Muse: John, first of all, we at Whispers of the Muse want to congratulate you for your success with The Snow Whale, having made it to the major milestone of top 100 so far in the 2009 ABNA (Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award) contest! Tell us a little about yourself. What part of the world do you live in? Your background?
John: I grew up in Elkhart, Indiana, and have lived in the Midwest, the South, and Pacific Northwest.  Currently, I live in Nashville with my wife and son, and I teach writing and literature at Middle Tennessee State University.

Muse: Who are your favorite authors?
John: There are many ways to classify this.  There are writers I return to again and again:  Donald Barthelme, James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, Gogol, Chekhov.   There are the ones who blew me away when I was younger and showed me things I never thought literature could do:  Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Beckett, T.S. Eliot.  And there are the ones who really influenced me as a writer:  Raymond Carver, Dennis Johnson, Hemingway, Dostoevsky.  The truth is, I wish I could read more, and the irony of teaching is you read a lot to get there, you go into it because you love to read, but the physical demands of the job take away most of the reading time.  I probably read the most when I worked summers in a cemetery back in college.  There’s no prestige, but the job comes highly recommended.  

Muse: Why do you write?
John: I have a talent for it, and the desire to do something creative, the desire to leave something behind.  What many of us say is true:  I do it because I have to.  I go a little crazy without it.

Muse: What is your writing regiment? How often do you work on a novel? Do you set daily time or word goals? What keeps you meeting your deadlines?
John: My deadlines are pretty loose.  I might know, if I’ve got an idea that’s inspirational, and I’ve got the time, how far along I will be in six months.  I tend to think of novels as having three parts so I might have a loose idea when I’ll get through one of the parts, with the end coming quicker.  Then, once there’s a draft, it takes longer than expected to get a polished book.

I like to write in the mornings these days.  During the school year I’m lucky that I only have to teach three days out of the week, so I write on off days, maybe three times a week, and more during breaks.  For THE SNOW WHALE I would often put in two writing sessions per day, or I would write after a long day of teaching.  I don’t normally do that but I was driven.   I’ve had jobs that kept me from writing, so the teaching has been good that way.  Teaching is very time consuming, no doubt about it, but not having to go every day is key.

Any new pages is a good day.  Five to seven pages is a really good day, while two to four is probably closer to average.  As far as goals I tend not to think in terms of pages but scenes.  I will sit down in the morning knowing the scene I want to write, and by the time I’m starving for lunch, I might have my scene and possibly the start of another.  A lot of what I do is line-editing.  If I’ve got dialogue, it will need to be worked over many times in multiple sittings before it comes across as natural.  I often go over my first page as a kind of ritual before I begin any new writing.  So that the first page has been gone over hundreds of times. 

Muse: John, in The Snow Whale, you have a very interesting outlook on life, sparked with humor and tongue-in-cheek observations. Are you anything like your main character? Does the way you personally look at life reflect in your writing style?
John: I’m pretty laid back.  Art and ideas and people are all important to me, but I live a simple life.  Humor in writing is something I’ve worked a long time at.  It’s difficult to pull off, but I believe that humor is an important part of creativity and one of the things I really enjoy when I’m reading.  It’s easier for me to be funny when I’ve had time to think about it and set it up,  Lots of my jokes fall flat, but I’ve had the chance to edit out the stinkers. 

We tend to put ourselves in the place of our characters, that’s natural, but I’m not too much like this particular main character.  I’m lucky that I’ve not had a job quite as bad as his, I’d like to think I’m not as naïve as he is, and I’d also never do anything quite as stupidly brave as he does.  I’m happy sitting at my computer.  Let someone else go off to have the adventures.

Muse: What are the creative jumping off points for you? Are you inspired by dreams? Music? Nature? What triggers your imagination?
John: I listen to music and enjoy the arts, like most writers, but my inspiration is literature.  I became interested in doing retellings of famous stories a long time ago.  So there are some I’ve always got in the back of my mind, then one day I’ll get a view to a way I can tell it, a way for me to have fun with an old standard.  Of course most of my stories are not retellings, but they’ll start in the same way.  I’ll get a glimpse of an idea I’m compelled by, something I’ll want to spend time with.  And once I start, it takes on an unpredictable life of its own. 

Muse: Tell us about the novel you have chosen for your Sneak Peek, The Snow Whale.
John: It’s a contemporary retelling of MOBY-DICK.  It starts as a satire.  A white guy with an office-cube job gets a DNA test, learns he’s Inuit, and decides to join a whale hunt under tribal rights.  So he sets off blindly, teams up with other characters, and has a run-in with the white whale.  The Alaska setting is based on a real place, a hunk of land that juts out into the frozen ocean at the top of the world, where they’ve been whaling for over one thousand years.  That part is a lot less satirical.

Muse: What was your inspiration for this particular novel?
John: MOBY-DICK is a really different kind of book, a much better book, but it gave me a plot outline and famous scenes I could emulate.  And of course I could make use of one of the most famous characters in all of literature, the white whale.  The whale is a remarkable lasting symbol and lending it a new imaginative space is the kind of thing I do for a good time.

Muse: What is your favorite scene in the book and why?
John: I really love the ending, the way it reads and the emotional release.  But there is a scene toward the end of the encounter with the white whale, where my character is thrown into the water and is freezing to death.  It allowed me to do a dream sequence, which is always fun, you get to dissolve reality and let loose.

Muse: Have you written other books?
John: I have.  Over the years I’ve written a rotating collection of stories, a first novel and a few other unfinished novels that were mostly false starts.

Muse: How do you feel about the current publishing marketplace?
John: Oh boy.  Everyone tells you it’s bad.  That’s no lie, not exaggerated.  I feel, had I been writing even just a generation ago, this book, which is still unpublished and which I still haven’t found an agent to represent, might have been my third or fourth book.  I would have been allowed to mature as a writer in public, and I would have had the support of an editor along the way.  It’s no longer unusual for a first novel to actually be a writer’s third or fourth or fifth novel.  So the bar has been set quite high.