The Next Big Thing

My author friend (in a virtual sense) Bill Torgerson recently invited me to share answers to some questions about the “next big thing” I’m working on from a writing standpoint. (As opposed to the next big thing I’m working on from a personal standpoint, namely getting my kid through and far, far away from cancer.)

Bill recently published a  stirring, entertaining and otherwise awesome novel in stories called Horseshoe, which I had the pleasure of reading and blurbing (that’s shop talk for providing one of those quotes for the back cover) last year. You can read Bill’s answers about his next, intriguingly named, book at his website.

As for my answers…well, they’re going to be brief and probably kinda lame. Because at this point, my next big writing project — a novel — is little more than the seed of a seed of very small, puny seed of an idea.

I’ve written a few pages and lots of notes for the book, but don’t expect I’ll really dive in until after the paperback edition of Double Time comes out in the spring. And who knows how long it will be until I actually finish it, or if I will at all. But hey. Just for shits-n-giggles, here are my answers.

1. What is the working title of your book?

Drama

2. What genre does your book fall under?

Fiction. Probably somewhere in the murky, unmarketable zone between literary and mainstream, much like Eden Lake. But maybe because the protagonist is a woman and I’m a woman I can convince a publisher that it’s “Women’s Fiction” — so they’ll actually want to publish it.

3. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A fifty-something high school English and drama teacher who directed musicals at a Connecticut theater as a young woman, back in the 1980s, recounts the events leading up to a fire that destroyed the theater.

4.  Where did the idea come from for the book?

I acted in a few professional theater productions as a kid in the 1980s, and it’s a world I’ve always wanted to revisit in writing.

I’m also interested in learning and writing about how the emerging AIDs epidemic would have touched the lives of theater folks during that period. Many of the people who performed alongside me were from the New York theater world, many were gay, and surely AIDS was starting to affect their lives. But I was nine, ten, eleven years old. It all went right over my head.

5. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I suspect that by the time I’m done with the damned thing Tina Fey might be old enough to play the protagonist. Which would be awesome.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

This is an odd question, since not all books represented by agencies end up being picked up by publishers. So they could still end up being self-published. But I nitpick. I do have an agent, and I hope he’ll agree to represent whatever I write next, and I hope that he can sell it to a publisher. But if not, then sure. I’d be open to self-publishing. I just want people to read my stuff. I don’t really care how.

7. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Everything that happens in the book may or may not turn out to have been just a dream!!!

On that tantalizing note, I highly recommend that you visit the websites of Randy Susan Meyers (author of The Murderer’s Daughters and the soon-to-be-published The Comfort of Lies) and M.J. Rose (author of, most recently, The Book of Lost Fragrances) who will (in theory!) be answering these questions soon.

Meanwhile, here’s the cover for my more immediate next big-ish thing —  the paperback edition of Double Time, which will be out in April. Isn’t it purty??