The Professor of Eventide is featured today in the BookBub New Release newsletter! Yay! Way to go, Jonathan!

If you’re here from BookBub, welcome! I’m so glad you found your way over. If this is your first time visiting my site, today’s post feels like a great place to begin because I wanted to share a bit about how the story came to be. I tend to be inspired by things I read or watch, like many writers. The Loving Husband Trilogy was inspired by True Blood. The Duchess of Idaho was inspired by Outlander. The Hembry Castle books were inspired by Downton Abbey. Woman of Stones was inspired by Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent. And The Professor of Eventide was inspired by Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

As I said last week, I became interested in the Dark Academia aesthetic a few years ago (was it late 2023? Early 2024?). I’m an academic, and I like dark, so I started looking at pins on Pinterest and watching Dark Academia-inspired videos on YouTube. I wasn’t inspired to go out and change my wardrobe or start writing with a quill and ink, but I was inspired to try out some Dark Academia-inspired novels. I checked out some lists of best Dark Academia books, and The Secret History was at the top of nearly every list. I began my Dark Academia reading experience with The Secret History, and I adored that book. I was captivated by Richard and his fellow Classics students. I couldn’t stop thinking about the story—about how Tartt constructed the plot, about how Richard became so compliant, and complicit, in the actions of his fellow students. I mean, really, I just loved the story so much I read it three times in the space of one year. I went on to read other Dark Academia novels, and I wrote about them here. But I kept going back to The Secret History. The writer in me was trying to figure out what made that book tick. 

I can’t recall exactly when it occurred to me that I wanted to try to write something similar, something more psychological. But occur to me it did. I had a vague idea for a campus novel about a group of students, but the point of view would be from that of their professor and what he saw happening around him as these students self-destructed. I have a PhD and I spent six years teaching at the university level, so I’m at the point where I see things from a professor’s point of view. 

At some point, I think it was early 2024, I came up with a vague idea for a novel. I had the name The Professor of Eventide almost immediately. It just popped into my head. Like Dickens, I can’t begin to write a story until I know the title. I don’t know why, exactly, but I feel like the title gives me a point to focus on. In early 2024, I was writing And Shadows Will Fall, which was published in April that year. When I finished And Shadows Will Fall, I went immediately to work on The Swirl and Swing of Words, my nonfiction book about leaning in fully to a creative life. The Swirl and Swing of Words was published in October 2024, and the day after I finished The Swirl and Swing of Words, I began the first draft of The Professor of Eventide. 

It’s interesting trying to pin down the influences on this story because there were so many. Obviously, The Secret History was the main influence. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke is definitely high on the list (somehow, Mr. Norrell’s library ended up in Southshore, Maine. I’m not quite sure how that happened…), as well as The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, and, of course, the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe plays a big role in The Professor of Eventide. In fact, he’s even a character in the story. I’m sure there are other influences that I’m not thinking of at the moment.

Even while I was working on the previous two books, my mind was on The Professor of Eventide. I started keeping writing journals specifically for my research for The Professor of Eventide in the Spring of 2024. I filled almost an entire notebook with research about Edgar Allan Poe, his works, his biography, and literary criticism about him. You can see some of what I learned here. I also needed to learn about nineteenth-century spiritualism, and you can see a bit of what I learned here.

Slowly, slowly, the pieces started coming together. I knew the college would be in New England, like The Secret History, but instead of Vermont, or Massachusetts, which I wrote about in the Loving Husband Trilogy, I went with Maine. I just like Maine. No, I’ve never been there, but it’s this weird sense of being connected to somewhere you’ve never been. That was a song, wasn’t it? I’ve never been to Maine… So Eventide College is in Coastal Maine. I wasn’t worried about writing about a place I’ve never been because I wrote Her Dear & Loving Husband without having set foot in Salem, Massachusetts, and I did a pretty good job of it, if I do say so myself. I visited Salem before I wrote Her Loving Husband’s Curse, and I was pleased to find everything where I expected it to be. Also, Eventide College is a fictional campus in the fictional town of Southshore, Maine. The Loving Husband Trilogy is set in Salem, Massachusetts, which is very much a real place, and the characters worked at Salem State University, also a real place. I can verify that it’s much easier to write about a fictional town with a fictional college because I can put everything where I want and no one can complain about it. 

Normally, writing a novel for me takes three drafts. The Professor of Eventide took five drafts. This book took longer because the story kept changing. As I worked through the various drafts of the writing process, I realized that the professor, Jonathan Ferrars, was the focus of the story, not the students. I knew the basic premise, that Jonathan’s students were being murdered and it looked like he did it, though he didn’t. That didn’t change through the drafting stages. What changed, actually, was the murderer. The who did it and why, that changed several times until I hit on a person with a reason that made the most sense in the context of Jonathan’s story. 

As the novel took shape, it became clear to me that I wasn’t writing a traditional mystery. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that because I rarely write anything that adheres strictly to any kind of genre or trope. While the book contains familiar elements—murders, a police investigation, a series of unsettling discoveries—the structure leans more toward what is often called an inverted mystery, like in The Secret History. The tension doesn’t come from identifying a hidden culprit but from watching the gradual realization as Jonathan figures out what happens and why.

I loved leaning into the Dark Academia and Gothic atmosphere of this story. I loved focusing on the autumn and early winter setting. I loved bringing readers onto the shore of Coastal Maine alongside Jonathan with the lighthouse winking in the distance. But also, I loved seeing how Jonathan’s own memory becomes his undoing. As a writer, I’m interested in how knowledge reveals itself and how we, stubborn people we often are, resist that revelation. The mystery is internal because it’s shaped by Jonathan’s memory, perception, and the way he tries to protect himself from uncomfortable truths. It’s not the first time I’ve written about how our own memories affect our perceptions. Her Dear & Loving Husband and Woman of Stones both focus on memory. Actually, many of my books deal with memory in one way or another.

Even the characters’ names underwent many changes. I need to have the names in place, like the title, in order to start to get a feel for who these invisible people are. Simon’s name was originally Charles, which I either got from The Secret History or Dickens, so I wanted something different. He went through several iterations until he tried on Simon and it felt right. I think Amandine was always Amandine, just like Thomas was always Thomas. Cordelia began life as a guy named Percival. As I was writing the second draft, I realized that I wanted the students in Jonathan’s graduate seminar to consist of three males and three females, so Percival went to the wind and Cordelia joined Jonathan’s class. Jonathan Ferrars was always Jonathan, for reasons I shall currently leave unsaid.

Once I read an interview with Outlander author Diana Gabaldon where she talked about her writing process. She said that she writes the scenes she’s inspired to write, and then she figures out later how to string them together. I finally understand what she meant by that because that’s how I wrote The Professor of Eventide. I wrote the scenes I knew I would need—the classroom scenes, the ball at Eventide Manor, and the final scene—and then I figured out later what I needed to add to pull it all together. Funnily enough, I knew the ending early on and it didn’t change despite all of the rewrites. 

There’s so much more I could say about the story behind The Professor of Eventide, and I’ll share more in the coming weeks.

Soon I’ll share my #Ask Me Anything: The Professor of Eventide edition! There’s still time to get your questions in. Send your questions through the Contact link, and it may appear in my #AMA post! 

If you’re curious about how all these ideas came together into one Gothic literary mystery, The Professor of Eventide is on sale now. And check out our BookBub New Release newsletter!