The Next Big Thing Blog, brought to you by Gillian Devereux and Jen Michalski
Last October, Jen Michalski (fiction writer and editor extraordinaire) was kind enough to e-mail me to say that she was tagging me in the Next Big Thing Blog Hop and encouraged me to participate.
I thought, That’s so nice! I should say thank you!
I thought that, but I did nothing.
Then, a few weeks ago, Gillian Devereux (poet who may or may not be (read: probably is) magical), called me out on her blog and Facebook, saying, “I’m excited to find out about the next big thing in store for Carissa Halston,” so here I am, responding.
Note: I am an awful friend who only responds to public shame.
THE NEXT BIG THING (for me)
1. What is the working title of the book?
Conjoined States
2. Where did the idea come from for the book?
Among other things, this sentence from Italo Calvino’s novella, Invisible Cities (translation by William Weaver): “Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”
I read that and thought it sounded exactly like living in America.
3. What genre does your book fall under?
Literary fiction.
4. What other books would you compare this to within your genre?
You know that novel you read once that was both funny and sad and made you think about emotional inheritance and the pursuit of finding home when you’re already there? It’s a lot like that.
5. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
The main character would be played by two different unknown character actors who looked alike, but not so alike as to be mistaken for each other. One occasionally is entirely bald. The other occasionally has short, stubby eyelashes.
6. What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
We will always be who we are now–who we were then–promise in perpetuity.
7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Ten months, off and on.
8 . Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Since this is awfully close to the second question, I’ll instead tell you about what has influenced the drafts as I’ve written them (I’m on the fourth draft now). This quote from Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons, “We had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time—those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.” The we, specifically, set me thinking about how I could literally divide my narrator.
9 . What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
There is a chapter for every one of the contiguous United States. The protagonist gets a tattoo in each state. All the tattoo parlors he visits (all 48 of them) are real.
10. Who is publishing your book?
As soon as I know, so, dear reader, shall you.
I’m tagging writers whose work I love. I’m sorry if they’ve already done this, but here they are anyway:
Susan McCarty, Dolan Morgan, Randolph Pfaff
