My Interview, Part 2

Following is more of my interview at a cool website for newbie and professional writers, The Writer's Block, at Raychelle-Writes.blogspot.com.  Specifically, you can find my interview here.  But it's an interesting site, so look around!

You can find Part One of this series a couple of blog entries ago, or here.


4)      Tell us about your latest published short story, “Hide the Weird”. Where can readers find it?

Readers can find “Hide the Weird” in Space and Time Magazine: The Magazine of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction, via http://www.spaceandtimemagazine.com or at a newsstand near you.  It’s a romance with a twist: a young man can see into the very near future (usually a couple of seconds to a couple of days); what he sees next is an ex-girlfriend, who he still loves, jumping from her apartment window, aflame, and plummeting to her death, a shooting star he loves crashing to the ground.  But when?  Can he stop it?  If he can’t, how can he warn her about it without her thinking he’s a freak?  And, throughout all this, is he really saving anyone, or just making someone else die?  All of that in just four magazine pages, with a nice illustration by Mark Levine.

5)      I understand that you have recently completed a novel. What can you share about it?

That I’m soon to seek literary representation for it.  Just finishing the pitch and packaging. 

And that it’s a story of redemption.  Foster was a cop who couldn’t save a three-year old girl from plummeting to her death.  Now he’s dead inside—despite a façade, he’s just a depressed and broke PI with a dying mother.  But after Henry Blanchard hires him to find his missing daughter, Foster soon learns he’ll have another chance to save someone from certain death.  And at the end, when he saves her, he saves himself.  

Some people fail at something so traumatic that it defines their lives.  How many get a chance at peace and self-redemption?  Foster does, but it’s not easy:  The vice-president of RI’s largest construction company is extorted and blackmailed by his ex-wife and her lover—a known crime figure named Charlie—who wants the company to work on the Mob’s pork-barrel projects and to launder its money.  The VP’s eighteen-year daughter, Melissa, witnesses this and runs away.  Foster finds her at her drug-dealing boyfriend’s in time to save her from Charlie’s hitmen.  But he’s forced to lose her.  Foster solves two other connected crimes while also fending off crooked cops, a dirty detective, a seductive and deceitful woman—and his depression, created by his mother’s illness and his regret and loneliness.  The climactic scene: a Wendy’s restaurant, where he finds Melissa—and the hitmen sent to kill her, plus some.  The novel resolves with Foster’s and Melissa’s recoveries, his mother’s death, the end of his mental and emotional anguish, and his self-redemption.  Sort of.

6)      Who are your favorite authors? What is on your reading list right now?

Too many favorites to mention, but here are some, in no particular ranking: Shakespeare, Stephen King, Robert B. Parker, Nietzsche, Anne Lamott, Alice Munro, Umberto Eco, Barbara Tuchman, Dan Simmons (though we need to have a talk about Flashback), Woody Allen (short stories and screenplays), Quentin Tarantino’s screenplays, lyrics of Paul Simon, Lennon/McCartney and Brandi Carlile.  And, well, how much space do you have?  Right now I’m reading Jonathan Kellerman’s latest (though they all seem to be bleeding into one by now), and The Best American Mysteries of 1998 (working my way up), and Joyce Carol Oates’ Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque.  And whatever I’m doing at my job, plus new stuff in the new textbooks that look interesting.  And…

(Me again.)  One more in this interview series to come.

James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway--and Dan Simmons

A friend of mine is leaving Sunday to go overseas for a few months, so he and I hung out for awhile tonight.  Where would two writers hang out on a Tuesday night with the salt and sand trucks haunting the roads and with both guys short on money?  Borders, of course!  Since his birthday is Saturday, I figured, Why not get him some books and then go out to dinner?  So what do you get an educated guy who's passionate about literature and writing?  James Joyce's Ulysses, the granddaddy of literate, educated, passionate writing.  C'mon, it took a landmark obscenity judgment in 1933 to allow its distribution in the U.S. at all, and the last 30 pages is one sentence--and much of that is the evocation of a young woman's stream-of-consciousness and lustful thoughts.  (One wonders if it would have been as big a deal had it been a man's lustful thoughts.)

Then I heard he'd never read Joyce before, so I got him Joyce's Dubliners, too.  I have to admit that the real treat of that volume is the short story, "The Dead."  As brilliant as Ulysses, in a much more compact and different way.  The last image of snow and ash-like substance is genius.  Lastly, because he'd never read Hemingway's short stories before, I bought him a complete collection of Hemingway's short stories, the Lingua Vica Edition, or something close to that.  A friend of mine, who works there, sang the praises of "The Killers," and mentioned its obvious effect upon Quentin Tarantino, which is a leap I will also take.  I preferred "Hills Like White Elephants," which my friend said was horribly overrated.  He was denounced by another friend of mine who works there.  This latter friend is the husband of my 6th grade teacher, because this state is like that.

After buying him these classics, I bought myself Dan Simmons' Drood, and another, earlier book by Simmons.  All of this cost me under $20 because I used my better half's 33% coupon, plus a 15% coupon I found in my wallet from a survey I did for Borders, plus another 15% coupon I found as I was leaving the house.  I took the survey for that one and used it just in the nick of time.  The remainder was paid for by a $30 gift e-card from a friend of mine--Thanks, F.!--and the final tally for me was under $20.  I hope to have the time to read these two books sometime in the next 9 months.