Ask the Author: Jay Sandover

“Ask me a question.” Jay Sandover

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I've been studying the older science fiction and it makes me sad when the authors pin a year on their fictional space accomplishments. From the 60's perspective we'd be living in space and on other worlds by the 90's. It makes me cautious about having 'dated' elements in a story and I write 'social media' instead of Facebook and Twitter. But it can be awkward. Slang is the same. How do you approach this?

Jay Sandover Great question. I do think about this a lot. In my novel, there are a handful of technologies that do not presently exist (at least in public view). My novel is set in the future, far enough ahead that climate change has continued its progress, and the Earth is dying, but I never set a specific date for the novel's present day. A reader could sort of work it out, because I did give some clues about how many generations had passed and how old the oldest character in the novel is (and what events they witnessed), but it's not stated. So, all that being said, I do continue to think about this stuff, but my main concern is creating characters people might connect to, and story lines that will hold your interest for a bunch of pages. As a reader, that's what I always want.

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If you could travel to any fictional book world, where would you go and what would you do there?

Jay Sandover This one is easy. Tormance, the planet from David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, a world evoked by the most vivid imagination.

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How do you deal with writer’s block?

Jay Sandover I'm a notoriously slow writer, so it may be that I've simply chopped up my writer's block into tiny chunks and spread them out. To break it, though, I look around for inspiration. I can't get enough stories. I consume them like an addict. Once in a while, a really beautiful book like The Left Hand of Darkness or Train Dreams comes along and gets me fired up.

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How important it is for a new writer to get hold of a big publishing firm? Can a book attract a wide readership otherwise?

Jay Sandover What a great question. This is a question I'd love to discuss with other writers at a dinner party, but I think a sincere answer has to be personal. I could only answer for myself. I do believe that a book can reach a wide readership by passing one reader and one reviewer at a time in these days of the internet. If the book is good and touches something in a reader's heart, they are going to talk about it. If you're not with a big publisher, how do you get that all started? That's a sort of magic question.

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Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Jay Sandover Several years ago, I read the history book Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America by Ian Bartky. I'd stumbled upon it in my local library. The story of trying to get the entire US population using a universal time (instead of using several, local times) made me think about projecting the story into a speculative future where times on Earth and other planets might not be universal. Thinking about this opened an entire fictional world in my mind.

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