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.

Library of America--Shiftless Little Loafers

Photo: Susan Orlean from Wikipedia

I thought it might be interesting to write a little bit about the short pieces I get emailed to me from the good people at the Library of America.  For those who don't know, you can sign up to get short stories, articles, essays, etc. emailed to you from the Library, knowing that the pieces are of high quality, regardless as to what you actually think of them.  (Often I find something to be well-written, though I'm not interested in it, so I delete it.)  I'm working backwards from Story #95, because I've let them get backed up and out of control.  And that's a lot of blogger fodder.  (Blogger Fodder should catch on as a term of the Net.  Let it be known that I deserve credit for coining it.)  The story here is a Swiftian essay by New Yorker writer Susan Orlean.

The piece should be checked out.  It's amusing, though not laugh out loud funny like some of Woody Allen's more absurdist pieces can be.  It's Swiftian in tone, kind of, though Orlean does not think we should eat the babies, as Swift said.  Maybe we should put the infants to work, though they are ultimately found to be too lazy and too smart.  (One can be both.)  And when they put on sunglasses, they're lazy and snobby, like Italian directors.  (That's her joke, not mine.)  So that was funny, as was the part where she describes a baby's complete fascination with one of his own toes, and then a blade of grass.  I saw someone today playing absentmindedly with a few strands of her hair upon a table, and this was a teenaged someone.  Then again, I will often absentmindedly rub my upper lip against the tall facial hairs standing at attention from just beneath my lower lip, so who am I to judge?  And I can massage my facial hair with my hands and fingers in a very fakely thoughtful way, as if I were smart and ponderous, or something.  And I can do that for hours.

So, anyway, check it out.  Good writing.  And it's really short, too.