AUTHOR INTERVIEW WITH ELLIE MORRIS
ULM: Can you briefly tell us,
readers, what your de- but
novel, When the Summer Ends,
is about?
EM:When the Summer Ends is
about a young girl, Aika, who
grows up facing a lot of
uncertainty and anxiety due to her
dysfunctional, selfish parents and
estranged brother. At the time,
Aspergers and Autism Spectrum
Disorder weren’t commonly
diagnosed for those that were
very high functioning, at least not
as we know it today, so she
struggles blindly with friend-
ships and the other things that life
throws at her until she meets
Carrie Knox, her first friend and
love.
the absent mother – was also
rather straightforward to make up,
as I could simply go all out and
create the harshest, most self-
absorbed person I could think of;
she may have been a mix-up of
film and book characters I had
seen before, but I can’t help but
love to hate her.
As for the hardest characters to
create, these had to be some of
the minor characters, such as the
brothers Pierre and Buddy, as at
this stage I hadn’t explored
options or futures for them, and
therefore I got a bit of a blank
whenever it came to write from
their perspectives. In the
upcoming book – Mansions of
Glass -
ULM: Who were your hardest
characters to create and which
ones were your easiest? ULM: What are three words you
would use to de- scribe your
novel?
EM: For me, Aika Rowland was
the easiest character to write as
we are both on the Autism
Spectrum and go through similar
challenges; her perks and
interests also closely mirror my
own, and we have a very similar
personality and reactions to
certain things. Despite being my
polar opposite, Carrie was
extremely fun and easy to create,
as I imagined her to be my ideal
kind of person, a person that I
could get along with easily and
find myself falling in love with. I
just wrote her as I imagined my
‘perfect’, dream best friend to be:
fun, outgoing, hilariously awkward
and lovably clumsy, as well as a
buccaneer adventuress! Celeste – EM: Painful, dramatic, and honest.
Painful because there is a lot of
heartbreak and stomach-churning
trepidation in Aika’s world,
dramatic because there is always
something furtive and wrong
going on in Jubilee, and honest
seeing as I didn’t want to tone
down the themes of social
marginalization, mental illness,
and adolescent love. I wanted to
tell it as it is, at least in my heavily
dramatized imagined town and
interpretation of the 1950s.
ULM: What are your three tips
that you would give to other
writers?
EM: I would say, allow the
characters to explore their own
avenues after a period of time. No
plot is set in stone, and
sometimes other, better ideas can
come in from the most
unexpected sources. For
example, the end of When the
Summer Ends came to me in a
dream, and it taught me to count
all ideas as possible out- comes.
Usually I hate changing things,
but this time it was for the best.
Also, keep a diary, notebook or
even an art journal full of all the
ideas that pop into your head.
Writing things down is always a
good idea, as every little thought
counts and could contribute to a
really interesting future story.