Even More About Me
If that wasn't enough information. Here's more. The Adult Paperback McNaughton Catalog (a publication that goes out to librarians) had me fill out a questionnaire for a profile they wanted to do. As usual, I got a bit too creative with my answers...1. Please describe where you grew up and what your family was like.
I grew up in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. My parents are Catholic, and I’m the oldest of seven children. We were well-cared for and fortunate--if anything particularly notable happened, it always had a happy ending.
2. When did you first become interested in being a writer?
In sixth grade, I was given a class assignment to write a story about how the solar system was created. My father, at the time, was suffering from leukemia, and the oldest three children were staying with another family while my mother cared for my father. The family that housed us had a son named Joel who was in the same class as me, and the two of us were very competitive. We both decided to write the longest story possible about the solar system--I have no idea what my story was about--but I do remember handwriting twenty pages of notebook paper, just to beat Joel.
I have since lost touch with Joel, but every day I wake up, look to the heavens, and think of Joel, and how he’s probably out there somewhere, writing something brilliant in that careful, thin script of his, just waiting for me to slow the pace. Damn him. Damn Joel.
3. What other professions, if any, have you had?
I have, in order, worked as a magazine delivery boy, a campus pizza runner, a bus driver for the elderly, a homeless shelter worker, a waiter, a bagel assembler, a data entry clerk, an online ad coordinator, and a technical writer for various doomed-to-failure dot-coms. I was not particularly good at any of these professions.
4. What is your educational background like?
I received a B.S. from Santa Clara University in Psychology, and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco.
5. Are there any writers, teachers, or other individuals that have had a major influence on your writing or helped you further in your career?
While there have been a few individuals who have, at times, given me well-timed advice and prodding, my career has largely been a result of floundering around desperately and aimlessly, sending blind queries, most of which get lost in large corporate mail stacks, and occasionally finding another human being--a total stranger--who finds some connection with my writing or my ideas, and who sees fit to print whatever it was that I sent them.
6. Can you briefly describe the process you go through when writing a novel? Where do you get your inspiration?
Coffee is my inspiration, my muse, and my only true love. (Don’t tell my wife.) Without beloved coffee, my fingers would never find their way across a keyboard. Every morning I walk the streets until I find my love--coffee!--and as I sit alone and barely noticed in some coffee shop--in San Francisco, or Portland, or Prescott, Arizona--my love provides me with my signature nervous and jangly diction, and off I am, another thousand words on a computer screen, praying that the words just written somehow connect with the work of the preceding day.
7. How would you describe your novel World Leader Pretend?
World Leader Pretend is a book with an international cast of characters, linked through an online fantasy game. The characters in the novel are all trapped in some way--Tres Rawlings is wheelchair-bound; Dietrich Bjornson is geographically marooned at the South Pole for the winter; Gek-Lin Troung is an orphan who depends on a corrupt "uncle" for sustenance; Xerxes Meticula has abandoned the company he founded and his hiding out in his parents basement--the novel is about how these trapped individuals escape in a virtual world, and also how they eventually find each other, and what happens when they do.
8. Why might people want to read it?
People who want to read about the modern human condition in an entertaining format will love this book.
9. You’ve created some very interesting characters. What is the character development process like for you?
I steal most of my characters from other writers. For example, my mentor in my Creative Writing Program let me read a novel he was working on in which a wedding took place in Antarctica. Some time later, I created Dietrich, a character who was married in Antarctica. I thought I was being creative--that Dietrich and sprung from the gray matter in my brain in some sublime way, but really my own faulty memory had turned me into a thief.
No, but seriously, in World Leader Pretend, I wanted to create characters whose feelings of isolation drove them to delve into an online fantasy world. I gravitated towards the extremes with this: a paralyzed boy physically isolated; a South Pole worker geographically isolated; a Thai orphan emotionally isolated.
10. Are there any elements of your characters based on anyone that you know?
That’s my secret.
11. What writers/books do you enjoy or have influenced your work?
I write characters like Tom Robbins, technology like Douglas Coupland, tangents like David Foster Wallace. Oh, and run-on sentences like Jack Kerouac.
12. What research did your novel require?
I didn’t do a great deal of traditional research with this novel. What I did do, however, was immerse myself in the kind of life that my characters were living. I quit my job, moved in with my parents, and spent a great deal of time obsessed with an online game--just like my main character Xerxes Meticula.
13. Are there any other books or projects that you are currently working on?
I’m currently working on a second novel set in my adopted home town of Portland, Oregon. Portland is a vastly unsung city, with a populace that somehow manages to feed itself despite a dearth of large corporations. It would do the rest of the U.S. a great deal of good if it could share a bit in its entrepreneurial spirit and general weirdness.
14. Do you have a family? Any kids? Where do you currently reside?
I live with my wife and daughter in Portland, Oregon.
15. What are your hobbies and interests?
This changes from year to year. When I wrote World Leader Pretend, I was an avid mountain biker and online gamer. Last year, it was triathlons and hurricanes. This year I spend almost all my extra time surfing the Daily Kos blog.
16. What advice do you have for aspiring writers today?
Give up. There are far too many aspiring writers today and far too few aspiring doctors, engineers, and scientists. If you’re not completely obsessed with writing, do the world a favor and get a career that actually helps people.
17. Is there anything you would like your readers to know that haven’t already been covered? Do you have a web site fans can visit?
Yes. Despite the cover with the weird cracked Mars-like planet on it, and the people all dressed in black with alien shadows, this is not a fantasy novel written for gamers. In fact, gamers will find all kinds of beef with this novel--they will pick away at the impossibilities of the game and its characters until there is nothing left of the novel but a scab.
The true audience for this book is the girlfriends of gamers. If you ever wanted to get into the head of a person with an online gaming addiction, here is your chance.