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Welcome Dave Thome, author of the romance novel, Fast Lane

“Don’t let anybody write your story for you. Say what needs to be said. Write your own story.” ~ Taequanda, in Fast Lane

Often in life, we approach a situation or a goal (or a relationship), letting outside assumptions and expectations fuel our vision, only to discover that the truth of the matter is not at all what we anticipate. The same can be said for Lara Dixon, the protagonist in Dave Thome’s debut novel, Fast Lane. In the quote above, Taequanda is talking to Lara, who is on a hunt for the inside story of Clay Creighton and his man-centered, womanizing business, Fast Lane Enterprises. What Lara discovers once inside Fast Lane’s inner circle, more so when she gets to know Taequanda, is that everyone harbors a secret and no one fits their facade. Lara is torn between writing truth or fiction.

In a post on Babbles from Scott Eagan ( of Greyhause Literary Agency), Eagan empasizes a few “musts” in category romance novels: not “to see [characters] in bed and having a full on romance after the first meeting” but “to really get to know who these people are AS people. Emotion, motivation, depth.” Dave Thome’s novel gives readers exactly that, a satisfying romance with well-developed characters. I’m honored to host Dave today, where he talks about his writing journey and the discoveries he made along the way.

CC: When you started out writing, did you imagine you’d embark on the journey of a romance novel? I’d love to hear more about your background and how you came to be a Man Writing a Romance.

DT: Way back. Way, way back, I always assumed I’d write novels. But I also liked writing articles and columns for my high school paper, so I became a newspaper reporter. I loved being a newspaper reporter. Every day I got to meet new people and write about different things. Literally. When you’re just out of college and work for a small-town paper, you’re writing about a new math program at the high school in the morning, the last local survivor of World War I in the afternoon, and a stampede of dairy cows circling a house near downtown the next morning. (Seriously, I once wrote an article about how cows got spooked on a dairy farm in the middle of the night, broke down a fence, ran along the highway into Watertown, Wis., turned onto a side street, randomly circled one house, left—and returned a few minutes later to circle the house again. In the opposite direction.)

Anyway, newspaper stories are kind of like mini novels. Really mini novels. Like 400 words instead of 55,400 words. But you have to hook people right away. The story has to flow. You work in dialog (quotes) and narration and use description to help readers visualize things. You don’t really build to a climax, but there’s usually some element of tension in a newspaper story. Lots of news involves tension. A good reporter also has to know something about human nature. You have to get to know people quickly and assess their veracity and character. That translates into writing fiction, too.

I started a couple of novels over the years but never got anywhere. They seemed too big and complex. Then I discovered screenplays, and they seemed like a good idea because not only are they a lot shorter than novels (18,000 words), they also have a structure you have to follow. Certain things have to happen by the end of page 1, 3, 10, 28 and so on. And you have to finish by page 120—max. For comedy, finishing by page 90 or 95 is even better. Having those goals in mind helped me focus on elements of story and character that had to be developed. My mindset is exactly the same when I write novels, only now it’s a matter of rhythm instead of a matter of having an absolute page number to hit.

I ended up writing twenty screenplays in about twenty years. I wrote comedies and thrillers and sweeping science fiction action stories. The first four weren’t very good, but something clicked on the fifth. I was in a writing group and I brought in the first seven pages of what I was working on and one guy tore me a new one, making big red circles on my pages to make sure to dramatize how much he hated my dialog. He did this in front of the whole group, eight guys, I think. And then he said the lines his way—and he was absolutely right. I went home and started at the beginning and rewrote all the dialog to sound more natural—shorter sentences, dropped words, things like that—and the script just came together. When the dialog became more organic, so did the characters and the story.

That script, TERMINAL SEX, is about a woman in her late thirties who was recently divorced, hated her job and was having problems with her snotty sixteen-year-old daughter, so she follows a friend’s advice and logs into an Internet cybersex website. I made up everything that happened online because it was 1994, and I had never seen the Internet, but I made the cyberspace sequences into scenes with the characters in fantastical settings. Sex and murder ensue, and TERMINAL SEX won a writing award and got me an agent at a fairly high-profile agency in Hollywood. The script got read by some cool people—actors, producers and directors—but no one opened their wallet. Then some writer friends who were hot after having a big TV movie success tried to sell it to a network. Everyone there loved it except the last guy. The guy who had all the power.

After that, METAL MOM, a comedy about a woman who continues her heavy metal singing career when her kids are in high school almost got made twice. Another comedy, THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS, was next up on a company’s docket until they had a movie tank so badly they lost their financing. And yet another script, FRANKIE BIG LEAGUES, about a gangster who coaches his thirteen-year-old daughter’s softball team, got optioned for money but went nowhere.

At that point, I’d had enough of screenplays, so I wrote a novel, CHICK FLICK, during Nano in 2006 and worked on it for the next two years. It’s the opposite of a screenplay, with lots of the action going on inside the main character’s head. People in my writing group liked it very much, but it’s a really dark romantic comedy with a male lead. In some ways it’s “literary,” in others it’s like a romance novel, so it’s hard to imagine a traditional publishing market for it. I will eventually self-publish it.

Fast Lane came about because the writing business my wife, Mary Jo, and I have run since 1999 had its worst quarter ever at the end of 2009. She knew a woman who published erotic romances online, so she thought that might be something to do while business was down. I thought that if she was willing to do that, I should, too. But neither of us ended up writing an erotic romance. Fast Lane began as an idea for a screenplay that I started but never finished twenty-five years ago. I tried to write it in the erotic romance style, but I couldn’t stop myself from cracking up like a sixth-grader. Not a good thing. But the story was much better after having steeped in my subconscious for a quarter of a century, so I decided to make it a contemporary romance instead.

CC: In FAST LANE, your minor characters add such depth to the story — from Taequanda, one of the women in the rotation, to Morgan Hopkins, Clay’s security guard (one of my favorites, by the way). Did you spend a lot of time initially on character development? Or, did the characters fully come to life during rewrites?

DT: I don’t develop anything initially. I’m the epitome of a pantser. The side characters, believe it or not, always come to me when I need them.

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Welcome Siobhan Fallon, Author of You Know When the Men Are Gone

She turned to descend the stair, her heart in tumult. Had she better keep her distance and question him, her husband? Should she run up to him, take his hands, kiss him now?

…And she, for a long time, sat deathly still in wonderment–for sometimes as she gazed she found him–yes, clearly–like her husband, but sometimes blood and rags were all she saw.
–Penelope upon recognizing Odysseus, The Odyssey

The quote above is the epigram to Siobhan Fallon’s amazing collection of short stories, You Know When the Men Are Gone, and this vision of Penelope, hesitating but desperate to rediscover the man – her husband – behind the clothes of a warrior, prepares the reader perfectly for the kinds of experiences the characters in her book endure. So often, we hear of military life, whether in war or in deployment, from the perspective of the soldiers. Siobhan Fallon gives us a taste of those stories and more, taking us into the hearts and minds of the families left behind. Because, nothing we do in life affects us in isolation.

I’m honored to host Siobhan Fallon here to talk about her book, life, and writing. As a bonus and a gift, she has donated a copy of her book (recently released in paperback!) for one lucky reader. At the end of her interview, drop your name in the comments. The winner will be drawn on Tuesday, January 31st, at noon.

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CC: In two of my favorite stories, “The Last Stand” and “The Gold Star”, Specialist Kit Murphy makes a powerful impact. Through his experience and his interactions with the other characters, readers are given a profound, heartfelt, and panoramic view into the minds of a soldier, a wife left behind, and a wife widowed. Was there a specific character or story that impressed you the most while you were writing this book?

SF: I have to admit that I have some favorites, though it is hard to narrow it down to only one. I feel a certain affinity for Meg, of the title story, “You Know When the Men Are Gone.” She is my closest doppelganger, and I often found myself thinking her thoughts during my husband’s deployments (like staring at a grocery store’s packaged meat, the exposed bone and blood held together in saran wrap, and thinking of a soldier’s wounds). And I too I have a soft spot for Kit Murphy. I’d say that I worked on his story, “The Last Stand,” longer and harder than any other. Even after it was published in Salamander Magazine, I felt compelled to keep rewriting it, to infuse it with as much genuine experience as possible. Kit is the penultimate soldier in my eyes, the sort I unfortunately saw an awful lot of during my husband’s company command at Fort Hood, a young man just out of teenage-hood trying to do what he thinks is right, often unable to articulate how he feels, left wounded and untethered in some way when he returns from his deployment.

The final story, “Gold Star,” also gets me every time I read it. That story is my worst nightmare, the worst nightmare of every military spouse with a deployed soldier, but I also like to think that there is an element of hope and healing in the ending, when Josie and Kit are able to offer each other a moment of understanding.

CC: In this post on Quivering Pen, you make a excellent argument for the short story as the structure best fit for revealing the lives of the characters in your book, saying “the surge of electricity of a [short story’s] beginning, the disorientation dealt to readers as they suddenly find themselves with a new cast of characters, a new setting, and a new dilemma. . . . [mirrors] the military life.” Was it easy to accept that this book would be a collection of stories? Or did you struggle in the beginning to mold it into a novel?

SF: The stories came to me as just that: stories. When I started writing them, I wasn’t even sure if I would have a collection that would fit together cohesively. I wrote the title story first, about Meg listening to the seemingly glamorous life of Natalya. I had an image of a woman pressing her ear against her wall, desperately eavesdropping on her neighbor as a way to keep from worrying about her own deployed husband. The next story that came to me, “Camp Liberty,” had almost nothing in common with the first. “Camp Liberty” is about Moge, a US Army sergeant in Iraq who forms a tricky friendship with his female Iraqi interpreter. For that story, I had two themes in mind. One, I was struck with the way soldiers, even soldiers who were trying to get out of the Army, talked about their wartime exploits as if they were the most incredible and vivid adventures of their lives. Two, I wanted to write about the local national interpreters who are intrinsic to the lives of our troops, and whose stories often go untold.

Initially I had played around with the idea of writing stories all set in the housing complex where Meg lives and listens against the wall, but so often you just can’t write the things you want to write. Other things pop into your mind and seize your imagination, an overheard conversation at the mall, broken kid toys strewn across a lawn, a soldier crossing the street on crutches. People keep asking me why I didn’t writer certain stories, like a story from a female soldier’s point of view, or from the parents of a deployed soldier. All I can say is that the stories in the collection are the ones that filled me up, had me awake at night thinking about the sound of a character’s voice or his choice of childhood friends, these were the stories that excited me as a writer, these were the characters whose stories I wanted most to know.

CC: How has the publication of your book changed your experience as a writer, and/or your experience as a military wife?

SF: As a writer, there is something magical about having your words finally filling up the pages of a book and seeing that book on your shelf. I finished my MFA in 2000 (which is when I started to seriously write and submit my work). I’ve had plenty of rejections, most of the stories in YKWTMAG have been rejected by literary magazines, not to mention my often rejected story collection/MFA thesis and the two novel drafts taking up space in my home office. So having my book published is, of course, awesome, and makes the decade plus of dashed hopes worth it. But it also doesn’t get any easier. When you are slaving away, desperately hoping someone will say “yes” to your work, you imagine that once you are in a bookstore, you will only hear “yes” from then on. Not true. I finished a new story a couple of months ago and sent it off to my literary agent with the rarely felt euphoria of having written something great. But everyone he has shopped it around to turned it down. Then I was asked to write an essay for NPR’s Morning Edition. It took seven or eight ideas, pitched over a couple of weeks, before the producer found something she liked enough to put on the air. So there are still plenty of rejections. If anything, I feel like I have to work harder now, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

How has my book changed my experience as a military spouse… wow, that’s a tricky question. When I talk to civilian readers, I have to be careful that I don’t speak with too much authority. I am a fiction writer, my stories are not fact, and the things that occur in my book don’t happen to every military family in America. Those stories are from a very specific point of view, about life on a military base that had an extremely high deployment rate, during the height of the US involvement in the Middle East.

When I speak with military readers, I also walk a fine line. Sometimes mil spouse readers are disappointed that I didn’t give readers the rosy picture that an Army wife ought to show the world. But most often military spouses thank me for my honesty, for letting people see a side of our lives that we too often try to keep under wraps.

CC: What are you reading these days?

SF: Oooh, fun question. I just finished Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. A poet friend of mine, Shara Lessley, recommended this novel, and it seemed like the perfect read for me at this point in my life. My family and I just moved from Amman, Jordan, to Falls Church, Virginia. Moving around is part of the Army lifestyle, and since 2004, when I married my husband, we have moved seven times. This transition from Jordan to Virginia was an especially hard one; we really loved the families who make up the Amman US embassy community, and leaving them made me gnash my teeth at the difficulties of sustaining connections when you move so often. Crossing to Safety is a story of marriage and lifelong friendship, and particularly resonated with me.

Other books I have read recently are Valerie Trueblood’s Marry or Burn and Shann Ray’s American Masculine, two short story collections. Reading them back to back was not intentional but they make a remarkable pair. Trueblood’s tales sometimes start with shocking hooks, a woman shooting her abusive police officer husband, or a woman attacking a bear with an ax, but the actual drama is much quieter, more about the intimacies women try to create and all too often irrevocably break. Trueblood’s stories spin out and envelope the reader, creating a kind of rapture. This is a book I will read again and again. Ray’s stories, as the title implies, deal with the other side of that gender coin, the shifting roles of men in today’s society, the idea of ‘masculine,’ the weight of expectations that can crush sons and fathers and husbands. But woven into these somewhat violent tales of the West is a current of redemption and possibility. Both books are masterful and I highly recommend them.

CC: Do you have any advice for writers on the rise?

SF: If you want it enough, don’t give up. Everyone dreams of writing a book and everyone has a story to tell (and will tell it to you, especially when they find out you are a writer)— but writers actually need to write. In the end, that’s what separates us from everyone else: the written page (and maybe those three or four discarded story collections or novel drafts under your bed).

It’s a long, long road to publication. You are going to spend a lot of time feeling like a failure and doubting every word you write. But having strangers in bookstores talk to you about the characters you created, well, that’s one of the most fantastic feelings in the world.

Siobhan Fallon’s debut collection of stories, You Know When the Men Are Gone, was listed as a Best Book of 2011 by The San Francisco Chronicle and Janet Maslin of The New York Times, has been called “the explosive sort of literary triumph that appears only every few years” by New York Journal of Books, “a terrific and terrifically illuminating book” by The Washington Post,and a “searing collection” by Entertainment Weekly.
Her stories and essays have appeared in , Women’s Day, Good Housekeeping, New Letters, Publishers’ Weekly, among others, and she is writing a fiction series for Military Spouse Magazine. More can be found at her website www.siobhanfallon.com.

To Siobhan, thank you so much. And to readers, don’t forget to leave your name in the comments for a chance to win a copy of You Know When the Men Are Gone.

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An Interview with Anna Solomon, Author of The Little Bride

“Minna continued pulling up grass in big fistfuls. . . . One day she would decide to learn the names of her torture and be disappointed when she found them nowhere near as precise as how she’d identified them then: Sharpest grass, shiniest grass, curly grass, hardest-to-pull grass. She pulled all of it up from the roots, giving in to the slices in her palms, watching the dry soil break into dust….” ~ From The Little Bride

 

When dreams turn to fantasy and take on a life of their own, and it becomes inevitable that they will fracture or crumble in the face of reality. Anna Solomon’s debut novel, The Little Bride, is the story of Minna Losk, a Jewish mail order bride on a journey to pursue her dream of life and freedom in America, which she assumes will include a handsome husband, a large house with running water, and servants of her own. What Minna discovers instead is the stark reality of life on a South Dakota homestead, marriage to a husband twice her age, and a forbidden attraction to the man who is her stepson.

Using subtle but rich details, Anna Solomon quietly introduces readers to each character in The Little Bride and takes us through the seasons of rugged South Dakota and through Minna’s self-discoveries. The characters are perfectly balanced, so that minutes after an unfortunate decision is made that casts a negative light, their stories still pull at the heartstrings of the reader. Today, I am honored to host Anna Solomon for an interview, where she discusses her novel and writing, and offers her best advice for others on the road to publication.

At the end of the interview, drop your name in the comment section for a chance to win a copy of The Little Bride. Random.org will choose the winner on Tuesday, January 3rd, at noon.

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CC: In a post on Beyond the Margins, you talk about a musical-literary collaboration, with musician Clare Burson (called A Little Suite for The Little Bride) as an innovative way to introduce readers to your novel. Can you talk a bit about the structure of these performances and how readers have responded to them?

AS: That’s a great question, because until people have seen Clare and I perform together, it’s hard for them to picture exactly what we’re doing. Basically, Clare wrote five songs inspired by scenes from my book. On stage, she starts playing a musical score, then I come in reading one of those scenes over her score, then my reading ends and she plays/sings the song that was inspired by it. Sometimes we break one of my readings up with music – I stop mid-scene for a musical interlude and then begin again. And sometimes the music drops out and I read in silence for a little bit. But that’s the basic rhythm of the work.

And there are projected images, too: old drawings or maps that Clare played around with in Photoshop, thrown up on the wall behind us in black and white. The images are there to accompany the various sections, and provide context; often they have text, too, maybe a line from the book, just to set the scene and give the audience a footing in our story. We wanted to create a narrative arc through the piece, which is similar to the novel but also can exist on its own, for the purposes of these performances. I find that aspect very satisfying – that we’ve created something inspired by but separate from the novel. It kind of mirrors the experience of publication, when you see your book go off and become something different in each reader’s mind. Maybe the performance process helped prepared me for that letting go. In any case, I’m excited that we already have more performances of our “Little Suite for The Little Bride” scheduled for 2012!

CC: Some of my favorite scenes in your novel are the early interactions between Samuel and Minna, the simple dialogue and how Minna describes his gestures. When he finds her pulling grass, helps her, and then leaves, her recollection of his departure says so much with so little — about his character, and hers. What was your favorite scene to write, and why?

AS: I did like writing that scene – especially after he leaves, when she’s replaying it in her mind. (Did he mean to breathe on her, or did he just breathe, like people have to do?) Minna’s a tough character – a survivor – and scenes like that let me into her tenderness, her humor. It’s funny – at some point I thought that the same scene might take place when she’s trying to milk the cow, that Samuel would wind up behind her, showing her how to do it, but then I thought: gag! My favorite scene to write might be one that comes pretty late in the book. I won’t give away too much, but it also involves Samuel and Minna – they’re standing outside at dawn and though nothing very physically intimate happens between them, it’s probably the closest they come to a true emotional intimacy in the whole book, without the walls they usually have up. Also, it involves a circus and gunshots, so those parts made it fun to write, too.

CC: You recently started up a blog on your website. How do you like the blogging platform? And, do you find it offers more freedom in writing?

AS: Honestly, I’m not sure about blogging – for me. I held off for a long time (aren’t new blogs sort of passé at this point?) and now that I’m attempting to do it I feel a kind of pressure and I’m starting to think I’m not going to be able to fulfill my idea of what I want to do with it. I like the posts I’ve done, and writing them was fun, but especially as I dive deeply into my second novel, I feel like I only have so many things I can pay attention to. In some ways I think I’m just not cut out for multi-tasking in my writing, or for quick, off-the-cuff pieces. I enjoy them, and they do offer a different kind of freedom – there’s something nice about just pitching my voice into the soup and seeing where it goes – but I’m also not entirely comfortable with the process. I’ve found this with writing for online formats before: I’m not prepared to move so quickly. Editors get frustrated with me. I think I’m a slower thinker, a slower writer.

That said, I’m loving being part of the wonderful Beyond the Margins blog. That gives me a way to try my hand at blogging without having to be the sole proprietor, so to speak – and more importantly, it’s introduced me to this amazing, incredibly supportive group of writers, all at different stages in our careers, eager to offer other writers bits of our own experience.

 

So we’ll see. I’m going to stick with my blog for a while, see if I can make it fun for myself, and also experiment with different kinds of posts.

 

CC: What are you reading these days?

 

AS: I’m loving Amos Oz’s A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS. Not crazy about the title – it’s so generic, I forget it every time I put the book down – but the book itself is wonderful: a memoir of Oz’s childhood in Jerusalem, and also of course the story of Israel itself. I’ve loved hearing Oz speak about conflict, war, and peace, and I find his book adds a complexity to those soundbytes – it’s very rich, very generous, and beautifully written, too. I’m also reading a totally different kind of book, a novel that came out last June, DAUGHTERS OF THE REVOLUTION by Carolyn Cooke. It’s about the first black girl (admitted by clerical error!) at an elite New England boarding school. But it’s about so much else, too – Cooke’s characters are totally real, often eccentric, always struggling to hang on to their individual selves even as they scramble to belong within “society” (theirs or others’). Her writing feels almost anthropological: look at these things, they’re called people, they create institutions like this, and they run around like that trying to get in or out.

 

CC: What advice do you have for writers on the rise?

 

AS: Stay focused on the work itself. I think the hardest thing about having my first book published was how obsessed I had to become – at least for a few months, while on tour – with my “career.” It’s so important, of course, I wanted to give my book the best chance possible, but it was also easy to lose track of the whole point: writing. When I was in an MFA program, just starting to publish short stories, I had this very rigid boundary for myself between writing and submitting stories – I would only deal with submissions at night, after my “real” work was done, and I wouldn’t think of it most of the time, I’d forget that the question of publication even existed. This gets tougher, of course, as you’re lucky to publish more, but I think it’s important to try to keep that boundary there. Now, as I start back in on my next novel, I’ll put up my wall again: in the morning, when I’m writing, there will be no phone calls, no internet, no criticism or praise to ingest, just me, my characters, my story. For me, this is the only way – I need rules, to bring my back to the work.


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From Anna Solomon’s website:
Anna Solomon’s fiction has appeared in One Story, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Her stories have twice been awarded the Pushcart Prize, have won The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, and have been nominated for a National Magazine Award.
For more information about Anna or for a chance to explore The Little Bride, visit her website. You can also follow her on Twitter or like her page on Facebook. Also, don’t forget to leave a comment to enter the book giveaway!