1. What inspired you to write your book?
Several years ago, I met a
man in West Philadelphia who was flashy, self-confident, extraordinarily
friendly, and wildly eccentric. He got stuck in my mind and a few weeks later I
wrote a parody of him into the opening paragraph of what would eventually become
No Place to Pray. I named him LeRoy.
Over the months and years that followed, the novel changed in every way a story
can possibly change: plot, setting, point of view, structure, language, tone.
Everything except LeRoy, the one constant. But even he underwent a
transformation as the story let me know it wanted to be tragedy, not pastiche.
2. What is it about?
No Place to Pray is
the story of two friends, one biracial and the other white, who share a
self-destructive alcohol addiction. Over the twenty years of their friendship
they lose everything except each other. It’s also a commentary on the failure
of social and religious institutions to provide a lifeline in times of despair,
leaving the book’s denizens with no place to pray.
3. What do you hope will be the everlasting thoughts
for readers who finish your book?
No Place to Pray’s
first chapter ends with this line: “They stood up from the steps, some of them
swaying, and got in the cars and went off in a line toward town, their glowing taillights
like a string of beckoning lanterns guiding all prodigal wayfarers home.” My
hope is that readers leave the book asking, "Is there more that I can do
to lighten the prodigal’s burden and welcome them back?"
4. What advice do you have for writers?
Begin early to establish a
network. Find people who will support you and that you in turn can support.
Build friendships around writing and reading. You’ll need favors as you go,
people to critique your writing, give advice about publishers and agents, and
to help you with the mechanics of submission. But it won’t work if you see the
network as only sustaining you. Give back. For every favor you ask, grant two.
Every time someone in your network reads one of your works, read someone
else’s. Be gracious and generous with your time. Be genuinely curious about
what others are doing. As you buoy each other up, you’ll all become better and
more successful writers.
5. Where do you think the book publishing industry
is heading?
Would anyone have guessed
fifteen years ago when the Kindle hadn’t yet been invented that eBooks would
comprise 20 percent of today’s market? What about the growing legitimacy of
self-publishing, once derided as the vanity press? Web site publishing? On
demand publishing? What these practices have in common is that they were
unforeseen and profoundly disruptive. In the same way, I don’t think we can
predict what comes next and what comes after that, other than to say that
whatever it is, it will be even more disruptive than what we see now. All of
us, wherever in writing and publishing we stand, are in for a bumpy ride.
6. What challenges did you have in writing your book?
No Place to Pray has
three plot lines (four, if we count LeRoy’s adventures) occurring in three time
periods and two settings. All of them intersect each other. My most difficult
problem lay in how to structure these interwoven parts in a way that wouldn’t
bewilder the reader and to make the text flow as naturally as possible. Over
the five years it took me to write the book, I tried a number of approaches
before settling on the annunciative technique I finally used. Originally, I
organized the book into five parts, one for each of the threerealistic lines,
one for LeRoy’s stories, and a fifth for a series of letters Edna wrote to her
daughter. The result was a mess. Nothing melded smoothly into anything else,
incidents that logically led to others were so far removed from each other
spatially that the connection wasn’t at all obvious, and the book was just too
long. Eventually I dropped Edna’s letters altogether (anexperience much like
going through the passing of a dear friend), interlacedwhat remained, and
finally set the chapter tags.
7. If people can only buy one book this month, why
should it be yours?
It shouldn’t be mine. Every
reader has a list of books they’ve been meaning to get to for a long time and
just haven’t been able to. Something they wish they’d read to fill a gap in
their reading experience or that one book by a beloved author that they missed
or a book a close friend recommended months ago and they promised to read. If
you can buy only one book this month, indulge yourself and choose one from that
list. No Place to Pray will still be
here next month.
Born and raised
in rural Mercer County, PA, James Carpenter made his way through college
working various eclectic jobs and, after graduating, taught middle and high
school English. He then retrained as a technologist, eventually developing the
Erica T. Carter software system that composed the poetry anthologized in the Issue 1 dustup. Erica’s poetry has been published in several
dozen literary journals and he’s presented Erica at international conferences,
including at the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, and the e-poetry
2007 conference in Paris.
Carpenter spent
fourteen years as a member of the affiliated faculty of The Wharton School, where he lectured in computer programming, system design,
and entrepreneurship before retiring to write fiction. Since then, his writing
has appeared in numerouspublications including The Chicago Tribune, Fiction
International, Fifth Wednesday Journal, North Dakota Quarterly,
and Ambit. His novel, No Place to Pray, is forthcoming from Twisted Road Publications in September.
Please Click On The Best Out Of 2,100 Posts
2016 Book Marketing & Book Publicity Toolkit
2015 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit
2014 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit
Book Marketing & Book PR Toolkit: 2013
Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog
are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter
@theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more
important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016 ©.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.