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Fiction Debut Author Roundtable
12.
AOTW: Tell us about your next book and what you have in the works for the future.
Jay Nussbaum: A writer needs to take risks to fulfill his potential, so the book I'm working on now is very different than Blue Road to Atlantis. I'm hoping to make a pact with my readers: I'll never write the same book twice if they'll trust me to know what they expect of me and do my best to deliver it. Toward that end, my next book takes a closer look at the results of ignoring one's current, but the venue is quite different. Beyond that, I have a list of seven books that I plan to write in the coming years, although I don't know yet in what order I'll write them. All I know is that they'll explore the same unifying principles on which Blue Road to Atlantis, and my life, is based.
Ad Hudler: It's the book I started writing before Househusband. It is the story of three women in Macon, Georgia: A facially disfigured former beauty queen who works as a produce manager in a grocery store, an alcoholic wife of a neurosurgeon, and the daughter of a tyrannical abortion-rights advocate who has just died. These women, all searching for something new, touch each other in ways that one would see only in a Deep South setting.
Ali Smith: No --- it's private. If I tell you about it I won't do it. But thank you very much for asking.
Jill A. Davis: I just finished writing a seven-part series (fiction) for usatoday.com --- they start running it on June 20th. I'm writing a second novel, but am superstitious about talking about what I'm writing while I'm writing it.
Steve Almond: Working on a big, ugly historical novel. It's a royal mess at this point. But I just keep slugging away. That's what writers have to do: keep slugging.
Jill Bialosky: I'm writing a new novel about three sisters and working on a new collection of poems.
Anahita Firouz: My next novel, I don't want to say much about, though I will say that it has a garden theme, and takes place in the 19th century in Iran and involves political and religious intrigues.
David Benioff: My next book, based on a family legend, is set during the siege of Leningrad in 1942. I've also completed a collection of short stories and written the screen adaptation for The 25th Hour, which Spike Lee is directing.
Gary Shteyngart: I am working on a novel set in Absurdistan, a fictional former Soviet republic on the verge of collapse (I spent my last summer in the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Georgia). It is also a novel about a very fat man so I have been carefully watching overweight individuals on the subway and plan to visit a Russian bath pretty soon.
Stella Pope Duarte: My next book is a second collection of short stories. At one point, I wanted to leave this book and begin another novel, then my soul spoke to me, and related: "If you do this, you will learn how to abandon your work, and you will never finish anything." I realized this to be the truth, so I am now finishing the collection. My fourth book overtook me in an amazing way while I was in another city, with other writers. A story of a tainted lover from the 1800s has surfaced in a manner so unprecedented, as to warrant the label of a ghostly request. This ancient lover wants his story told and will not take no for an answer. So, here I go....
Kate Manning: The story that's obsessed me for a long time is called Precious. It's also about race, about two mothers, past and present, searching for two far-flung children, and the long tentacles of our slave-owning past, how they reach into the present. But the subject is so emotionally draining, I am not sure I have the strength for it right now, so until I do, I've started working on another novel called Bluebird, which is about a woman fugitive, how she runs away and why, and how she finds her way home again.
Masha Hamilton: Lust of the Eye is a phrase from the Bible, but it refers here to a journalist's need to see. It is the story of a woman reporter in the Middle East who encounters bloodshed on a nearly daily basis. She becomes a victim herself when she and other colleagues are ambushed and her lover, a news photographer, is killed. She then is divided between wanting to distance herself from the violence and being drawn to it. She finds herself taking needless risks in the field during the day and dreaming of revenge at night. Eventually she has to balance her humanity and professionalism with her desire for vengeance. People have asked me whether this story was inspired by Danny Pearl's horrible kidnap and murder, but of course I started it long before. Journalists are killed every year on the job, since so many have to confront brutality so often.
David Rosenfelt: The next book is a continuation of the Andy Carpenter saga begun in Open and Shut. There are two more in the series after that, so I'm going to go to my "perfect writing room" and start on them.
Arthur Phillips: Superstition dictates that I pass on this one. Sorry.
Karen V. Siplin: I recently finished my second novel, Such a Girl. It's part love story; part social commentary. The narrator of the book, Kendall Stark, is a lovable slacker who runs into the now successful young man she dumped in college because he was a loser. I am currently outlining my third book, and I would like to write the script for His Insignificant Other next year.
Michael Redhill: I'm finishing a collection of short stories that will come out in Canada next spring. Following that is a novel I am still researching. It takes place in Toronto in the present as well as in the 1850s. It concerns a man, late of England, who comes to Toronto and by dint of bad luck becomes a photographer and ends up taking the very first extant photo of the city, in 1857. In the present, the story is about a woman trying to prevent the city from covering up the results of an excavation for one of the city's new sports arenas. The stories are linked, and the novel is about city-hood, as well as photography and the persistence of history.
Terrence Cheng: The next book I'd like to write is set in China during the Japanese occupation of China, around the time of the Rape of Nanking, 1937. It won't be set in Nanking during that specific horrible time, but it will be close to it. I want to examine some of the human stories behind those incredibly dramatic tales of suffering, tragedy, and survival. I also want to examine the people who committed some of those crimes: what were they thinking and feeling? I think, similar to Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Western media has a way of spoon-feeding us bits and pieces of history without scrutinizing and analyzing the personal and detailed lives of the people involved in those historic moments. That's the novelists job --- to dig beneath the surface, to make the two-dimensional three-dimensional. To find lessons of human heroism, mortality, and vulnerability, and try to make sense of it all.
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