Interview with Olivia Taylor, author of “Welcome to the Paradise Motel”

Olivia Taylor’s book, Welcome to the Paradise Motel will be published on April 22, 2025 through Apprentice House Press. Apprentice House describes it this way: “Welcome to the Paradise Motel is a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing set in Florida. Quick-tempered Beatrice Bright has carved out a niche for herself as a small-town reporter for the Paradise Post. Unfortunately, the biggest news in her tiny beach town is that her old rival, Ben Constant, is moving back and bringing his depressingly successful video game company along with him. With the arrival of the company, Bea’s world begins to change rapidly. Bea and Ben engage in battles of wits in the midst of parades, interviews, holiday parties, and hurricanes. Fed up with the years of romantic tension between them, their friends and neighbors at the Paradise Motel decide to trick them into revealing their feelings for each other. But when one of their friends is slandered, Bea and Ben must face up to their feelings and work together to reveal the truth.”

We are trying to highlight more Florida authors and books about Florida. Can you share a little about your connection to the state of Florida?

My family is from South Carolina, but we moved to Northeast Florida when I was pretty young, so I grew up in Fernandina Beach, north of Jacksonville. I really loved being able to live near the beach. I think it always felt like home to me. I love the diverse nature of it, like there's all these beautiful, natural landscapes, but there's also the theme parks and people from all over the world. And also, I think the fun thing about Florida is that there's this kind of feeling that anything can happen, so there are always strange people doing crazy stuff or crazy animals out in the wild.

I read that your college dorm was an old motel and that helped inspire Welcome to Paradise Motel. How did that inspire you? 

Yeah, so you could tell there was a lot of history there and it was very sort of dilapidated. And there was this whole sort of ghost of the motel, there used to be a rooftop pool in one of the rooms, and you would just get various lore. People would say that it used to be a drug den and things like that, which might be true, I don't know. So yeah, it always made me wonder what it was like when it was kind of in its heyday, when there were a lot of people living there, and when it was very very colorful and bright. 

What were some other inspirations for your book? 

I wrote this book for my master’s degree. It started out as a creative project for my master's thesis, and this was all when I was trying to figure out what to do during the middle of the pandemic, like what to write about. As you know, everything else was happening right at the very beginning of the pandemic, so I was home for spring break. I was walking on the beach because that was one of the few places we could go and I had a couple of different pieces floating around where I wanted to write about a journalist in a small town whose stories didn't always line up with what was happening, or they would contradict it in some way. I'd gotten this idea of writing about the motel because it was like a place where you would have community in a time when I was feeling pretty isolated and I was like, well, “How can I connect these two together?” So the journalism thing came from very brief journalistic stints. I did a summer internship with a local paper for one year and then took a couple of journalism classes at Palm Beach Atlantic University, so I had a basic knowledge of that.

What led  you to write a modern twist of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing?
I've always been really interested in Shakespeare. It just became like one of those strange, interesting developments as a child. I got to be in a production of Much Ado About Nothing when I was 13, and I was kind of a catch-all character, kind of the ‘everybody else’ character. I was in this tiny little theater, a local one, and they didn't really have a backstage area. So I would sit out in the audience and hear what all was happening. And I was just so fascinated by it because it felt so alive and sparkling. And so that kind of cemented my love of Much Ado About Nothing as this very funny but very strange romance. I can still hear a lot of the lines spoken in the voices of the actors, which was fun because it was, you know, the local production, so it was people with Southern accents doing Shakespeare, which is always fun. Some people think that's more true to how it actually probably sounded, which is a whole other wild tangent. So as I was mulling over these ideas and thinking about Shakespeare, because I'm a nerd, I was like, “well, Much Ado About Nothing would be a great way to kind of bring these ideas together as a framework for this story. Beatrice could be a reporter for this local paper. And she has a rival who is obnoxiously successful.” 

As a fan of the original play, what was it like to write a modern version of it? 

In a lot of ways, the modern take gave me a lot more freedom. I think the difficult thing to put into the modern is the importance placed on the hero character's reputation. In the original play, the  conflict is based on whether or not the hero sleeps with the man’s wife before her wedding, and that would be like total devastation in early modern England in a way that it isn’t quite as much now. It’s still going to be a problem, but not quite as much of a problem. So, the way I kind of got around that as much as I could was to emphasize the personal aspect of it, like the cost to the hero character, Honey. I did that by putting it in a very small town, so that everybody's lives are under this microscope and, also, fictionalizing the town so that all the drama could be dramatically exaggerated. With Benedict, I thought it would be fun to make him a videogame designer because the military aspect doesn't translate over as well; it seems much more serious now than it would in the context of the play. I wanted something that would give him social clout by being successful, but that was also very playful, so I came across the idea of video games for that.

I’d love to hear you talk a little more specifically about setting. Your book is set in a small-town in Florida, and you grew up in Fernandina Beach, Florida. Did your Florida upbringing influence your description of small-town life? 

Yeah, the town I grew up in was kind of like a cluster of small towns in Fernandina Beach. My fictional setting is loosely based on it. It also has elements from other places because I moved it to the Central Florida coast, and threw elements of West Palm Beach in there, too. I think growing up in a small town, (it's gotten a lot bigger since then, so it's a little bit less tightly knit in some ways, which is good in some ways), you're very much aware of what's going on in people's lives. You recognize people everywhere you go. And sometimes that can be really fun and build a great community, and sometimes it's challenging because, you know, you're hanging out with a lot of people and people are always in conflict with each other. So yeah, that definitely shaped a lot of my experience.

It's a very historic town, so that was kind of my inspiration for layering in these levels of history and how they're thinking about how the history is being told by the townspeople versus what might have actually happened and how it's emphasized as this tool for commercialism. Everything's very constructed, and sometimes a little bit artificial. But there was also that sense of tightly knit community and friends you had known all your lives that I wanted to convey in it, as well. Specific to Fernandina, a lot of the structure or like the general structure and the look of the architecture in downtown inspired me. We have a lot of pirate history in the area because Fernandina's right on the border between Florida and Georgia. There was lots of smuggling. So that was what inspired the pirate-y aspect of the boys’ characters, especially with Ben. As I was growing up, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies came out, so all of the pirate culture in Fernandina intensified. So yeah, pirates were another big influence. I think the actual historical pirates that were there… would be Jean Lafitte, who was a French privateer, he is the one people talk about the most. Maybe Blackbeard also.

What is it you hope readers take away with them? 

I mostly wrote it as kind of a fun adventure, but it’s also about the importance of cherishing your friends and learning how to be compassionate to the people around you and. It encourages women to try things that might traditionally be considered things for men, like with the whole video games part.
Also, not looking down on other women who embrace things that are more traditionally considered feminine. That was sort of the central conflict of the whole Bea and Honey story, that learning to appreciate each other and grow from each other. Bea is very much kind of a “not-like-other-girls” character in that she's very consciously independent, trying to make her own way in the world. Then Honey is more fun and popular and sociable, and so it’s them negotiating their dynamics together.

What do you think makes Florida special?

That's a good question. I think it's that sense of possibility that makes it special. There's kind of this paradox of connection between, like on the one hand, you're very conscious of nature and connected to nature if you live by the beach, or always aware of what's going on with the water and the storms and hurricanes that come in. There's an awareness of how the environment is affecting you, with swamps and things like that. But then it's also very artificial as well, so that makes for fun combinations.

Did you learn anything new while writing this book?

You always do research. I wasn't a big video game person before I started writing this book and sort of in the process of doing it, I learned a lot more about the video game world, and that was really fun. I became more of a video game person myself. I'm really fond of cozy video games now, which was a whole genre that I didn't know existed when I was writing it. Learning more about the different components, I also learned a lot about Dungeons & Dragons, which makes an unofficial appearance in their friend group. Peter is the Dungeon Master and his sort of plot to make them fall in love unfolds as like a role-playing campaign, so a lot of fun knowledge there. I think on a more serious note, I also learned a little bit more about Hurricane Irma and kind of how widespread its impact was, because I had set the novel in 2017, as a mini nostalgia adventure, and then realized as I was going through this, “Oh my gosh, there was also this hurricane that I totally forgot about, despite having lived through it,” so that was a sobering thing I learned more about, as well.

What are you working on now/next? 

I feel like I have like five or six different project ideas that I'm still trying to settle on. Right now I'm working on a very, very loose retelling of The Canterbury Tales in space.

Interview conducted by Grace Mackey.