Interlude: The Next Big Thing

You might have noticed that this isn’t a chapter.  Sorry!  Chapter 7 will be coming very soon.  But first I must break for this brief programming note: I am so honored to have been tagged by the brilliant Sophie Hardach as THE NEXT BIG THING!!! Sophie is the author of The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages, which is about the hippest book about Kurdish refugees you will ever read.  It is really sad, funny, surprising, and cleverly structured. In fact, don’t even bother reading my answers to the questions below; just go buy her book right now.  Then go read it.

Finished?  It was awesome, right?

Okay, welcome back.  Now comes the part where we NEXT BIG THING types answer the following questions:

What is the working title for your book?

The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God. I swear, it came to me in a dream.  Weirdest thing ever.

Where did the idea come from for your book?

The book is inspired by the four years I spent as an undergraduate English major and the six years I spent as an English Ph.D. student.  I loved studying English, but I often noticed discrepancies between the things English scholars said they believed and what they seemed to believe in practice.  That’s what this book is about, sort of.   That and the fear of death.   

What genre does your book fall under?

The last book I wrote didn’t have a clear enough genre, for marketing purposes: it was somewhere between literary fiction and “chick lit.” That’s why I’ve made sure my new novel falls squarely into the category of “metafictional academic satire porn.”  This time there will be no ambiguity!  

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Self-serving literary scholar gets called out by savant undergrad.

Or for a multi-sentence version: Gavin Cheng-Johnson, soon-to-be English Ph.D., is searching for a job as an English professor while he finishes his dissertation on the experimental playwright Liam Stump.  He wants to devote minimal effort to teaching his undergraduate composition course, but his student Rona Gomez wants much more than that.  She hangs on every esoteric idea carelessly tossed around Gavin’s classroom.  Hoping to become Gavin’s protégée, she pursues a relationship that will lead both of them to places they never expected or wanted to go.

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

Oh, no, I don’t know any actors!  I hate movies and TV.  But I think Margaret Cho would be a good Gavin Cheng-Johnson.  And then maybe Aubrey Plaza could be Rona Gomez.  I’ve never seen her act or speak, but I just read an interview with her in Bust Magazine and she seemed pretty cool and also kind of crazy.  Jeremy Irons could play Liam Stump.

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

Don’t know.  Wish I did!

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I’ve only been writing it for two months, but I am keeping a good pace.  I hope to be done with a draft by around June, though it’s hard to gauge these things sometimes.  The first draft of my last novel took three years, but it was about 500 pages long. I want this one to be much shorter.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Well, of course “compare” is a heavy and kind of scary word.  I was heavily influenced by the novels White Noise and End Zone by Don Delillo.  End Zone is the most brilliant novel, amazing, all about highly philosophical football players at a remote college in Texas during the cold war.  I was also inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which is a novel about a poet and his editor, but it’s written as a preface and annotations to a lengthy poem.  Through the preface, poem, and annotations, we learn about the relationship between the editor and poet. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

All my friends with Ph.D.s who have moved to the ends of the earth to pursue their avocation.  I’m talking Ohio, South Carolina, upstate New York.  Who knows if anyone will ever see them again. I pour this novel out for you, my homies. 

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

It has a lot of texts-within-the-text.  These are mostly 1) excerpts from one of Liam Stump’s plays, 2) quotes from critical theorist Julia Kristeva, and 3) scenes from pornographic movies. 

Oh, and I'm writing it serially.  So if you'd like to read it, you can start here.

Phew, that was a lot of thinking about this novel!  I’m exhausted.  Luckily, now for the most fun part: tagging my victims…

I mean, introducing THE NEXT BIG THINGS: 

Michelle Gonzales, besides being my professional and literary life-partner, is the author of the memoir Pretty Bold for a Mexican Girl: Growing up Chicana in a Hick Town, a touching and brutally honest tribute to the small town she left behind. Her love of dystopian fiction borders on psychotic, and she's currently writing her own uniquely Californian/Chicana contribution to this genre. 

Anita Felicelli blew my mind by studying art, literature, and rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley before obtaining a law degree and becoming a published poet and novelist. I just finished her poetic and moving novel, Sparks off You, and can't wait to read her next one. 

Diane Rinella is such a brilliant baker, cake decorator, insane antique house restorer and Rocky Horror cast member that it only stands to reason that she is a brilliantly twisted writer as well.  She is currently working on a series of romance novels about a love so transgressive that it offends about half the people she summarizes the plot to.  Nice work! (I'm totally jealous.)