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LIVE CHAT with DeLaune Michel
Updated: We've finished chatting. It was mostly just me - where were you all? Still, DeLaune was wonderful so click on the comments and have a read.
Let me start by welcoming author DeLaune Michel. I had prepared a bunch of questions on books and publishing and writing and then I read the bio on her website. Once I'd picked my jaw off the floor, I wrote some new questions...
Thrilling personal details aside, DeLaune has written two books: Aftermath of Dreaming and Safety of Secrets.
Came straight to this page? Visit www.trashionista.com for more female fiction news, reviews and interviews.
Posted by Shiny Media on July 11, 2008 in Interviews | Permalink
Comments
I guess the first question should be - DeLaune, are you there? (This will be a short live chat if she's not...)
Posted by: Keris | Jul 11, 2008 3:01:54 PM
hey y'all
I'm here. That was so sweet what you said in your intro.
PS I can't figure out time zones at all. Especially hard when I lived in Milan.
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 3:37:55 PM
Yay! Welcome and glad you made it! Okay, first question (which I've already alluded to):
I had a list of questions about books and writing and publishing and then I read your bio! Modelling! Acting! Gilmore Girls (one of my favourite shows of all time)! Warren Beatty! Now I just want gossip. Got any?
Posted by: Keris | Jul 11, 2008 3:42:37 PM
you're so funny! I agree, it's Friday. Let's have fun!!
Modeling was fun, but not as fun as acting, which isn't as fun as writing - my opinion! though the clothes for writing are the worst, generally being PJ's!!! My modeling agent in Milan, who had one of the biggest agencies, was a lesbian Communist with a wooden leg - I'm not making this up!! I wouldn't be able to !! That is DEFINITELY another book. Both of my novels have fun peek-behind-the-scenes stuff in them about LA and the people there.
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 3:48:02 PM
No Gilmore Girls gossip, eh? Okay then. :)
The other amazing aspect of your bio is your family history. For those who haven't read it, you come from a literary family, including your uncle Andre Dubus, your mother Elizabeth Nell Dubus, and your cousin James Lee Burke. Plus you were named after a woman on your mother's side who was in the court of Marie Antoinette. That's a lot to live up to. Did you ever just think about working in McDonalds and living on the beach ... or something?
Posted by: Keris | Jul 11, 2008 3:50:30 PM
Okay,I totally have Gilmore Girl gossip. I LOVE that show, too. So I was hired in the second season for a recurring role (lots of episodes!!) to play Suky, the chef's girlfriend. The first episode of my role had all these really great and fun scenes with us. Lots of smart, funny dialogue and great Amy Sherman-Palladino (the writer/producer) stuff. So I get to the table read - which is the very first rehearsal with the full cast and the first time that the regulars on the show get to read the script they are going to shoot the following week - and I"m sitting next to the totally lovely and sweet actress playing Suky, and as she and I read the scenes, she starts quietly, but clearly, kind of freaking out. Okay, now it's not like there is any awful Paris Hilton/Brittany Spears sleazey stuff in there - it's Gilmore Girls for Christ's sake, it's great stuff. I've always been totally straight, but if having a girlfriend is the way Amy wrote it - it sounds fun!! So we finish the read and everyone - it seems! - is thrilled, but the next day, I get a call from my agent that the actress totally flipped out and called her agent and said that she wasn't signed on to suddenly become a lesbian, and so they dropped the whole story line, and my character got cut down to just the visiting vet who pronounces Sally Struther's cat dead. Oh, the indignity!So that was a drag. But I still had a great time shooting the show, and love it to this day.
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 3:59:17 PM
Oh wow! Now that's some good gossip! Thanks! It's currently being repeated on UK TV, but I've just checked and I missed your episode - curses!
Posted by: Keris | Jul 11, 2008 4:01:21 PM
And I know I still haven't finished answering your other question, but in the realm of other silly stuff, when I lived in LA, I used to box in Bob Dylan's gym. It was this great private gym that you had to know someone to get in, but a fun small group of us used to box there. Bob Dylan would walk through every now and then always wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up. It always reminded me of the Nicolas Roeg film, Don't Look Back, but anyway, we did real boxing, so we had to wrap our hands. Now I kind of knew how to wrap my hands, but not well enough, so I'd always get the trainer to wrap them for me, but there was a girl there that rumour had it that Bob Dylan was dating who would get so annoyed that I couldn't wrap my own hands that the trainer and I would have to hide it from her.I based a bunch of scenes in my first novel, Aftermath of Dreaming, on being at that gym - particularly when my nose was broken. But thank God, it was still straight!
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 4:06:27 PM
It's probably time for a writing question! When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Posted by: Keris | Jul 11, 2008 4:14:57 PM
If working at MacDonald's would pay be enough to live at the beach, I might ditch the writing! I would love to live at the beach one day. Besides writing, the Florida Gulf Coast is my great love. I always knew I would be a writer. I started my first novel in third grade with my cousin Claire. it was called The Stranger, and, no, Camus has nothing to worry about! I remember it involved a little girl (guess why!) waking up in her bedroom, and seeing that her window was open and the white dotted swiss - when was the last time you saw that?? - curtains were blowing in the breeze and there was blood on the white shag carpet. even at eight, I had style, I guess you could call it!
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 4:16:54 PM
Sounds intriguing! :)
How long did it take you to get published and what has been the most surprisingly thing about being published?
Posted by: Keris | Jul 11, 2008 4:21:02 PM
Who are your favourite authors? What did you read as a child? What book would you like to have written?
Posted by: Amy | Jul 11, 2008 4:25:15 PM
My first novel was based on nine stories that I had written. A woman heard me read one of them in LA, and sent them to a friend of hers who was an agent and that agent took me on. She always represented Joyce Carol Oates, so she sent Ms. Oates one of my stories, and Ms. Oates wrote back that she loved my voice as a writer, that it was very promising and fresh, but that this wasn't a short story, it was a chapter of a novel. And she was right, but it was also very encouraging as I started writing a novel for the first time. I wrote two drafts of that novel, each one took a bit less than a year, and I finished the second draft a few weeks before I had my first son. Then my agent sent it out a few months later, and it got a two-book deal with HarperCollins, so I felt very grateful about that. Then I wrote my second book, and finished that one a few weeks before my second son was born. I have already begun my third novel, and my husband asked me how am I going to finish it without the built-in deadline of a baby, but I told him that somehow, I will manage!
I think the most surprising and wonderful thing about being published is that my books are read by people that I otherwise never would have met, and when I hear from them or meet them at events, there is already a connection there because we have created an experience together - the story in my novels. I believe that novels are kind of like that old saying, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I think a novel really exists when someone reads it, and their particular life and imagination created the story from the words I put on the page. I think it is a truly collaborative art form, but with lots of different people.
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 4:32:59 PM
Great answer, thank you.
I've also got a book and a baby due at the same time! Won't be doing that for the next book, though...
Is there a book (apart from one of your own!) that you always recommend to people?
Posted by: Keris | Jul 11, 2008 4:37:50 PM
I inhaled books as a child. My mother's also a writer, so we were at the library every week, sometimes twice a week since I was really little. I have four older sisters - yes, lots of great clothes to borrow! - and we'd all go off in different directions to lose ourselves in the aisles. It was were I learned that I could travel anywhere, if I had a book. I loved the Betsy books by Maud Hart Lovelace, and Jane Eyre, and all the Bronte sisters stuff. Now, I love Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith and Julian Barnes - ones on your soil! and here I love the new Charles Bock book, Beautiful Children, and Denis Johnson, and my cousin Andre, and Ann Patchett and the Jhumpa Lahiri and... so many.
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 4:39:21 PM
Oh, and I wish I had written "Streetcar Named Desire" which I know isn't a novel, but that's my background in theater - and my Southern roots! - coming out.
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 4:41:15 PM
Your cousin Andre is the author of The House of Sand and Fog, yes? I had one of the most absorbing reading experiences of my life with that book! I shouted at it, I dreamt about it, I had to keep putting it down because I was afraid of what was going to happen...
What's the most involving book you've ever read?
Posted by: Keris | Jul 11, 2008 4:44:17 PM
Congrats on the baby and the book!!! That is wonderful!
For writers, I recommend Chekhov because he is so spare and is such a great dissector of the human heart. For just enjoyment, I recommend my favorite of the week. I am starting "Lush Life" now by Richard Price and love that.
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 4:45:25 PM
Andre's (yes, he's my first cousin) House of Sand and Fog was definitely one of them, too. That was amazing, wasn't it?? I was torn between those characters. I felt the same way about 100 Years of Solitude - love that one. And ages ago, a book by Joyce Carol Oates called You Must Remember This, and The Awakening by Kate Chopin. I literally had to put that one down at point because my heart was literally racing from reading what the main character was doing.
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 4:48:40 PM
Thank you! (I work better with a deadline, thankfully!)
Okay, enough of the serious questions. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Posted by: Keris | Jul 11, 2008 4:50:33 PM
Being a good Southern girl, I'm supposed to say Rhett Butler, but he never did it for me. If I had to spend a week with a character on a desert isle, I would choose Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. of course, there would have to be a full supply of gin and cigarettes, and some kind of untoward business on hand, but who can resist him?
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 4:56:43 PM
Being a good Southern girl, I'm supposed to say Rhett Butler, but he never did it for me. If I had to spend a week with a character on a desert isle, I would choose Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. of course, there would have to be a full supply of gin and cigarettes, and some kind of untoward business on hand, but who can resist him?
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 4:57:19 PM
Okay, think this will have to be the last question, so how about your favourites? TV show? Movie? Song?
Posted by: Keris | Jul 11, 2008 5:00:45 PM
TV - Curb Your Enthusiasm, and most of HBO.
Movie - that's a hard one! Boogie Nights is definitely up there, Rosemary's Baby, GoodFellas, and The Big Lebowski among too too many
Song - anything that Louis Armstrong played or Prince
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 5:04:08 PM
Thanks so much for having me on today!!
Posted by: DeLauné | Jul 11, 2008 5:07:35 PM
Thank *you* so much, DeLaune.
Posted by: Keris | Jul 11, 2008 5:08:48 PM
