The Next Big Thing blog hop: Freebird!

[layla]

As mentioned last week, I’m participating in the Next Big Thing blog hop, having been recruited/tagged in by Aundrea Singer, author of Black Hawk Tattoo. Next week, SL Huang will be answering these questions about her novel-in-progress.

What is the working title of your book?

The book is called Freebird. (Or, on the copyright page, Freebird: The Complete Collection. But the other is easier to type.) The protagonist is Karen Bird, nicknamed Freebird, hence the title!

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Freebird was conceived in a cartooning class I took in 2005 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Some of the classwork involved character creation exercises, and most of the main Freebird characters were developed over the course of a couple of weeks for class assignments.

After the class ended, I kept working with the characters, refining their personalities and coming up with storylines for them. At the time I was working in the layout department of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, and towards the end of the year we began developing a free weekly entertainment paper (one of those little weekend event calendar type of things that you find in coffee shops and whatnot). I proposed doing Freebird as a comic strip in that weekly, and they went for it, so the rest is history!

What genre does your book fall under?

Humor/drama/slice of life.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Oh wow … you know, this is not a question that I can ever really answer. Fantasy-casting, of my own books or ones that I’ve read, just isn’t how my brain works, in general. When I see an actor in something, I typically think of them as the character that they’re playing, as opposed to thinking, “Wow, that would be a perfect Karen!”

Richard fancies himself a younger Sean Connery (minus the accent), but no one else agrees with him.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Karen Bird returns to Fairbanks, Alaska after a decades-long absence, searching for a fresh start, and discovers a new home among a cast of (mostly) likeable Alaskan eccentrics.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Self-published.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I started it in 2005, and finished drawing the strips in 2010. The book languished at a publisher for a while, before they ran into financial difficulties and we made a mutual decision not to continue forward on that path. I reclaimed my files, did the typesetting myself, and published the book this fall.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I think it’s similar to the work of Garrison Keillor, Tom Bodett, and other authors who write about weird small-town life. It’s in comic-strip format, obviously, but otherwise it definitely falls squarely in the “small-town weirdness” genre of fiction.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

It was inspired by Fairbanks: the nature of the place, and the people who live here. The characters are all stock Alaskan “types”: the guy who lives in a cabin in the woods with a bunch of dogs and guns; the former flower child and cabin-dweller who moved to the city and joined the rat race; etc. I hope that people who have lived in Fairbanks will find something familiar in this book, but it’s also my hope that the book will be an enjoyable read for those who’ve never set foot in Alaska, as well! It’s a portrait of a particular time and place, but it’s also about people being people. The characters can be petty and silly, selfish and kind; this book is about a bunch of flawed human beings fighting and loving and ultimately learning how to get along with each other, as we all have to in the end.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I’ll just leave you with a scene from the book. Karen has a job interview; now all she has to do is get there …

I hope you’ve enjoyed this mini interview! Come back next week to check out SL Huang‘s answers to these questions, and don’t forget to follow the blog chain back to Aundrea Singer’s blog to check out some more authors’ responses.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.