Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
For quite a few years now I have been writing mostly on blogs, mainly for a film blog called ScottsMovies.com. I think it is one of the oldest movie blogs around, since I started it in the mid-1990s. I was born and grew up in central California, lived for many years in and around Seattle and currently have been living in the west of Ireland for the past decade or so. I published my first novel this summer, and I have four others in various stages of the writing process.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
It has a kind of long and strange title: Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead. The inspiration for it came from a few different sources. I wanted to convey some of my experiences and impressions from having lived for a year in Latin America in the 1970s. I also wanted to tell a story that highlighted a friendship between young men, drawing on my own experiences with my childhood best friend. And I wanted to tell a Huckleberry Finn story that would be updated to the place and time when I myself came of age.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I don’t know how unusual this is, but I do all my writing in HTML. In other words, I write my books the same way as if I were creating a web page, with all the codes and tags inserted as I go along. That means I use a plain text editor instead of a word processor. It’s just a habit I’ve always had as someone who generates web content, and it definitely simplifies things for producing an e-book.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
I really like Hemingway’s simple, declarative, straightforward writing style, and he is someone I definitely try to emulate in my writing. That didn’t really work for the first book, though, since it was in the first-person voice of a teenager. In Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, I was consciously trying to channel Mark Twain and the way he wrote Huckleberry Finn in dialect and with a young person’s voice. I was also influenced by Evelyn Waugh, although I doubt most people would pick up on that. But some of his themes involving young male friends and Catholicism can be found in my first book. Another writer I really like and try to use as an example is the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa.
What are you working on now?
I am about halfway through a fantasy novel. So far it is the only real “genre” book in my queue. It is based on a story I wrote in high school for a Spanish class and which then evolved into a bedtime story for my daughter when she was small. It has princes and a princess and swordplay and monsters and all that good stuff. I have also made a start on a follow-up to Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead. It takes place about nine years after the main events of the first book.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I’m still figuring that out. Because I have been blogging for years now, I have that audience I can promote the book to, but reaching a larger audience is obviously a challenge since there are already so many books–and so many good ones–out there. GoodReads is definitely an indispensable place to communicate with people who love books and are interesting in reading new ones and then spreading the word.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
I’m afraid I don’t have anything more insightful than the advice that has always been out there and which always gets repeated. If you want to be a writer, then you simply have to write. You need to write something everyday. If you want to make a living at it, then you will spend at least half your time doing things that aren’t writing, so be prepared for that. Find people to read what you write and who can be honest with you and then listen to them. That’s the only way to improve your writing.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
My dad used to tell me to find figure out what I loved doing and then do that for a living. The rest would take care of itself. He was right. If I had tried to figure out what profession would make me the most money and then had gone into that, I probably would not have been as happy. And I have done pretty well at working at jobs that didn’t even exist back when I was going to school. The bottom line is that people will work harder at something they like than at something they don’t like.
What are you reading now?
I’m reading At Swim, Two Boys, a 2001 novel by Jamie O’Neill which is set in Dublin around the time of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland. It is this quarter’s chosen book for the GoodReads Ireland group. Like my own book, it is a story of a friendship between young men during a turbulent time. The title is a nod to a seminal 1939 novel by Flann O’Brien called At Swim-Two-Birds.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Right now I’m in the process of getting the paperback version of Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead on the printing press. It should be available in the next few weeks or so. When I have some copies in hand, then there will be another round of trying to publicize it. In the meantime, I want to get back to my fantasy novel and finish that. After that is the sequel to the first book. And after that is a novel set in the burgeoning software scene in Seattle in the 1980s. And after that is a novel set in rural Ireland at the height of the Celtic Tiger economy.
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?
If there was a book called “How to Build a Raft Out of Little or Nothing,” I would want that one! Seriously, I might bring The Collected Works of H.P. Lovecraft and/or The Collected Works of Robert E. Howard since I would want some escapism. Old favorites I might want to bring for comfort would probably be Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and/or Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World. And I might bring that last one in the original Spanish. In that case I would also want to bring along a Spanish/English dictionary!
Author Websites and Profiles
Scott Larson Website
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