Daniel A. Blum grew up in New York, attended Brandeis
University and currently lives outside of Boston with his family. His first novel Lisa33 was published by
Viking in 2003. He has been featured in Poets and Writers magazine, Publisher’s
Weekly and most recently, interviewed in Psychology Today.
Daniel writes a humor blog, The
Rotting Post, that has developed a loyal following.
His latest release is the literary
novel, The
Feet Say Run.
WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:
WEBSITE | TWITTER | FACEBOOK
About the Book:
At the
age of eighty-five, Hans Jaeger finds himself a castaway among a group of
survivors on a deserted island. What
is my particular crime? he asks. Why have I
been chosen for this fate? And so he begins his
extraordinary chronicle.
It
would be an understatement to say he has lived a full life. He has grown up in Nazi Germany and falls in
love with Jewish girl. He fights for the
Germans on two continents, watches the Reich collapse spectacularly into
occupation and starvation, and marries his former governess. After the war he goes on wildflower
expeditions in the Alps, finds solace among prostitutes while his wife lay in a coma, and
marries a Brazilian chambermaid in order to receive a kidney from her.
By
turns sardonic and tragic and surreal, Hans’s story is the story of all of the
insanity, irony and horror of the modern world itself.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Thanks for letting us
interrogate you! Can you give us a
go-for-the-gut answer as to why you wanted to be an author?
I truly love the writing itself. It is the most intriguing puzzle, the best
brainteaser and the most intricate, joyous daydream, all rolled into one.
Tell us (we won’t
tell promise!) is it all it’s cracked up to be?
I mean what are the perks and what are the demands?
If it is cracked up to be lots of fascinating repartee with
the intelligentsia, scandalous gossip at The Algonquin Club, not to mention
several James Bond girls hanging on your every word, then no, it is not all it
is cracked up to be. Even with the
success I have had, there have been plenty of frustrations – a glutted market,
challenges of getting read and noticed, and dreaded time spent promoting
oneself. I truly weary of all of those,
“Look what so-and-so said about how wonderful my book is” Facebook posts.
On the other hand, the writing itself is a great pleasure,
and producing something that truly moves
people, that makes them think, that people connect with – that is extremely
satisfying.
Which route did you
take – traditional or self-published – and can you give us the nitty gritty low
down on what’s that like?
My first novel, Lisa33,
was with Viking, a very prestigious name in the industry. And it was an awful experience, to be
perfectly frank - a dream that gradually morphed into a nightmare. This one, The
Feet Say Run, is with a small press, Gabriel’s Horn.
What’s the snarkiest
thing you can say about the publishing industry (e.g. rejections, the long
wait, etc.)
Yikes. How much time
do we have, and how many glasses of wine have I had? For one, I truly don’t understand the
judgments of the Ruling Class of opinion-makers. I read lots of celebrated, literary fiction,
lauded by critics, and so much of it is just plain tedious. Can’t anybody just
say, “Nothing happened in this book!
Where was the story?” Sometimes I
feel editors and critics are just so many sheep. One praises an author, anoints him or her as
“the chosen one”, and everyone else, feeling secretly insecure in their own
judgments, just falls in line.
The Feet Say Run
is mostly quite serious, but I also write a humor blog. I grew so frustrated at bad writing by
celebrated authors that I wrote pieces in the blog about the Worst
Sentences in Modern Novels and the Worst
Sex Scenes. They were two of my most
popular pieces. Of course, they’re meant
to be fun but there is a serious element to it:
if we are unable to critize and demand the most from ourselves, from one
another, then literature is in trouble.
Tell us for real what
your family feels about you spending so much time getting your book written,
polished, edited, formatted, published, what have you?
I would say they’re all supportive. My wife is my toughest critic, but it has
made me a better writer. When she was
really enthusiastic about The Feet Say Run
it was definitely a good sign.
What was the craziest
or insane thing that happened to you in the book publishing process?
That would be with my first novel, Lisa33. My agent, Bill
Clegg, managed to get a bidding war going for it, and I got a very big advance
from Viking. After years of rejections,
this was all completely surreal to me.
“You’re going to be famous,” Bill assured me. Yet after that, everything went wrong. I won’t go into all the details, but it was
ultimately deep-sixed. Buried by the
publisher, not promoted at all. And Bill
himself mysteriously disappeared just when the book was coming out.
All things must pass, and that definitely includes my
advance, which I spent through in the next year. So I found myself back at my day-job. One day I was sitting in a cubicle, reading
the New York Times, and there was my old agent, Bill Clegg, on the front
page. He had just published his own
memoir. He’d descended, evidently, into
cocaine addiction, had left his authors stranded and bad left the literary
world entirely. And now he had returned
- this agent who had assured me I would be famous – and was himself basking in
fame and success. In his memoir he actually
wrote about how he’d left his writers stranded.
And there I was, one of his writers, feeling very stranded indeed,
reading about his book, his redemption and glory, from my anonymous
cubicle.
To be honest, I stopped writing and even reading fiction for
a couple of years after that. But of
course, life must go on.
How about the social
networks? Which ones do you believe help
and which ones do you wish you could avoid?
I suppose Facebook is the behemoth, and it is definitely
useful. But I am very ambivalent about
it. I started my blog to promote my
fiction, and then got on facebook to post links to the blog, and then got on
twitter to tweet about my facebook posts.
Its an infinite loop, a whirlpool, and feels like art and beauty are
getting sucked right into its vortex.
Book sales. Don’t you just love them (or lack of?)? How are you making the sales happen for you?
I have absolutely refused to look. I don’t want to know. I’m enjoying that so many friends and book
group readers have loved the book. I’m
sure if it really starts to take off I’ll know.
Thankfully, this time around, my expectations are a good deal more
grounded. Eventually, I’ll get a royalty
statement from my publisher, so I’ll deal with it then.
What is one thing
you’d like to jump on the rooftop and scream about?
Hmm…it might be to complain about, “The Dying Animal,” by
Philip Roth. This novel is a perfect
example of mindless critics raving about a truly horrible book. And it is also
an example of a writer suffering from way too much praise, believing that
whatever he writes must be a work of genius by definiton. Roth has written some fine books and some
awful ones. This was definitely in the
latter camp. Or maybe if you have a
breast fetish, it’s a work of ineffable genius.
Who knows?
Okay, too much sugar
for you today! Here’s a nice cup of
Chamomile tea and come on over and sit under the cabana and watch the waves
roll in. Now…can you tell us what you
love about being a published author and how all those things above doesn’t
matter because it’s all part of the whole scheme of things and you wouldn’t
have it any other way?
Haha. I think I would
need something stronger than tea to believe that I “wouldn’t have it any other
way”. We all have our regrets, after
all. But I will say this: I still truly love writing and reading - in
spite of how I may sound. I just read, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
and it is everything a novel should be.
I can’t say enough good things about it.
What’s more, I truly enjoy talking about books – whether seriously or
snarkily. Most importantly, I’m really
proud of The Feet Say Run. I want to write a literary novel with passion
and suspense and a real, compelling plot - in short, to write the book I would
most want to read. So many people tell
me the book is really hard to put down, which makes me feel that on some level
at least, I have succeeded. And that is
incredibly gratifying.
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