AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Joshilyn Jackson

Welcome to our exciting new series on Trashionista: exclusive author interviews! First up is Joshilyn Jackson, author of the prizewinning gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia (review coming soon), as well as the wonderful blog Faster than Kudzu. 

Please describe your latest book in 15 words or fewer Wow! Fifteen words huh? Do I have to count the part that says "Between Georgia tells the story of? Or can I assume that part and simply count the words in this fragment?

"A Southern Juliette, her redneck Romeo, and the feud that blows up Georgia's smallest town"  There, 15 exactly! 

Continue over the cut for the rest of the interview. 

Where do you like to write your books (in bed, a coffee shop, an office)? In my office which is in my house. It is in a constant state of chaos and I like my peaceful trash piles to grow and grow until the carpet's color is a distant memory. I know where everything is. I don't like other people to come in and touch things. On the wall I have a SIGNED! limited edition print of a work by my favorite surrealist. It's a puffy cat and a skinny, melting cat riding a spaceship with boobs across an olive green wasteland. I love it. My husband loves it. Everyone else thinks we must be sprinkling hallucinogens onto our salads like bacon-bits...But when I get stuck I can always look at it and get centered.                         

Your favourite chick-lit book? Hrm -- I think probably Lani Diane Rich's Ex and the Single Girl.

Your favorite female heroine ever (if different from above)? Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. PERIOD. I also love Scarlet O'Hara.

What tips would you give to any of our readers who want to become writers?  Writers write, so BIC,HOK.  It's the advice I give myself on lazy days when I want to go watch all 100 episodes of CRIMINAL INTENT I have Tivo'd. (Vincent Donofrio is PRETTY!) It's pronounced BICK-HOCK, and it stands for, "Butt in chair, hands on keyboard." I did NOT make that up, but am not sure who did. I heard it on a writer's list, and it's useful to me still.

Don't put ANY emotion into the publishing end. You have no control over that. Just send out your queries and forget them. Focus on the thing you can control...the work. How much craft you learn. Revising and improving and WRITING every day. Publishing is heartbreaking and exhausting and breaking in takes years. Do the time, but don't put your heart in it. Put your heart into the work, love the work so much that you would want to make it perfect whether you were pursuing publication or not. The work will fill you up if you let it.

What are you reading at the moment? The Vanishing Point, by Mary Sharratt. I am REALLY digging it so far. Speaking of strong heroines! Sharratt's Hannah Powers is a girl after my own heart.

What are you working on now? (Give us a hint!)It's called THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING. It's about Laurel Gray Hawthorne...a woman who can't help but make things pretty.  Coming from a family with a literal skeleton in their closet, she's developed this talent all her life, whether helping her willful mother to smooth over the reality of her family's ugly past, or elevating humble scraps of unwanted fabric into nationally acclaimed art quilts.  Her wayward sister Thalia, an impoverished Actress with a capital A, is her polar opposite, and prides herself in exposing the lurid truth lurking behind life's everyday niceties. And while Laurel’s life was neatly on track—a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, and a dream home in lovely suburban Victoriana—everything she holds dear is thrown into question the night she is visited by an apparition in her bedroom.  The ghost appears to be her 14-year-old neighbor Molly Dufresne, and when Laurel follows this ghost out back, she finds the real Molly floating lifeless in her swimming pool.  While the community writes the tragedy off as an accident, Laurel can't.  Reluctantly enlisting Thalia’s aid, Laurel sets out on a life-altering investigation that triggers startling revelations about her own guarded past, the true state of her marriage, and the truth about the girl who stopped swimming.

Oh. Wait. Was that supposed to be 15 words, too? Hrm.

Dead girl! Closet Skeletons! Hot Husband! Trampy Actress Sister! Sex on the dryer! Secrets revealed!

There, 15 exactly. *grin*

Thanks Joshilyn- you're fabulous!

[Author photo © Elizabeth Osbourne].

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