The Whims of the Muse: Carla Vergot and the Curious Case of Lily Barlow
Carla Vergot loves wrestling with the mechanics of a cliffhanger. She’s just released the third novel in her Lily Barlow mystery series—The Mystery of the Tiles on the Tombstone—a project whose path to publication was more puzzle than plotline.
“I wasn’t feeling the fuel,” Vergot admits, in a virtual visit that sounds less like a promotional push and more like a conversation between old friends trying to explain how lightning gets caught in a bottle—three times.
Vergot, a former educator and nonprofit professional, speaks in rhythms shaped by experience and honest fatigue. The pandemic didn’t just stall her third book; it stole the spark. “It wasn’t glitter and jelly beans,” she says, recalling the grind. Her creative rhythm had once been buoyed by travel and movement—external inputs that dwindled during lockdown. “Everything came to a screeching halt.”
Worse, her first publisher folded, vanishing with books one and two. Without them, book three would exist in a vacuum. And what is the point of mystery if no one can read the clues?
But Vergot, like her protagonist Lily Barlow, has a bit of gumption stitched into her narrative DNA. She found a new publisher. She rolled up her sleeves. She wrote. “You just do the work of writing the book,” she says. It sounds simple until you try.
Lily Barlow, Vergot’s spirited sleuth, is no stranger to complexity either. The series unfolds over a brisk three weeks—compressed time that readers often mistake for months, perhaps years. “Somebody said to me, ‘They should be getting married already,’” Vergot recounts, referring to Lily’s on-again, off-again tension with Jack, her maybe-boyfriend. “And I’m like, dude—it’s been three weeks.”
That same compression gives the books their taut, almost breathless pacing. The third installment picks up precisely where the second left off, each novel a baton in a relay, each scene a link in an emotional and narrative chain. “There’s a big thing in this book,” Vergot teases, deliberately vague, as if protecting her own plot twist. “Nobody’s going to see it coming.”
Even as a Lilly Barlow fan, prepared for intrigue, was caught off guard. It wasn’t anything I was expecteing.
Vergot smiles. That’s the goal.
She writes by instinct—what fiction writers call “pantsing,” as in writing by the seat of one’s pants. “I knew three things that needed to happen in book one,” she recalls. “That was it.” But even within the chaos, there’s order. “My muse works. She just whispers, and it’s always going forward.”
That forward momentum was disrupted only once: by an out-of-sequence scene that arrived like a dream, unbidden. She wrote it immediately, then later had to wedge it back into the story like a jigsaw piece with no defined border. “Very challenging,” she confesses, but worth it. That scene—Lily recounting her day on a Key West veranda—remains Vergot’s favorite.
Despite her self-proclaimed weaknesses as a “re-weaver,” the novels hang together with surprising elegance. The characters breathe. The humor is subtle but sharp. And the storytelling feels less constructed than conjured. Still, she’s not afraid to leave readers dangling. Book two ends on a cliffhanger. Book three does, too.
Why?
Vergot laughs. “A little maniacal,” she admits. “After I did the first one, I thought—can I top myself? And I think I did.”
It’s a statement that’s less boast than curiosity. Can she keep doing this?
That question haunted her after the first book. “Almost everyone has a first book in them,” she says, quoting a character from The Affair, a TV drama she watched before becoming a novelist. “Almost nobody has a second.” That line stuck. When she published her second book, she breathed easier. “I can do this,” she told herself.
Now, with book three released and the fourth already percolating, Vergot’s confidence is earned, if still softly held. She knows her strengths—character, pacing, voice. She knows her limits. She knows she needs travel. And people. Lots of people.
“I’m a big fan of the people-watching game,” she says. “The more entertaining they are, the more likely they’ll end up in a story.”
Her characters, indeed, feel real—textured, talkative, particular in their gestures and turns of phrase. The stories are as much about who these people are as what they’re trying to solve. “Character-driven,” she says, without hesitation.
Even the covers of her books are an exercise in intentionality. “Lily Barlow” used to be written in delicate script, too “scrolly” to latch onto, Vergot says. Now, the branding is clearer, bolder. She holds up the latest book. She’s proud of it.
And she should be. The road from spark to story is rarely straight. For Vergot, it’s involved pandemic detours, publishing setbacks, creative droughts, and quiet personal victories. But somehow, the muse keeps showing up.
“She whispers,” Vergot says again. “And I listen.”
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