A couple of weeks ago I received an email from my friend Lauren Carter, asking me if I’d like to carry on a “blog tour.”
She wrote: “I was just tagged in an ongoing blog tour by Aga Maksimowska to do a blog interview about what I’m working on now. You can see Aga’s here: http://maksimowska.com/blog/?p=68
These are, for the most part, questions most of us have already answered, but nonetheless it’s a good check in. Here are the questions:
What is the working title of your book?
It began as Weather Vane, and after last year’s Niagara Algonkian Pitch Conference it became The Cost of Weather, thanks to the keen ear of Michael Neff.
Where did the idea for the book come from? Five years ago I met a man who had lost contact with his young daughter. His efforts touched me – he moved to England, worked as a labourer, spent hours on trains to be close to her, slept on a bare floor, only to be turned away again and again, until the final blow hit – that the child had been thoroughly alienated from him by the mother. This came at a time when my child’s own father made no effort whatsoever to spend time with him. I thought about how we are so familiar with these “deadbeat dads,” that men are generally painted with that brush. I wanted to write a story about a flawed but essentially decent man who loves and fights for his child.
What genre does your book fall under? Literary or Upscale fiction.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? I have thought about this a lot in creating the protagonist. I envision someone who is good looking but not distracting – John Cusack was my first choice, although by now he may be a bit old for the part. Edward Norton is another possibility, although he’s a bit too pretty. Another choice would be Edward Burns. For the antagonist Courtney Cox – she’s a dark haired beauty with pale skin. Not sure if Courtney has the chops to play the narcissistic manipulative Beth. Maybe Catherine Zeta-Jones. And for the love interest, Katie, I’d like to see someone juicy and alive, such as Julia Ormond, but she needs to be able to dance.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? A single father agrees to shared custody with his two-year-old daughter’s tempestuous mother, only to be struck repeatedly by the unpredictable and sometimes devastating results of this choice.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? Three agencies want to read it as well as two major publishing houses, so to be agented is definitely my aim.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? The first draft only took a year. The other fifteen have taken four more.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, by Kim Edwards and Kramer versus Kramer by Avery Korman. Since posting this, I have come across a novel with many startling similarities to The Cost of Weather: Planet Reese, by Cordelia Strube. Darker, wittier, but full of the same themes that run through my story.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? There is a pervasive theme of weather patterns – their unpredictability and the havoc they wreak, which parallels the emotional world of the protagonist. It’s set in Toronto. I also had fun with demonstrating his emotional/psychological arc to maturity through his sexuality.
