the cover image. In this respect, it plays a key role in capturing your attended audience and, as such, is one of the hardest decisions to make. After two failed attempts (the first had us listed on Amazon under a telenovela and the second was too similar to a title of an already popular book) we finally took our title from a passage in our novel. We felt the title The Merging of Shadows conveyed a sense of mystery and hinted at the central theme of our book—the blurring of the line between the known and the unknown.
Meghan: Tell us a little bit about your books, your target audience, and what you would like readers to take away from your stories.
Sheníe: The Merging of Shadows and its sequel The Darkness that Lies Inside originated from a single nightmare of mine. Three times I had tried to wake myself up from it only to fall back asleep and enter the dream, watching the story play out like a movie from beginning, middle, and end. When I awoke the next morning I told my sisters about it and we just knew we had to write it. As luck would have it, our Dad was about to have us start on a book report for our English assignment when we managed to convince him into letting us write a novel instead as part of our homeschool project.
Flash forward six years, and we have polished the manuscript, found an editor, published it in paperback form, and have just released its sequel. Yet, in spite of all the years in between, the biggest take away that we wish young adults and our adult readers will have has always stayed the same and that is that we all have the power inside ourselves to take control of our own lives.
Meghan: What was it like working together?
Taís: As in any democracy, there is a lot of checks and balances. Everything has to be put to a vote and there are countless vetoes.
Meghan: Do you think it’s easier or harder to work together as sisters?
Marité: For us, it was easy as we think alike. Truth be told, at times we speculated whether the stories would have come out faster if only one of us had chosen to write it, but in the end we have all agreed that the story wouldn’t be half as good (in our opinion) without each of our thoughts, ideas, and (in our case) dreams.
Meghan: I’ve interviewed several author-teams, but never one consisting of three people. How does the process work for y’all?
Sheníe: The three of us take turns writing in the book, and we split up the writing depending on whose idea it was for a scene or chapter. When facing writer’s block we will hand off the book to whoever is available. Interestingly enough, when we all are stuck on a certain scene one of us will have a nightmare about what to do next and we will write around that central idea. The spookiest part about this is that all three of us have been visited by the same character in our dreams.
Meghan: Who is the sister that is the most outspoken? Who is the quietest? There’s always one that is more bossy than the others – who would you say that sister is?
Taís: Marité is the most outspoken, I am the quietest, and Sheníe is the bossiest although Marité is the oldest.
Meghan: What can we expect from you in the future?
Marité: At the moment we are working on two new projects, one being the spinoff to The Merging of Shadows series and the other is a contemporary young adult novel inspired from yet another one of Sheníe’s dreams.
Meghan: Where can we find you?
Sheníe: Visit us if you dare at our young adult blog and be sure to stop by our official website (Coming Soon) which is kindly hosted by WebsiteDreams.
Meghan: Do you have any closing words for your fans or anything you’d like to say that we didn’t get to cover in this interview?
Taís: Firstly, we would like to express our thanks to Meghan’s House of Books for conducting this wonderful interview, and lastly we would like to thank all of you paranormal geeks, horror lovers, and bookworms out there for making this interview possible. Sweet dreams. Love, Price Girls.
Marité, Sheníe, and Taís Price are three sisters who write under the collective name Price Girls. The three of them have escaped a small—always hot—western town in Texas to live in the mossy—seems like it is always raining—urban city of Olympia, Washington. Together, they are living out their dream of residing in the Pacific Northwest in a home filled with three generations of women, cats, dogs, ducks, and chickens. Currently, they are hard at work writing during the day and conjuring scary ideas during the night.
The Merging of Shadows 1: The Merging of Shadows
Sixteen-year-old Marimar Utterson has just found herself living in a small southern town’s notoriously haunted house when she meets Sage Sterling. A handsome hazel-green eyed boy who is not only captivated by Marimar’s petite beauty and fiery disposition, but by her home’s mysterious past. Unfortunately, his fascination with her house turns perilous when he manages to infuriate the spirit who in turn lashes out against Marimar.
Together, they must set off to uncover the spirit’s dark secret in hopes of finally laying it to rest. For with each encounter the malicious presence diminishes Marimar’s grasp on her sanity and odds of survival.
The Merging of Shadows 2: The Darkness That Lies Inside
After undergoing battle with her dead roommate and reclaiming her house, Marimar attempts to go back to life as normal. But darkness has a way of creeping back in and as the darkness spreads so does the chaos. Sage begins to keep secrets, her once loving baby sister is beginning to change and grow distant, and everything Marimar thought she knew to be true was wrong. Danger is once again lurking at every corner and if she is to stop it from spreading any further a sacrifice must be made.Cornered and alone, Marimar must choose to either embrace the light- fulfilling the role she was predestined to take, risking the loss of the one she holds most dear-or be swallowed by the darkness.
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