Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I have published one book, a novel called “Eye of the Moon”. Novels tend to involve people and their interactions. To write with insight, empathy, and to some degree, accuracy, requires experience. One must have loved, lost, won, struggled, and persevered through many ups and downs to be able to describe and understand what that feels like. Simply reading the latest self-help book on relationships will not aid a writer with characterization and dialogue because a self-help book is only a synthetic model of the world. Reality is different. It is not synthetic. It is quirky and utterly boring until it isn’t. It’s that “until it isn’t” part that makes all the difference. Until one has lived, one hasn’t a clue as to how weird things can get, and believe me, they can get mighty weird.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
“Eye of the Moon” was inspired by three facts and three ideas.
My grandmother was an Egyptologist who died reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead. “W Magazine” reported that she may have been murdered. Her house in Rhinebeck, NY, that passed to my father when she died, had been visited by the ghost of my grandmother according to several adult eyewitnesses. Those were the facts.
I was a kid. I didn’t see a ghost, yet I wanted to very much. My lack of positive results may have been due to the time I went to bed (early) compared to when apparitions would appear (late) or a peculiarity of the perceptions and general psychology of adults in general. The psychological angle piqued my interest. “How come” is always an important question that I try to answer in my writing.
The three ideas were:
The action had to take place within a finite time frame of five days. This was based on the Greek model, which restricted the action to twenty-four hours. Since I wasn’t in ancient Greece, I extended the time allowed.
The plot would evolve from the situations the characters found themselves in. No outline was permitted.
The characters in the novel would be free to act in any way they saw fit with only one proviso, whatever they had a mind to do had to take place within the time frame allotted. I said, “begin!” and things happened. The plot took off in wild directions and often left me as surprised as I hope the reader is. I mean if the author is surprised, how could the reader not be?
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I think the above is unusual for a start, but I must confess to several others. I write every day, until I can’t take it anymore and have to stop. I sometimes take a “flop day” that can stretch for two or three. I read, ride motorcycles, enjoy time with Mary Jo, explore and photograph Uruguay, and a host of other things when I’m not writing.
I do dislike planned writing hours. If someone told me I had to write from ten to four I would likely begin plotting their demise. I write when I want, which lucky for me is often.
I am also old-fashioned enough to invoke the muse every morning. This may seem completely anachronistic in this day and age, but it works for me. I know a muse has taken a hand when what I read is something that I could not have written had I planned it. Details form, thread, and weave into patterns that are opaque, before suddenly popping into view like pulling back from a single tile in a mosaic to the full image.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
The number is very large. Even bad books help. After reading one, you know what not to do, and that can be just as important as knowing what to do in the first place. I love the classics, but they can get a little trying. I do like taking a break by picking up a quick read like the Murder Bot series, and going off into the cosmos before landing back in Combray and reading more of Proust, or Thucydides, Xenophon, Chandler, James, Huxley, Wilder, Wodehouse, and the list goes on and on.
What are you working on now?
I am up to Chapter 64 in the sequel of “Eye of the Moon”.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I have a team composed of my wife Mary Jo, and daughter, Joanna, who like to promote and connect with others. Without them I doubt very much would happen. I suppose I could do what they do, but then I would not be writing, and I would be very grumbly.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Don’t write for others. Write to please yourself. Read a lot so you know what a good read is and know what you like in a book. Write that. When you write fiction, you have license to do whatever you want, go wherever you want, overhear whatever you want, create whatever you want. Why restrict yourself to what you think others would like or what they might buy? Who cares? That being said, it is a good idea to have at least one person other than yourself who adores your work. That helps a great deal.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
My advice to myself: if you want to be truly great, you can’t think like everyone else.
What are you reading now?
Proust… still. It’s really long. Thucydides for a political comparison to today. “Brave New World”, because I didn’t read it in high school. (I hate it when that happens.) “Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity” by Carlo Rovelli, and “A Student’s Guide to the Schrödinger Equation” round out my immediate list. Oh, and “Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel” by Martha Wells when I need a break.
What’s next for you as a writer?
The sequel, followed by a novel I am one-third finished, followed by a collection of short stories about Percy and Johnny growing up. (They get in lots of trouble.)
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, “The Feynman Lectures on Physics”, the complete works of Plato, Jane Austen and Raymond Chandler, as well as the 21 volumes of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series. As you can tell, going on vacation with me can be trying. Nowadays, I carry all my volumes in a waterproof Kindle, and nobody can tell I’m packing serious literary heat.
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