I posted about Joe Klingler‘s novel, Missing Mona last week (if you didn’t read it, take a moment now — or skip what I said and go get the book). Klingler was kind enough to participate in a Q&A with me. I asked some Missing Mona-specifc questions and then a couple of generic questions. I kept it short and sweet, because I’d rather he work on his next book than take too much time with me, y’know? It could’ve been a little shorter, but he insisted on providing thoughtful answers (I really appreciated the last one)
Where there challenges in writing someone going through a “technology reallocation phase” that you didn’t expect? I’ve often thought Sue Grafton’s books would be at least 1/3 shorter if Kinsey had a cell phone — there are so many things she has to do to make a call/get messages/get information/etc.
One of the challenges was how to keep Tommy connected to a grid that he wasn’t a part of, since all of the other characters had smartphones, and used them constantly. He was already an outsider from another town, but his lack of a phone also made him an outsider in the virtual world as well. He had to constantly figure out how he was going to solve problems without technical assistance—which wasn’t always even possible. However, his interaction with paper messages, meeting times, and just showing up places unannounced provided experiences that would have never happened if he had just sent a text.
The other challenge he immediately faced was how to fill all the alone time created by not being constantly connected to the stream of text and images most people interact with all day long. This gave him time ponder and appreciate his new experiences, plan his next step, and even practice his guitar.
Seeing the references to Martin Caidin on your website warmed my heart — I was afraid I was the only one who remembered him. Describe some the influences on Missing Mona beyond the initial inspiration from Crais (whether or not you think they’re on display in Missing Mona).
Caidin’s The God Machine started me thinking long ago about the perils of power concentrated in one place (or person, or corporation), which we see in the character of LaRuche. Hammett and Chandler helped me understand how to describe experience as it happens, without much attention to the past or future. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee is a masterwork on how to construct a long series, and build story around a single character with enough depth to carry many novels. Lee Child has his character Jack Reacher arrive in a new town on a new adventure in each book, much the way cowboys did in old westerns. His approach inspired me to have Tommy start out on a road trip with only a vague destination.
I also drew on some of my own experience riding an R75/6 BMW motorcycle along the east coast and down the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Smoky Mountains, seeking only to experience different people and places (yes, I rode to Chicago on a number of occasions.)
If you’ve decided, when we next meet Tommy is he going to be on Route 66 (or en route to it), or will he have returned to Chicago? Are we going to see Marvin, Lizzie, Penny and the rest again?
Tommy will likely begin his next mystery in Chicago, right where he left off. He has made new friends, and found a place to play guitar. Will he stay? How does a traveler ever know when it is time to stop, or if it’s best to keep moving? He finally has himself in motion after years at Walmart, and will struggle with the idea of stopping. That said, his new friends might show up at any time in the future, wherever he may be.
(Phew! That’s what I wanted to hear)
Is there a genre that you particularly enjoy reading, but could never write? Or are you primarily a mystery/suspense/thriller reader?
I read widely, though I prefer writing mysteries and thrillers because they integrate the way people, events, social customs, personal decisions, and technology are all interconnected. I’m a big fan of science fiction, and would like to try it at some point. A horror novel would be very difficult for me to write; I’m not sure I could sleep at night while writing one, though I like reading them on occasion.
I’ve often heard that writers, or artists in general, will forget hundreds of positive reviews but always remember the negative — what’s the worst thing that someone’s said about one of your books, and has it altered your approach to future books?
I definitely remember the positive ones, so please keep them coming. In an interview Stephen King said that if one person says something about your book, you can usually safely ignore it, but if ten people have the same criticism, then perhaps you should look at your work and see how you might improve in that area. So, when I read reviews, I look for the same topic to come up (often in different guises). I like to tell a story from many different perspectives (which some people don’t care for), and I have to be careful with how, and how often, I change point of view. One of the reasons Missing Mona was told in the first person is because I wanted to experiment with using a single point of view.
The worst thing is hard to measure, but being misunderstood is way up there on my list. One person hated the name Qigiq because she couldn’t figure out how to pronounce it, another considered RATS not good enough for an airplane ride, and one thought there were too many floozies in Mash Up. Every reader comes to a book with their own background and set of expectations. About the only thing a writer can do is describe the book clearly in their marketing materials, get as many reviews as possible, and trust that the book will find its readers while he or she sets off to write the next book as well as they possibly can.
Another challenge is that some readers try to infer things about an author from their fiction. Stephen King also wrote to never try to figure out his beliefs from his books. Characters in fiction have their own biases and beliefs and are created to fill the needs of the story. What they think has nothing to do with what the author thinks.
I’ll be posting about Larry Higdon’s first novel, The Storms of Deliverance, tomorrow (Spoiler: It’ll be positive), but before that, I wanted to post this Q&A that he was kind enough to participate in with me. Kept it short and sweet, because I’d rather he work on his next book than take too much time with me, y’know?
Why don’t you start by giving me the elevator pitch for this book.
(Warning: His answer reveals a little more than I’d want to know about the book before reading it)
A former baseball player, who has wasted his life through alcoholism and violence, seeks to win back his ex-wife and daughter. On this quest he suffers a traumatic experience, a bout of amnesia, and encounters with supernatural phenomena. He emerges from these experiences a better man with at least a chance of realizing his dream of reuniting his family.
What prompted this particular story? What was the genesis of the book?
Most of my life I had three or four scenes in my head that didn’t seem to connect with each other. Then all of a sudden they did, and I decided to try to put them together in a novel.
Just a great answer
In the writing of Storms, what was the biggest surprise about the writing itself? Either, “I can’t believe X is so easy!” or “If I had known Y was going to be so hard, I’d have skipped this and watched more TV”.
This novel wrote itself. I felt as though I were taking dictation. Of course, when the editors got involved, the work became more like work.
Describe some your influences (whether or not you think they’re on display in Storms).
I had given up writing–sick and tired of rejection slips. One Christmas my niece, who is also a writer, gave me a copy of Stephen King’s On Writing. That plus King’s novels have influenced me. Some wags might say that I kill off children because King often does so, but that’s not true. That was one of those scenes in my head.
So, it’s been a few years since the publication of Storms — is there more on the way?
The sequel should be published this year. It’s called The School from Hell. Johnson’s ex Katy narrates it. She’s assigned as a counselor to a high poverty elementary school. Johnson, Zoe, McBroom, and Ellen all make appearances.
This is about as far from the answer I’d have guessed at/hoped for as you could imagine. And I’m really looking forward to this sequel.
I want this blog to be about more than just my reviews, like many readers, I’m interested in the process of writing and the people who do it. So I thought I’d try to look at what various authors are up to. One of the best side-effects of one of your favorite authors coming out with a new book in this social media-heavy age, is them being interviewed and/or writing guest posts for various and sundry blogs.
To promote his new book, Stonecast (which I’ll be reviewing here tomorrow), Anton Strout‘s been just about everywhere over the last couple of weeks, talking about Stonecast as well as sharing his thoughts about Urban Fantasy and writing in general. Thought I’d share a sample, there’s a lot to chew on and enjoy here:
Para-urban Rom-antasy — Strout talks about the differences and similarities in Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasty, and why he writes the kind he does
Blank is the New Vampire — Strout talks about attempting to write “The Next Big Thing” in a genre
Kasey Kasem Is My Spirit Animal — behind that odd title (and odder thought, Kasem? Really??) is some good advice for aspiring writers
Life as a Serial Murderer — Strout talks about his struggles with learning how to write not just a book, but a series
Hopefully that gives you a decent flavor of both the author and the book/series. Check out both The Spellmason Chronicles as well as his Simon Canderous books.
25 Things To Know About Your Story’s Stakes — Speaking of writing, these tips on craft are helpful to use while evaluating books. Why do some plots/books work better than others? So often it comes down to stakes.
Robert Crais at Mysterious Galaxy — announces next book will have Elvis, Joe, Maggie and Scott. I assumed this would happen, I just figured we’d have to wait a few years. But Santa came early! Is it too much to hope that Carol’s in it, too?
This Week’s New Releases I’m Excited About and/or You’ll Probably See Here Soon:
The thing I mentioned with Arnold the other day is pretty much over, and the family (he in particular) are working on recovering from that, and I am drained mentally and physically, I’m clinging to consciousness here at work the last few days. For example, right now, if I leaned back in my desk chair, I could be asleep in 30 seconds. Which is making the whole writing thing pretty hard — I’m trying to be good, I just know if I let off on the daily writing thing, it’ll take months, if not a year, to reestablish that. So I got about 100 words yesterday, 300 or so today. No where near my minimum requirements, but…
Anyway, by gum, I’m trying to get something new posted by the end of this week.
Trying.
Here’s something that both entertained and inspired me, sorta the point of this post. Geek & Sundry, one of the new Youtube channel things (and the one I watch the most of, all due respect and fealty to The Nerdist notwithstanding) started a new thing yesterday, a monthly google+ hangout conversation hosted by Patrick Rothfuss about writing called The Story Board. Now, that’s enough for me, I’m watching. But this first episode featured Jim Butcher as one of the guests talking about Urban Fantasy. Squee! Good stuff. You must check it out.
Subject A:Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Carravagio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-three-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.
Subject B:In the history of the world there have been lots of onces and lots of times, and every time has had a once upon it. most people will tell you that the once upon a time happened in a land far, far away, but it really depends on where you are. The once upon a time may have been just outside your back door. It may have been beneath your very feet. It might not have been in a land at all but deep in the sea’s belly or bobbing around on its back.
One of these is the first paragraph of a “Juvenile” novel that will never make the author famous. One of these is from a record-selling novel that received mega-press. One is imaginative, clever; the other seems paint-by-numbers. One is something I wish I could write; the other I could whip off in a few minutes.
Was playing around on Chabon’s website and read his essay, “Our Nabokov” I would give just about anything (short of my kids) to be able to write a sentence like this (much less like the writer he’s describing):
It’s a conundrum that for me approaches the absurd opacity of a Zen koan to try to imagine how English written by a Russian sounds to Russians reading in English, but to our ears, Nabokov’s English combines aching lyricism with dispassionate precision in a way that seems to render every human emotion in all its intensity but never with an ounce of shmaltz or soggy language.
This, btw, is probably the best description of what draws me to Nabokov,
“He has an amazing feeling for the syntactic tensility of an English sentence, the way an ironic aside or parenthesis can be tucked into a fold with devastating effect or a metaphor can be worked until it is as thin as gold leaf.”
I can distinctly remember telling my friends (engineering, educatation and architecture students) around the dorm’s dining room table about Lolita, and the joy and wonder I was experiencing. They all (without exception) reacted with horror and revulsion to the premise of the novel and couldn’t understand what was wrong with me. Maybe if I could’ve expressed myself like Chabon just did, they’d have not written me off as insane. At least not that day.
Doing a little reading this morning while the boys do schoolwork and the Princess is hopping around on gymnastic equipment…read this paragraph from Jim Butcher’s Summer Knight. Just struck me as the kind of thing a writer should be able to do, should be great at. This is a paragraph that Dan Brown could never write. Me either. Which bugs me more than I can say.
I leaned against my door with my eyes closed, trying to think. I was scared. Not in that half-pleasant adrenaline-charged way, but quietly scared. Wait-on-the-results-of-medical-tests scared. It’s a rational sort of fear that puts a lawn chair down in the front of your thoughts and brings a cooler of drinks along with it.
Little bit of humor to create/maintain the tone, gives insight into the character, and you know exactly how the narrator feels–even if you haven’t felt that way yourself–and if you have felt that it resonates with you in such a way that you are in the moment.
