The Big Idea: Joanne Merriam

What if the “happily ever after” ending the author gave you doesn’t really seem all that happy? If you’re author Joanne Merriam, you take matters into your own hands and retell the story, which resulted in her newest novel, Aether and Ego. JOANNE MERRIAM: Johannes Kepler and Shonda Rimes are responsible for the existence of my novel. In the months before I began writing Aether and Ego, I started on and then discarded a number of ideas for the novel I suddenly had the time to write. I had just moved back to Canada, and had about a year’s worth of savings to live on while we waited for my American partner’s permanent residency status to come through. My parents put us up during that time so I wouldn’t run through those savings too quickly. One of the books I started and discarded, I ended up coming back to (I’m working on it now) but most of the ideas I had just didn’t gel. Then I happened to read a quote from Kepler that forms one of the two epigraphs to the novel: “Ships and sails…