How psychological depth shapes paranormal fiction [PODCAST]

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Join Daniela Valenti, a psychiatrist, as she brings a unique perspective to her writing, weaving psychological depth into her characters. Today, she discusses her book, Sentinel 10, The Edge of Destiny. We’ll explore the creation of her intricate world, the development of her protagonist, and how her professional background influences her narrative.

Daniela Valenti is a psychiatrist.

She discusses her book, Sentinel 10, The Edge of Destiny.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast, get CME for this episode by clicking on the CME link in the show notes. Today we welcome Daniela Valenti. She’s a psychiatrist, and we’re going to talk about her book Sentinel 10: The Edge of Destiny. Daniela, welcome to the show.

Daniela Valenti: Thank you so much for having me, very excited to be here.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll talk about your book in a little bit. Just first off, briefly share your story and journey.

Daniela Valenti: So I went to McGill for medical school, McGill in Montreal, Canada. So I am a Canadian psychiatrist, practicing right now in my private office here in Ontario. So after McGill I did my residency at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and so I graduated in 2015. So I’ve been practicing since 2015, mostly doing inpatient psychiatry in fact. So yeah, that’s one of my passions.

So the other part of course, the writing endeavors. I started to write early on, like most writers, in my childhood. I never really had, obviously it’s just kind of fun practice, I never had any kind of story at all until I hit on this idea of, well, Sentinel 10, basically this paranormal fiction. The very first idea for it came in my early 20s in fact. To be honest, a little bit inspired, like I was whatever, 21 or something, a little bit inspired by the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m always a bit embarrassed, but hey, it’s fiction, whatever, I was 21. No vampires in my books though, OK, it’s very different.

But in any case, so I still didn’t have a story. I had this idea for some kind of framework to follow a young woman as she evolves in her life while having special powers. So that’s the only connection there with the TV show.

But the real writing started 2017, when I attended the forensic psychiatry conference in Prague, in Prague, Czech Republic. Somehow on the flight back, suddenly everything just started to come together, almost like a puzzle. It was amazing, very, very interesting, amazing, strange experience. I basically had the full outline of book one, all those ideas from everything, who I am, my background, people I know, and again forensic psychiatry, about psychopaths, narcissism, all sorts of things like that. Everything just started to connect and form into more interesting characters, and the action started to happen in my head. So I had the outline by the time I arrived back to Montreal. I had basically the full story, and it just continued for the next three years. So until pretty much the pandemic I kind of kept writing. So it’s a series of books, it’s not just one, it is going to follow the same characters.

Kevin Pho: So you are a psychiatrist. Did you have a background in writing? What made you make that jump from doing psychiatry into publishing a series of books?

Daniela Valenti: Yeah, so again, that’s the whole story. So psychiatry is something that I discovered in medical school. I never knew I wanted to be a psychiatrist. Obviously I mean, I was always interested in human nature and things like that. So as soon as I discovered psychiatry, on the second day of my med school rotation in psychiatry, literally I remember walking down the hallway at the end of that second day, and I was like, wow, I think this is the right one. Almost like falling in love, very strange. In any case, so that’s how psychiatry came about.

I have no actual formal education in writing. In fact, English is not my first language. My real background, well, Valenti is a pen name, but my real ethnic background is Eastern European, Ukrainian. Arrived to Canada at age 10, so arrived actually to Montreal, so my second language I suppose is French. Although right now I’m really bilingual in that sense, French, English, and Ukrainian. So English is my third language. Obviously at McGill I studied in English, and subsequently as well.

I did take some writing classes, but literally that came later. The whole decision, there was no decision to write, like I say, literally that story. I was always an imaginative kind of person, some dabbling in writing occasionally here and there, not when I was in med school, no time for that, not in residency either. So it had died down for quite a while, and then suddenly it just all came together after Prague, after that forensic psychiatry conference. A fascinating conference, like really and truly, you discover what psychopathy really is. That’s horrible obviously, but very interesting, because they’re sort of missing some normal human functions in their brain, and it shows on scans too, so it’s almost like a biological issue. In any case, it’s quite fascinating.

And somehow it all interconnected with my long ago kind of idea about those paranormal powers and all sorts of villains, the kind of story about a young woman who has paranormal powers but also is a doctor, and she goes through the next years of her life having all sorts of interesting adventures, trying to balance work, friends, love, whatever, villains, creatures, stuff like that.

Kevin Pho: So your book is Sentinel 10: The Edge of Destiny. So I’m interested in hearing how your background as a psychiatrist, how does that inform your characters? Do you use a lot of your psychiatric background and your background in medicine in your stories?

Daniela Valenti: Right, I certainly use it, because frankly, psychiatrist at this point, it’s part of who I am. Some of the reviews, and I’ve been told that my characters are, including really good reviews from Kirkus Reviews, a really well recognized review source for writers, but in any case, I have multifaceted characters. They’re all flawed, but that’s a very good thing, because they’re not cookie cutter or anything, they’re not stereotypical at all.

Certainly I do take some inspiration from, well, really my knowledge of let’s say human nature, not only as a psychiatrist but definitely as a psychiatrist as well. As a psychiatrist we encounter a large variety of all sorts of people which are usually struggling with a lot of problems, even sometimes aside from the mental illness, personality problems. We certainly see narcissism for instance, occasionally technically psychopaths, antisocial personality disorder. In any case, so yes, there’s inspiration there.

Sometimes I even presented like a supernatural version of a bipolar illness, let’s say having a manic episode, but it’s because of a paranormal thing that happens to the person, their powers go out of control, so they go on this rampage. And there’s definitely parallels with having a manic episode, and then they’re like, oh my God, what was that, what happened to me, it’s horrible. So yeah, there’s definitely inspiration there. And of course still me as a person, also all sorts of people I’ve encountered in life outside of psychiatry as well, including some colleagues sometimes, whatnot.

Kevin Pho: So do these colleagues know that they’re the inspiration for some characters in the book?

Daniela Valenti: Well, I camouflage. It’s not current colleagues, it’s from way back, med school, whatever.

Kevin Pho: So tell us, in terms of the response to your book, I guess from the medical side, do your colleagues know that you’re writing this series?

Daniela Valenti: No, I mean, I don’t tell, well, currently I changed places. I was working for six and a half years at a different hospital, a community hospital, right now I’m in an academic hospital. So eventually I basically told my colleagues, eventually, even the nurses, because again, inpatient unit, eventually I told them. At first I was keeping it secret, because again, I’m certain that I am the only North American psychiatrist writing paranormal fiction. There’s no way there’s another one.

So it’s pretty unusual, or at least I feel it’s unusual, so I’m not sure how people would react to that. I certainly want to remain professional in their mind, and especially on top of it, what if the patients find out? So I certainly have a pseudonym for that reason especially. Psychiatric patients, you never know, you don’t want to interact with somebody who’s reading your book or having ideas about it.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Daniela Valenti. She’s a psychiatrist and author. Her book is Sentinel 10: The Edge of Destiny. So Daniela, tell us about your future writing endeavors. What do you envision your writing career to be in the next year or so?

Daniela Valenti: Well, I mean I’m still working on the whole series. It’s interesting, because it’s almost like I write sometimes, well OK, the first book I wrote it all together as a full story, in succession. Basically since then, nowadays I’m working on book four, it’s being edited by my editor. Book five, I’m finishing it. Basically I work on scenes, like chapters let’s say, so it’s almost like a movie. Apparently movies are being filmed in scenes which are not necessarily consecutive. Well frankly that’s how it’s working for me now. I know the scenes that are missing in each of the remaining books. The books are actually written, but they’re missing some pieces, some scenes, which I am still working on. And my plan is to carry on and have all 10 books out in the next perhaps two years, because they’re mostly done. So I don’t necessarily think I’m going to be writing maybe other books, but you never know. You never know, it might hit me again.

Kevin Pho: And my final question, Daniela, tell us some of your take-home messages that you’d like to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Daniela Valenti: So I’d like to tell a little bit about, again, I mentioned what the story is about, but basically it’s about an anesthesia resident, her name is Amanda Griffith, and in Boston, in the US, and she discovers she has paranormal powers in terms of, she can generate basically such psychic impulses. But it’s not like a psychic, she can’t read minds or things like that. She can project a psychic charge, like a psychic power surge out of her hand, and with that she can destroy things like ghosts or paranormal entities like that.

By the way, a lot of my entities are in fact inspired by some almost like science fiction, but like quantum physics off YouTube, like those kinds of interpretations, dimensions and things like that. Anyway, they’re all quite original takes on existing concepts like ghosts or demons, whatnot.

And additionally those kinds of charges, pulse energy, can also hurt quite a bit if you’re a psychopath, even if you’re not a supernatural one. It can hurt people, it’ll give you a horrible, more than a headache, it’ll knock you out. So she can fight basically all sorts of criminals. There are secret societies, there are moral dilemmas in there. I mean, this is not young adult, this is adult. Some of the books are more romance, others are more like urban fantasy.

So it’s all about her, and the kind of, well, she has a best friend, how she finds love, the kind of people she interacts with. There are some, like, what happens at work, how it can affect her work, because eventually she’ll have to quit anesthesia, because it’s too much, she can’t do both. She’ll go to family medicine. In any case, so it’s all following Amanda, and how her powers, well, if she’ll have the powers for the next 10 years of her life, so from age 25 until 35, and how her life stages also evolve in conjunction with the powers, having that kind of destiny.

Kevin Pho: The book is Sentinel 10: The Edge of Destiny. Daniela, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks again for coming on the show.

Daniela Valenti: Thank you so much.

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