Wednesday, February 20, 2013

The Next Big Thing

It's a self-interview form of blog tag where writers answer questions about work in progress and then tag others to do the same. The lovely writer/performer Amanda Davidson tagged me. Some other great links are:  Stephen Boyer, Claire Donato, Susana Gardner, Deborah Poe

What is the working title of the book?
The Lost Boys

Where did the idea come from for the book?
A few years ago, I started making short videos from found images, mostly stop motion animation with photographs from magazines. I was interested in how bodies moved through a frame and also the possibility of misunderstanding or altered meaning when images came sharply into focus or contorted to a blur. I thought a lot about how bodies moved through space and wondered about the relationship between internal and external landscapes. Here is one of the first videos:



What genre does your book fall under?
fiction, epistolary, queer map-making, instruction manual for a former self

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
The cast of Stand by Me but ten to fifteen years older and with multiple, shifting genders, bodies becoming. River Phoenix is a high femme drifter. T, the missing character, would be Keifer Sutherland but less of a bully. There’s a scene where they’re squatting under an oak tree in rural North Carolina talking about finding a corpse and it reminds me of that movie. I imagine the narrator would smoke cigarettes in that awkward teenage way where their hands always come to rest in a gesture to emphasize the fact that they are holding a cigarette.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
This story is full of bodies.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I've been working on it for six months.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I started writing letters to my future self, several versions of my future self, also letters to passages from books, paintings, objects that demanded my attention, people I loved and missed or thought I could love and miss if I could get close enough to them. I needed guidance. I had lots of questions and I ended up with a bunch of letters that started:
Dear Ren,
Dear T,
Dear Painting of a Floating Christmas Tree,
Dear Blue Electric Pilot Light,
Dear Box of Rocks on the Closet Shelf,
Dear Tennessee and California,

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
When you're alone on the dance floor and the song you really love dancing to ends and there's an elongated pause before the next song begins and you don't know whether to sit down or rock back and forth on your heels or stand still in the center of the dance floor - What do you do with your body, in your body? This is an important question.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Good question. It’s not finished yet.



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