I’m on a bit of a kick using my blog to promote the
work of fellow authors. So, when I stumbled up on author Chris Jane, whose book
The Year of Dan Palace (November 2014), has been called by Cheryl Anne Gardner,
author of The Kissing Room and head fiction editor at Apocrypha and
Abstractions Literary Journal, “Some of the finest sh*** out
there”, I thought to myself, sounds like my kind of writing, my kind of book.
Not to mention, when reading adult fiction I am a fan of the following elements:
a.) Road Trips b.) Complicated marriages. This book has both. Below are five
questions with Chris followed by links for purchase and additional
information.
Five questions:
Q: Why did you choose an
end-of-the-world prediction as the catalyst that would motivate Dan Palace to
leave everything behind? Why not the diagnosis of a fatal disease, which seems
more believable?
A: When a disease enters
the picture, a certain part of the story then has to be about that disease. I
didn't want to write about a disease.
I chose the end of the world as a threat not only because I
thought I would have fun doing it, but because it's a strange, complicated
thing. We talk about the end of the world the same way we talk about the
lottery:
"If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would ..."
"If I won ten million dollars, I would ..."
In a way, it's exciting. It gives us a chance to fantasize about
how we would live "if we knew we would die" (as if we aren't all
going to die, anyway, even without the end of the world as a threat).
It's also scary. I think a lot of us enjoy feeling like we have some control
over how long we live - healthy diet, exercise, doctors, medicine, prayer,
karma, you name it - but none of those measures can prevent the end of the
world. Knowing there's no control over the end, no way to stop or even delay
it, increases the urgency to live fully in whatever time is left.
The end of the world also invites partners in adventure, others
who aren't quite satisfied with their lives and who welcome the opportunity to
do something different - like the young hotel worker, Jenny, who latches onto
Dan. When someone shares a belief, no matter how outlandish it might seem, that
strengthens the belief's credibility, and any resulting selfishness or brazenness
become almost ... valid. At the very least, excusable.
Q: What books did you
read in your childhood that helped influence your writing?
A: I started out with a
lot of mystery/suspense: Sydney Sheldon was an early favorite, and then Dean
Koontz (Dean R. Koontz at the time) and Stephen King. After that it was some
Agatha Christie, Richard North Patterson, and Nelson DeMille. A little later,
after high school, I moved away from mystery and into writers like George
Orwell, John Irving, and Margaret Atwood. College introduced me to some of the
known minimalist writers (Hemingway, McCarthy, Carver, Steinbeck).
The books I read up to and through high school taught me how
critical it was to keep things moving, pages turning. As a reader, I insisted
on being utterly absorbed. As a writer, I enjoy the challenge of applying
techniques typically labored over in literary writing (the iceberg theory,
minimalism), but I also like the challenge of combining that with a story that
has movement, one that would make me as a reader want to turn pages.
Q: Novels will sometimes
begin one way and end up being something completely different by the time
they're finished. Is The Year of Dan Palace the same book now as it was
when it began?
A: Skeletally, yes. The
story goes from A to B to C as it did when it was in an earlier draft. But the
early-draft characters were motivated by a force I hadn't yet identified, which
made them difficult for me to predict and at times understand. An exciting
development to come out of a revision, to me, anyway, was the discovery of the
for-better-or-worse influence of the characters' parents.
Dan, April, Nina, and Jenny are products of their unique,
individual experiences separate from early family life, yes, but they - like us
- are also the Selves their parents built. Whether they like it or not, the
lessons of their parents often guide them, and those lessons - good and bad -
live in their most raw, vulnerable spaces.
The inclusion of the parental influences (but not the parents, themselves
- they don't appear) changed the core "why" behind how the story and
the characters get from A to B to C.
Q: When Dan leaves his
wife, Nina, one of the things he wants to do is win back the love of his
ex-wife, April. The conflict between Dan and April isn't clearly delivered to
readers. You don't tell us exactly what happened. Why?
A: I don't tell you what
happened, but they do.
One of the things I enjoy most about limited point of view is
that it is incapable of being objective. It can't tell you the absolute truth,
and I like that, because people don't deal in absolute truth. When the truth
isn't as black and white as someone being murdered, or someone being hit by a
car, what does objective truth mean to a subjective person? What does it mean
in a marriage?
Dan has his truth, and April has her truth. Their problem
(boiled down) is that their truths don't necessarily coincide. Often, or in my
experience, anyway, it isn't what physically happens that creates the problem;
it's how the participants react to what happens.
Whatever it is that leads to undesirable behavior, it's usually
- at its infant roots - forgivable. Some will forgive. Others will choose, for
their own often complicated reasons, not to.
Chris Jane is a fiction and freelance writer living in New
England. Early work involved going door to door and offering to take out the
neighbors’ trash for a nickel a bag. A great gig for a 6-year-old entrepreneur
at a time when most opportunities for child workers had been criminalized by
busybody grown-ups.
The Year of Dan Palace synopsis (paperback and Kindle release
date: Nov. 22, 2014):
Dan Palace has always played it safe. He chose the safe job.
Married a safe woman. Rarely travels far from home. But something is missing –
until a man named Tucker Farling delivers a doomsday prediction that changes
his life.
In the final minutes before the New Year, Dan musters the
courage he desperately needs to embark on a quest to find that missing
“something”: the sense of adventure and true magic he remembers from his youth,
along with the love of his ex-wife, who has hated him since their wedding night
nine years before.
When things don’t go as planned, Dan finds himself on an
unexpected road trip with a young hotel worker and her possessive boyfriend.
Together, they experience some of the surprising consequences of living life to
its passionate fullest – as do the people they love.
Kindle pre-order link ($0.99 until it releases on Nov. 22. Reg.
price: $6.99): http://www.amazon.com/Year-Dan-Palace-Chris-Jane-ebook/dp/B00OFC8HAO
Praise:
"I could not stop reading this. This is some of the finest
**** I have read in a while." - Cheryl Anne Gardner, author of The
Kissing Room and head fiction editor at Apocrypha and Abstractions
Literary Journal
"Honest, original and impossible to put down." -
Joseph Dilworth Jr., Pop Culture Zoo
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