Never Too Old For This With Samantha Downing

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Welcome to the shit show.

Things are going to get weird.

Get weird.

It's your fae villain, Kale Wower.

Kale Lauer.

And you're listening to Barely Famous.

Welcome back to Barely Famous.

Today's guest is a best-selling thriller author, Samantha Downing.

She's known for My Lovely Wife.

He started it in a twisted story.

Her newest book, Too Old for This, comes out August 2025.

Her books turn picture-perfect relationships into draw-dropping suspense.

And we're talking plot twists, writing behind the scenes, and what really goes into creating characters you love to hate.

Too old for this, it'll keep you on your toes and get you out of a reading slump.

So if you are looking for a book like that, I highly suggest it.

Samantha Downing, thank you so much for joining us on Barely Famous Podcast.

Thank you for having me.

I'm so excited to be here.

I'm excited to have you and excited to be reading your book.

I'm reading too old for this right now.

And I love, love, love that you went into it.

and dove headfirst like favorite thing about a book it'll get you out of a reading slump it's good for anyone who just wants a quick read read.

I love it so much.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I'm glad you're enjoying it.

Yes.

So your debut novel, My Lovely Wife, came out in 2019.

Is that right?

What was the inspiration for that book?

That book actually came from a documentary I watched about a man and a woman who had kidnapped the husband and wife who kidnapped a woman and held her hostage in their house.

And we hear this a lot about men doing it, but it was so interesting that a woman was involved.

And I started thinking, now that case turned out very differently.

The woman ended up letting the girl go and testifying against her husband in the real story.

But it made me think, if a woman was going to do this, actually kidnap another woman and hold her hostage, who would that woman be?

And I created this character of Millicent, and her and her husband do this together.

And she's more of the driving force in that.

particular story.

So sinister.

Very.

So what were you, what was your career path before you,

before your first novel then?

Because that was pretty recent, 2019.

Yes,

I did something totally different.

I was working for a manufacturing company, mostly administrative, and nothing to do with writing.

I never studied writing.

It was something I did as a hobby for many years.

My Lovely Wife was the 12th book I wrote.

But you didn't publish any of the other ones before that.

Why?

Why, My Lovely Wife, did you feel like this is the one I'm going to move forward with?

It was actually a fluke.

I never thought about getting getting published.

To me, when I first looked at publishing, it was this labyrinth to try to maneuver through and getting agents.

And I had no pedigree.

I had no degree.

I didn't know anybody in the business.

So I kind of just put it aside and did it as a hobby and thought, I'm never going to get published.

I'm not one of these people.

And I joined a writing group, and someone in the writing group loved the book and knew somebody who went to high school with somebody who became an agent in New York.

And this is when I was living in New Orleans, and New Orleans sort of survives on who you know.

And she sent it to her friend and said, send it to your friend, the agent.

And he did.

And the agent contacted me, and he did not even represent fiction books.

He did non-fiction books.

But he said, I know somebody who would love this.

Send it to her.

And her name is Barbara.

And she became my agent.

And she sold my lovely wife in two days.

Oh, my gosh.

And so over the course of a month, my whole life changed, basically.

Yeah.

But what's so funny is you talked about a writing group.

I think Abby Jimenez talked about a writing group.

So many authors that I've talked to have talked about writing groups.

And I think that's so interesting because I don't think that people that, you know, today that they want to be authors, I don't think they realize that that can actually be their way into publishing.

Yes.

Did you ever think about self-publishing?

I did not.

No.

No, I didn't.

I didn't know.

I had a full-time job.

I didn't know anything about it.

And I just, I just really liked the writing aspect of it.

That's what I concentrated on So when it came up I was when this opportunity came up I was lucky that I had written a book that somebody wanted and that somebody thought could sell and that people would want to read So do you have any plans to publish the rest of the 11 books that you wrote?

No.

No

They're all terrible

So what was your entrance into the publishing world like did it was it fairly easy since you sort of knew somebody or was it still really hard to get you know your book published and enter the book space?

Well my agent sold it very quickly to Berkeley at Penguin Random House, my editor, Jen Monroe, and it was a two-book deal and then I signed a three-book deal.

So I've had five books and Too Old for This is the fifth book.

And so I guess from that aspect it

was kind of easy.

My work was all done in the front end, the 20 years of writing I did to get there.

So I truly believe there are no

overnight successes yeah the work is done somewhere even if you don't see it yeah so I had a quick

transition into publishing after writing 12 books so

some people they put in the work in the querying when they're trying to get an agent what we call querying when you're querying agents and trying to get an agent and it takes years to go through that process somewhere behind the scenes work is always done there's no true overnight successes Yeah.

What was everyone's reaction when you released My Lovely Wife?

The funny thing is I hadn't told anybody.

I didn't tell anybody I was a writer, not my family, not the people I worked with.

So it all came, I think, as a bombshell.

I thought, I said, so I'm a writer and I sold this book and I have this book coming out.

And I didn't tell anybody until after it actually sold, until I had a publishing contract in my hand.

I didn't tell anybody.

And And they would just say, Wait, go back.

You're a writer?

And you did what?

And you have what?

And I'd say, Look, here's the cover of the book.

It's coming out in March.

And

they just all were staring at me like I was an alien.

It was really funny.

But were they super supportive?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Have you talked to other authors in the industry as well?

And what has their reaction been to you, and especially like the thriller genre?

I think everybody's journey is so unique that everybody's got a great story to tell.

So it sounds like it's one of those things where it wouldn't have happened if my friend hadn't sent it in and sent it in and it got...

it happened so because i wasn't sending it out i wasn't really querying at the time and and or trying to get an agent i was kind of i was starting to attend a couple of conferences and feeling more i was feeling more confident after going to the writer's group right the writer's group was really important um for my writing because you really get a an objective and opinion from people who don't know you are reading your writing for the first time and they're just giving you what they think and you get a sense of whether or not

you're writing something that is being interpreted the way you mean it or if people are interpreting it in a completely different way which is always interesting because I may mean it one way and people say oh I hate that character and I thought I love that character right yeah I love that character wait what that's a bad character yeah well what is that like because you you have your own vision when you're writing a story right so when you, when people talk to you about how they interpret things, is that so weird?

So weird.

I think it's the weirdest thing because it can be so off.

In my head, I think it's so clear.

And then someone else, you know, we all see things differently.

We all see what we want to see and bring our own experiences to it.

And they can say.

No, that's a great character.

That's a terrible character.

Or I saw that twist coming or I didn't see that twist coming.

And it's so strange to hear somebody do that.

That's what's so strange about reading reviews even.

Do you read your own reviews?

I try not to.

I can imagine.

I haven't seen any bad ones

about you or your books, but I can imagine that that would be challenging.

It's really hard to put something out there.

I think for any artist or any writer that you spent so many months writing and editing and trying to make it the best possible and

then you fling it out into the world and hope for the best.

But people will rip it it to shreds for anybody, not just you.

But when we were talking about perspectives or perceptions rather, and we all play the comparison

game a little bit.

So when it comes to like book to movie or TV adaptations, I feel like we all have this like vision in our head about what the books are that we're reading, the characters, how they look.

And then when it's being brought to the big screen, the perception changes a little bit.

And so it sort of goes hands hand in hand.

Do you, would you ever sell the rights to your books for an adaptation, a movie or TV adaptation?

Some of them have been optioned before, but nothing has ever gone into production.

So we'll see if it ever happens.

You know, it's always the dream to see that.

And I know people ask me a lot what, who would you cast in these?

And it's not something I think about when I'm writing.

I don't think about actors or actresses when I'm writing.

No, not at all.

I see them as just the people in my head, and they're always, they're not so specific as a specific person.

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And when you are writing writing and you're in the middle of your writing process, what type of writer are you?

What pants are, plotter?

What are you?

Pure pantser.

Okay.

I don't plot anything.

For any listener who doesn't know what a pantser is, could you talk about that?

Sure.

Pancer is short for fly by the seat of your pants.

That's meaning you don't have a plot, you don't have a plan, you haven't outlined the book.

You sit down in the computer and fly by the seat of your pants.

And so I don't plot anything.

I write chapter by chapter and each chapter I write,

every decision you make leads to further decisions and the story starts to take shape as I go.

So I sort of discover the story the same way a reader does.

It comes to me that way and I usually, when I'm writing, I write a chapter a day and then I think about that chapter overnight and the next morning I get up and write another chapter and it sort of comes that way.

It means I also have to do a lot of editing in the book and changing things and what have you.

But I tried to plot once and it did not work out well at all.

I feel like I get ideas.

I feel like I would be a plotter.

I get some ideas.

Like one time I stayed at an Airbnb in Dominican Republic and I was like, how crazy if an intruder came in and I'm like plotting it in my head, but I never took it to paper.

So I'm just an idea girly.

Yeah, definitely.

I'm not a chess player.

A chess player, you're thinking all those moves ahead.

Yeah.

And I think one move ahead and then to the next move and then to the next move.

So I'd be a terrible chess player.

So you write one chapter a day, but then what do you do if you have writer's block?

I don't ever really have a writer's block.

Once I get started on a story.

What's it like to be God's favorite?

I have too many ideas.

They don't all work out.

Sometimes I write two chapters and throw it out and think this story's, that's not my story.

So that's the other thing about being a pantser.

I throw out far more than gets published.

Well, so that's what I was going to ask next.

Like, where do you draw the line for certain ideas that you come up with?

What do you feel like is too much when you reread it, when you think about it overnight?

Like, how do you decide what stays and what gets edited out?

When I get to the 20,000 word mark, my books are between 80 and 90,000 words.

If I write 20,000 words, at that point,

I have to know, do I have enough left for another 60 or 70,000 words?

Are there enough options?

Is the story going to get big enough to be a full book?

And sometimes, sometimes it happens before I get to 20,000 words.

I think this is not it.

This is an idea is not a book.

So a premise is not a book.

So I have lots of premises in my head, but they don't all develop into what could be a full book.

So I have dozens and dozens of 20,000 word files that

never get to a full book stage.

Could you ever go back to them and just add on to them so that they do change?

Okay.

Sure.

Because I feel like that's, I mean, you could have a lot of things.

If I think of it, I might think of something that could, that could, oh, that would work for that story.

But at the time I was writing it, I didn't see anywhere interesting to go with it.

Okay, that makes sense.

Would you ever collab with anyone to like finish one of them?

I guess I could and not something I thought of, but that would be cool.

I've only seen a couple authors collab on books, but most authors that I talk to don't want to work with anyone else because they have a very specific writing style or writing process.

And so they don't really want to work with someone else.

But that could be cool.

It would be interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've never

Colleen Hoover worked with Taryn Fisher on a book.

I forget what the

Too Gone or

I forget what it was called.

I remember seeing it with their names on it.

Yeah, with both of them.

And I thought that was really cool.

Do you ever feel pressure at this point to maintain like your full career in writing because of, you know, it takes a lot of time to write a book?

Do you feel pressure?

Sure.

Yes.

Always pressure to

sell books, to come up with something people like, to,

yeah,

I guess, yeah,

when your first book comes out, you're fresh and new, and everything's, you're the debut, and

then everything else after that is

trying to keep up, trying to, there's getting in the business, and then they're staying in the business.

And is that hard?

I think so.

Yes, because you're constantly,

there's constant new debut authors coming too.

And so the pool gets bigger.

So it's not just like the seasoned seasoned authors, it's the all the new debut authors.

And then,

in a way, you're sort of competing, but obviously, you make friends in this space and you want to see them do well.

But I could imagine that could be hard.

Do you think your characters need therapy or jail time?

Because all of your characters seem to need both.

Both.

Some probably need a

correctional institute, or

some probably need prison some probably need lots of help some probably need some pharmaceuticals buy lots of things jeanie what um made you want to do like thriller suspense like have you always loved true crime and watched like id channel like the rest of us yeah i i grew up actually reading thrillers my whole family read thrillers so they were always around the house growing up um reading was big in my family we went to the library a lot and uh it was it was seen as a real fun activity.

So I grew up as a reader, but my family was always reading Michael Creighton and John Grisham and just all kinds of thrillers.

And I definitely gravitated towards that.

And then when Dexter came around

and

Gone Girl,

and after I read Gone Girl and Girl on the Train and

those thrillers, we call them domestic thrillers, thrillers that did not have a law enforcement person as the main character.

It wasn't police chasing serial killer.

It was something that was taking place inside of a home.

I thought,

I've never been in law enforcement.

That's not my area.

But I thought something like that I could write.

And that's when I wrote My Lovely Wife.

Okay.

That's that I never even thought about the fact that a lot of thrillers that I read don't have police enforcement at all.

Right.

I mean, so that is a domestic thriller, you're saying?

Domestic thrillers, that's how I define it, is something that takes place within a home or within a community a neighborhood and the lead characters the main the protagonists are not law enforcement so pretty much the thrillers that most of us read are like would be domestic okay not something that would not be silence of the lambs which is very specifically fbi chasing serial killers ah okay so we're talking about a thriller that takes place between a husband and wife or in between family members neighbors okay kind of thing you've also written about messy marriages is that something coming from like personal experience or something that you've seen or it's just an idea that you've had?

I've never been married.

And so this is all my observation on marriages.

And I think that can be more helpful

because you see it as an objective person.

And when you're in the marriage, you can't see it.

But when I see marriages, whether it's in my own family or with my friends, I see the way they treat each other and the way they act.

I can see the nuances.

Right.

Whereas they're feeling it because they're in it.

Right.

But you see it from sort of a different lens because you're on the outside.

So I think that that gives me a different perspective as a writer to try to capture those moments, those nuances that can be in a marriage that I see.

No, that makes sense.

And how do you name your characters?

Because

Too Old for This has a character named Plum.

And as soon as I read that, I was like, oh, what an interesting name.

Like, how do you name your characters?

I am super specific about the names that I pick because a lot of them I want to be short.

Okay.

It's just easier on the reader.

And I want them to be different because I want readers to be able to remember them and to be able to keep the characters separate.

I rarely pick names that start with the same letter or that have the same sound.

They're going to be used together a lot.

So Plum and Lottie.

One ends with the IE and one ends with the consonants, so they don't have that same sound.

So I'm really specific when it comes to names like that and just how the reader will hear it in their head and be able to keep them straight.

Well, I appreciate names that are also a little bit different too, because I mean, I still remember characters from books I read last year because they were different.

They weren't just everyday names.

So it's helpful, in my opinion, to have a book stand out compared with others.

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Do you ever freak yourself out when you're writing a book and you're like, oh, this is really dark.

This twist is really dark.

Yeah, sometimes.

Sometimes.

Yeah, I think, oh, this is so, this is so wrong.

Yeah, well, I mean, too old for this starts off really wrong.

I called one of my girlfriends and I was like, girl, like,

I do, but then I just write it anyway.

Yeah.

What's the alternative?

I don't want to edit.

I want to go all in on the first draft and then leave it to my editor to say, oh, you got to pull that.

Like, that's way too much.

I might as well just go all in on the first draft.

And if it's too much, then I can always take it out.

Right.

How do you decide when you're going to like like I was saying when we first started recording too old for this you dive head first

you start reading it.

Are all of your books like that or how do you decide when to sort of insert the bomb being dropped?

Right.

They don't all star like that.

No.

But for Lottie it was important because she's coming out of retirement.

Okay.

So I needed that bomb to drop quickly and then sort sort of fill in her backstory.

I don't want to start a book with a bunch of backstory.

So I'm showing you who she is from the beginning and then you can learn the story of how she got there throughout the book.

I sort of like to put backstory, pepper it in throughout the book.

Sure.

So for her,

I like to start the book at the moment something changes.

So I'm just going to drop you into a scene, drop a reader into a scene, mid-scene.

And thriller readers are smart.

They've read a lot of thrillers and

they can catch on yeah i i don't need to overexplain anything she's an old woman she's in it she's in her house somebody knocks on the door

you can follow that that's not hard

and then you see what happens next for sure and um

so not not all stories start that

dramatically as that one does, but it always starts with a change.

A change has to start the story.

Somehow, someone loses a job, gets a job, you know, whatever, meets somebody,

is attacked, or something.

Something starts the story.

Well, I mean, I can appreciate the early bomb being dropped, though, because there's been so many times I've read a thriller that nothing has happened until almost page 200.

And I'm like, I like a slow burn, but that's too slow, you know?

So I appreciate the switch up for.

What would your toxic trait be as if you were a character in your book?

In your own book?

That's a really hard question.

My, probably my most toxic trait um

i'm way too blunt okay way way probably blunt to the point of i just don't see the the sense in messing around and i'm just gonna say what it is we're not gonna beat around the bush no and i'm just gonna if i don't like something or like somebody or what i'm just gonna say i'm not gonna i i don't have the ability to say it in the nicest way.

Would you say that that quality or that trait seeped into Lottie in Too Old for This?

Certainly in her head, in her inner model.

But she has the ability to be pretty

disciplined in how she presents herself to others.

She's very aware of her appearance to others, especially as an older woman and

uses it to her advantage.

But certainly in her head, she's very blunt.

That's what I'm getting from it as well.

Do any of your characters in any of your books have qualities or characteristics from people in your real life?

Sometimes, yeah, I might take a small thing and add it as a

habit that they have or a way that they move or something that they do.

There's no full character that's someone else, but sure, I take traits from real life and things all the time, personality traits and things.

Oh, that makes sense.

Do you have a dream cast for any of your books?

A dream cast?

I don't really.

No.

Who, if you on the spot, who would you cast for Lottie?

Oh, gosh.

I mean,

Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep.

I was going to say Meryl Street.

That's who I was amazing.

There's so many who could do such an amazing job at it.

Yeah.

One of my favorite at all times.

I don't think she's old enough,

but I love Jodi Foster.

Oh, I could see that.

I think she's amazing.

I think each of them would bring their own slant to it.

Yeah.

But

yeah, there's a lot.

I love Margot Martindale, who is a character actor.

She was in Justified, if you ever saw that.

I've probably

if I saw her.

Yeah, she's she was fantastic in that show.

And she's, she's, she's, she's one of those real blunt type people.

Have you watched any

book to movie or show adaptations that you really like?

I just saw The Better Sister, which I love.

Oh, I saw it being promoted on socials, but I haven't seen it yet.

I love it.

Is it good?

I loved it.

I watched Little Big Lies or Big Little Lies.

I loved it.

Yeah.

But I didn't read the book.

I actually watched it and didn't know it was based on a book.

And then my son was reading,

what was the one by Holly Jackson?

Good Girl's Guide to Murder.

I think it's more of like

YA.

Yeah, I didn't read it.

He read it and then we watched it together, which I thought was cool.

But would you sell the rights to Old for this if you, if they were optioned?

Sure.

I mean, I don't have a problem.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The, oh, I was going to say also sharp objects.

Oh, it's fantastic.

And Gone Girl, obviously, was a fantastic movie.

I forgot about that one.

The, I loved the movie Gone Girl.

So good.

But the book is better.

The book is, the books are always better.

You definitely get more inside the character's head than you can in a movie.

For sure.

Well, so, and I say this all the time when I have authors on, but Colleen Hoover was the first person to tell me why they have to make changes.

And she basically was saying that, you know, you were describing your books to be up to what, 90,000 words, but for a movie script, they have to essentially cut it in half to make it make sense for a one and a half or two hour movie.

And so I think as an audience, we never realized that that's why they have to make the changes because certain things that you can put in a 350 page book, you can't fit it all in one movie.

So it makes sense to me now.

And I look at adaptations in a different, from a different point of view now, because obviously I know it doesn't fit.

And you can't, it's really hard to show what's happening in somebody's head.

I mean, in Dexter, they had the voiceover, so you could hear, you could hear him talking to himself, and then you could also hear his father talking to him.

But we can't do all book-to-movie adaptations like that, so it's hard.

What book of yours do you think would cause partners to break up if they read it together?

Maybe my lovely wife.

Probably my lovely wife.

Yeah, I think so.

He started it.

That's kind of a

that's got some twisted marriages in it as well, but that's more of a sibling story.

Okay.

But a twisted love story is

that was the fourth book.

That was about a dramatic roller coaster relationship, up and down, break up, break up, together, together, break up, break together.

That dramatic, a couple that really got off on drama.

So if people read it together and one person said this is a great relationship, but one person said this is a horrible relationship, they might be in the wrong relationship.

What makes you want to write characters like that with twisted stories?

I think it's just interesting.

I think

to me, I guess that's just that

people that act outside the norms of what we, whether it's a serial killer or

somebody who's just in this very twisted, toxic relationship by choice, and they want to be in it.

I think it's just interesting to explore that as a writer.

It's a different art than

finding the subtle aspects of a person interesting and making that interesting in a writer.

That's a whole art I do not have mastered of making somebody really normal.

I hate to use the word normal, but a non-serial killer, a non-breaking the law person, but putting them as the main character and making that

interesting and compelling seems far more difficult to me than making a serial killer interesting.

Fair.

And that makes sense to me.

For some reason.

Yeah, no, that makes sense to me.

Do your friends and family read your books?

Yeah.

They do.

They do.

Well, they say they do.

I don't know.

Do they think that you're like absolutely unhinged?

You said it's so nonchalant.

Yeah, they do.

They do.

Did you ever scare yourself?

Like, okay, am I taking this too far?

I was in, back when I was still in at working at my job, I was in the break room one time.

And in one of my books, coffee pods becomes very important in the book and being able to do something bad to coffee pods, like poison them.

And I said that once in the break room.

I said, do you know how easy it is to poison, put poison in here?

And I remember saying this to someone who is an executive at the company.

He just looked at me and said, there's something wrong with you.

You're like, I know, I know.

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Do you have a favorite thriller author?

Oh, gosh, so many.

That's a really

tough question.

Obviously, I always read Gillian Flynn's books, or I've read all the ones that have come out.

Mary Kubica is one of my favorite.

I actually met her

down at Rehoboth in Delaware, and she was really sweet.

She's also, she's a plotter, I think, though.

I don't know if she is or not.

Yeah, I don't know.

That's what she said.

She's a plotter, so she like plots it all out.

But she's great.

I really like her.

She's great.

Carolyn Kutneys, who wrote the books for you.

Okay.

The big series on that's a- Oh, that's based on a book?

Yeah.

Book series, Carolyn Kutneys.

I did not realize she was.

She's so nice, and she's, yeah.

You gotta put that on your list.

Yeah, seriously, but that's so interesting because I, for some reason, I thought, like, okay, growing up, we didn't really have a whole lot of book-to-movie adaptations.

But now that you're saying that, maybe some of them are not advertised as books to movies or movies to shows or whatever.

Right.

I think it's easier to miss that now in the streaming era.

I think when it was, when they used to, like when the Gone Girl movie came out, it was a big movie in the theaters.

Nobody knew it was, like a lot of people didn't know it was a book unless you were already a reader.

Right.

And now the streaming, it goes by so quickly.

You know, you binge watch it and then you're on to the next and you never even realize it was a book.

book right and i think too with um the rise of book talk it's helping people to social media in general not just book talk but just in general like

oh this movie is coming to the big screen sort of deal so i think that helps but yeah i think there's so many i'm like where are all these adaptations coming from out of nowhere but really it's been going on the whole time and there was no awareness i guess unless you were already in the reading space to know but like i got on i started reading again because of book talk

so you know what I mean?

So it's like influencing is really making a big difference, I feel like, in the book community.

I think so.

And then one coming up, it comes out this month is The Hunting Wives.

What is that one?

The book is The Hunting Wives by May Cobb.

And the series was made and it's going to be airing on Netflix this month.

Oh, I see.

And that's a thriller about

some wives in, I believe it's East Texas.

or West Texas?

Part Texas.

I can't remember which part, but it's a, it's a great, they all go like skeet shooting together and then they're at the hunting wives in Texas.

Oh

it's a thriller.

I haven't heard of that.

I just

the last book that I read that turned into something for the big screen was Long Bright River.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I read that one

and I'm really excited for remarkably bright creatures because I actually listened to that one on audio and I loved it.

I thought it was so good.

I just read God of the Woods.

I just read that.

Well, I read it a couple months ago, I guess, at this point.

So good.

Same author that

Liz Moore.

I haven't met her, but her books are pretty hefty.

But Longbright River, that's based in Kensington, and I'm from an area really close to Kensington.

So I felt like

a connection to it, I feel.

But okay, so have you ever read a book where you it's a thriller and the twist is so bad you want to throw it across the room?

Or do you DNF?

If I,

there have been times when I'm so sure I know the twist, I will look at the end.

You will?

Everybody looked at you like, oh my gosh, and to see if you're right.

Yeah.

And

I'm wrong.

Sometimes you're looking at it and you're like, oh, crap.

So bad that I didn't read the book.

I mean, I've DNF'd books before, but the

typically,

even if I know the twist, if the writing is great, I keep writing.

Even if I think I know the twist, I'll keep writing because it's just enjoyable to read.

Right.

So, knowing the twist doesn't kill the book for me, or thinking I know the twist because I'm I've been wrong enough times that I know I try not to do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I always think that once I have a book figured out, I'll know it and then I'm always wrong.

There's only been like two books I've ever really figured out, but I still liked them because the books were good.

But if someone tells me about a book and they give me the spoiler, I'll still read it.

Like, it doesn't bother me.

What I try to do is have a number of reveals in the book and a number of twists, not just one, but more than one.

So you may not be surprised every time, but you will be surprised some of the time.

Okay.

So my theory is I think that thriller writers and readers are always trying to figure each other out.

It's like a little game we play.

I'm trying to.

make write things that you're not going to guess and you're trying to guess.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's how it goes.

So if I say something like,

he put the picture in the desk drawer, that's so specific.

You're going to think to yourself, that means something that he put that picture in the desk drawer.

It's coming back.

And I know you're going to think that because you're a thriller reader.

And so I'm going to do the least

obvious thing with that picture in the desk.

I'm just going to burn down the house.

So the picture doesn't matter.

So the fact that the picture has been burnt, it becomes the important fact.

Okay.

Not the fact that it was in the desk drawer in the first place.

So I feel like I am always trying to switch it up.

You switch it up.

Yeah, we got to keep us, you got to keep us on our toes.

Yeah, I don't want to do anything obvious.

I try not to.

What inspired you to move away from the family domestic thrillers to writing one around a teacher in For Your Own Good and then a dating story with a twisted love story?

For your own good.

With the teacher story, I was trying to think that

my first three books always had an element of children in it and the impact that adults have on children.

My My lovely wife, they had kids.

He started it was about siblings and how they grew up.

And for your own good, next to parents, teachers are the adults that spend the most time with kids.

So I wanted to look at, well, what happens if you have a really twisted teacher?

How is that going to affect your kids?

Because they're sitting there every day, five days a week with this teacher.

So I thought that that was still sort of an offshoot of a domestic thriller, is where you send your kids to school, but how much do you really know about those teachers?

And not in the predatory way.

That wasn't what he was about.

He was simply a psychopath.

And what happens when you have a psychopath as a teacher teaching your, what do those kids learn from him?

Right.

Especially in younger ages, for sure.

And then a twisted love story.

That one, I really wanted to make the relationship itself a character.

Okay.

And so Wes and Ivy were individuals, but when they came together, they created something.

They created basically a tornado and they whipped through life and other people got drawn up into their tornado of drama and they weren't even paying attention to the other people.

They were paying attention to their own drama.

So their relationship was a third character in the book.

That's kind of cool.

I feel like that's...

That was that was the goal anyway.

Yeah, no, that actually sounds really good and different from a lot of stories that I read.

So put that one on my TBR.

For the book, talk girlies.

What trope would you never write about?

What would I never write about?

I don't know.

Never say never.

I have never put rape in any of my books.

Okay, I don't know if that's a trope.

Yeah, well, it's dark romance, I would say, in that, sort of in that category.

I've never put the anywhere near the rape category or coercion of that.

It doesn't mean I won't, but I don't,

I've never come up with a way to do it that makes me want to do it.

Have you ever had any desire to write rom-com?

No.

A sigh.

No.

Just a dark girly?

Yeah, I think so.

I mean,

I've thought about horror or something, even a more slow burn type of a thriller,

not as thrillers that don't have a serial killer in them at all, but just people making choices.

And some of them are bad, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily not every person who does something bad is a psychopath.

That's a very specific diagnosis

of having no empathy and what have you.

So

I have thought of other genres, but not the rom-com.

Not rom-com.

Okay.

So since you've put yourself in the mindset of serial killers and good versus evil, do you feel like a serial killer or people that kill other people?

are it's a situation of nature versus nurture or do you think that people can be born evil

I think both.

I think both and sometimes it can be a combination of both.

I think

we've seen that there are psychopaths that are just born that way and there are small children who show those tendencies and show this lack of empathy.

And sometimes it happens after a traumatic brain injury.

And sometimes it can be a combination of born, the way they're born as well as the way they're treated, severe cases of abuse, which who knows, maybe they also have a brain injury involved.

Right.

So I don't think you can make someone not have empathy.

But I'm not a doctor.

Maybe you can.

Maybe you can abuse them to the point I know somebody like Charles Manson was severely abused by a child as a child.

And he was diagnosed as a psychopath, I believe.

I wonder about like people like Brian Koberger, who seemingly had like a normal upbringing with his two sisters and his parents.

They're still married to this day.

They live in the suburbs of Pennsylvania.

You know what I mean?

Like how does that happen?

And he could just be born a psychopath.

True.

That's the Idaho.

Yeah.

The Idaho.

Who knows?

I read one book about it

and it

seemed to indicate he certainly had those tendencies that he could have been a blossoming serial killer.

Yeah.

It's very hard to be a serial killer now with DNA and technology.

And that was in too old for this.

Like you really have to think about

because people have written doorbells now and CCTV and phone pinging off of towers and all of it.

And the DNA and the fingerprints and the, I mean, we have so much science now.

Yeah.

I don't even know how you could get away with it at this point.

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How do you put yourself in the mental space for characters like Lottie?

I think that what I have to do is that they have a belief system.

They have a belief system about what they're doing and why they're doing it, and they do not veer from that.

They do not question.

They

believe

what they are doing is right for their reasons.

Whether anybody else agrees with them or not doesn't matter.

And they just don't question it.

So I come at it from that standpoint.

Lottie is doing what she has to do, period.

There's no question in her mind.

She's doing what she has to do to protect herself, to protect her family, to protect her life.

In this case, of her being brought out of retirement.

So

there's no

questioning of her behavior.

So

once you're reading from that standpoint as a reader, you're in their head.

Right.

You may totally disagree with it and think that they're crazy, but as long as

it's interesting,

you keep reading.

Yeah.

and obviously Lottie is an elderly woman and we don't see you know a serial killer that is an elderly woman or a woman in general

so what inspired you to have a female elderly serial killer well it's actually interesting I had some health problems and for the first time I had I was led a very healthy life and suddenly had some health problems and was unable to do things that I had spent a lifetime doing.

I was a very active person and suddenly could not be active and

had to adapt and change.

And it really changes your brain when suddenly

when you do something every single day and suddenly you can't.

And you think, I'm never going to be able to do this again, ever.

Like that avenue was closed to me.

And I sort of channeled that into Lottie as she's getting older and there are things she can't do anymore.

And she adapts and she finds new ways.

And I really tried to

show that about her, that she, it wasn't that she couldn't be a serial killer anymore, but she couldn't do it the way that she used to.

She had to do other things and adapt to the new technology and change her methods and

start

compensating for potential memory losses.

And even though she doesn't have Alzheimer's or dementia, she just has a basic not as good memory as it was when she was younger.

So I think that that's what made me write it.

Before I was writing Lottie, I was writing about a younger character and I wasn't connecting to her at all.

Okay.

And I

was having trouble writing the story and I thought, okay, you know what?

I'm just going to switch this character and make her a lot older.

And then it just flowed.

So I guess that's just where my mind was.

It just felt better.

Yeah.

I think it's cool though, because I haven't read anything like it.

So it sets you apart from other thrillers, which I think is great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was a lot of fun to write.

She's a lot of fun.

And Too Old for This was set in Oregon.

It was

right.

She originally lived in Washington and now she lived in Oregon.

Do you have ties to Washington or Oregon, or did you just wanted to write?

Not actually.

I've been there, but not specifically.

No, it's kind of cool.

I live on the West Coast.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then Archie, her son, her son is in California.

And he's an attorney or a lawyer.

What inspired his character just because?

Well, I wanted her to have, she had a full life.

I mean, she has a child.

She has now grandchildren and daughter-in-law and the whole, she has friends and she has a whole social life.

Single on Thursdays.

She's not the unabomber.

She's not just in a unit cabin.

She has a whole life going on that she's trying to protect.

So,

and the fact that she was a single mother becomes a very important part of the book.

And Archie is very important to her.

It's giving BTK, like when the BTK killer has a whole family that he's protecting and his daughter, did you, she did an interview years and years and years ago and she said something along the lines of like he was a good dad to her sort of like living that double life yeah um exactly so interesting so yeah lottie has like a maternal instinct when it comes to her son and that's a really interesting characteristic to give to the villain of the story what inspired that i think that uh there's

i think for serial killers have a way of um

at least the ones that have families and full lives, they have a way of compartmentalizing

and making exceptions for some people, the people that are important to them.

And we all do this.

We all treat our, you know, do things for our family we might wouldn't, maybe wouldn't do for a stranger.

They're just at the extreme end of it.

Yeah.

They're able to kill someone, but would never think of doing that to their family.

They don't want to just kill anyone.

It's right.

There are people that are exceptions to their other behavior.

Makes sense.

What was your favorite part about writing Too Old for This?

I think

probably coming up with the way she kills.

Yeah, I was floored.

Which was fun.

So I won't.

I didn't want to

do anything typical.

Yeah, it's...

I think that the commentary, if there's any commentary, I guess, in the book, is the same commentary I had from my lovely wife.

You don't really know the person next to you, the person living next to you, and you don't know what they're up to.

So

I think an older woman can be like that, or an elderly woman can be like that, the same as your perfect next-door neighbors that are in your fun little, in your little upscale gated community.

They might be serial killers.

For sure, which is terrifying.

Don't underestimate anybody.

Even old women.

You can't underestimate anyone.

Do you have plans for any other books moving forward?

I'm always writing.

Yeah, I'm always writing, but I don't have anything specific right now.

I'm still getting in, I'm still in that phase, that opening phase.

Yeah.

So we'll see, but definitely more books.

Yeah, absolutely.

A lot of maternal themes, I guess we'll call it in Too Old for this.

Lottie's a mom, and then Plum's mom enters the scene as a bigger character.

What was the inspiration behind that?

Was there any?

Was it just a coincidence?

I think that throughout the book, the characters that come up really raise the stakes for Lottie and coming up against someone's mother, the mama bear, is a much bigger threat to her than

a different character would be.

So I specifically brought her in because it that was her child and she's trying to find her.

Yeah.

And that's

she, you know, someone like that, you know a mother is going to be more tenacious than some of the other characters.

So and more dangerous because that's their child.

I feel like that in real life, too, like social media, or if something happens to someone's kid, like, ask a mom.

A mom's going to figure it out.

Moms make the best internet sleuths, online investigators, private investigators.

We will figure it out.

Yeah.

So, I love that about the story.

So, there's two older characters in your book: the detective, and then obviously, Lottie.

Do you feel like you intentionally included themes of how people, elderly people, are treated in the book, or was it just a coincidence?

um

yeah I think so and I think that I what I wanted to capture

in part was that they they are thinking in some ways thinking differently when you get to

that age where you're sort of you're beyond the average lifespan of a person and in the country and even if you're healthy that weighs on you and you start thinking about what you leave behind and what you've accomplished and I think that that

that becomes important for both of them yeah I don't want to give away too yeah of course

okay first of all you can get too old for this wherever you get books Barnes Noble Amazon it's out August 12th 2025 and where can people find you on social media my website is samanthadowning.com and I have links there to all my social media mostly on Instagram I still post on Facebook but that that's mainly website and those two.

Thank you for coming on Barely Famous Podcast.

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