Questions from Mike

Kim: Cool question, but I actually already have one....invisibility. When I was a kid I wanted to be invisible. It was the Cold War era and I was always pretending I was a spy. Constantly hiding behind the couch to eavesdrop on the adults, that sort of thing. It turned out to be excellent training for growing up to be a writer and I still love to sit somewhere in public and pretend to be reading while actually I'm spying on people and/or recording their conversations. It gives me the chance to be, for at least a few minutes, invisible.
If I could choose a writing superpower I didn't already have, I'd become Sequencing Girl, able to know exactly where each scene belongs in a novel. Because now I spend so much time in cut and paste frenzies - moving stuff all over the place, trying to get every line, scene, and flashback into the right sequence.

Mike: Do you have any superstitious rituals? I met with this editor lady who says she always writes better in her lucky pajamas....

Kim: I'd love to have a pair of lucky pajamas. I don't have any particular rituals, although I do write better in the mornings so I structure my day to take advantage of that fact. And if I get stuck, I switch venues and write in public. Most of my first draft writing is done in coffeehouses and cafes or on planes. Planes, come to think of it, focus me especially well. Maybe because part of me feels like I'm getting ready to die.

Mike: Who do you model your writing after?

Kim: No one. When I was in school I did like Melville, Fitzgerald, and Joseph Conrad especially well, which may be where I got my penchant for first person POV. But I would say that my style is my own.
Last week I was talking to a writing buddy who said an editor once gave her a spectacular line edit, which is interesting because I can't stand to be line-edited. I think it breaks voice. I'd much rather an editor tell me to change the plot or a character...I'm like "Sure, I'll kill off Litttle Susie, just don't ask me to cut the word 'very' from that last sentence."

Mike: Is there a book out there that Love in Mid Air would remind people of?

Kim: I was very impressed with Tom Perrotta's Little Children and I think my book is thematically similar. My story is nowhere near as dark as his.

Mike: What do you enjoy doing when you're not writing?

Kim: As followers of my blog know, I dance. American Smooth - the foxtrot, tango, and waltz. I'm obsessed with it. It scratches the same creative itch that writing does, but it also has a performance aspect to it, which I love.

Mike: What would you be doing if you weren't writing these books?

Kim: Talking about writing these books. I always knew I had to be a writer. There was no Plan B.

Mike: Will Love in Mid Air be part of a series?

Kim: Yes. It's like Elvis Costello says in "Everyday I Write the Book"....I own the film rights and am working on the sequel.

Where does inspiration come from?

I've been working on my author interview for the first novel - quite a few of my friends responded with questions and I'm in the process of answering them. Here are the first two:


What inspired you to write about this subject?

When I got divorced twelve years ago, two weird things happened. First of all, women started spontaneously telling me their bad marriage stories, even women who I thought were perfectly happy. If you get divorced in a small town, you’ve screwed up in a very public way. All of a sudden you become the person it’s okay to confess to and women were practically flagging me down in the supermarket, leaning over my cart and saying “You know, things aren’t that great at home….” I became the repository of a hundred women’s secrets, and the notes I kept from that period became the basis of Love in Mid Air. The stories were altered, of course, a loose amalgamation of what was happening to me and my friends. For so long I had thought it was just me who was unhappy but now I was being shown the whole spectrum, the oceanic quality of female discontent. I walked around for a year saying ‘Wow, isn’t anybody happily married?”
The other thing I realized is that there were very few books that dealt with the subject of divorce in a realistic manner. Most of the books were about men leaving women, even thought it’s more statistically likely for a woman to initiate divorce, especially after the age of 40. And there was often some sort of quick fix - the deserted woman ended up falling in love with her attorney or some hunky handyman who showed up to help at her new house. I resented this whole idea that divorce is about swapping one man for another - ideally as fast as possible - with little exploration of the affect a woman’s divorce has on her friends and the whole social web. I knew that needed to make it into the story as well.


Is the material autobiographical? Are you Elyse?

I’m Elyse, but I’m also Kelly and Nancy and Lynn and Belinda and even Gerry and Phil and Jeff. For me, a novel is like a dream - all the characters are aspects of me, in dialogue with each other. But while the material isn’t literally autobiographical, it’s emotionally autobiographical. I’ve never been kissed by a stranger in the traveler’s chapel of the Dallas airport, but it’s the kind of thing I’ve wished would happen. It’s not hard to imagine how it might feel.

A little irony on a Tuesday morning

There has been a sudden flurry of activity about preparing publicity for the first book. The people at the publishing house have been talking to me about websites, email blasts, author photos, etc. (Even though the pub date has now been pushed back to March. Don't ask.)

The tasks at hand are to make a list of questions for reading groups (i.e., book clubs) and to do an "author interview" both of which will go on the website when the hardback debuts and which will be included in the paperback. I'm not having any trouble coming up with the questions for the book clubs but I'm having trouble thinking of how to interview myself. I'm glad they are letting me do it...and I appreciate that it's my background in journalism that's making them think I can easily do it, ergo the irony.

Turns out it's hard to interview yourself. Turns out that I'm a bit secretive.

Also turns out that the only questions I'm coming up with are questions I already know the answers to, i.e., it's tempting to torque this opportunity toward subjects that I want to talk about. To lob myself pitches I know I can hit out of the park.

I might be missing the chance to ask something fresher and more surprising.

So....do any of you have any ideas for author questions?