Hello, Tom Weston, and thank you for joining me today. Would you mind briefly introducing yourself?
Hello, it’s good to be here. I am author, Tom Weston. I live in Boston with my wife, Leigh, although I am originally from England. My background is Computer Science and in a prior life I ran a consulting company and dabbled in business. It worked out well enough to enable me to pursue a new career in writing. This is much more fun – the business world does not have a sense of humor.
You are the author of the young adult book First Night. What is the book about?
First Night is a ghost story for the holidays.
It is set in Boston on New Years Eve, during the First Night Festival. It is about the ghost of a seventieth century Puritan girl, Sarah Pemberton, who meets two teenage sisters from San Diego, Alex and Jackie, and enlists their help in fighting the charge of witchcraft that has been brought against her.
Along the way, the book delves into Boston history and landmarks; one critic dubbed it a history mystery, which I think has a nice ring to it.
What started you on the road to writing First Night?
I had just written a screenplay called Fission, based on the real-life story of the scientist Lise Meitner, and the race for the nuclear bomb. Now, that story began in 1906 and ended in 1968, and included two world wars and the collapse of an Empire. It was very much in the form of the epic or mini-series genre: quite serious and dramatic and high-brow.
When that was completed, I thought that it would be fun to go in exactly the opposite direction, and see if I could come up with a story where all the action takes place in just one day, something light and whimsical. And I was in Downtown Boston on New Year’s Eve when I realized that Boston and the First Night Festival would make the perfect backdrop for the story.
