Q & A With Author Lou Aronica

Hello Readers!
Please give a warm welcome to author, Lou Aronica, whose book, Blue, toured yesterday.




1. Please tell readers about your current book.

Blue is a novel about a father and his largely estranged teenaged daughter and what happens when the bedtime-story fantasy world they created when the daughter was little comes alive. The three focal characters (the father, the daughter, and the young queen from the fantasy world) are all experiencing life-changing crises, and there is a very specific reason why this connection has been made at this time. Of course, explaining what that connection is would ruin the story, so I’ll refrain from doing so here.



2. Who or what inspires your writing?

The inspiration for this novel was my concerns over my daughter soon going away to college. I was worried that I was going to lose her and I decided to turn to the page to work out my issues. I didn’t realize at the time that I was starting a six-year process, which is how long it took me to finish Blue. The upside is that I have a novel I’m very proud of and I can also say that my daughter has graduated college and I didn’t lose her at all.



3. When did you know you would be a writer?

I recently reconnected with a friend who told me that I talked about being a writer in elementary school. I didn’t remember that, but I do remember beginning to take writing seriously in high school. I intended to pursue a career as a writer right out of college, but I took a job in book publishing, fell in love with that world, and put off my first book project by twenty years.



4. How long did it take you to write your first novel?

I completed a novel in college in a semester. No one will ever see that novel, however. My first published novel, The Forever Year, took me nine months to finish. My second, Flash and Dazzle took me three months. I’m sure you can imagine, then, that I had no idea my third would take me six years.


5. What is the hardest part of writing for you?

Accepting the fact that the first draft is going to be awful. I do a great deal of prep before I start. With fiction, I storyboard the entire thing before I write a word. Still, I find I’m just grasping until I get a draft on the page. This causes me a great deal of stress.


6. Do you have any writing rituals?

I move around a great deal when I’m writing. I’ll write a couple of sentences and then walk around the room. I’ll add another line and go into the kitchen for a minute. When I started writing, I worried that this was a form of procrastination. As it turns out, it’s just the way I work.



7. Have you written any thing else?

Blue is my twelfth book and my third novel. I have coauthored nine works of nonfiction, including the New York Times bestseller, The Element (with Sir Ken Robinson), and the national bestseller The Culture Code (with Clotaire Rapaille).



8. Any advice to aspiring writers?

This is a tough time to be a writer, especially a novelist, because of the seismic shifts in the publishing marketplace. For the same reason, though, I think it is going to be a great age to be a writer. The key for writers, though, is to write with tremendous honesty. Readers have great respect for writers who approach their subjects with honesty. This is more important now than it has been in a very long time, because readers have more ways of learning about the quality of a book before buying it.


9. Who is your favorite Author?

I have many, but I would have to say that right near the top are Ray Bradbury and Pat Conroy. Bradbury because of his ability to make the mundane seem magical and Conroy because of his ability to make characters and relationships spring to life.



10. What is your favorite book?

Wow, that’s nearly impossible to say. I think The Catcher in the Rye probably had the most impact on me.


11. What are you currently reading?

I just finished The Hunger Games because my wife and eleven-year-old daughter couldn’t stop talking about it. It really is an extraordinary work. I suppose that means the next two things I’ll be reading are Catching Fire and Mockingjay.



12. How do readers find out more about you?
They can go to my site, www.fictionstudio.com and they can e-mail me at laronica@fictionstudio.com.