Ficlets

1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and about Grey.

Grey is set a couple of hundred years in the future, but a very recognizable future filled with giant corporations, lots of bad fashion choices, and celebrities everywhere. People have called the story a cross between Romeo and Juliet and the movie Blade Runner with a dash of Jane Austin thrown in. The cool cover is by Jeremy Geddes.

As for myself, I’m forty-four. I’m married to the greatest woman of all time, and have the greatest daughter of all time. I’ve been in New York for twenty years and have had lots of jobs over the years including: bi-lingual travel agent (English and Japanese), temp, airline employee, graphic artist, all around web dude (not an official title), and sales trainer among others. I have dabbled in music, fashion design, and stand up comedy.

2. Grey is an interesting mash-up of what can be considered classic elements (particularly the starcrossed-lovers element) with new elements of your own invention. Is there a formula for mixing tried-and-true story elements with stuff you’re putting out there for a first time, and if so, how do you know when you’ve reached that balance?

I like to draw an analogy between writing and cooking. Some cooking can employ traditional ingredients and methods, but attain fresh flavor from new combinations, techniques, and treatments. But there is no recipe for innovation; one proceeds from inspiration gradually, tasting and testing the results along the way. How much endorphin-rattling capsicum (the chemical that makes hot peppers hot) can the reader take before a little sweetness is in order?

My wife has been a tremendous gauge for me. She read Grey out loud to me several times and when her tone would get bored or she would stumble over word choices, I knew I’d gone too far.

3. You spent some time in Japan when you were younger – how did that experience figure into your writing this book?

I went to Japan back in college (in early 80’s), with a small and absurd hope of finding something from a Kurosawa movie—Toshiro Mifune wandering around cackling that goofy laugh of his while wielding a samurai sword – only, of course, to find the land of a thousand Walkman, sushi on conveyor belts, and a kitty without a mouth who can still say hello.

One experience in particular made a great impact. While I arrived in Japan during the summer, a time of intense humid heat, large bugs, and tiny water glasses, when winter came around, I discovered I hadn’t packed well and was freezing, so I headed to the Sannomiya Mall in central Kobe and searched for something warmer. After spending several hours not finding anything I liked or that fit, I happened to turn a corner and found a small men’s store packed with nothing but black, white, and charcoal clothes.

I loved the minimalism and was delighted to find that one of the long, dark, and warm coats fit perfectly. I returned to the store many times, purchased more clothes, and befriended the store owner, Mr. Sugimoto. That store was the source for the “grey” in my book—the subtle, muted space of the protagonist juxtaposed against a bright, brash, and narcissistic world in which he lives. And the owner of that clothing store became the inspiration for the tailor in the novel, Mr. Cedar.

4. Share a piece of writing advice you’ve been given.

A few years ago, I was in a great novel writing group led by Marina Budhos (whose Young Adult novel Ask Me No Questions has just been selected as an ALA Best Books for Young Adults 2007) and she used tell me that I had interesting characters, dialogue, and scenes in my work, but needed to arrange them in such a way that they built upon one another and formed a larger arc—a story.

That may seem terribly obvious, but it wasn’t to me and it took a lot of work before I started to write with the idea of pulling a reader along and structuring my scenes so that they built one on top of the other. In fact, along the way and in a geeky graphic arts way, I started drawing charts and graphs to try and visualize larger sequences and make sure that “something happened” and that the story propulsion wasn’t lost.

5. There’s the old crack that “Satire is what closes on Saturday night” – meaning that when one writes to satirize, one risks losing one’s audience. Grey is satirical on a number of levels, particularly relating to advertising and fashion. How do you work to get in the hits without leaving the readers behind?

Mixing satirical elements into a story is a similar problem to that of the jazz improviser – having sufficient reference to the basic thematic material to keep the audience from getting lost while providing enough of the unexpected to keep them from becoming bored. One must make a choice, of course, as to the target level of sophistication, but also take care not to under-estimate the audience.

6. Your book is being published by Night Shade Books, which is a well-regarded small press. As a new author, tell us what some of the advantages are to being published by a press of this size. Are there also disadvantages?

For me working with Night Shade has been all positive. The personal contact, enthusiasm, and attention that they have given me as a new author simply would not have been forthcoming from a larger press.

When I first met Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen, the two heads of the press, in Austin at the World Fantasy Convention last summer, Jeremy, dressed in a striped zoot suit, black fedora with feather looked up at me, smiled, and said, “I love you, man!”

There can be no better welcome to the world of publishing.

Plus, in reference to my answer to question 2, above, the hot stuff of hot peppers, Capsicum, is a genus of plants, which is, yes, part of the Nightshade family!

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Check out Grey with this excerpt from the novel’s first chapter.