author under duress

Today, Jim answers readers pressing questions! (If you have a question, please submit it in the comments or by email.)

How did you get the idea for “The Forest Dark”?

I wanted to do an “if these walls could talk” kind of story. Originally I envisioned it quite literally, i.e. I’d tell the story of successive generations of renters at a single apartment (what became Shirley Knolls in the book). That pretty much morphed into a story of friendship over time, and how people change from youth to midlife. Also, a big part of the story is acceptance of where one finds oneself in midlife. You might say that’s an ongoing personal challenge, so it resonates with me.

Are your characters based on real people, such as yourself or others?

When I’ve written mid-life white gay male characters, like Ben Schmidt in “Benediction” or Noah Baldock in “The Forest Dark”, of course there’s a lot of me in those characters. With Noah in “Forest Dark,” I tried to model a lot of the character’s behavior on someone I knew in the past who died fairly young, and extrapolating what I thought that person would’ve ended up as in midlife. That process was actually easier than writing from what your own motivations and reactions would be. And how much more refreshing, it is, too, for the writer to be invested in someone outside of him or herself. My other main characters in both books are based on a conglomeration of friends and relatives—sometimes enemies, too.

Have you ever thought about writing a novel series?

I never did until recently. I’ve gotten a bunch of comments from fans of “Benediction” wondering what happens with Ben Schmidt after the end of that book. And, more recently, I’ve had a couple of people express interest in my character Louis Ronald Reagan von Eiff White—thinking there should be more. I think it would be fun to revisit the characters—but the story and the situations have to be compelling and stand on their own. I’ll likely make a decision soon on what to write once “Kept” is finished— later this year.

What is your best experience with self-publishing?

Seeing “Benediction” start selling quite a bit of time after its launch—which would never have happened in traditional publishing because it would have been pulled from bookstores early on for not selling. I think that’s one of the advantages of internet selling and publicity—you have a lot more time to make your case, so to speak. In fact you might have practically forever in some sense.

And your worst?

Honestly, it’s probably the realization that I have to do everything with my books—yes, writing them but also marketing them­—and coming up with continuous and hopefully fresh and cheap ways to do that. There’s an incredible amount of noise out there and certainly no right answers for all of that. I think you just hope that occasionally something you do will attract a reader. When that happens, it’s worth all the sweat.

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