{"id":5138,"date":"2011-11-19T12:19:52","date_gmt":"2011-11-19T18:19:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/polarbear60.org\/randr\/?p=5138"},"modified":"2023-03-28T09:24:49","modified_gmt":"2023-03-28T14:24:49","slug":"interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This month&#8217;s Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour topic is a self interview.\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve browsed Google* and have come up with a few completely unanswerable questions, and I will attempt, before your very eyes, to answer them.\u00a0 You will think they are simple, but the words are deceptive.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>How long does it take you to write a book?\u00a0<\/strong> You <em>think<\/em> that&#8217;s an easy one.\u00a0 The easy, snippy answer is, &#8220;As long as it takes.&#8221;\u00a0 That&#8217;s not the answer you want to hear.\u00a0 I can tell you a first draft takes approximately three to four months.\u00a0 Don&#8217;t ask about revision.\u00a0 I&#8217;m still working on that.<\/li>\n<li><strong>How many books have you written?<\/strong> Are we talking finished first drafts? (3) Polished, submittable works? (0) Mostly finished drafts? (3) Finished wherever they&#8217;re at, because they will never see the light of day? (2) Not counting the ones in the answer to Question 4.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Which is your favorite?<\/strong> It&#8217;s kind of like children in that respect.\u00a0 You can&#8217;t ask a mother which her favorite is, because each child has characteristics they admire, love, and respect.\u00a0 Books are kind of that way.\u00a0 <em>Polar Bear on the Loose<\/em> will always have a special place for me &#8212; it was my first full length novel attempt, I completed the first draft, I love the story, but it needs a <em>lot<\/em> of polishing before it will be a book others can love.\u00a0 <em>Twilight<\/em> is another draft I&#8217;ve completed.\u00a0 I love certain aspects of it, and it needs a serious revision before I can really get it going, but it has so many elements that tickle me and interest me, that I hope I&#8217;ll be able to get it to a point where it can be read by someone else &#8212; one person has read it and provided wonderful feedback and has kind of a crush on one of my characters.\u00a0 I think if you can write a character people want more of, that&#8217;s a good thing. <em>Threads &amp; Ties<\/em> is another book near and dear to me &#8212; the subject matter is a twist on what is considered &#8220;normal&#8221; behavior, so I&#8217;m enjoying playing with it.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a not very romantic romance.\u00a0 Finally, there&#8217;s <em>Walls<\/em>, which is a play on the phrase, &#8220;If these walls could talk.&#8221;\u00a0 <em>Walls<\/em> is a series of vignettes narrated by the walls of one of those lower budget, park at the door, and walk into the room motels.\u00a0 The walls narrate what they see.\u00a0 It&#8217;s incomplete, but I enjoyed writing it and would like to polish it for other eyes to see. I&#8217;m currently working on <em>Granite Hill<\/em>, which is a working title (they&#8217;re all working titles).\u00a0 This one may be shaping up to something I could really like, too, but it&#8217;s too early to tell.<\/li>\n<li><strong>When did you write your first book and how old were you?<\/strong> I have two self-bound books I wrote during my teenage years.\u00a0 One, which this blog is named after, is a conglomeration of my physics and trigonometry class notebooks from high school.\u00a0 One was titled, <em>Rantings of an Insane Trigonometry Student<\/em> and the other was titled, <em>Ravings of an Insane Physics Student<\/em>.\u00a0 Some friends wanted copies of it.\u00a0 Copier machines were not as prevalent then as they are now.\u00a0 Computers were room-sized or building-sized devices that programmers fed punch cards into to perform calculations (really).\u00a0 So I typed those notebooks into book form on my electric typewriter (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mrmartinweb.com\/images\/type\/scmcoronetauto12lg.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">it looks like this<\/a>) in three copies &#8212; one for me and one for each of my friends.\u00a0 Yes, this is pre-Facebook, and I only had two friends back then.\u00a0 Some time before that, I typed a book of poems and bound them between two hand decorated pieces of cardboard.\u00a0 My artwork indicates something pre-teen, but I&#8217;m pretty sure I was a teenager at the time (I&#8217;m not much of an artist).<\/li>\n<li><strong>Um.\u00a0 Okay.\u00a0 How are the kittens doing?<\/strong> They&#8217;re wonderful.\u00a0 Thank you for asking.\u00a0 <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13061 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/pmtoo.jeanschara.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/DSC00081-1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Tarzan Kitten\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13060 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/pmtoo.jeanschara.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/DSC00045-1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"LadyKit\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>On the left is Lady back when she was known as &#8220;Three Cat.&#8221;\u00a0 On the right is Tarzan, back when he was known as &#8220;Four Cat.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>This photo was taken this week of the four cats in the San Antonio house garden window.\u00a0 Ajax is in the upper right, and Natasha is in the lower left.\u00a0 Tarzan, of course, is in the upper left, and Lady is in the lower right.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-13065\" src=\"https:\/\/pmtoo.jeanschara.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/DSCF0450-1-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Tarzan, Ajax, Natasha, and Lady\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Thank you for joining us today.\u00a0 If there are any questions the interviewer missed, please ask in comments below, and we&#8217;ll see if we can get a follow up with the author.<\/p>\n<p>* Some of these questions have been taken from this page: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.teachervision.com\/listening\/suggested-author-interview-questions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Suggested Author Interview Questions<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"border-radius: 2px; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; text-align: center; font: bold 11px\/20px 'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; color: #ffffff; background: #bd081c  no-repeat scroll 3px 50% \/ 14px 14px; position: absolute; opacity: 1; z-index: 8675309; display: none; cursor: pointer; top: 762px; left: 47px;\">Save<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This month&#8217;s Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour topic is a self interview.\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve browsed Google* and have come up with a few completely unanswerable questions, and I will attempt, before your very eyes, to answer them.\u00a0 You will think they are simple, but the words are deceptive. How long does it <span class=\"excerpt-dots\">&hellip;<\/span> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/interview\/\"><span class=\"more-msg\">Continue reading &rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68,52,77,53,49,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-merry-go-round-blog-tour","category-pbotl","category-pets","category-threads-ties","category-twilight","category-walls"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5138"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15656,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5138\/revisions\/15656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}