Jay Slayton-Joslin

It is the fifth of April. Still not over the hump of birthday celebrations and there is only one thing in my mind, other than wondering how to fix my sleep cycle. Stranger Will is one of those books that when you finished, you’re not done with it. This is easily one of the best books that I have read recently, and I know that it will not leave my mind for a long time. Caleb is currently doing an internet tour, The Stranger Will Tour For Strange Tour, to promote his latest book. From the comfort of your armchair you can win some prizes, and help support Caleb. Information about how to win the prizes is here:

“Expanding on my effort to put book promotion on par with rock tours, I’m embarking on the Stranger Will Tour for Strange in support of Stranger Will. But beyond just shoving the word “tour” into what is essentially a series of paragraphs spit out from my living room couch to sex up this thing, I am also offering some very special gift packages to all my groupie friends. All you have to do is post a comment on every blog post during the tour. Simple. If more than one person qualifies for this prize, I’ll randomly draw a name to receive this package. But I WILL MAKE SURE that every qualified person gets something cool. It might not be as cool as a vomit-inducing book and a 1970s movie poster print, but it will be close.

Full details can be found here, at tour stop #2: click here to find out.

The package to be given away will include:

1. A VERY GRAPHIC PHOTO FILLED book about sexual disease called Color Atlas and Synopsis of Sexually Transmitted Diseases. Seriously, this book makes me queasy.
2. A used t-shirt from the 1999 Goo Goo Dolls Dizzy Up the Girl tour. Why? Because I can’t go on living with this thing in my closet.
3. Cecada’s debut EP, Fog at Midnight. This one, unlike the Goo Goo Dolls t-shirt, is not ironic and is actually an incredible album. I’m just sharing the wealth with this item.
4. A paperback copy of Stranger Will, possibly slathered in my own DNA, definitely slathered in a personal inscription
5. An 11” x 16” poster from the 1970 movie “I Am a Groupie.””

So, comment here (and every other place on which he has visited) and win some fantastic stuff. It’s awesome how you can participate just by commenting on websites, rather than collecting coupons and sending off (my Dad said you had to do this in a time before the internet?) to win the prize. Follow Caleb and his tour by going to his official site.

US readers can find Caleb’s work here, and choose from Kindle edition or a print copy. UK readers can find Caleb’s novel here.
Stranger Will is a novel that I urge you to buy.

Interview is as follows:

1.) The novel follows William, a human remains specialist, was it difficult to research such a specific job for the character?

Fortunately, the topic is so morbidly fascinating—universally, I suspect—that what little information exists tends to be quite comprehensive. I first dug into short newspaper articles and personal stories from friends and family who have unfortunately had to employ these bioremediation cleaners. Then I unearthed a few technical manuals that detail the cleaning processes and tools used. Finally, I found two amazing non-fiction accounts that lent tremendous credibility to my characters, particularly the jobsite jargon: Alan Emmins’s Mop Men and Gil Reavill’s Aftermath, Inc. I reached out to Alan personally to talk with him. He’s an amazingly cool guy. Much cooler than such an interest in violent deaths cleaning might imply.

2.) William holds the mentality that to birth is to kill, could you explain this concept and how your own journey into fatherhood influence this?

Though Stranger Will deals specifically with fatherhood—and I was definitely wrestling with the idea of fatherhood myself when I wrote this, which was many years before I had a child of my own—the primary impetus for the novel was political in nature. The idea that “to birth is to kill” at its core is way to recognize that no matter what we as a species do we will never escape death. The political component comes in when, during my first years of college, when the Bush administration (I know, just saying “Bush administration” is a bit cliché now) was failing to appropriately defend its invasion in the Middle East, I looked around and was distraught by the fact that no amount of citizen protesting really did anything to curb the continued occupation. I was still starry-eyed and thought that college was where action makes change. But here I was, in college, seeing the public outcry for answers be met with the verbal equivalent of a brick wall. That’s when I started to explore the idea of apathy as an –ism (Apathism). Understand that to birth is to kill—truly understanding and accepting this concept—is the heart of Apathism.

It should be noted that nowhere in Stranger Will does the term Apathism appear. The novel is definitely not a manifesto. It’s simple a noir story of a man trying to understand fatherhood.

3.) Was it difficult to have the compassionate relationship between William and Mrs. Rose without undermining the nihilistic tone or making William difficult to relate to?

Extremely. The first few drafts were typical angry-young-man blather, devoid entire of compassion. I was on a mission to see how twisted the story could get. But when I found myself yawning during a re-write, I knew that I had to throw away sympathy for the characters and begin to develop some empathy.

Mrs. Rose was actually the hardest character to write. She is definitely the villain, but even the villain, in a good novel, must have a relatable message in some sense. Trying to make eugenics relatable could have quickly devolved into some weird Nazi sympathizing. Eventually, I had to just get rid of trying to make Mrs. Rose someone the reader cared about and instead use her as a device for forcing William, the protagonist and to-be father, through his own emotional gauntlet.

4.) Which writers do you draw inspiration from and how do you believe they influenced the novel?

Albert Camus’s The Stranger was a definite influence here, though the similar titles are entirely a coincidence. The Stranger was the first piece of fiction to show me that it is okay to try and get the reader to sympathize with a polarizing—or at least skewed—perspective. As for writers, Chuck Palahniuk will always be an inspiration. Though the quality of his material as of late can be debatable—and is always so at his forum site, The Cult—he was the first writer I read who could basically ham-fist a bizarre concept into a believable plotline, which is basically what I’ve done with Stranger Will. Anytime I describe his work I feel as though I am always qualifying it with, “no, but really, it works.”

5.) Your current Stranger Will Tour For Strange tour gets you across the internet in a creative and imaginative way, how did you come up with the idea and is it having a positive effect?

I am not the first author to do a blog tour for a book, but as far as I know this Stranger Will Tour for Strange is the largest that has ever been done. I am currently scheduled to write 70 different blog posts for various blogs, with more added all the time. I will cram as many as I can from March 18th to November 18th, which is from the release of Stranger Will to the release of my next novel, I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin.

I did a tour for the release of my chapbook Charactered Pieces: stories in late 2009, but with a much smaller number of blog posts. Nineteen, I think. The idea for this current tour was to simply build on what I had done before.

The response has been nothing but positive so far. It’s hard to correlate each blog post with an increase in book sales, but I can definitely say that my readership has increased. I get Twitter and Facebook messages almost daily from new readers. I love it. I’ve become a bit of a Twitter whore over the last few months, due partly to making sure I am available should someone want to comment on my work at all. If someone sends me at @-message on Twitter or posts to my wall on Facebook, I do everything I can to respond.

6.) You have also published Charactered Pieces: Stories, how did you establish your writing career and was it harder shopping about a short story collection than a novel?

The story collection actually came about with no real shopping around. I had been doing website stuff for OWC for a while, so when the idea for a chapbook series came around I was approached to be one of the authors. Of course I had a few previously published stories in the collection which may have made OW Press’s decision easier.

As for establishing a career, I’m still working on that. Having the story chapbook and novel out is great, but it doesn’t yet pay all the bills. Hopefully as I continue to be lucky enough to have books come out, the bills will shrink proportionately.

7.) With two novels coming out this year, Stranger Will and I Didn’t Mean To Be Kevin, are you a prolific writer and how did you come to have two books released so close together?

I don’t think I am as prolific as my 2011 spurt would imply. I wrote for years and years without ever having anything more than a few short stories published online. The first drafts of Stranger Will and I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin were written during college and shortly after (that was about five years ago). After I finished the first draft of Stranger Will, I jumped immediately—literally, the very same day—into writing I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin. After I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin, I jumped into writing The Synapse (which is currently awaiting major edits and probably a title change, so don’t sear that name into your brain just yet).

I was shopping both novels at the same time, and it just worked out that two different publishers wanted them. I am still not sure if having two novels released so close to each other will be a good thing or a bad thing.

8.) How do you imagine your writing career in the future?

Hopefully I will continue to write what I want, without compromise. The term “career” is illusive for me that this point, as I am not yet able to fully support myself with writing alone. I have plenty I want to say, so I hope things work out so that I can empty my head before I die.

9.) With your work being available for Kindle, what is your stance on the print vs e-book battle?

I fully embrace the production and distribution of e-books. Though, to be honest that embrace took a long time. As a writer, I love the simplicity of e-book distribution. As a reader, I am still very much a paper guy.

I do have one fear. I don’t want e-books to completely change the experience of a novel in terms of simple, direct, one-one-one engagement between reader and author. I fear that hyperlinks, video, and advertising might soon muss the experience. Though, I suppose if that happens, the terminology will likely change as well and “book” will become something else, and the “book” proper, as we know it today, will exist as a nostalgic referent, reserved for the type of people who seek out vinyl records today.

10.) Stranger Will is a fantastic novel, do you view it as complete and done or like Will Christopher Baer, could you rewrite it endless times?

Wow, my name and Will Christopher Baer in the same sentence. I know the comparison wasn’t for our work, but hey, let me dream.

I could never go back to Stranger Will, not after having a child of my own. I love that I wrote it, for sure. I love the story, I love the language, and I love the experience I had while writing it. I was lucky enough to capture a very specific time in my life with Stranger Will, something I could not have done just two years before or two years after. Perhaps that’s what the relationship between author and novel should be: one easily buried away.