Q: You're reading Lee Child's web site, obviously.
A: I have a theory that when a reader finds a writer it likes--I call the
he or she reader it--it reads everything by and about the writer it can find. Wherever
it can find it. In books, magazines, and on the Internet.
Yes, I read Lee
Child's home page, I read his FAQ page,
he has a page of links to interviews. I linked to them, downloaded them, printed
them out, and read them.
I saw similarities between his series and mine.
And between his series character and himself.
He was downsized. From television
broadcasting.
He had been a shop steward. This made his likelihood of getting
a job elsewhere in the industry he'd trained for and spent a career in unlikely.
He was blacklisted.
He decided to write a novel, a mystery novel, and to
make it a series. Like the old Travis McGee series.
He knew nine months
before they got rid of him he was going to be sacked, so he used that time to start
writing a book. I used the last year of my NDEA fellowship to learn to write. When
I saw I wasn't going to get a PhD in anthropology.
He writes a book a year.
A book in six months. Then uses the rest of the year to promote it, start thinking
about the next book. He publishes a book a year.
He said he could
write two books a year, if he had to.
I write a book a month. I could write
two books a month if I had to. Or got the chance to. The one time I had the chance
I did write--and publish--two books a month.
I don't have to
spend time editing a book, promoting a book, or thinking about what I'll write next.
I'll write the next book in the ongoing series next.
I finished writing
OLD FOLKS AT HOME and started writing PHILLY ZINE FEST 2005 the same day.
I know what I am going to write in August 2005.
I have the writing year,
from September 1, 2005 to August 31, 2006, my 35th year as a writer, outlined. I'm
going to write a book a month that year. Here's a list of
the books.
Q: He was blacklisted from his job in television. You are blacklisted from having a career as a writer. You wrote 250 books without selling one.
A: That has been the shaping dynamic of my hero's character. Not being able to sell his books and live on the proceeds, to write full-time. He has had to work as a technical writer and write nights and weekends and before work. Looking over his shoulder, like a spy, or a saboteur.
Q: And on the job, causing him to get "fired for blogging."
A: And on the job. A writer with a job writes on the job.
Q: You are writing a series of related books, with a recurring cast, like a police procedural.
A: Yes. My books are underground writer procedural novels, since my hero
is an underground writer.
And not entirely by choice--he is trying to cross
over to the mainstream from the underground.
Well, partly by choice. He
knows what New York wants. He refuses to write it.
He knows what they will
not publish. He is trying to stretch the boundary.
This is not theoretical.
This is actual.
I wrote 250 books, and couldn't sell one.
First,
I did it. It not only can happen, it did.
Second, anybody in the industry
can tell you that's what will happen if you do what I did. You can take that to
the bank.
The reason nobody else has done it is that most people aren't that
self-destructive, they get the message and quit, or they adapt. Sell out. Tailor
their goods to the market.
Q: You have an ensemble cast.
A: Yes. My hero, his wife, based on Brenda, two sons, bluegrass musicians, based on Owen and Balder. Friends, co-workers, bossmen, if I'm working. Potter and Suzette. Old bandmates of Potter, like Duke and Franko, old running buddies of Suzette, like Pretty Michelle and Crazy Eileen.
Q: They've been set wherever you lived.
A: Yes. New Orleans, New Iberia, Louisiana, Penland, Winston-Salem, North
Carolina, Fort Walton Beach, Tallahassee, Delray Beach, Panama City, and Wewahitchka,
Florida, and Culloden, Yatesville, Young Harris, and Atlanta, Georgia.
The
south.
Mainly Florida.
Neither the University Press of Florida nor
Pineapple Press will publish me, The Book Lover's Guide to Florida and the
Florida Artists Directory, from which schools K-12 and community colleges
choose writers to be a writer- or a poet-in-the-schools, leave me out.
I'm
not on the Florida Artists Wall of Fame in the New Capitol.
Q: Is that part of the setting?
A: It's the cultural milieu I work in. The artist without honor in his native land. Whose work is deemed unsuitable or inappropriate be a committee of educationists and grants administrators.
Q: What's the theme?
A: Vocation and career in conflict.
How do you be true to your
responsibility to your loved ones and your responsibility to your own finer qualities,
your talent, over the course of a writing life? How do you resolve those competing
demands? Conflicting demands?
Q: What's the plot?
A: The hero writes, he sends it out, he writes about what happens to it,
and how what happens makes him feel.
This book I'm going to be a headliner
at a ULA function held the same weekend as Philly Zine Fest.
I will travel,
meet new people, have adventures, come home and write about it.
But query
letters for my last book will come back rejected, my proposed 12-book series will
be turned down, I'll watch the money in my LDA grant fund (last ditch attempt)
run out, like sand out of an hour glass. I will panic.
I will see less deserving
writers prosper in my stead.
I will write about what that feels like, and
be called a whiner and an Alibi Ike.
If a man speaks in the forest and his
wife is not there to correct him, does that mean he is still wrong?
Q: You stole that from a Lee Child interview.
A: Busted.
Q: So basically, you're just like Jack Reacher.
A: I could stand to lose a little weight.