Ask the Author: Rodney Ross
Answered Questions (7)
Rodney Ross
Without too specifically violating the privacy of others, several years ago there was a horrendous double suicide. Someone knows why -- or at least has a inkling -- I am sure, but friends were left devastated, mystified and troubled. To look at framed photographs now of happier times, to know what lay ahead for those two, is a very grim reminder of how shit can go very wrong.
Rodney Ross
My best ideas, whether its fragments of dialogue, vivid description or an entire scene, come in the twilight gap between closing my eyes and cascading into sleep. I often wake myself to write key words down (and, in the morning light, I often find that I can't decipher my sideways scrawls). ALWAYS keep paper and pen handy, although some of my finest stuff was scribbled onto the back of an ATM receipt or a paper bag.
Rodney Ross
I am completing a novella entitled 'Smoking With Didi'. Its synopsis: At his older sister Didi's request, Pete Garhart makes a reluctant trip from Miami to small-town Ohio for his father's February funeral. Beyond the sun, he leaves little else behind. Alcohol has drained any momentum from his culinary career as a chef, and he's been reduced to line cook at Applebee's; his string of failed relationships have begun to resemble a line-up of wooden soldiers, all with great guns and the same fade haircut; and, now in his late 40's, he's painfully aware of enroaching invisibility in his own community. Back in his hometown, he's battered by flashbacks of an anxious adolescence and his father Beale's rejection of a queer son, yet also finds the house he grew up in renovated and the town itself shorn of other memories. But bigger revelations are yet to come, including an unexpected hot tub reunion with a straight high school crush and a road trip back to Florida with Vantage Blue-loving Didi. She has a few things she wants to get off her chest about their own sibling alienation, but the surprise may be hers when Pete opens a floodgate of his own revelations.
Rodney Ross
Read other writers.
Rodney Ross
The possibilities. You may have an outline, but it's yours, so you can depart or retrace your steps or revive a character you thought might die whenever you want. It belongs to you.
Rodney Ross
I can honestly recall an image of a young boy, maybe 10 or 11, sitting on a dock on a river or lake in darkness...in my own adolescence. I don't know from where this stillshot came: a film, maybe, an ad, or my own fertile imagination. But I would re-visit this kid occasionally. Sometimes he'd be fishing. Or he'd have a large dog as a companion. But the mysterious noises on water at night -- thumps and bangs and big splashes and occasional yelling -- formed a soundtrack. Was his time out there joyful, of tragic? Where was his home? So began, literally, 40+ years later, 'Diversionary Fires'.
Rodney Ross
I ignore it. I sit down, and I write. Sometimes it's just typing and, upon editing, I eliminate 95% of what I have written. But putting words on paper is part of the discipline. It would be a beautiful thing if I could await my precious muse but I ain't 24 and I don't want to run out of time to tell my stories.
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