Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.

Growing up, Robert Beatty was fascinated with building things. He applied this interest to two seemingly oppositional passions: He loved engineering, and he loved writing stories. He was 10 or 11 when he ran out of books to read at home and his mother pointed him toward an old typewriter stored in a closet. She said, “Why don’t you play with that?”

“I literally got the typewriter out, put in a blank piece of paper, and typed ‘Chapter One,’” Beatty says. “I typed with one finger, and I started writing my first novel.”

Around the same time, Beatty discovered the technical world of computers and software programming. He fell in love with that, too, and by age 32, he’d founded Plex Systems, which builds management information systems for manufacturing companies and defense industries around the world. He was also the chief architect of Plex Manufacturing Cloud, making him a pioneer of cloud-based computing.

But Beatty never forgot his love of writing. After settling in Asheville in 2006 and later taking a step away from the companies he’d created, he turned his focus back toward building fictional worlds in the same way he’d once designed computer systems. He found the pursuits remarkably similar.

“Both writing and software programming require you to be alone, to be quiet, and to think within a very deep space inside your brain,” he says. “And you’re sitting in a chair, using your mind, and it’s coming through your fingers onto the screen.” He laughs. “Neither writing nor programming are so good for your physical health, or your social life, but that’s all right.”

Ask any writer the hardest thing about the process, and they’ll tell you about rejection and frustration. Beatty had his fair share of both. He’d written several novels for adults and had no success in getting them published. One evening, the eldest of his three daughters, 11-year-old Camille, wandered into his study and asked him what he was working on. He told her he was writing a book, and when she asked to read it, he explained that it was for adults. It was only after going down into the basement and coming across a manuscript her father had written during his own childhood that Camille discovered he’d once written for kids, too. When she asked about it, Beatty said he didn’t write books like that anymore.

“Well, you should,” Camille said, “because I just read it, and I love it.”

Her words inspired him to begin working on a novel about a young girl named Serafina, an outcast who lives in the maze of hallways and basement rooms beneath the Biltmore House. The estate was near the Beattys’ home, and the family went there often. Now, their visits took on a new meaning.

“We’d explore the basement rooms and the upper corridors and come up with ideas about what kind of character Serafina would be,” Beatty says. “We talked about what her name would be, and what her characteristics would be.”

Serafina and the Black Cloak was published in the summer of 2015 and became a No. 1 New York Times best seller, spending more than a year on the list. Four more Serafina books followed, including a graphic novel. He eventually published three more novels beyond the Serafina series.

Despite Beatty’s success, perhaps his greatest feat of engineering lies in how he and his wife met. At 30, while working as a chief technical officer, he decided to take a creative writing workshop. One of his friends joked that Beatty would meet his future wife there. At the beginning of the second class, a young woman named Jennifer walked in. While he’d enrolled in the class to learn to build fictional worlds, he would actually end up learning to build a life with Jennifer as well.

“As soon as I saw her, I thought, ‘There she is,’” he says.

Not bad for the young engineer whose mother told him to go play with a typewriter.

Heroine in the Hallways

photograph by Matt Hulsman

Serafina doesn’t know which is stranger: the fact that Pa hides her from the wealthy Vanderbilt family, for whom he works as a custodian, or the sudden appearance of a black-cloaked figure who haunts the basement of the Biltmore Estate at night, somehow making children disappear. Serafina sets out to find the lost children and to prove to Pa that the man in the black cloak is not just a nightmare. This story is full of suspense, but for some readers, it could be a little scary. Join Serafina and take the reins of a horse-drawn carriage while she and Braden, the fictional nephew of George and Edith Vanderbilt, venture into the mysterious woods that Serafina’s been warned not to enter. Help Serafina win a battle of strength against a mountain lion in a cemetery. Walk with her as she stalks through the moonlit gardens. And while you’re at it, see if you can uncover the identity of the figure in the black cloak. You might discover more than you expected, especially when it comes to why Serafina is different from other children and why Pa won’t discuss her dead mother.

— Early Cash, age 10, Wiley Cash’s daughter

More to Explore: Catch Robert Beatty in conversation with Wiley Cash. New podcast episodes air December 3 and 17. Find out where to listen at ourstate.com/podcasts.